The 'F' Word. posted by Richard Seymour

My parodist has me screaming the word "Fascist" a lot, rehearsing Rik Mayall's schtick in The Young Ones, so I'd better allow life to imitate 'art' (if I may speak loosely).

I agree with Norman Geras that John Pilger is far too willing to use the term 'fascism' in inappopriate contexts. America is obviously not a country on the verge of fascist rule, notwithstanding the quips of certain cigar-loving Generals. (Although, if you follow the link you will see that I have conflated 'fascism' with authoritarian rule, which brings to mind Slavoj Zizek's point that we lack a concept to adequately capture such styles of governance, with terms like "proto-Fascist" and "crypto-Fascist" supplying a kind of stop-gap). Pilger still nails the essential truth about the upcoming US elections and I don't think that one can read anything essential about the state of the Left into such usage, as Geras seems to, because I don't think it is ubiquitous on the Left.

On the other hand, certain members of the pro-war Left have been entirely too promiscuous in their use of the term, using it to allude to the Ba'athist regime and certain Islamist formations. Nick Cohen's ignorant claim that "Islamism can't create a sustainable or good society: it can only kill and oppress" comes to mind, along with a number of similar statements in which political Islam is portrayed as a singular, hermetically sealed ideology that is either 'fascist' or merely death-dealing, depending upon what mood Cohen is in. Oliver Kamm's chosen "definition" of Fascism is particularly inept , as Charlotte Street notes:

The great elephant that was Oliver Kamm’s discussion of ‘Fascism and the Left’ turns out to have been standing on nothing more substantial than the following fragile tortoise:

The definition of fascism I am working with is the one from Roger Eatwell that I quoted in the second post in this series: "a form of thought which preaches the need for social rebirth in order to forge a holistic-national [An utterly rebarbative hyphenation] radical Third Way."

The idea that Fascism is primarily a ‘form of thought’ [a form of thought??], i.e., that it is primarily a matter of ideas, is - to say the least - highly contentious/ culpably incomplete; the irony, of course, is that it is just this idea, a frankly idealist one, that a Left analysis would want to contest and, I would argue, it just this error that a left analysis is able to correct. Even in its own terms (which are false) it is dubious – if Fascism preached the need for ‘rebirth’ one surely needs to qualify this by pointing out that this typically took the rhetorical form of a ‘return to roots’, pseudo-atavistic appeals to ‘Blut und Boden’ and so on. (For some reason Shelley’s proto-fascist lines “the world’s great age begins anew, the golden years return” just popped into my head.)

Kamm continues: ‘The value of this definition lies in its stress on the radical character of fascism.’ And the redundancy of it is that it is unusably broad, yokes together inherently diverse phenomena and fails completely to address the historical specificity of fascism; perhaps worse, it makes fascism itself sound rather innocuous.

Kaplan, as ever, riots in understatement. However, he is right to refer to the specificity of Fascism as against Kamm's feeble generality. I ought to point out, by the way, that anyone who had read Eatwell's book (Fascism: A History, 1996) will be aware that the sentences excerpted don't attempt to define fascism, but refer to its "ideological core". He does not reduce fascism to a "form of thought" as Kamm does, but accepts that it is a modern form of revolutionary, mass politics in which a mythic period of national decline is to be overcome in a new post-liberal order. I don't think his definition is sufficient, and Eatwell is too eager to impute a submerged left-wing tradition to Fascism (which is belied by his own evidence, in fact).

Christopher Hitchens, at a debate hosted by the London Review of Books, was challenged on the way in which such terms were being abused in relation to Iraq, to which he protested: "I never characterised the Ba'athist regime in that way." A year later, he could be found in the Mirror declaring that "He [Saddam] is Hitler...". Hitchens' earlier protestations lead one to think he understands that scrupulousness about the use of such allusions is not an attempt to confect a distinction without a difference (as he might say). On the contrary, the use of such language by politicians is generally supposed to raise the spectre of "the good war", conferring on their own imperial subventions the same aura of necessary, common struggle as attends the memory of World War II. There may not be a morally significant difference between the ousted Ba'athist regime and regimes that have issued from fascist movements, but there is an important distinction to be had.

Now, here's my ABC of F. A more authoritative version of what follows can be found in volume one of Ian Kershaw's outstanding biography of Adolf Hitler, or indeed in Leon Trotsky's The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. Fascism is, most importantly, a movement. It is a modern, mass movement originating in the social distress and dislocation created by capitalist crisis. The social character of such movements is disproportionately petit-bourgeois and 'lumpenproletariat'. Their success has typically only been made possible, however, through their being appropriated by conservative elites. They are nationalist, anti-socialist, anti-Marxist and anti-liberal. The "rebirth" they seek is one of organic, national unity, preserved in a new authoritarian state. Das Volk feature only as the blind puppets of history, transfixed by charismatic leader. The ideological quality of this renewal is mythical, miraculous and religious. As George Steiner comments:

"This is what Luther has been calling for, in his waking of the German nation. The cry is there in Fichte's famous letters to the German nation, but this time there is a validation of the Lutheran belief that the state must be a religious phenomenon, in a very concrete sense, that is to say, a collectivity transcending individual motives..." (George Steiner, No Passion Spent: Essays, 1978-1996, 1996, p. 229).

But the important point is that this dystopian appeal emerges directly from the squalor of market failure, and as a counter-blast to the potential communist revolution. And it is this latter which makes Fascism an appealing option for the ruling class. In other words, in every convincing formulation of Fascism must be an acknowledgment that it is both a popular and elitist movement, 'radical' precisely in order to conserve, 'socialist' all the better to crush socialism, and 'workerist' so long as it shall have the chance to break the power of the working class. Charlotte Street quotes Walter Benjamin :

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Fuhrer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

The study of Fascism is reduced by the canards that seek to implicate all "extreme" political positions in it. Marxism is too Marxist to be reduced to a variant of some archetype or psychological disposition that includes Fascism. Political Islam is too varied, diffuse and internally contradictory to be simply equated with Fascism. And Ba'athism as a movement in the Arab world is more Stalinist than Hitlerite (notwithstanding the claim by Syrian Baathists that Hussein's regime was a deviation). Once again, fascism is not to be identified merely in ideological significations, or in certain "family resemblances" between what one ideology says and what fascists say; it should be understood as a movement, not simply as an idea.

To all those who casually disinter the putrid Cold War platitudes (extremists are bad, totalitarian etc.) to justify their present political stance, I simply say this: F off.