Defining F & T. posted by Richard Seymour

The word "fascism" is over-used, and with it the word "totalitarianism". In the former case, it was used in ridiculously broad terms by ultra-leftists from the 1920s until the 1980s. These days, it is used by some pro-war leftists and conservatives to describe a wide variety of movements without much discrimination. The silly blogger Tim Worstall calls Naomi Klein a fascist on grounds that ought to invite a chuckle or two. Similarly, Paul Berman described Che Guevara as a "totalitarian". In the latter, I think it is over-used by definition since it has little to recommend it as a concept. The liberal columnist Nick Cohen referred to the Muslim Council of Britain's lobbying for an 'incitement to religious hatred' law as "religious totalitarianism".

T.
I'll come over all English, then, and have my T first. A while ago, I described 'totalitarianism' as a shifting, polysemous notion . Naturally, I did so to sound cool (and it worked), but the point stands. The term originated as an anti-fascist concept in May 1923, but was shortly thereafter appropriated by Benito Mussolini himself, who spoke of the "fierce totalitarian will" of his Fasci di Combattimento, while Ernst Junger spoke of "total war" and "total mobilisation". The reputed historian of fascism Ian Kershaw notes that, although totalitarianism has evolved into a comparative method, a means of associating and discerning similarities in different kinds of dictatorship (principally, fascist and communist), its accounts have typically been more satisfactory in dealing with fascism than with Stalinism (he singles out Arendt for this critique). So, while Carl Friedrich adumbrates a six-point theory of totalitarianism (among which are the shared characteristics of a one-party state, monopoly over the media, state control of the economy etc), Kershaw points out that the concept can "only speak in a generalised and limited fashion about similarities of systems, which on closer inspection are so differently structured that comparisons are forced to remain highly superficial". For instance, the 'state control of the economy' model is highly misleading when applied to fascism for reasons I will come to later. He cites Hans Mommsen: "The totalitarianism theory is a myth which stands in the way of any real social historical explanation [of Nazism]". One of the main disadvantages of the theory is that it begins with a regime, takes it as a fait accompli, and works backward, accepting the regime as a teleologically necessary result of the movement that produced it. Another more serious one is that with its focus on the techniques and forms of rule, it has nothing to say about social or economic conditions, the functions of the regime, or its goals. (See Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 2000; also Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds), Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, 1997). Robert Paxton adds similar objections - for example, while Hitler came to power with the assistance of "traditional elites", Stalin did not. Therefore, Stalin did not have to deal with concentrated centres of socio-economic power that Hitler did, since these had been removed by the Russian Revolution. Whatever the similarities in the techniques of power, there were significant differences between the two regimes. He adds further that if 'totalitarian' theory typically bundles Nazism and Stalinism together, the exclusion of Italian Fascism is mysterious, since it achieved a 'totalitarian' control over its own citizens every bit as repressive as Nazism.

Even, however, if you were to place the most generous construction on the term, and hold it as a concept with limited use in identifying movements and regimes which claim a total mandate over the behaviour of a people, it couldn't conceivably be applied to the Muslim Council of Britain's misguided call for a law against 'religious hatred' or incitement to it. And in any serious analysis of different movements and regimes, it is close to useless.

F.
This brings us neatly to fascism. However you begin, this is a difficult phenomenon to define. Is it, strictly speaking, an ideology? What regimes count as fascist? The term is known to originate from the Italian word fascio (a bundle or sheath), although it was also related to the word fasces, a Latin term for the axe encased in a bundle of rods used in Roman public processions to signify the unity and authority of the state. Mussolini launched the world's first fascist movement on May 23 1919 in Milan to "declare war against socialism ... because it has opposed nationalism". Although it united syndicalists and war veterans, proposed all kinds of radical measures (women's sufferage, huge tax levies on the wealthy, workers' say in control of production), it implemented none of these in power. In fact, Robert O. Paxton, a liberal historian of fascism, writes that whenever "fascists acquired power, they did nothing to carry out these anticapitalist threats", although "they enforced with the utmost violence and thoroughness their threats against socialism".

This experience led some socialists to conclude that fascism was merely the instrument of the bourgeoisie for crushing the workers. Such was the view of Gramsci in his early years, who described it as the "white guard of capitalism". The German Communist Party (KPD) reached a similar conclusion, deciding that fascism had already arrived in Germany courtesy of General Seeckt's crushing of the Left in Berlin. The fact that this was ordered by the Social Democrat Frederich Ebert led some of them to conclude that fascism was a means of control which capitalists could use even through the social-democratic left, so that the problem was "social fascism" as much as it was real fascism. This was officially the position of the Comintern after 1924, which described it as the "open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvanist and most imperialist elements of finance capital". As Dave Renton points out in a useful but flawed summation of the arguments from a Marxist viewpoint, this didn't make a lot of sense. First, it ignored the role of the masses in fascism's rise to power, and second it ignored the primacy of the petit bourgeoisie in the movement. How could it have a mass appeal if it was merely the expression of one section of a tiny capitalist class? (Fascism: Theory and Practise, 1999)

He advances the analysis of Trotsky, Silone, Thalheimer, and the later Gramsci, and so will I shortly. Let's get back to the question of fascism as an ideology. Roger Eatwell, Stanley Payne and Roger Griffin all argue for an understanding of fascism as an ideology of a peculiar kind. Griffin calls it "a revolutionary form of nationalism", while Payne defines fascism as a series of ideas containing negations, goals and a particular style. Tellingly, in describing fascism in this way, Payne will not allow that Nazism was a movement of the same genus as Italian fascism, but rather it was a "non-communist National Socialist equivalent to Stalinist Russia". Eatwell, in defining it as an ideology, mildly proffers the following qualification: "There is a sense in which fascist movements and regimes departed significantly from the ideological roots". (Fascism: A History, 2003). He says further "it did not necessarily lead to brutal dictatorship and genocidal practise" in the same way that Marxist ideology did not necessarily... I think this is a shockingly misplaced thought. Primo Levi put it best when he said (in an interview featured at the end of If This is a Man/The Truce) that one could imagine socialism without concentration camps, but this could not be said of fascism. Socialism had gone wrong, fascism had gone right - all too right. Eatwell here performs a move similar to many liberal interpreters of fascism in that he gives too much credence to what fascists claim for themselves. True, genocide was not a necessary corrolary of fascism (even if it was a very likely one), but brutal dictatorship? Similarly, when Sternhell describes fascism as "socialism without the proletariat", an anti-liberal, anti-rationalist synthesis of nationalism and socialism, he gives too much weight to some of the intellectual roots of fascism and to what fascists had to say of themselves.

Ian Kershaw proposes a different way of looking at the question, in which the actions of the fascists are at least as important in defining what the phenomenon is as the ideology, however constructed. Characteristics which Italian Fascism and Nazism had in common include: "extreme chauvanistic nationalism ...; an anti-socialist, anti-marxist thrust aimed at the destruction of working class organisations...; the basis in a mass party drawing from all sectors of society, though with pronounced support from the middle class and proving attractive to the peasantry and to various uprooted or highly unstable sectors of the population; fixation on a charismatic, plebiscitically legitimised leader; extreme intolerance toward all oppositional or presumed opposition groups, expressed through vicious terror, open violence, and ruthless repression; glorification of militarism and war...; dependence upon an 'alliance' with existing elites...; and at least an initial function ... in the stabilisation or restoration of social order and capitalist structures". These are, as Kershaw points out, much more significant overlaps than those traced between Stalinist Russia and the Nazi regime, and therefore the category of fascism is far more helpful in understanding Nazism than that of totalitarianism.

Robert O. Paxton, in his account, offers a more general objection to defining fascism as an ideology:

The classical "isms" rested upon coherent philosophical systems laid out in the works of systematic thinkers. It seems only natural to explain them by examining their programs and the philosophy that underpinned them.

Fascism, by contrast, was a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics. It sought to appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremonies, and intensely charged rhetoric. The role programs and doctrine play in it is, on closer inspection, fundamentally unlike the role they play in conservatism, liberalism and socialism. Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system...

Interestingly, Paxton goes on to describe fascism's reliance on romanticist ideas of national historic flowering, the historic destiny of a people and its mystical union with the leader. He refers to "Fascism's deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with the immediate sensual experience ... And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war". (Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 2004).

Fascism seems to be principally a movement, sustained by mythologies, emerging from the social distress of the petit bourgeoisie yet appealing to segments of all classes. Now, while Paxton certainly rejects the case I am about to make, his book provides much of the empirical support for it. Indeed, while he briskly rejects the crude ultra-leftist notion of fascism as simply the tool of big business, he does acknowledge the ease with which the two worked together once they had made their Faustian pact. Fascism does not emerge from within the ruling class, but they do accomodate themselves to one another.

One Marxist definition which does seem to be of some use, therefore, is one that conjoins the Bonapartist model and the Gramscian hegemony model. The Bonapartist model derives from Marx's discussion of Louis Bonparte's coup, following a failed working class uprising. It was as if, Marx said, the bourgeoisie realised that in order to retain its social system, it had to give up political control. Given an equilibrium between the working class and the bourgeoisie, Bonaparte, representing only a narrow section of society (the petit-bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat) was able to assume power and achieve some independence. But in doing so, he preserved the material power of the bourgeoisie, thus regenerating their political power. The homology was picked up by Klara Zetkin and, later, Trotsky. It is also given a favourable hearing in Ian Kershaw's non-marxist approach. The other element, Gramsci's hegemony theory, is roughly as follows. No regime can rule by force alone - they usually rule by consent, whether tacit or explicit. The fascist regime in Italy enjoyed much public support as a result of easy victories over foreign enemies (the last of which was Ethiopia in 1936). There was so little active dissent in Nazi Germany that the Gestapo required only one officer for every ten to fifteen thousand citizens (the GDR, for instance, required many more Stasi officers). For a regime to consolidate this consent, it must achieve ideological hegemony. When hegemony breaks down, as it did for liberal democracy in late Weimar, there will be a recourse to extreme measures to preserve the status quo. Gramsci understood the state as a hegemonic bloc, welding segments of different classes together (a case in point would be Anderson's "supine bourgeoisie" in alliance with the old feudal elite after the Glorious Revolution).

In this vein, Ian Kershaw outlines four blocs of power in the Nazi regime, drawing on the analysis of Franz Neumann and Peter Huttenberger: the Nazi political elite; 'big business' (including large landowners); the army; and later the SS-police-SD complex. There was some tension within this bloc - their interests overlapped, but were not identical, and power shifted gradually away from business and the army to the Nazis and the new SS-police-SD complex. The early power of the conservative business establishment could be seen through both the crushing of 'subversive' elements in the SA in 1934, and in the waning power of Hjalmar Schacht, since his position as President of the Reichsbank inclined him to expand international trade, while more powerful sectors of business (especially the electro-chemicals giant IG Farben) pressed for more autarkic policies aimed at protecting crucial raw materials for rearmament. Indeed, for Kershaw, it was rearmament that provided the crucial catalyst for the fusion of interests between the Nazi elite, the army and large capital. It has often been argued (for instance by Tim Mason) that the initiation of the Four Year Plan in 1936 signalled the final "primacy of the political", in which the Nazis acquired considerable independence from the business elite. In fact, IG Farben had scripted the technical details for the plan, and it was itself part of a long fusion between elements of business, the military and the political elite. Both Hitler and Mussolini were inclined to see the economy as subordinate to the nation, but they could not and did not seriously depart from the interests of big capital right until the last few years of the war. The formation of the state-owned steel company, Reichswerke-Hermann-Goring, was opposed by Germany's steel barons, but the state's involvement kept steel prices high, and it coincided with a major "re-privatisation" wave, which also returned the mammoth United Steelworks to private hands.

Doubtless, the balance of power within this 'power cartel' tipped slowly toward the Nazis and the SS-police-SD complex. However, even with the increasing radicalisation of the regime, there was no shortage of opportunity for business to profit, including the exploitation of labour in conquered territories and the construction of deportation and gassing facilities as the Nazi holocaust began. They also benefited to a large extent from the 'Aryanisation' of Jewish capital, and were instrumental in bringing about the expansive wars of conquest that made the Final Solution possible. While certain groups within the army and the old aristocratic elite eventually resisted Hitler, industrial leaders did not join them. Kershaw writes:

Until the last stages of war, the benefits of the Third Reich to all those sections of industry and finance connected with armaments production were colossal. Undistributed profits of limited liability companies were four times higher in 1939 than they had been in 1928 ... The mammoth profits of major concerns was no incidental by-product of Nazism, whose philosophy was closely tied in with provision of a free hand for private industry and the eulogization of the entrepreneurial spirit.

Again and again, Hitler's ideological obsessions overlaid domestic or foreign policy decisions, but these nevertheless redounded to the considerable advantage of business. The decision to launch Operation Barbarossa, for instance, was certainly animated in part by Hitler's hostility to "Jewish Bolshevism". But it also had the aim of deterring a Russian attack on Rumanian oil fields, which gave the Axis half of its supplies. As long as the Soviet Union was undefeated and expanding in East and South East Europe, it could be a threat.

This is to understand the hegemonic bloc comprising Nazi rule as one in which business joined as a last resort, given the impotence of liberal parliamentarians and old-fashioned conservatives. Terrified by the threat of revolution, desperate for industry to be made profitable again, they had been nevertheless wary of the horny-handed rabble-rousers of the far right. Once the pact was made, however, it held fast and, with the vicious suppression of labour, the destruction of trade unions and leftist organisations, and the repeal of many gains made during Weimar, business was bountiful.

What distinguishes fascism from other forms of authoritarian rightist rule is its roots in mass politics. It is a distinct and unique danger which, regardless of populist rhetoric and promises to the poor, forms a deadly pact with the state and business elites; and it is this pact which makes its lunatic racist visions possible. It is not a coherent ideology, or even one that tries to be. It is a movement emerging from the social distress of the petit-bourgeoisie and the very poor during a crisis of capitalism, and a liberal-democratic crisis of hegemony; but it is one which fuses with other class interests. It is buttressed by myths, sutured by nationalism and racism. It is a proxy movement which turns the revolutionary discontent of the lower middle classes and poor against them, and which seeks to obliterate the Left and its allies.

To put it as simply as possible, fascism is not a simple conjunction of nationalism and socialism, some synthesis of left and right. It is a movement that in each and every case, in every empirically validated way possible, has treated the Left as a mortal foe, destroying it before all else. The socialists filled the concentration camps before anyone else did. Those who casually toss about the phrase 'totalitarianism' or knowingly tap their nose and hint that some lefty rhetoric overlaps with the far right merely evince their own paucity of analysis and political imagination.