What is fascism? How do we strategise to fight it?
These questions are not often engaged with in the antifascist scene, and when they are, answers are almost always unsatisfactory. I tend to hear anyone who is politically reactionary get called a fascist. Fascism became a synonym for bad, politically. The truth is that fascism is, perhaps by nature, nebulous, and often self-contradictory. Which makes organising against it difficult.
A handful of comrades and I have come together to try answer these questions. In preparation, we read Don Hammerquist’s essay Fascism & Anti-Fascism, J. Sakai’s essay The Shock of Recognition, and Petronella Lee’s Anti-Fascism Against Machismo. What follows is a collation of our outtakes from these texts.
My initial definition of fascism, the only one that I feel the most confident in proclaiming, is generally the one that Walter Benjamin provides in his works. That being, fascism is a failed revolution; it gives the proletariat a political voice without actually changing property relations. Anything other than that, I can’t be sure if it’s fascism, just far-rightism, or something else entirely. But this is very broad. And abstract. It lacks analytical and strategic clarity.
Don H. presents two historically common positions on fascism and the strategies derived from them. Most of these sentiments we see today.
1 – Coming out of the Comintern’s 3rd period, communists saw fascism as a kind of tool of the bourgeoisie. Fascism was the bludgeon of the capitalists to control the people. Fascism is a wing of the state, where social democrats were the left wing of the state. Social fascists. This led to tactical alliances between communists and fascists to fight social democrats in an attempt to combat the state. Yikes.
2 – Once the fascists took power, especially within soviet doctrine, fascism was seen as so extreme – so reactionary – that it was almost beyond capitalism. The strategic response to this was to ally with anyone who opposes fascism. Ultimately, J. Sakai argues, this ended up stabilising capitalism at the hands of the left.
A position common to the left in europe and the uk, shared with groups such as the rcp, equates fascism with racism. Therefore, someone like farage is immediately labelled a fascist. kkkier sstarmer is a fascist. Your uncle and his dog who both bark at their brown neighbour are fascist. That fascism, and racism, are a lie from the state that ‘the workers’ buy into – against their better interests. fascist working-class people are tricked into being fascists.
There are a few problems with this reductivist position. First of all, the white working class has a lot to benefit from racism and fascism. It puts them in a position above the racialised working class, domestically and globally. It provides them with an upward social mobility in a racialised class structure, as fascist economic policy often includes an expansion of a managerial middle class for privileged workers. The other problem was that benito mussolini, inventor of fascism, was vehemently opposed to the notion of race as a point of political unity. He saw the idea of race as nonsense. And was a fascist.
So, does fascism need to be racist, to be fascism? J. Sakai argues that fascism has different hats in different places. For example, fascist Islamism is responding to imperialism based on religion – not so much concerned with race. What is common to mussolini and the racist fascism in the uk is a kind of promised retvrn-to-glory. It is palingenetic, focusing on a kind of rebirth, as with the fascist Islamist caliphate. The base of the far right in the uk is the old labour aristocracy, which has been smashed over the past few decades. Historically, we see fascism emerge from the petit bourgeoisie, declassed populations, and the criminal bourgeoisie. Fascism to them is a fantasy of returning to this kind of class structure – something present in not just the white petit bourgeois. This inflated middle strata of administrators and officers is neither the proletariat nor the upper class and can be seen in, for example, israel. Isn’t it funny how every time the Palestinian resistance slides an iof soldier, israel loses another 19-year-old sergeant or even colonel?
With this in mind, does that mean there could be a kind of left-wing fascism? Promising a rebirth of the british workers’ movement, of the great old union? Don H. says… kind of. There is a 3rd position of fascism – an anti-capitalist fascism. In my mind, this aligns with the characterisation Benjamin makes. Fascism can be ideologically opposed to how capitalism is right now, the state of capitalism, without necessarily going so far as to abolish property relations or, to get a little LeftCom with it, abolish value. Nonetheless, there is a trend in some fascist thought that seems to call for a kind of ecological, communitarian, we-all-look-after-each-other rebirth of old agrarian village-style cottagecore life. For the rightful anglo-saxon/celtic/pict/gaelic scot/maybe norse and dane/norman at stretch residents of the isles, that is. This is painfully the case with the litter-picking, ecologically minded, hurray for the return of the pine marten and the red squirrel fascism of the homeland party.
Another point common to almost all of fascism is its masculinity, as Sakai argues. Women in fascist movements often wholeheartedly support patriarchy. Alberto Toscano, in Late Fascism, calls it a kind of female anti-feminism. However, this misogyny can often mask itself as pro-women’s rights, and sometimes as feminist itself. This is painfully obvious with transmisogynistic pundits as Kellie-Jay Nyishie Keen-Minshull, also known as Posie Parker, who often ally themselves with the far right. Or the pink ladies of newcastle siding with the far right in protesting the asylum seeker hotel (at which many nazi salutes can often be seen).
Don’s strategic point here is that fascism can draw its base from both the left and the right (hence, I presume, the 3rd position). On this spectrum is, for example, laura pidcock; nominally a leftist, she is incredibly sympathetic to transphobes. The sdp too, they are socially conservative socialists. Therefore, fascism is a very real problem on the left as well as the right. pidcock’s desire to bring together everyone, including transmysoginysts, against the rise of the far right and fascism, could be the sign of a desire for a rebirth of workers’ solidarity – at the expense of the marginalised. Furthermore, the argument (often on the left) that ‘we shouldn’t be alienating the white patriarchal working class by calling them fascists’ also falls into this category.
We also landed on agreeing that fascism found itself in the failure of communist national liberation movements. These often have incredibly reactionary elements despite being wholly anti-imperialist, thus posing the question of support we should be giving them a complicated topic. Fascists can claim they are socialists; heirs of 20th-century social democracy and trade unionism. What is most puzzling is that anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist fascists can be revolutionary.
Don partially attributes far-rightism and fascism to false consciousness. In a vaguely Adornian and Deleuzian way, many people may genuinely want fascism, from a kind of false projection. My understanding of these points is very weak, however. These notes so far have been guilty of not specifying ideological vs economistic arguments and, indeed, where these two elements meet.
So, if a fascist movement is pro-worker and not racist, how could they be fascist? Firstly, being pro-worker is not a position that wishes to abolish the capitalist relation underlying the political position (and class) of worker. Therefore, it doesn’t actually aim to abolish class itself, nor would it necessarily aim to abolish global inequality of the capitalist world system.
Herein is the central outtake of this discussion: fascism enshrines social hierarchies. These can take many forms, such as class, race, and gender, but also hierarchies based around religion or, in the case of fascism in India, caste. India is a particularly interesting case, as caste is very difficult for non-indian politics to grasp, and the fascist movement in India is also, at least nominally, anti-colonialist. Western fascism is often racist, imperialist, and repressive on gender. It could also be anti-imperialist, as in the case of the amerikan communist party (jury is out on if they are fascist), where these movements aim for economic autarky – something hitler was very adamant on. The acp is also guilty of signalling a rebirth of the white male fordist amerikan working class, and therefore, if they aren’t fascist themselves, struggle to genuinely combat the fascist movements which signal the very same thing.
Finally, fascist movements are notorious for perpetrating street violence, illegitimate violence, and doing so as a central aspect of their movement. This can be seen from the likes of the racist riots in the uk recently or brownshirts of the previous century. This is even the case when fascists are in power, as then both state and non-state violence is employed under fascism to repress populations and reproduce social hierarchy. fascist movements seek to monopolise state and non-state violence.
As a tangent, I posed a question to my friends. It’s one to which I have been struggling to find a satisfying answer for a long time. Mostly due to it being so libcoded that any time I want to ask it, I shudder and imagine my comrades sending me before the firing squad. That question is: Was The Soviet Union Fascist?
I calm myself before the void of a satisfying response by saying; of course not. It emerged from a completely different place than fascism. Even though mussolini was a socialist (sort of). It was the only power that genuinely recognised fascism as a threat and sacrificed so much to combat it. However, this feels a little like evading the question. After all, it did actively reproduce gendered and sexual repression. It did, ultimately, enshrine certain social hierarchies. And at times repress entire ethnic groups. It was, in many ways, quite masculinist. And it was also founded on illegitimate violence against the tsarist state.
We landed on a few answers. Firstly, under such qualifications, any overhaul of a state and maintenance of hierarchy would have to be deemed fascist. This would seriously impede the category’s analytical specificity. Secondly, the USSR heavily repressed non-state violence, whereas fascist movements use both state and non-state violence to maintain social hierarchies. Thirdly, the USSR changed a lot over its lifespan, and to characterise the entire thing under one lump sum would be disengenuous. Furthermore, both the USSR and China, as developmentalists, were founded differently than the economies of, e.g. nazi germany, as the latter’s substance was slave labour. I’m not fully satisfied with these characterisations. Perhaps some of them are inaccurate. But they do provide some clarity on the topic.
Nonetheless, and finally, states are not fascist. Movements are fascist. And these movements can then take over/set up states. The communist movement behind the Soviet Union was not fascist; it was communist. But fascism is always first and foremost a movement.
With all of this in mind, we can finally move on to the topic of antifascist strategy itself.
As the lessons of the past teach us, do not ally with liberals and the bourgeoisie. They are incapable of defeating fascism. Do not ally with the state. Be actually revolutionary. Push a line and act in a manner that genuinely resists both. And do not ally with one to fight the other. Insurgent workers are a political force that is being contested over by the communists and the fascists. Seeing communists ally with social democrats, they’ll side with the fascists as the insurgent bloc. Anti-authoritarian anti-fascism is good. Communist revolutionary work needs antifascism. We must do things that force the fascists to side with the state. This last one is tricky to parse and for me to put into practical terms. Other than, say, having fascists need the police to feel safe around revolutionary leftists…
We must be militant, but not militarist. This is a big one. Militarism often lends itself to masculinism. We must engage in military confrontation with fascism, but we are not military squads. This is machismo; it suppresses internal autonomy and creativity. We aren’t squaddies, as the fascists are. Unfortunately, this sort of mentality is prevalent in the militant left, as some of the aesthetics of e.g. the YEC are beginning to lean towards, who are often also themselves demeaned with a sentiment of ‘look at those bairns go, aren’t they really trying’. This is also a mentality that us at RSC are guilty of leaning towards. We must be revolutionary, not tough. And don’t be paternalistic – attitudes of being there to protect someone, positioning ourselves as stronger than someone who is weaker and needs us to be safe, this reproduces the social hierarchies we are setting out to destroy. The fascists often use this kind of mentality towards women. Attacking the weakest wackiest fascists is a bad idea, according to Gramsci. We are not to over-emphasise military victories; beating the weakest points in the enemy is militarist. We attack where they are, on this strategic level, the strongest, most presentable and unified. Over-militarisation will also lose us people. We become paranoid and insular. Red Storm is guilty of this as well, to an important degree. Cadres that are militarist close themselves off. Who beats up whom is nothing.
The left right now is split between two sentiments; those who want to bash the cops (e.g. RSC, maybe YEC) and those who want to talk to the israeli weapons factory worker (like the rcp or, in lacking a clear political standing, groups like Food & Solidarity also fall on this side of the spectrum).
What matters is the political fight, the popular base. This political fight, the contestation between us and the fascists over the popular base, can be enacted via agitprop, meetings, cultural work, etc. Anti-fascism is a fight for the masses. Which way will they swing?
This is no perfect essay nor a full and clear explication of my own thoughts and opinions. Some of the points made I don’t fully understand or agree with, and often these two together. Fascism is slippery, perhaps by design. We have that eel mussolini to thank for that. But we know what we are fighting for, and against. And, in the failures of anti-fascism and communism of the past, we know we have to be trying something new, to push for a revolutionary situation, one that’ll lead to the liberation of the earth and everyone who calls it home.
Death to the west.
– Farfadet la Complotiste