Fascism

Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the bourgeois exercised through a one-party state with a mass base. Fascism emerges in certain conditions of the decay of capitalism. It was first seen in the early 20th century, in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire.

Fascism initially builds its mass base among the declining middle class, in other words the petty-bourgeois being proletarianized. It also finds many recruits among the lumpenproletariat. Finally it seeks to expand among the most retarded elements of the proletariat.

Historical basis

When threatened by the proletariat, the bourgeois will abandon bourgeois democracy and rights in favor of open terrorist dictatorship. Palmiro Togliatti: The bourgeois "must turn against what itself created, because what was once a factor of its development today has become an obstacle to the preservation of capitalist society."

Georgi Dimitrov:

Comrades, fascism in power was correctly described by the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.

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Fascism is not a form of state power "standing above both classes -- the proletariat and the bourgeoisie," as Otto Bauer, for instance, has asserted. It is not "the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state," as the British Socialist Brailsford declares. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.

This, the true character of fascism, must be particularly stressed because in a number of countries, under cover of social demagogy, fascism has managed to gain the following of the mass of the petty bourgeoisie that has been dislocated by the crisis, and even of certain sections of the most backward strata of the proletariat. These would never have supported fascism if they had understood its real character and its true nature.

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The accession to power of fascism is not an ordinary succession of one bourgeois government by another, but a substitution of one state form of class domination of the bourgeoisie -- bourgeois democracy -- by another form -- open terrorist dictatorship. It would be a serious mistake to ignore this distinction, a mistake liable to prevent the revolutionary proletariat from mobilizing the widest strata of the working people of town and country for the struggle against the menace of the seizure of power by the fascists, and from taking advantage of the contradictions which exist in the camp of the bourgeoisie itself. But it is a mistake, no less serious and dangerous, to underrate the importance, for the establishment of fascist dictatorship, of the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie at present increasingly developing in bourgeois-democratic countries -- measures which suppress the democratic liberties of the working people, falsify and curtail the rights of parliament and intensify the repression of the revolutionary movement.

20th century Interwar Period

After the Bolshevik Revolution, the bourgeois turned to dictatorship in many countries across Eastern Europe to stop the spread of communism. Poland had a dictator, Josef Pilsudski, and after his death, the "National Democracy" party took power and repressed Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Jewish minorities. Hungary's dictator Admiral Horthy scapegoated Jews with pogroms and allowed the corrupt Catholic Church to own the peasants' land and schools.

The term "fascism" was invented by the Italian Giovanni Gentile and popularized by Mussolini, an former socialist who was kicked from the socialist party for supporting Italy in World War One. Mussolini's Fascists were handed power by the bourgeois (specifically, the King appointed him) because they wanted to stop the workers' strikes.

By contrast, in Germany, the bourgeois chose Nazism (appointed Hitler Chancellor, purged the Communists from parliament, and then passed the Enabling Act) to stop the rise of the Communist Party of Germany.

Liberal Obfuscation

Liberals attempt to reduce fascism to an ideology rather than a material phenomenon. They often cite Umberto Eco, who in Ur-Fascism tried to define fascism in 14 points, such as traditionalism, anti-intellectualism, ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, machismo, and glorification of permanent struggle and martyrdom. But Eco admits fascism does not have to fulfill all these characteristics, and that fascism in one country may be entirely different from fascism in another.

Fascism cannot be reduced to a set of characteristics. Fascist ideology is merely a justification for bourgeois dictatorship. Fascism can put on the clothing of whatever ideology is useful to it.

Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Communist Party of Italy during World War II, gave a clear warning against narrow ideological characterizations of fascism:

"I warn you against the tendency to regard fascist ideology as something that is solidly formed, complete, homogenous. Nothing more closely resembles a chameleon than fascist ideology. Don't look at fascist ideology without considering the objectives which fascism proposes to reach at a given moment with a given ideology."

Slide towards fascism in the West

In ultra-late-stage bourgeois rule, with Western imperialism facing a declining rate of profit enforced by Chinese socialist competition, fascism once again becomes a possibility, looking for a mass base now in the declining petty-bourgeois professionals.

Lyndon LaRouche in 2003 saw this tendency in President George W. Bush:

The best way to understand the way in which Chicken-hawk captive President Bush's imperial hubris is being expressed today, is to look at the way in which a concert of Anglo-American financier-oligarchical power led by Britain's Montagu Norman, using Norman's asset Hjalmar Schacht, et al., imposed Adolf Hitler's dictatorship on Germany. The "independent central banking" interest, so expressed, put Hitler into power, both to prevent a Franklin Roosevelt-like option in Chancellor von Schleicher's Germany, and to arm Germany for a world war intended to destroy both Germany and Russia.

Today's potential mass base of fascism mostly identifies with the so-called "cultural left", i.e. the cultural hegemony of the globalist-imperialist bourgeois, embracing cosmopolitanism, LGBTQ, and emasculation. These cultural trends actually arise from the 1991-2014 era stability of international bourgeois institutions such as NATO and the EU, and the deindustrialization of the West. Such leftoid fascism looks nostalgically on the Obama years and the apparent global dominance of the US Empire. Under Biden's presidency, the most reactionary, chauvinistic, imperialist elements of finance capital wave Pride flags while clamoring for another another billion to both Israel and Ukraine against "fascist" Russia.

Richard Spencer supporting the Woke Reich

Ironically, the proletariat that suffered from this deindustrialization and coalesced as 2016 MAGA as a challenge to that cultural hegemony, was called "fascist" by the professionals, who are the actual potential base of fascism. To these liberal professionals, anything outside the liberal status quo, whether actually fascist or progressive and anti-imperialist, is "fascism". (The fact that these liberals are not fascists now does not mean they will not be in the future: Mussolini was originally a socialist.)

It is still possible that American fascism will come in the form of either the left or the right.

Logo Daedalus predicts a Woke Reich run by moderate Democrats. They will co-opt socialist language to uphold imperialism.

Further reading

• Lectures on Fascism - Palmiro Togliatti
• The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism - Georgi Dimitrov
• Fascism and Big Business - Daniel Guerin
• Under the Axe of Fascism - Gaetano Salvemini
• The Theory of Factions in Monopoly Capital - Richard Corell and Ernst Herzog
• Blackshirts and Reds - Michael Parenti
• The Struggle Against Fascism - Clara Zetkin
• Various works on fascism by R. Palme Dutt