Fascism and its Enemies

At the outbreak of World War I, a number of key figures within the socialist movement, namely Karl Kautsky of the German SPD, advocated a patriotic pro-war stance, with many socialists theorizing that their nation was fighting an anti-imperialist defensive war against their enemies. This moment in the development of socialism would come to be of great historical importance as it led to the growth of a new, alternative tendency within the labour movement, one that synthesized race, creed and class struggles with the militarism and industrial idealism birthed from the development of mechanized warfare and the major advancements that war had made to technology.
In Italy, most major political factions supported intervention on either the Allied or Central Powers fronts. The recently developed syndicalist movement, as well as many socialists and Marxists were in favour of war, while the central committee of the mainstream Italian Socialist Party were fervently anti-militarism. This dissonance between the base and the party led to an access point being opened up for a new political movement. Socialist and nationalist pride had been surging as a result of the war, yet without representation from any established parties this political energy could not be channeled into action.
Benito Mussolini, a Socialist Party organiser and popular figure within the labour movement, was initially against intervention. It was only when he analysed the class oppression at the hand of the Hohenzollern and Hapsburg regimes of Germany and Austria that he broke from party line and called for a socialist intervention. Mussolini asserted that Austro-Germanic imperialism was an attempt to expand the market forces and dictatorial powers of the Central European monarchies across the continent, arguing for Italy to serve as a bulwark of anti-imperialism and to defend the European proletariat against Austrian and German forces.
Mussolini also predicted that the war would undermine Russia’s Czarist regime and bring about the conditions needed for a social revolution, a prediction that would be verified three years later. Anti-war Socialist Party organisers came into conflict with Mussolini and his faction, leading to his eventual disenfranchisement from the party and of traditional socialism itself, resulting in his expulsion. A short time later he enlisted in the Italian armed forces, as well as founding the Fasci Rivoluzionari d’Azione Internazionalista, the precursor to Italian National Fascist Party.

It is this estrangement from socialism and class politics that makes Fascism an important development in European politics. Identity and the nation-state are, broadly speaking, social constructs based upon slight connections to material realities (for instance, there are general trends between ethnic groups that inform aspects of identity, as well as there being physical geographical borders which have led to the development of wholly different cultures across the world), yet these constructs contain vast amounts of power through the potential for the generation of political energy to be used as a means to shape human society. The Fascist will take these constructs and make them real, using romanticism to exploit the human mind’s susceptibility to emotion as a means to wield political energy and shape their society. The Socialist will take the construct of class and expose it as a construct, yet what many on the contemporary left misunderstand is that without applying romanticism and appealing to the emotions of workers and the exploited masses they cannot expect to harness any political energy as just the knowledge of chains alone will not motivate you to lose them. The Fascist knows that without a romanticisation of boot and iron, blood and soil, god and country, as well as the demonisation of the other and the fear of non-conformity it is impotent and unable to accumulate political energy.
One major failing of the contemporary Social Justice movement is a general inability and disinterest in educating the outgroup. The movement’s origins lie in academia and in the bourgeois intelligentsia, where isolationism and use of jargon is widely accepted and promoted as often the fields of study require years of research and full academic dedication to be accessed. But this should not be the case with ‘pop-feminism’ and the Social Justice movement as it is the application of lofty, esoteric academia to everyday life, something that should be accessible to everyone. So there inlies the problem. It lacks the intellectual depth of academic Feminism, Sociology, Gender Studies, etc. yet retains the insular and isolationist nature of its academic origins, therefore stunting the movement’s ability to stimulate the development of political energy in a mass movement, something that Socialism and specifically political Marxism has been very successful at.

Political Marxism is, broadly speaking, the application of academic Marxist theory onto the material conditions of a given society, for instance Lenin’s application of Marxism onto the material conditions of the Russian Empire in 1917 and Thomas Sankara’s application of Marxism onto the material conditions of Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) in the 1980s. Political Marxism is successful when it allows for the romanticisation of working class identity, as well as cultural identity in the case of Third World Marxists like Sankara without placing race above class. Social Justice in the 21st century has been unable to apply its identity empowerment rhetoric to the same success as Fascism and Marxism as it would rather romanticise “the resistance” against the constructs of patriarchy and exploitation without inspiring a mass of people almost crying out to use their political energy to build a movement against the destructive force of capital.
The western bourgeoisie has adopted the concepts of Feminism, Black and LGBT+ empowerment and civil rights to weaken them and reinforce already existing institutions, electing to place women, non-whites and Queer people in traditionally male, white and straight positions in capitalist society. The Social Justice Movement has allowed itself to be neutered, stripped of any potential to generate political energy amongst a broad mass and has turned into a tool for further oppression and assimilation of non-conforming cultures within western liberal democracy. The Marxist understands that to generate mass political energy you must not become a part of the system of which you oppose, whereas the Fascist almost always requires this as a means to further their goals of reshaping society. The Social Justice movement instead has become a tool of the bourgeoisie not to further affect change but to submit to the already existing institutions. It is by its very nature unable to build a mass movement as it is trapped within a capitalist frame of reference for viewing the world without even the knowledge of how to manipulate capitalism from within.

Antifascism, specifically the American Antifa has, much like Social Justice, come to represent a bloated and impotent shell of a movement that has been denounced by Liberals, Fascists and Marxists alike. It seems that the guiding principle of Antifa in America is to resist Donald Trump and the vague umbrella movement of the “Alt-Right”, yet Antifa lacks a materialist analysis of class structures and capitalism, electing to perform isolated acts of superficial violence rather than organising an effective united front that targets capitalism and the institutions which maintain it. Antifa has become another tool of capitalism, giving bourgeois society a mandate to increase the militarisation of the police force and serving as a scapegoat for both Russiabating Centrist conspiracy theorists and their anti-‘Cultural Marxist’ counterparts on the right. While Antifa’s destabalization of the American political system may bring about access points for a true revolutionary movement of the working class, as it stands now it lacks the organisation needed to seize power for the oppressed and effectively end capitalism.
