the word fascism has been bandied around
a lot recently
and it's not really surprising given that
far-right movements are literally on the
march across Europe, and America has
just elected a demagogue known for
calling for deportations at his mass
rallies. For anyone with half an eye on
history, that's pretty alarming.
But nonetheless, there's still a lot of
confusion surrounding what exactly we
mean by the term. In 2016, fascism was the
most looked up word in the Merriam-Webster
online dictionary, and a lot of people
with a lot of PHDs spend their lives
battling it out over this question.
So we're not going to settle it here, but it
is worth delving into the terms of the
debate to try and clear a little ground
to figure out what fascism is what it
looks like and what it does.
There are a couple of ways of approaching this.
On one hand there's a simple answer, the fascists are the one's
wearing the swastikas, attacking mosques, killing MPs
and, in many ways there's a lot of
strength to that argument because these
guys are dangerous and if people are
telling you they're Nazis, its probably in
your best interest to believe them.
But this over simplified analysis obscures
the fact that in reality there are as
many fascists with nice suits as there are
fascists with shaven heads
and moreover, it doesn't give us an insight into what
fascism does at a macro-political level
and that's the question I really want to tackle here.
Let's take a look at this tweet
from back in November just after the
election of Trump. "The racist, fascist
extreme-right is represented footsteps
from the oval office." Now that wasn't some
pinko lefty that was John Weaver who is
a top political consultant for the GOP
Republican Party. So clearly, even for a top dog
of a political party crammed with
racists and xenophobes and bigots of
every stripe, the election of Trump marks
some kind of break from business as usual
now whilst he's wrong to distance
himself entirely, the Republican Party
has a lot of responsibility to bear when
it comes to fostering the kind of
bigotry that fueled the Trump campaign. He
is not wrong to mark some kind of
rupture, because fascism isn't just the
extreme end of a simple left-right
political spectrum, it has particular
characteristics
that mark it out as something distinct.
Whilst the term fascism is now pretty toxified
and rightly so, the term was
invented and popularized by people who
would proudly call themselves fascists.
The idea comes from political movements
that sprung up in early to mid-twentieth
century Europe. We're talking Italy under
Mussolini, Germany under Hitler and Spain under Franco.
You also probably need to
throw in the Vichy government of France
the Occupied government of Norway during
the war, and let's not forget Britain's
own Oswald Mosley who was determined to
bring Mussolini's methods to UK soil
These political settlements were of
course very different spanning different
time periods, different countries
different cultures, but there are some
striking continuities, some striking points
of similarity that it's definitely worth
paying attention to. The first
of these similarities is of course
authoritarianism, by that i mean harsh
state control of the lives of citizens. This
usually involves heavy policing, harsh
penalties for crimes, surveillance,
censorship. Its also packaged along with
crackdowns on institutions that could
provide a counterweight to state power such as
independent media, trade unions
international organisations, civic
institutions, that kind of thing.
The second of these features is the idea
of a fall from grace.
Fascism is underpinned by the mythology
of a golden past from which we've
now fallen into political, social and
moral decline. The need to write these
wrongs provides a key justification for
authoritarian policies. Where
conservatives promise stability, fascists
promise to totally overhaul a failing
system. According to this mythology its not just
the state that week and failing and in
need of change, its also the people who
are weak and failing and in need of change.
This gives the green light to policies
that clamp down on frilly emasculating
affectations like LGBTQ rights or women's
liberation. It gives the green light to
policies intended to reforge a strong
pure people, this can range from anything
to control of school textbooks to a
creepy focus on the fertility of white
women, to mass deportations, to actual
ethnic cleansing.
So who's responsible for this fall?
Well that's where the third similarity comes
in to play.
It's no secret that fascism fuels and is
fueled by hatred for a racialized other
scapegoated for all of society's problems.
That's the invading force of the foreigner,
the immigrant, the Muslim, the Jew.
This invading external other faces horrendous
levels of discrimination and violence
under fascism, but in addition to this
external other there's also someone else
to blame. A kind of internal other.
This is a corrupt decadent alliance of
liberals or socialists who collude with
the invading force of the external other
in the downfall of society. Think
"political correctness gone mad".
While the external racialized other tends to
have it far worse, it's important to
remember that fascism poses itself as
fighting a war on two fronts, both
against the invaders and against the
cultural marxists who let them wreak
havoc. The fourth aspect is that fascism
constructs itself paradoxically
both as populist and as elitist. It appeals
to the flight of an honest hard done by
white working-class man, and indeed some
people believe that fascism is the
condition endemic to the working classes
but in reality the fascist
governments we've been talking about where
all administered by and for the upper
classes. To paraphrase the writer
Berlet, elements of ostensible support for
the working and agrarian classes, were belied
by a forging of an alliance
between elite sectors of society.
A last point of similarity I want to raise
here is the fact that fascist ideas reliably
gain traction in moments of economic
crisis, depression and rising inequality.
When people get more desperate, fascist
ideas tend to look more attractive.
Stop me if any of this sound familiar.
When it comes to these economic crises, fascists
in the past have propounded a wide
variety of solutions. The National
Socialists in Germany and some modern
Scandinavian fascists push for large
subsidies of industry, national
ownership of infrastructure, that kind of
thing.
Franco and arguably UKIP, want to
liberate industrial capitalism from
the yoke of regulation and paying their
workers a decent wage. Le Pen and Trump
on the other hand vary wildly between
some kind of protectionism and support
of the free market.
But this raises an interesting
question right? Economics is inseparable
from politics, and so if these movements,
if these government's propose quite
different economic policies then how can we
really call them the same thing, how can
we really consider them as different
manifestations of the same political project?
Some people say you can't, some
people say that the word fascism draws a
false allegiance between very different
forms of right-wing thinking. I would
disagree, i think there's a connection
between these things that goes beyond
these guys wearing the same uniforms and
reading the same books. And to see this
connection its worth asking ourselves
why these features keep cropping up
again and again in the same kind of
configuration. There's no necessary
connection between them they don't
always go together and you can see this
by the fact that different governments
that we wouldn't necessarily want to
call fascists have one or two or even
three of these features. There are
authoritarian governments all over the
world, and for the left wing populist
parties cropping up all over Europe, they
do seem to appeal to some kind of fall
from grace. Wherein that golden era was
the welfare settlement of the fifties
sixties and seventies, and of course
racial scapegoating is nothing new.
So clearly these different aspect can be
separated, and yet they seem to go so
nicely hand-in-hand. Put together they do
an especially good job of one thing, and
that's managing the capitalist crises that
gave rise to them. They're perfectly
equipped to try and placate the sense of
disaffection whilst protecting profit
margins and pretty much ensuring that
the economy rolls on as usual.
Remember that in times of economic
crisis such as the one we're seeing, with
falling productivity, industry threatened
by technological change and global
competition. In these kinds of times it's
not just ordinary people who are
desperately scrabbling around for solutions,
it's also business owners, landowners and
bankers. Authoritarian crackdowns are pretty
good at managing
this kind of social unrest whilst
doing away with the troublesome unions
that might pose problems for businesses
in this delicate time. The mythologisation
of a golden past explains away
the indignities of falling wages,
exploitation and disaffection as a
temporary embarrassment that can be
blamed on the enemies of society.
It says that the goal for society should
not be genuine transformation but a
return to an era characterised by
booming industry and rising profit
margins. Gestures towards populism
promise to restore some sense of power
or dignity to disaffected populations
and its a power that can be won without
making trouble for landowners or
businessman. And of course racism
and scapegoating has always been a handy way
of managing class conflicts by dividing the
working class amongst themselves. It
papers over widening economic division
in the wake of the crisis by persuading the
white worker that they have more in
common with their white landlord than
they do with that black neighbour. Fascism
in particular deploys a kind of
bogeyman that appeals to the
stereotypical fears of both working
class people and upper-class people. So you
get the kind of Schrodinger's immigrant
that both steals your job and manages to
laze around on benefits at the same time. You
get the Jewish person who is somehow both
a member of the feral underclass and
secretly ruling the world at the same
time. And by casting socialists or even
moderate reformists as a kind of internal
enemy, fascist ideology protects the
interests of business by expunging the
possibility that the solution might
just lie in economic reform rather than
letting business run rampant and
tank the economy, again. You'll notice that
fascists rarely invent the ideas that
they use. Hitler didn't invent
anti-semitism, Trump didn't invent
Islamophobia and he certainly didn't
invent anti-globalisation discourse and
kind of populism he appeals to, but
rather these ideas are sort of borrowed as
sticking plasters to patch a bourgeois
hold on power at times of social unrest.
Mussolini called fascism a kind of
reaction, and I think that's a
pretty useful way of
thinking about it. Something that
evolves as a matter of political
convenience recruiting old tropes to
mobilise hatred and forging alliances
where the interests of nationalist
capitalists and racists collide. Therefore
fascism doesn't so much propose a new
politics as it does protect an old one.
The fascist economic strategies we've
talked about, whether that's massive
subsidies for failing industries or
deregulation of business, are all
designed as patch and stitch solutions to
haul capitalist economies out of crisis
of their own making. This is why as writer Corey
Robinson recently pointed out, under the
so-called National Socialists, German
industrialists actually enjoyed massively
increased profit margins. And the same
goes for Franco's regime. Similarly,
although the Trump campaign was fueled by
everyday bigotry it was bankrolled by
real estate tycoons and businessmen more
likely to actually profit from his
policies. So perhaps this is a useful way
of thinking about what fascism does at
a macro political level. It's an
extraordinary response to an extreme
historical economic moment. It manages
the morbid symptoms of capitalism whilst
allowing the disease to rage through the
body politic. This analysis might give us a
clue as to what a genuine alternative
to fascism might look like in the
contemporary political arena. It doesn't
look like trying to cravenly triangulate racism
it looks like trying to build
long-lasting sustainable economic
solutions the crisis that don't trade in
the lives of many people to protect the
position of a privileged few. In 1916
Rosa Luxemburg wrote that society stands
a cross-roads between socialism and
barbarism. It's still time to choose.