Notes towards a manifesto of political resentment
If there is a meaningful politics, it starts with feelings of resentment.
The political is the opposite of the governmental. The governmental way of thinking, which is socially the dominant one, can find nothing to criticize in the social world except individual sinfulness or psychical illness (which is, and obviously, the same thing treated differently). In the governmental way of thinking, negative affects are signs of individual deviance (which ultimately means crime: from a statist viewpoint sin or mental illness is potentiality for crime). In a political way of thinking, they are signs that something is wrong with the fabric of a social world in which they occur. The political reaches for commonality, which it works to construct (it does not find it prefabricated). Thus it tends to speak in a middle voice, in which the I/you distinction is not strongly marked.
The basis of the feeling of resentment is the feeling that something is wrong with the situation. This may be called negative affect in general, or negativity. An unpleasant state of mind that reveals itself as a way of being affected, and that conceptualizes this objectively unhappy state in a judgment that something is the matter.
And this cannot be about "me"; when it is, the political as a way of being is being attacked or has not yet been constructed. If it is about you, then your feeling (and likely, some other's judgment) that something is wrong is validated and ascribed to you as its cause: something is wrong with you. Then you can be taken out.
A fascist society would be one in which this is done constantly and to many people. It would be a police state, with lots of prisoners. And disaffected people would be expected to blame themselves.
It might be impossible to live in a social world that approaches a model in which everything was politicized all the time. It would be noisy and troublesome. It surely is possible to live in a social world that approaches the opposite model. That is the ideal of societies like ours, which in its uglier forms becomes fascism; in its less troubled forms it is what we might just call the corporate state. It is an administered society. It is profoundly authoritarian and totalitarian, but this is managed in ways that people who manage to be successful normally do not notice. The only recognized problems of the society are opportunities for management experts to provide treatments for it to keep it all running. Individuals, considered ideal as functioning bodies employed to get work done, including the work of paying for things and participating in other profitable ways, are considered as like machines, which can "break down," in which case they need (punitive) reparative treatments, which most people are also persuaded to want. Slaves must want to be ruled and not think of themselves as slaves for the system to work properly, though they may be allowed to fight with each other or take out their frustrations on people they resent for having it better than they do or for supposedly being responsible for their not having it as well as they might. But then slaves also are supposed to want to live comfortably.
At its best functioning, such a society would be numbingly boring for those who succeed well enough in it, though some young people and many artists would refuse that boredom for something else. In the extreme, such a society would be a hyper-privatized corporate state which is heavily policed in both direct and obvious ways and indirect and less obvious ones, manifest mainly in the way people treat each other. As such as a society comes into crisis, the policing becomes more intense as the inevitable social disorder also does, the authorities having no way to respond to it except with suppression. We do live in such a society, and that has been breaking down. This happened in Europe after 1917, and in the United States after 1968. Things have been falling apart with no center to hold them for some time. Fascism is a state and society that pretends otherwise.