Fascism 101
And a few more clarifications
Everybody knows what ‘fascism’ means — or at least you would think so, given the frequency with which the word has been used over the last couple of weeks. Yet there seems to be a differing definition every day, and that applies equally to those who do or don’t think that Trump is one. That itself is something I want to set aside for now, step back from the present and take a look at what it means to be a fascist. In order to do that, I’ll try to quickly cover its intellectual roots, and clear up a few other terms along the way.
Although fascism is often described as “far right,” others on the right have contested that fascism is actually “left wing” or “socialist,” an accusation staunchly rejected by most on the left. So who’s right? To answer that we need to first look at what it means to be “right wing” or “left wing”. To do so in turn requires a brief overview of how the major established schools of political thought have come to be. I’ll try and keep this as short as possible.
The left and right wings take their name from the arrangement of the post-revolutionary French National Assembly. At that time, socialism, like anarchism, had relatively little political representation, with the primary divide being between supporters of liberal democracy on the left— that is the combination of a limited democratic state and capitalism — and a restoration of aristocracy on the right. The liberal philosophy came to be typified in the British Liberal Party, which supported freer markets as well as more progressive social policy in terms of abolishing authoritarian interventions and prohibitions. This brand of liberalism has come to be known as ‘classic liberalism’. In this sense there was some mutual interest between social progressives and capitalists, both standing against a waning aristocracy, now acting through the state. Both had good reasons to limit state power. Conversely, conservatives and aristocrats stood against capitalism, in favour of protectionism and power through land ownership. Capitalism was a threat to traditional landed aristocrats, as it allowed others to borrow, invest and ‘rise up above their station’.
By the 20th century liberalism was progressing towards social liberalism and started to seek action on the part of the state to address social and economic inequality. The cause of return to aristocracy had been reduced to relative insignificance, and the interest of capitalists in minimal government then aligned with conservatives wishing to block social liberal movements to create a basic welfare state. In Britain they did so under the Tory party, which retained its right wing association, although it moved closer to classic liberalism. When the Labour party entered the scene in the early 20th century, it sought to distance itself from the Communist government in Moscow, yet went significantly beyond social liberalism in terms of the welfare state and government involvement in industry, pursuing an ideal of democratic socialism. Since the height of that movement, followed by a general global movement towards freer markets, social democracy has emerged as a descriptor for economies like the “Scandinavian model”, based around an extensive welfare state retained from democratic socialism, but otherwise free markets and few state industries.
So what does all this have to do with fascism? What I’ve just tried to concisely describe is the overall progression of mainstream modern politics. Despite this, a number of movements that have otherwise been minorities have, in a series of cases, cut off that mainstream and diverted the direction of change drastically. One, already alluded to, was the communist movement. Largely associated with Karl Marx and later Lenin, communism is a subset of socialism, but it was not the first nor the only socialist movement. Anarchism, also known as libertarianism, also started out broadly socialist, with movements like anarcho-communism which rejected the state dictatorship of Marxist-Leninism, anarcho-syndicalism based primarily around trade unions, and the mutualism of Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who incidentally did sit in the French National Assembly.
Then came a quirk of history; a strange construction: a group named Cercle Proudhon took mutualism and elements of syndicalism and fused them with nationalism. Their interpretation was rejected by other mutualists, but intersected with the national syndicalism of Georges Sorel. It was then in Italy that this movement then originally developed into fascism. It was a progression from libertarianism and voluntary association, to nationalism and integration under the state, with Mussolini describing fascism’s economic model of corporatism as, “the merging of state and corporate power”. Fascism also stressed the idea of agrarian autarky; self sufficiency through possession of land, which indeed goes hark back to Proudhon. Fascists also took the model of direct action and local organisation, alongside pursuing state power.
The Nazi movement in Germany had more conventional socialist roots, but was also the most extreme in terms of the social ideology that it tried to mix that with. The obvious argument for referring to the Nazis as socialist is the name: National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Yet it’s important to note that in national socialism, socialism is entirely slave to nationalism. As a result, the Nazi economy was, in reality, a mixed economy. Although socialist rhetoric was employed widely in the earlier days, it waned as the Nazis courted wealthy backers and attempted to appeal also to bourgeois votes. Common to fascism was the syndicalist structure of trade unions, however under fascism unions were again integrated into the state, and free unions suppressed. Private industry was also heavily planned and overseen by the state, to varying degrees. Fascists also supported the welfare state, but as an active measure to benefit favoured groups, rather than promoting egalitarianism.
Nazis resented socialists, particularly Marxists, because the latter pursued an internationalist rather than nationalist ideal. Internationalism parallels with globalism, and the modern fascist disdain for it. For fascists, it also ties into another common element, which is the betrayal myth, where the global elites and internal traitors are deemed to have colluded against the people. This in turn is usually tied into aspersions against disfavoured demographic groups. The betrayal myth with the Nazis was specifically the “stab in the back myth” which was common in Germany; that the war had not been lost, but that Germany had been sold out by Jews and Communists. Cited as evidence was the socialist leadership of the 1918 Revolution, after which the Kaiser abdicated and a social democratic government sued for peace. It ties back in with internationalism, with Communists largely supporting Germany joining the Soviet Union. Indeed, Marx’ original expectation was that Communism would first take hold in an industrial nation like Germany or Britain, and early Russian Soviets held out for the Germans to join them and provide technological support.
Although fascism, at least in practice, has always retained private industry, it states itself, as with socialists, as anti-capitalist. With fascism however, it is not the working class that has been exploited by the capitalists, but both whom have been exploited by ‘parasites’. For fascists, the state’s role is to take control and eject these groups, and to mend class relations by restoring what was seen as a natural order, a concept overlapping with aristocracy. Also overlapping is the idea that capitalism wrongly allows anyone, including undesirables, to potentially ‘rise up’ and take financial power; an aspersion cast particularly at Jews by the Nazis.
Conversely the most obvious argument that the Nazis were right wing comes from their social values, which are at the extreme right over the modern spectrum in that sense, along with nationalism and traditionalism, extending beyond the modern mainstream right and into the territory of the old aristocratic right. In Spain and Italy this manifested with fascists in union with monarchists, but this was not the case in Germany. Nevertheless, Hitler was revered as a monarch, and the top-down hierarchical model of control has striking similarities to aristocracy, as well as Stalinist Communism. Unlike the generally progressive values of socialists, the traditionalism mandates a restoration of pre-liberal values, including age and gender roles.
Social values were not entirely harmonious. Mussolini, for example, placed little emphasis on anti-Semitism until coming under pressure from the Nazis. Although Mussolini and Franco committed war crimes, the Nazi extermination programme was of an exceptional scale. Whereas the Nazi movement focussed more on racial divides, the more traditional fascist element was more concerned with national culture as superior. Mussolini attempted to spread cultural Italian Fascism through the creation of institutions in Libya, for example.
In modern times however, there is a trend to move towards more capitalist libertarian economic values. As social liberalism has progressed, fascists’ immediate objectives have moved towards repealing positive government action and restrictions that they see standing in the way of grassroots fascist efforts, like white enclaves; again an example of direct action. During the rise to power of most fascist movements, a priority is to stop the state acting against fascist street gangs, giving them liberty to commit violence.
The contradiction between the authoritarian and libertarian inspired elements of fascism is reconciled through the same vanguardist approach as with state communism: a totalitarian state that purges the enemies, destroys the old system and constructs a new one, indoctrinating children into its constructs so that it may fade away, nevertheless having fixed its form on society. With fascism it is viewed less as a vanguard and more as a rebirth of the nation.
The difficulty, then, is that fascism combines concepts from other political areas in a way that isn’t concordant with the traditional left-right model, at least not without breaking that model down into separate economic and social axes. Identifying fascist movements requires a comparison of philosophy, policy and practice.
Many different criteria have been put forward for fascism; the above is simply what I’ve settled on personally. I hope it will be useful. For now, I’ll also leave you to draw your own conclusions about present regimes and which criteria they meet.
