07.02.2008

What is fascism?

Is it a matter of principle that communists should attempt to deny organisations of the extreme right a platform? Jack Conrad provides historical background in support of his motion to be put to the February 9 CPGB aggregate

The term ‘fascism’ has been subject to all manner of different definitions since Mussolini formed the ‘Italian Fascisti of Combat’ in March 1919. Nowadays on the left, however, the word has degenerated into little more than a throwaway insult.

Members of the Italian paramilitary police force are dubbed fascists by black bloc anarchists; the guerrillaist left in Turkey describe all the country’s governments as fascist since the foundation of the modern state by Kemal Attaturk in 1923; fascism is frequently equated with any manifestation of racism or anti-semitism; in Britain restrictions of civil liberties are denounced as creeping fascism; etc.

Such abusive labelling rallies support, fills those who use it with righteous indignation and often provokes a pleasingly spluttering response from the target. Yet it does nothing to reveal the true nature of fascism, as it emerged historically and functions as a social force in capitalist society. This is no matter of pedantry or semantics.

If you shear fascism of history, if fascism is reduced to little more than something unpleasant and objectionable, an object of opprobrium, then one cannot methodologically distinguish between the role played by fascism in mercilessly attacking the organised working class in Europe during the 1920s, 30s and 40s on the one hand and on the other the Peterloo massacre of 1819 or the anti-trade union legislation introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s.

Giving fascism a clear, definite meaning by rooting it in history has nothing to do with any softness towards carabinieri violence, fondness for the Turkish state, toleration of racism and anti-semitism, or endorsement of New Labour’s draconian terrorism legislation. On the contrary, by labelling fascist what is not fascist, terrible mistakes in political practice are inevitable and building an effective movement against real fascist threats is severely impaired.

For example, in the late 1920s and early 30s ‘official communism’ dogmatically classified everything and everyone from the Labour left to Ramsay MacDonald’s national government, and from German social democracy to Franklin D Roosevelt, under the rubric of fascism or tendencies towards fascism. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration was described as a “transition to fascist forms, especially in the economic and industrial field”.

Over 1934-35 Stalin’s Communist International ‘corrected’ its analysis. First at the 13th plenum, and then at the 7th congress, Georgi Dimitrov delivered a new formulation which was duly adopted by all ‘official communist’ parties. Dimitrov redefined fascism as the “open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital”.

His cure was, though, not much better than the original disease. Fascism was still viewed as an outgrowth of capitalism. But overcoming fascism was completely divorced from the revolutionary class struggle against capital. Besides blessing cooperation with social democrats, the door was held ajar for the forthcoming drive for popular fronts in every country - Britain, India, US, Chile, France, Spain, etc. They would countenance communist support for the less terroristic, less chauvinist and less imperialist representatives of finance capital. Eg, Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle.

Trotsky damned this ‘fourth period’ as a headlong descent into naked class collaboration. He ranked Comintern’s new line on a par with social democracy’s collapse before inter-imperialist war in August 1914. The Marseillaise was drowning out the Internationale. The Communist International was entering the “social patriotic camp”, he concluded.

We can safely say, then, that putting the term ‘fascism’ on a firm, scientific footing hardly blunts, but greatly sharpens, serious, meaningful political practice. Certainly without a correct theory the fascist germ that lies festering in the belly of present-day socio-economic conditions can neither be successfully fought nor killed.

Doubtless fascism’s intellectual origins lie in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Social Darwinism, the pseudo-science of race, state worship, romantic national history, anti-semitism, and the vilification of international socialism and the organised working class were the dominant ideas of the European ruling classes prior to the outbreak of World War I. Colonial empires found justification in racial theory. Romantic national history bound masses of people at home to the imagined community of the state and social Darwinism reconciled them to the existing hierarchical social order.

Nevertheless, though fascist leaders and their shrill publicists freely deployed such ruling class notions, they did so in an entirely demagogic fashion. There is with fascism no body of logically sustainable reasoning of the kind found in the catholic church or Marxism. Read Mein Kampf or Mussolini’s My autobiography. Hence frantic attempts to locate Le Pen’s ‘fascism’ in some subtle anti-semitic codeword or quoting Jörg Haider’s ‘fascist’ admiration for the Third Reich’s system of autobahns and public works programme is entirely misplaced. There is no fascist theory systematically linking proposition to practice.

Organisationally fascism has precursors in the anti-liberal and anti-socialist counterrevolutionary movements of the same late 19th to early 20th century period. A loose analogy can be drawn between Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s movement and fascism. Being the centre of European revolution, France was also the centre of counterrevolution - Action Française, established in 1899, being a close approximation to fascism. Action Française combined anti-semitism with nationalism and dynastic royalism. Here we have the first ‘shirt movement’ - ie, rightwing fighting squads. The ‘Camelots du Roi’ began as Action Française’s street gang and in 1917 became a full-blown, mass, counterrevolutionary militia.

The Union of Russian People, formed in 1905, likewise mobilised declassed elements into fighting squads. With the cry of ‘Nicholas II’ on their lips and Holy Russia beating in their hearts, the Black Hundreds conducted vicious pogroms against Jews, striking workers and revolutionaries.

World War I marked an epochal turning point. Capitalism metamorphosed into monopoly capitalism and entered its decadent phase. The law of value, competition and other essential laws decline and can only be sustained through organisational measures such as state intervention and the arms economy. Market forces are partially demystified. They are exposed as political. Socialism is imminent. Where it can, collective capital puts off the transition by elevating state power above the immediate interests of profit. Wide-ranging concessions are granted to the assertive working class.

However, official Europe, especially in the defeated countries, emerged from the mayhem of World War I thoroughly discredited, weakened and riven with internal divisions. Our class was presented with an unprecedented historic opportunity. Bolshevism brilliantly trailed the path. Tragically, elsewhere, the organisations of the working class either proved inadequate or wretchedly backed away from the task and sought to reconcile themselves with capitalism. Bourgeois society was exhausted and chronically split. But the working class lacked the necessary leadership with which to deliver the final revolutionary blow. Fascism erupts as a counterrevolutionary social movement under these conditions.

The 1920s and 30s show that fascism comes not from the extreme right alone. Mussolini began on the left. He actually edited the Socialist Party’s paper Avanti. Oswald Mosley served as a Labour minister; one of the first recruits to his New Party being AJ Cook, the miners’ leader. Joseph Pilsudski, the Polish nationalist socialist, undertook a similar journey.

Besides garbled propaganda denigrating Marxism, fascism launches itself against the working class movement using physical force. Fascism organises counterrevolutionary fighting squads Au:separate from the state - this is its essential and defining characteristic that distinguishes it from other forms of counterrevolution. Fascism is therefore frequently structured internally according to command-and-obey military principles. Discipline and obedience are the watchwords. Put another way, fascism is a terroristic variant of Bonapartism.

Though fascism organises separately from the state, at critical junctures it often acts in close cooperation with the established forces of law and order. Fascism beats down the organised working class movement with fighting squads and clears its own path to state power by rallying a wide, though disorientated, mass behind its crude concoction of slogans, half-truths, hatreds and promises of national and personal redemption. Where exactly fascism gains its human raw material can obviously vary - but it tends to be desperate, ill-educated, insecure or simply in need of a sense of belonging.

Obtaining power, fascism is obliged to restrain or even silence its mass base. Capital has no fondness for freelance armies. Mussolini incorporated the blackshirts into the state. Hitler massacred his brownshirts. Fascism is thereby bureaucratised and becomes what Trotsky calls “Bonapartism of fascist origins”. From this bureaucratised position fascism brings to bear the whole unmediated weight of the state machine against any manifestation of working class independence.

Simultaneously fascism acts to temporarily suppress contradictions within the ruling class - if need be by recourse to state force. Property is usually left untouched, but traditional political parties are turned into mere husks, dissolved or absorbed into the body of the bureaucratised fascist movement. Any turn to fascism is an act of desperation by the ruling class. It shows that the controllers can no longer control their system. The ruling class has had to cede political power to demagogues, street thugs and maniacs. So there is nothing ‘normal’ about fascist rule.

While fascism strikes in two directions - against the working class and against divisions in the ruling class - it objectively acts to preserve the capitalist system of exploitation. Fascism is then a particular form of anti-socialism and counterrevolution under conditions of monopoly capitalism.

After 1945 bourgeois Europe was forced to reinvent itself. The fascist past had to be denied and turned into other. In Britain World War II became our finest hour. A crusade for freedom. The motive was to save the Jews, not the British empire.

Jörg Haider, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Gianfranco Fini, Pim Fortuyn - and Nick Griffin, for that matter - are reactionary rebels against the carefully constructed post-World War II consensus ideology. They rail against the self-satisfied political elite, with their bribery and lust for money. Turn back globalisation, neoliberalism, free trade and migrants. The future for them is national, decentralised … and somewhere in the past.

The bourgeois establishment reacts with such hostility because these men with their crude chauvinism, campaigns against immigrants, occasional anti-semitic outbursts and xenophobic nationalism remind official Europe of its shameful, pre-1945 past. Few establishment historians or other paid persuaders dare recall how official Europe promoted social Darwinism, race theory, anti-semitism and a brutal arrogance towards colonised peoples. And how these ideas were blessed by the clergy and enforced with police batons and army bayonets.

Nevertheless, official Europe is striving to meet the ‘legitimate concerns’ of its far-right doppelganger. Illegal migrants are confined, sent back and kept out. They are to blame for crime, drugs and overcrowded schools. The message is the same.

Nick Griffin undoubtedly comes from the vile tradition of Mosleyism. Le Pen, Haider and Fini too have definite sympathies with fascism. Many of the BNP’s cadre are genuine fascists with prison records for violence to prove it. Nowadays, however, the BNP shuns the skinhead image, Nazi uniforms, songs and stiff-arm salutes are banned and clashes with the left are avoided.

The BNP is ideologically a party of the extreme chauvinistic, islamophobic and anti-communist right. In terms of membership and organisation it cannot be properly described as fascist though. There are fascists at the core, but they are a minority and even then they present themselves as born-again democrats. The ballot box is where the BNP concentrates its main energies. It organises accordingly. The BNP has branches and districts, not companies and battalions.

In general, then, the extreme right is not organised along fascist lines. There are no fighting squads or military lines of command. We are certainly neither in a revolutionary nor a counterrevolutionary situation.