The sad end of Welfare State: Kubrick's parable

Abstract

Classical fascism is currently identified as a regime maximally repressive. Thus, how dare to admit that a new fascism might update through hedonism and deregulation? Nevertheless, such is the forerunning thesis of Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange (1971), one of the first films to picture the reversion of terms and expectations arose by the movement of May 1968. To determine new fascism, one needs to establish the correspondences between the aesthetics of violence, inherent to classical fascism and new terms, that
reappears in Kubrick’s film under the guise of the street gangs’ spontaneity, whose actions are not so far from the Reichskristallnacht (1938), and the coming true of the imaginary, under mixed signs of immediacy and of travesty actions, interacts as the newest counterpart of violence. Such are highly current and narcissistic issues. So, Clockwork Orange works as a laboratory for Kubrick. What is synthesized in his “political-science-fiction”? The after-effects of the defeat of the 1968 political revolution. The plunder taken by capital was the Welfare State dismantling and henceforth the recycled State: a criminal organization in symbiosis with the media, at the service of the absolutism of the market.