We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Politically, the capitalist and socialist refusal of autonomy takes the form of the centrist demand that all particular projects be subordinated to the general interest of development. Among capitalists diverse autonomous demands must not be allowed to challenge or undermine the central processes of profit making, investment and growth. Among socialists, such demands must not be allowed to impede the realization of the general interests of the working class, which in practice turn out to be the party's plans for realizing surplus, investment and growth. Thus the autonomous activities of women, blacks, peasants, students, industrial workers, and so on, must be either integrated within the overall development process (which eliminates their autonomy) or suppressed.

Harry  Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically

But the exercise of labor power, labor, is the worker’s own life activity, the manifestation of his own life. And this life-activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of subsistence. Thus his life-activity is for him only a means to enable him to exist. He works in order to live. He does not reckon labor as part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life.  -- Karl Marx "Wage, Labor, and Capital"

 

Unlike fascism, capitalist totalitarian machines endeavor to divide, particularize, and molecularize the workers, meanwhile tapping their potentiality for desire. These machines infiltrate the ranks of the workers, their families, their couples, their childhood; they install themselves at the very heart of the workers' subjectivity and vision of the world. Capitalism fears large-scale movements of crowds. Its goal is to have automatic systems of regulation at its command. This regulatory role is given to the State and to the mechanisms of contractualization between the "social partners." And when a conflict breaks out of the pre-established frameworks, capitalism seeks to confine it to economic or local wars. From this standpoint, it must be acknowledged that the Western totalitarian machine has now completely surpassed its Stalinist counterpart.  -- Felix Guattari, "Everybody Wants to be a Facist", from Semiotext(e) "Anti-Oedipus" issue, vol. 2, no. 2, 1977 (added emphasis mine)

As long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of—and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate.
— James Baldwin : Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Davis 

As Adorno recognized long ago, there is a kind of artifice to this rebellion that belongs less to what we used to call political reality than it does reality television.  It is true that Trump says outrageous things and that (as his champions might say) “he tells it like it is.”  But the strange aspect to this candor is that one cannot get over the impression that he hardly means what he says.  He is as likely to reverse his opinion the next moment and deny what he has just said.  Even those who support him will say that one shouldn’t take offense because this is just Trump being Trump.  When he “tells it like it is” the authenticity of his performance is precisely the performance of authenticity, rather than the candor of somebody who is announcing without embarrassment what everyone already thinks.  With the casual bluster of a talk-radio host, attitude displaces meaning, and the telling displaces what is told.  It is true, of course, that Trump constantly invokes political correctness as an evil force of liberal repression, and it is therefore tempting to consider him a kind of impresario for what liberalism has repressed. But Trumpism is less the “undoing” of repression than he is an event of political theater in which everyone gets to experience the apparent dismantling of repression without actually changing anything. Even his unabashed misogyny, racism, and demagogic remarks about Muslims merely recapitulate a repertoire of stereotyped attitudes that have long characterized American public discourse.  Too easily condemned as exceptional, Trump’s exceptional “vulgarity” is actually not exceptional at all:  it is a symptom of a culture that has succumbed to the thoughtlessness of received typologies.  Hence the importance of Adorno’s remark that the authoritarian personality represents not a pathology from which others can claim immunity.  It represents “the total structure of our society".
— Peter E. Gordon — The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump

We are further led to believe that there were real antagonistic contradictions between the fascist Axis and the Allies. This is a way of concealing the nature of the selection process which was to lead to the elimination of a fascist formula which, after a while, the bourgeoisie finally decided was dangerous. Radek defined Naziism as something external to the bourgeoisie, somewhat like iron bands used by the bourgeoisie, in an attempt to consolidate "capitalism's leaky tank." But wasn't this image a bit too reassuring? Fascism only remained external to a certain type of bourgeoisie, which rejected it only because of its instability and because it stirred excessively powerful forces of desire within the masses.  -- Felix Guattari

As soon as there will exist for everyone a margin of real freedom beyond the production of life, Marxism will have lived out its span; a philosophy of freedom will take its place. But we have no means, no intellectual instrument, no concrete experience which allows us to conceive of this freedom or of this philosophy. 

                                                                         — Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method

Paging Donald Trump

The fascist leader types are frequently called hysterical. No matter how their attitude is arrived at, their hysterical behavior fulfills a certain function. Though they actually resemble their listeners in most respects, they differ from them in an important one: they know no inhibitions in expressing themselves. They function vicariously for their inarticulate listeners by doing and saying what the latter would like to, but either cannot or dare not. They violate the taboos which middle-class society has put upon any expressive behavior on the part of the normal, matter-of-fact citizen. One may say that some of the effect of fascist propaganda is achieved by this break-through. The fascist agitators are taken seriously because they risk making fools of themselves.

Educated people in general found it hard to understand the effect of Hitler’s speeches because they sounded so insincere, ungenuine, or, as the German word goes, verlogen. But it is a deceptive idea, that the so-called common people have all unfailing flair for the genuine and sincere, and disparage fake. Hitler was liked, not in spite of his cheap antics, but just because of them, because of his false tones and his clowning. They are observed as such, and appreciated. Real folk artists, such as Girardi with his Fiakerlied, were truly in touch with their audiences and they always employed what strikes us as ‘false tones.’ We find similar manifestations regularly in drunkards who have lost their inhibitions. The sentimentality of the common people is by no means primitive, unreflecting emotion. On the contrary, it is pretense, a fictitious, shabby imitation of real feeling, often self-conscious and slightly contemptuous of itself. This fictitiousness is the life element of the fascist propagandist performances.

— Theodor W. Adorno, “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda”

A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labour for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing Foreign Wealth, broken in body and brutalized in mind.   — Karl Marx - Value, Price and Profit