How to Stop Fascism, page 23
The take-off of industrial capitalism made many people understand that human freedom was close. It was logical to assume, said Marx, that industrial capitalism would eventually produce a) enough for everybody and b) a crisis in which the working class would overthrow the capitalists. The working class could not be a ‘ruling class’, since they owned no technologies or property; they would have to abolish the class system altogether.
But here’s the problem, and it is highly relevant to the explanation of fascism. On the evidence of 250 years of industrial capitalism, Marx was wrong about the working class. The working class organized themselves into an influential force, but they rarely achieved political power. Nor were they really capable of holding on to it when they did.
What they achieved was control – islands of social autonomy where the rule of the factory owner and the logic of the market were absent. It was a magnificent control, exercised through the creation of deep, resilient counter-cultures, in which you could live a rich institutional life separate from the institutions of capitalist power surrounding you.
In his early writings, which were not discovered until the 1930s, Marx expressed four radical ideas at once:
individual human beings make history – it is our human nature that makes social change happen;
capitalism, through technological progress, creates the potential for communism, a society without class hierarchies;
communism will bring complete liberation of every individual by ending our alienation from nature, the things we produce, from each other, and from our own human ‘essence’;
the way to get there is for the workers to take power, so in this sense the working class is the ‘subject’ of history: it embodies the general desire of humanity for freedom.
The workers who faced the fascist threat in the 1920s and 30s knew nothing of these radical humanist foundations of Marxism. They had been taught only that the working class would overthrow the capitalists, that the middle classes would be ‘proletarianized’ and disappear, that all forms of oppression other than class were subordinate, and that their own victory was inevitable.
Fascism was the living refutation of the orthodox Marxist doctrine. Fascism happened above all because the hierarchies within capitalism are more complex than those created by class interests alone. Deeper than all specific class antagonisms is a human antagonism: the desire for freedom, tempered by the fear of freedom whenever it approaches.
In some people the fear of freedom is stronger than the desire for it. When they decide to defend capitalism through fascism they are not doing so as the ‘agents’ of capitalists, or even because they like capitalism. They are doing it because they fear the end of class society and hierarchy in general. They fear freedom.
Marxism acknowledged the economic role of the family as the basis for all exploitation; it recognized and fought women’s oppression and it attacked the hypocrisy of nineteenth-century paternalistic morality. But it gave no account of how the oppression of women and children shapes the subconscious ideology that validates capitalism for all of us.
As a result, said Reich, while the Nazis ranted to large crowds about ‘blood and soil’, using symbols, clothing, imagery and desire as weapons, the communist leaders could only stand at a rival lectern, reading out the unemployment statistics to the unemployed.
For those who feared freedom, there were strong grounds for doing so. The great wave of strikes, mutinies, factory occupations, land occupations, and armed insurrections and revolutions at the end of the First World War was the biggest outbreak of freedom the capitalist world had witnessed.
Many were, inevitably, frightened by it. Middle-class people did not want to be subsumed into the working class, and they refused to abandon the important material things which gave their lives meaning, from the family motor car to the nation state itself. The long rearguard action of the nineteenth-century conservatives against liberalism, democracy and science mutated suddenly into fascism, launching a ‘revolution against the revolution’. That was not in the script for orthodox Marxism. But we, experiencing this phenomenon for the second time, must write it into ours.
Until the 1970s, the Marxist understanding of ideology was unsophisticated. The general ideology justifying capitalism in people’s heads was thought to be produced in two locations: passively and spontaneously through work and everyday life, while the elite’s monopoly over the spread of information (through the media, universities, the church, etc.) reinforced the ideology actively, from above.
When Karl Mannheim drew a distinction, in 1929, between passive, spontaneous ideologies and active, utopian ones like fascism, and suggested that Marxism itself had become an ideology for the German working class, dozens of critical articles in the socialist press attacked his view.46 But his insight was correct.
It is futile to try to trace the ideology of fascism to the economic position of the twentieth-century middle class, just as it would be impossible to trace the ideology of the Proud Boys or Identitarian movement to the specifics of middle-class life in the 2020s. Yes, a large number of people indicted for the Capitol Hill riot, for example, are ex-military, or small-business owners. But it would be ludicrous to try to identify that class position as the cause of their behaviour. Nor do we need, as Reich did, to look for susceptibility to fascism through the prism of the nineteenth-century family, or people with specific sexualities.
The much more basic truth is this: human society has been based on hierarchy and oppression for 40,000 years. Part of that hierarchy is based on the economics of ownership and control; another, overlapping part is based on gender, racial and sexual oppression; yet another part is socially constructed around biological and behavioural differences, like the right-wing obsession about Alpha and Beta males.
Put plainly, some people like these hierarchies. They tend to be the people who benefit from them. That’s what put thousands of white working-class men into London’s Parliament Square to defend a statue of Winston Churchill. It’s what makes some women join the far-right ‘TradWives’ movement, accepting systematic gender oppression in return for status within a broader movement for white supremacy. And it’s what made people storm the US Capitol.
Marxism failed in the 1920s and 30s because it didn’t have concepts that could describe this emergent reality. What follows is an attempt to synthesize these insights into a theoretical summary.
FASCISM: A SUMMARY
Fascism is the product of a social disintegration process that begins when capitalism enters an acute, prolonged economic crisis, and when an ideology that is usually reproduced passively ceases to explain the world, for large numbers of people at once.
The turn to fascism is triggered when a group that is supposed to be subservient suddenly gains power and agency, and begins to revolt in ways that actually embody freedom, and show what it might look like.
Fascism mobilizes a subconscious fear of that freedom, a fear that is embedded in the deep structures of class society, through exploitation, the family, racial and even biological hierarchies.
Those most susceptible to this fear, and fascism’s most likely converts, include: those with no clear, future-oriented identity; those who believe their status is reliant on stopping other people achieving freedom, for example white racists and violent misogynists; religious fundamentalists whose beliefs are entirely moulded around hierarchy; and people for whom violence and repression are already a way of life (e.g. the classic ex-serviceperson or military fantasist).
Once they sense they can no longer rely on the capitalist elite, its state apparatus, or its passive ideology to hold the line against progress, those susceptible to fascism begin their ‘revolution against the revolution’. Though its function is to defend capitalism, its ultimate intention (always explicit both in theory and ritual) is to go further: to end society’s reliance on rational thought, stop progress and reverse human history back to a pre-modern, pre-Enlightenment state.
Fascists adopt methods designed to force a violent rupture, whether in pursuit of national rebirth (as in the 1920s) or the global ethnic civil war (as in the present). In preparation for this moment, their actions become violent, symbolic and ritualized.
To replace the passive ideology of capitalism, fascists actively co-create a new kind of active ideology based on racism, male dominance, dehumanization and violence, with a strong internal logic but no necessary connection to the facts. This ideology operates both as a myth and an ethos – a code for what’s right and wrong, which fascists can be rewarded for following even before they reach their goal.
Because it is not anchored in facts, or in a single sociological class, fascism at the movement stage is unstable. It must react to all setbacks by bolting on new explanations, new conspiracy theories, targeting new enemies and regaining momentum. If it cannot, then on the basis of the failed fascisms of the 1930s – in Britain and the USA for example – it dissolves back towards its constituent parts: authoritarian conservatism, nationalism, religious radicalism, folk-racism and misogyny.
Where it gains power, fascism inherits the capitalist economy in its existing form. There is no specifically fascist economic model. From the historical evidence, fascism then has to push whichever economic model it inherits towards a project of war and conquest. Because dehumanization is the centrepiece of its ideology, as fascism radicalizes and mobilizes for war, it begins to think about and prepare for genocide, if for no other reasons than those advocated by Carl Schmitt: it needs enemies and it cannot tolerate difference.
Fascism is neither the direct ‘agent of the bourgeoisie’ nor even its autonomous proxy. Fascism’s defence of capitalism serves only to defend the bigger phenomenon of all class society, all inequality, all hierarchy and all forms of oppression against the prospect of human freedom. It is, in this sense, a movement against the potential for self-liberation. It is, as Ernst Jünger’s machine fantasies reveal, always radically anti-humanist.
As a result, where it fails, it will attempt to destroy everything, including itself. At all stages, from Hitler’s bunker to today’s lone shooters, suicide – single or mass – forms part of the logical structure of fascism. I will explore this further in the final chapter.
Fascism is compelled to attack all ideologies embraced by those fighting for freedom. Where Marxism becomes the dominant liberation theology, as in the early twentieth century, ‘fascism is anti-Marxism’ (Nolte). Where it cannot find Marxism, it is obliged to invent it, as in today’s paranoia over ‘cultural Marxism’. In both iterations it has identified and dehumanized specific social groups as ‘carriers’ of Marxism (Jews in Germany, ‘social justice warriors’, LGBTQ+ people, feminists, etc. today).
Fascism is, in summary, the fear of freedom triggered by a glimpse of freedom.
Once it gains momentum, fascism can only be defeated by state action combined with a popular mobilization by groups likely to be victimized under a fascist regime. Though liberalism and the left cannot abandon their defence of rationality and democratic institutions, they can (within limits) construct a dramatized, symbolic politics of their own.
COMPONENTS OF THE FASCIST PROCESS
In ‘The Five Stages of Fascism’ (1998) the historian Robert Paxton argued that rather than static, isolated definitions, academics need ‘to study fascism in motion, paying more attention to processes than essences’.47 Instead of compiling a list of similarities, he said, we should focus on the differences between fascist movements, states and ideologies.
To facilitate this, Paxton identified the five stages fascism went through in the interwar period: the creation of movements; their entry into the party political system; the ascent to power; the regime; and finally the point at which they either radicalize while in power (towards war and genocide), or collapse in the direction of ‘normal’ dictatorships.
Paxton is alive to the problem of abstraction. If we write down a five-stage process there is a danger that it, too, becomes an ‘ideal type’ – a model of fascism that never existed in reality.
The way to avoid this, he said, is through a functional definition of fascism: that is, by summarizing what fascism does, rather than what it is. Fascism, Paxton wrote in 2004:
may be defined as a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.48
It should be immediately obvious how relevant Paxton’s definition is for those resisting fascism today, and how much more useful than all the others. Paxton’s work stands head and shoulders above every other contribution to the ‘definition wars’ for this reason. It aptly describes the panoply of groups active on the American far right, the Identitarian movements in Europe and – critically – how they collaborate with traditional elites.
Paxton describes fascism not as a movement, or party, or religion, but as a kind of ‘political behaviour’: people can take part in such behaviour who are not fully signed up to the party, and don’t wear a badge. He emphasizes the interplay between the party and its allies among the elites, rather than just the obvious conflicts. Finally, he restores something that had slipped away completely during the definition wars: the philosophy of violence.
In a prophetic summary, written more than twenty years ago, Paxton listed the questions we should ask about far-right movements:
Are they becoming rooted as political parties that represent major interests and feelings, and wield major influence on the political scene? Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble to the existing authorities? Is a rapid political mobilisation threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tougher helpers to stay in charge?49
In many countries, the answer to all of this is: ‘oh shit, yes!’ But the emergence of networked society poses a new question: are the fascists capable of wielding major influence without a party? And the collapse of globalization in the 2010s raises another one: is the elite itself split fundamentally over its geopolitical strategy?
In the spirit of Paxton’s ‘five stages’ this chapter concludes with a model of the fascist process, in which Paxton’s first three stages are broken down into ten smaller ‘components’. They don’t need to happen in the order presented, but are dependent on each other, and suggest where the process might be stopped.
1. The Big Disruption. To start the process that propels fascists into power, something big has to happen that disrupts the ‘ordinary world’, which individuals, groups and institutions have taken for granted. In Italy’s case it was the First World War; it transformed the peasantry, shattered the confidence of liberalism, empowered and radicalized the working class and created a multilayered sense of loss. In Germany it was the economic slump following the Wall Street Crash. For us the Big Disruption is the 2008 crisis and its aftermath, combined with the scale of the social transformation needed to mitigate climate change.
2. The Big Threat. On top of a big event, there has to be a large, persistent and unmistakable perceived threat, around which the latent fears and prejudices of those susceptible to the fear of freedom can be mobilized. In Italy’s case it was the Comintern. In Germany it was unmistakably ‘the Jew’ – the abstract, generalized image of an entire people. At half a million people, Germany’s Jewish population constituted just 0.75 per cent of the country’s citizens in 1933. But in populist right-wing culture their existence had become intertwined with broader and more significant ‘threats’: international finance, cultural modernity, ‘mass society’ and Marxism. Hitler mobilized these fears with precision when, in Mein Kampf, he wrote: Marxism is the pure essence of the Jew’s attempts to eliminate the importance of character in every aspect of human life and replace it with the numerical power of the masses.50
In our time the perceived Big Threats driving fascism are black civil rights, migration, Islam and feminism. We will explore in the next chapter how that changes the way we need to resist.
3. An oppressed group rises. A third trigger for the fascist process, highly relevant for today, is that a segment of the population that is supposed to be passive has to become suddenly rebellious, overthrowing the deep-rooted hierarchies that underpinned their expected behaviour at local level. In Italy this was the peasantry. There is no exact parallel in Germany, but the emergence of a new, rebellious and subversive culture among working-class youth, and its alignment with the KPD, worked on the anxieties of right-wing voters in a similar way. In our time the oppressed group rising includes black people, migrants, women and young people. The #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter and Fridays for the Future movements represent a demand for freedom by people who, in the minds of everyone to the right of mainstream conservatism, are not supposed to be free, or to possess their current level of influence and voice.
4. The Culture War. To the interwar left, the idea that disagreements over cultural values could divide the working class looked impossible: working-class culture was solid. Nevertheless, acute observers such as the anarchist Luigi Fabbri warned of the political cost of all the cultural hostility expressed by working-class people towards the lower middle class. In Germany, too, the moderate wing of the SPD increasingly bemoaned the hostility shown by their largely manual (and therefore male-dominated) mass base towards the emerging class of clerical (and more often female) workers. Today, as I will explore in Chapter 9, the working class is much more heavily divided by cultural conflict. The conclusions we should draw from the Italian and German experience are obvious: if there is a social force that represents progress, deeply attached to its own conceptions of justice, solidarity and fairness, it needs to build alliances with other social forces who do not share those conceptions, and to avoid needless cultural friction with them.
