The arcades, and the culture of consumerism these ushered in, is identified here as prerequisite of fascism, which cannot be understood without reference to capitalism, both in terms of its economic basis and in the way in which people are encouraged to conceive themselves, against all reality, as consumers and national masses, not workers and internationalists. At the same time, the arcades and other similar nineteenth-Century forms, such as railway stations, museums, exhibition halls, fizz with utopian promise, the promise of luxuries, of mobility, of knowledge. Benjamin is always alert to a dialectical switch in which the contemporary 'hell' of commodity production and capitalist society can be probed to reveal traces of hope, prefigurations of a communist society, but this is also the forging ground of a consumerist mentality that feeds fascism and an aestheticisation that amplifies the cultivation of myth. This is the ground on which fascism thrives. It goes both ways. Choices are to be made.