What Is Fascism?

There have been many academics, journalists and others who have tried to define what Fascism is but the vast majority have made the intellectually fatal mistake of describing the surface phenomena produced by Fascism in cultural terms rather than starting with its underlying political-economic drivers. Fascism can be quite fluid with respect to its surface phenomena, creating a slippery creature that evades easy or even stable definition; its surfacing in such places as Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, Argentina and many other Latin American nations, as well as the deeply memory-holed US example under President Wilson during the period 1917-1920, produced quite heterogeneous examples.

When we move beyond the surface criteria so loved and thrashed nearly to death by the careerist and co-opted Western”critical” theorists and ruling class organic intellectuals, to eye the political economy of Fascism, its definition becomes much easier. As Gramsci noted, the capitalist ruling class much prefer to dominate society through a “democracy” under which they control the state and the consent of the people is manufactured through a cultural hegemony that both legitimizes their rule while obfuscating the nature of that rule. The tools of coercion (e.g. the need for people to work to support their families) and outright violence (e.g. incarceration) are always there to lend support to the cultural hegemony. Bourgeois democracy is an efficient way to manage a modern industrialized capitalist economy, given the required literacy and geographical mobility of the population.

To describe the main functions of the fascist state the following will use the 2023 twenty-second printing of the English version of Guerin’s book, as it provides one of the most direct and forthright descriptions of Fascism. As Guerin notes, “the state has always been the instrument by which one social class rules over the other social classes” (p. 25). When a crisis threatens profitability the state must be changed in character:

the bourgeoisie can only see one way to restore its profits: it empties the pockets of the people down to the last centime … brutal slashing of wages and social expenditures, raising of tariff duties at the expense of the consumer etc. The state, furthermore, rescues business enterprises on the brink of bankruptcy, forcing the masses to foot the bill. Such enterprises are kept alive with subsidies , tax exemptions, orders for public works and armaments. (pp. 27-28).

Does that sound a lot like the period from the mid-1970s to the present? Are we currently living under a form of Fascism which is skillfully hidden behind propaganda? Guerin identifies the importance of freedom of the press, universal suffrage, and an organized working class as restricting such actions under bourgeois “fake” democracy, but have those been nullified within the present? Are we living in an Inverted Totalitarianism as Wolin put it? I will return to that topic later.

Guerin notes that the capitalist ruling class is not homogeneous, and it is the capital investment intensive industries such as iron and steel and mining (also the large agricultural landowners), together with their bankers, which are most exposed to falling profitability. Guerin could not have imagined the peace-time scale of the US Military Industrial Complex, nor the rise of transnational corporations that rely upon the ability to manage global supply chains, having their much-expanded intellectual property rights respected abroad and the ability to ward off challengers. In addition to an incredibly concentrated and leveraged financial sector. Creating a much larger group supportive of foreign wars and a disciplining of the population both at home and abroad, while being resistant to tariffs that threaten their extensive global supply chains. Light industry, that relies much more on mass consumption is dependent upon the masses to consume their products and therefore too tough a level of austerity for the masses threatens their profitability. It is exactly this group that was central to the class compromise of the New Deal, but increasing foreign competition in the US domestic market, and the ability to offshore, from the 1970s onwards has altered the calculus for such light industry in the present.

With respect to the youth, Guerin makes a statement about the inter-war years that could have been written about the present:

the lot of the young bourgeois (or petty bourgeois) and young proletarian was almost identical: all young people, without distinction, were victimized by the crisis … As a result of the economic crisis, the position of the intellectual and student youth became more precarious. Their particular ‘aspirations’ were thereby intensified. (p. 78)

And sadly also:

But the socialist movement did not show itself revolutionary and ceased to be a pole of attraction. It was fascism, playing skillfully on the youth mystique, which won over not only the intellectual youth, but also - what was far more serious - many declassed unemployed youth. (p. 79)

Guerin also notes that “fascism recruits a certain number of outcasts from the working class … the lumpenproletariat”. With the destruction of the trade unions outside of the state in many Western nations, and the precarious individualized nature of so many jobs that lack any form of group solidarity, this breeding ground for Fascism is very significant in the present day. The middle class, the youth and the lumpenproletariat are prevalent within both the Brazilian right-wing parties and the Milei base.

To hold together such a diverse coalition of forces, Fascism relies on a vague mysticism to arouse faith rather than intelligence.

A party supported by the subsidies of the propertied classes, with the secret aim of defending the privileges of property owners, is not interested in appealing to the intelligence of its recruits; or rather, it considers it prudent not to appeal to their understanding until they have been thoroughly bewitched. The moment the faithful believe, nothing is easier than to play with truth and logic … Thus fascism presents itself, above all, and even before trying to define itself, as a religion. (p. 86)

This use of propaganda was nothing new, as the British and Americans greatly developed this during WW1 - with the power of images over words, feelings over thoughts.

The post-WW2 alignment of the US right wing with religious figures who were against the Social Gospel that supported the New Deal, to create a new Prosperity Gospelthat turned support for capitalism into a matter of faith comes to mind. Also, the manipulation of the Scofield Bible to increasingly support the state of Israel. In the present, the average citizen is surrounded by propaganda throughout the day at a level far above that of the inter-wars years as they are connected to media delivery devices continuously. With increasing attempts to shut down those individuals, and those platforms, that do not follow the required messaging.

Within this mysticism is The Man of Destiny, created by the propagandists funded with ruling class money. His image will never be allowed to be tarnished by the actual policies and real personal history. Does not the cult of Obama fit with the Man of Destiny? A man whose path in life was carefully groomed and lubricated, with a meteoric political rise, who perfectly served the ruling elite instead of the people throughout his two terms? The man who told the bankers that he was there to protect them against the avenging people, who ramped up covert operations and the surveillance state, who prosecuted whistleblowers but not war criminals and torturers, destroyed Libya and Syria, remained in Afghanistan and Iraq, and turned the hope of real healthcare reform into a new massive capitalist subsidy program? Of course Trump is attempting to also fill that role, but his Man of Destiny project is spoiled by the resistance of the Mainstream Media. In the same way that TikTok has undermined the Israeli Nation of Destiny project.

The fascist party must also exude a fake anti-capitalist message, so that it can claim to provide answers to their material interests. It is a “demagogic anti-capitalism … a utopian and harmless anti-capitalism” (pp. 105-106) that helps turn the population away from genuine socialism.

Fascism’s game is to call itself anti-capitalist without seriously attacking capitalism. It first endeavours to transmute anti-capitalism of the masses into nationalism … In all periods as we have seen, the hostility of the middle classes towards big capital is accompanied by tenacious attachment to the idea of the nation … Hence fascism has no difficulty in shielding its financial backers from popular anger by diverting the anti-capitalism of the masses to the “international plutocracy.” (p. 106)

Is this not exactly what Trump does with his spurious Make America Great Again which much more blames the Chinese for America’s ills than the actions of the US ruling class and its corporate underlings to outsource, offshore, and close down so much of America’s productive capabilities while crushing the unions? The very notion of being unAmerican reeks of such fascist ideology.

There may be much rhetoric about disciplining business, or even breaking up or nationalizing businesses, but once in power such promises are quickly forgotten as they would displease the backers of the fascists. After gaining power both Mussolini and Hitler went through a process of cleansing their parties of the most radical elements that threatened the ruling class interests as well as disarming party members by replacing their security functions with the police and the military. In Germany this included the Night of the Long Knives of 1934 where the leadership of the Nazi brownshirts (the SA) were executed. Instead of disciplining business, the fascists disciplined the workers and the state to serve the interests of their business backers as well as their own ends. Only when those ends become problematic for the business backers, as with military expansion far beyond that envisaged by business leaders, did the business backers understand that they had lost control of the state. The profits kept rolling in though, and the vast majority of those business leaders were allowed to keep their wealth in the post-WW2 years while not being prosecuted for their crimes.

In the past 2-3 years heavily under-reported levels of inflation have in fact allowed business profits to be substantially increased in North America at the expense of the living standards of the many, while public protest has been muted. In the European nations, where unions are much stronger but truly socialist parties have very much disappeared, pressure from the populace has been very much met by the power of the state. As with the heavily militarized reaction to protests within France, who needs brownshirts when you have a police force like the French one?

German AfD, with its core in East Germany, espouses an anti-capitalist nationalism and opposition to climate change policies and Muslim immigration, but does not possess a mass brownshirt style movement, as with the French RN. Both could be utilized by the capitalist elite if needed, perhaps in the very much tamed version of of the Italian Meloni and her Brothers of Italy, the organizational descendant of Mussolini’s fascist party. The European capitalist ruling classes may have worked out how to have all the benefits of Fascism without the need for a mass fascist party that takes control of the state from them.