Fascism

The Roman Salute is commonly associated with Nazis and other Fascists.

Fascism, usually understood in Marxist theory as capitalism in decay, is a counter-revolutionary reactionary movement led by finance capital, and a form of dictatorship of the bourgeoisie which emerged during periods of economic crisis in imperialist countries. The Third International described fascism as the "open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital."

Fascism usually promotes policies that favour the ever-expanding domination of capital. Its political aspect is marked by pervasive anti-communism, a profound aversion towards democracy, the justification and glorification of class society through class collaboration, and chauvinistic tendencies, namely ultra-nationalism, racism, sexism, and ableism. Fascist ideologues usually promote conspiracy theories, irrational myths and manipulative distortions of truth to gather support of their popular base.

Bourgeois publication The Economist magazine introduced the euphemism privatization in 1936, unseen in political discourse at the time, to describe Nazi Germany's economic policies, which in Marxist terms is the selling out of state infrastructure to the highest bidder.

Analysis of fascism

Georgi Dimitrov's analysis of fascism, paraphrased, is as follows: fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital, taking vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. The development of fascism, and the fascist dictatorship itself, assume different forms in different countries, according to historical, social and economic conditions and to the national peculiarities, and the international position of the given country.

Fascism was able to come to power primarily because the working class succumbed to class collaboration with the bourgeoisie, and was divided and disarmed in face of the onslaught of the bourgeoisie. The Communist Parties failed to form a united anti-fascist proletarian front with the Social-Democratic leaders, to struggle against fascism's poisonous ideology and its historical and cultural revisionism, cleared the path to power for fascism.

Fascists engage in historical revisionism of cultures. Communists must respond with a better alternative: we must adjust to the national conditions of every native culture, and practice proletarian internationalism. The socialist revolution will be the "salvation" of nations, cultures, the people. Both the proletariat's international and diverse national interests will be defended. The cultures will be liberated from monopoly capitalism. The proletariat of colonized nations will not shy from national sentiments and struggle against the imperialism oppressing their native cultures, and the proletariat of imperialist nations will struggle against their own bourgeoisie's oppressor policies.

Are we class-conscious Great-Russian proletarians impervious to the feeling of national pride? Certainly not. We love our language and our motherland; we, more than any other group, are working to raise its laboring masses (i.e., nine-tenths of its population) to the level of intelligent democrats and socialists. We, more than anybody are grieved to see and feel to what violence, oppression and mockery our beautiful motherland is being subjected by the tsarist hangmen, the nobles and the capitalists. We are proud of the fact that those acts of violence met with resistance in our midst, in the midst of the Great Russians; that this midst brought forth Radischev, the Decembrists, the intellectual revolutionaries of the seventies; that in 1905 the Great-Russian working class created a powerful revolutionary party of the masses.

We are filled with national pride because of the knowledge that the Great-Russian nation, too, has created a revolutionary class, that it, too, has proved capable of giving humanity great examples of struggle for freedom and for socialism; that its contribution is not confined solely to great pogroms, numerous scaffolds, torture chambers, severe famines and abject servility before the priests, the tsars, the landowners and the capitalists.

We are filled with national pride, and therefore we particularly hate our slavish past... and our slavish present, in which the same landowners, aided by the capitalists, lead us into war to stifle Poland and the Ukraine, to throttle the democratic movement in Persia and in China, to strengthen the gang of Romanovs, Bobrinskis, Puriskeviches that cover with shame our Great-Russian national dignity. | V. I. Lenin, Collected Works 21:103-4}}

Bourgeois governments usually pass through preliminary stages, adopting reactionary measures which directly facilitate the accession to power of fascism. To not fight these preparatory stages is to facilitate fascism's victory. It gains the following of the petty bourgeoisie, and even of certain sections of the most backward strata of the proletariat, through manipulative appeals to their needs and demands, inflaming prejudices and playing on their sense of justice and even on their revolutionary traditions, their faith in revolution, their resentments, hatred of corruption, and the urge towards socialism.

Fascism promised many things: to fight corruption, "a fair wage," a great future for the youth; for the landless and indebted peasants, an end to debt bondage and rent, expropriation of the landed estates from usurers without compensation,

But actually it has brought them an even lower standard of living; destroyed their trade unions; deprived them of the right to strike and to have their working-class press; forced the revolutionary movement underground; forces them into fascist organizations; plunders their social insurance funds and transforms the mills and factories into prisons where the unbridled arbitrary rule of the capitalist reigns; wholesale dismissals of young workers, labor camps and incessant military drilling for a war of conquest; placed the peasants in unprecedented servitude to the usurers, landlords, and the fascist state apparatus; the democratic liberties of the working people are suppressed; the law is falsified and curtailed and intensified; crimes against humanity in concentration camps, torture chambers, police brutality, sterilization, countless murders,

In foreign policy, fascism foments violent hatred of other nations, acting in the interests of the extreme imperialists, yet it presents itself to the masses in the guise of champion of an ill-treated nation, and appeals to outraged national sentiments.

   First, complete independence from the bourgeoisie and dissolution of the bloc of Social-Democracy with the bourgeoisie;
   Second, preliminary unity of action;
   Third, recognition of the revolutionary overthrow of the rule of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of soviets a sine qua non;
   Fourth, refusal to support one's own bourgeoisie in an imperialist war;
   Fifth, building up the Party on the basis of democratic centralism, which ensures unity of purpose and action, and which has been tested by the experience of the Russian Bolsheviks. 

Dimitrov's analysis is useful, but it is an observation of fascism from the European perspective and requires adaptation. In Discourse on colonialism, Aimé Césaire exposed the old colonialist mindsets that would later influence fascism and survive after it. This prompted him to write in that same essay that fascism is colonialism applied to the coloniser. A similar observation was made by Frantz Fanon, who wrote: "what is fascism if not colonialism when rooted in a traditionally colonialist country?" In essence, following this line of reasoning, we can say that fascism is when the violence that the colonialist-imperialist Europe visited upon the world over the course of the development of the modern/colonial/capitalist world-system comes back home to visit.

Fascism in the settler colonial countries translates to the acceleration of colonialist violence upon indigenous and marginalized bodies, perpetrated largely by a collaboration between the settler population, the settler-colonial state, and indigenous compradors. Along with it there may be all the indignities of accelerated capitalism onto the native and settler population. With diminishing returns of primary capital accumulation as the colonialist project progresses, the bourgoisie may exact increased demands and pressure on the settler proletariat.

The effects of fascist propaganda results in its followers being inspired to violent terrorist actions against the blamed populations, and these terrorists "have friends in high places" in the form of fascist politicians. The murder of working class Muslims and Latinos in the name of protecting the environment, and the shooting and bombing of Mosques and Synagogues to fight "globalists" or "replacement" anxieties of the white man, are examples of this.

Acting thus, the bourgeoisie acts as all classes doomed by history have acted. Communists should know that the future, at any rate, belongs to them; therefore we can and must combine the most intense passion in the great revolutionary struggle with the coolest and most sober evaluation of the mad ravings of the bourgeoisie. [V. I. Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, New York (1949), pp. 81-82; Collected Works 31:101]

Ideological features and origins of fascism

Rather than being a unified, cohesive ideology, Fascism has always been very eclectic and based in philosophical idealism, in fact it is a core characteristic that fascists opportunistically recycle, adapt and twist narratives to fit their goals. However, the goals are always similarly brutal. Therefore it is necessary to outline fascism's ideological evolution by observing its noteworthy material impacts upon the world, not by the myriad, obscuritan, overlapping, incoherent ideological tendencies and thinkers. The only uniting force behind fascism, in practice, is its defense of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy and Western chauvinism. A disproportionate amount of influence, in fact, comes from European aristocrat ideologues.

The origins of fascism as a counter-revolutionary movement can be traced back to French far-right French Action, which was an openly anti-Marxist political organization established in 1899 proposing an "integral nation" for French society through class collaboration.

The term "fascism" comes from the Italian National Fascist Party, a party founded by Benito Mussolini in 1921; whose practices and ideology would later define this reactionary movement as a whole. Mussolini's fascism was constructed out of an admiration and romanticization of Roman civilisation, which originated in modern-day Italy. Thus, the name fascism was based on the fasces, an axe that is surrounded and bound to a bundle of sticks and was carried by officials (lictors) in political and military demonstrations. This was a symbol of power and authority that Mussolini repurposed for fascism.

Cooptation of the aesthetics of existing popular movements through entryism remains a common strategy for fascist self-promotion, solely to capture popularity. Thus, as the climate crisis unfolds in the 21st century, ecofascism has strongly emerged, shifting blame from fossil fuel capital to immigrants and nations of the global south -- in other words, promoting fascist policies through greenwashing. One prominent politician of ecofascist policies is Marine Le Pen. Population control, anti-immigrant policies, and ethnocide become the alternatives pushed instead of facing capital's responsibility for ecological destruction. Blame shifting away from capital is as old as fascism's birth: the oldest and most common example shared by fascists worldwide is antisemitism. The most widely circulated and influential myth since the late 19th century is a fake story that blames Jewish people for the world's problems, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Blavatsky, Cultural Appropriation and New Age Myths

The violent and shameless appropriation of the world's cultures was wildly popular among Europeans since European colonialism began, in everything from food to clothing to "spirituality", and by the 19th century, their orientalist gaze fixated upon Asia, or "the Orient". These appropriations became extremely instrumental to fascist myth making. New Age occultism such as the bizarre "Theosophy" (not to be confused with the term used by Neoplatonists) was invented by 19th century German aristocrat, Helena Blavatsky, a lifelong traveler and settler in Russia, the United States of America and India. Theosophy used a patchwork of orientalist myths and interpretations of various indigenous cultures, such as Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism. Blavatsky was the inventor of the Atlantis myth, Lemurians, etc. Among the bizarre myths, Theosophy claimed that the mixing of races caused degeneration. Theosophy was influential in the 20th century German fascist regime's construction of the "Aryan" national myth through Guido von List's German adaptation of it into the spiritual and cultural framework of Nazism. That is why the Nazis appropriated the swastika from Buddhism.

Nietzsche

Historian and Marxist-Leninist philosopher Domenico Losurdo pointed in his work Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel that Nietzsche, who was an aristocrat, can be associated with a reactionary trend against the rise of the Paris commune in 1871. Nietzsche's views were consistently anti-liberal, anti-socialist, anti-democratic and even promoted racial hygiene, a tendency which would later inspire fascist movements.

Sorel

Georges Sorel (1847–1922) was a French syndicalist that contributed and inspired the rise of National Syndicalism in Italy and Spain. His most famous works centred around the idea of myth; which he highlights as "forming the centre of man’s cosmology and world view in all ages". In 1909, Sorel began to adopt the idea of Integral Nationalism, publishing an article praising the far-right group French Action in Divenire Sociale—the leading journal for Italian Syndicalists at the time. It received immense praise by French Action; being reprinted under the name "Antiparliamentary Socialists”, and in 1910 he joined the group. During this time, he developed further reactionary ideals, leading him to support Catholic Patriotism and further embedding himself in fascist ideology. Mussolini looked up highly to Sorel and claimed he was his "foremost teacher".

Types of fascism

Italian fascism

The Italian fascist government of 1922 was the first known historical example of large-scale privatizations of state-owned enterprises.

German fascism

See main article: Nazism

The most extreme form of fascism was German fascism, which called itself National Socialism despite being supported by finance capitalists.

German fascism was most known for its genocidal, expansionist, imperialist and colonialist rule under the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945, culminating in the deaths of at least 30 million people, including 26.6 million Soviets. While the word "Nazi" is short for "National socialist", they were capitalists, the term "socialist" being nothing more than a ploy to gain working-class support. Not only did the German fascists allow the virulent exploitation of the working people and concentration of capital, they adopted a settler-colonial model coupled with exploitation, colonialism, and mass terror applied to the European continent. The ideological justification for colonization of European peoples by Nazis was promoted as Lebensraum, and was directly influenced by Statesian genocide of Native peoples through Manifest Destiny.

The Nazi Party was beaten into dissolution by the Soviet Union after the Battle of Berlin in May 1945.

Japanese fascism

Japanese fascism, also known as Shōwa Statism, was based on a number of imperialist and ultranationalist political ideas from various Japanese thinkers. Japanese fascism manifested itself in extreme militarism, monarchism, and expansionism in Asia.

Portuguese fascism

From 1933 to 1974, Portugal was ruled by the Estado Novo ("New State"), headed by António de Oliveira Salazar. Under Salazar's dictatorship, the Portuguese working class was subjugated to reactionary Christian doctrine, as well as a corporatist economy. The Salazarist regime was also militantly imperialist, repressing calls for independence and self-determination in Angola and Mozambique. The Estado Novo would finally fall in 1974, after a military coup. By the end of the 1970s, Portugal had returned to being a bourgeois democracy.

Portugal, at the time a Fascist dictatorship, was one of the founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Spanish fascism

Following the victory of the United Front in 1936, a fascist revolt led by General Franco and assisted by invading Germany and Italy, tacitly backed by the rest of the allies, broke out. A civil war lasting three years followed, culminating in the crushing of Republican forces. The regime went on to last three more decades, and it is said that the current "reformed" Spanish state is a continuation of the same regime. Notably, Franco reintroduced the king of Spain in 1956 (whose parent was deposed in 1931), and to this day Spain remains a monarchy.

Neo-fascist movements

See main article: Neo-fascism

2019 coup in Bolivia

President Evo Morales of Bolivia was re-elected to office in October 2019 with 47.08% of the total vote. Soon after, opposing fascists called the results into question, helped by fraudulent reports from the Organisation of American States (OAS), which led to their paramilitary wing causing violence in the streets. After three weeks, Morales agreed to step down and left the country.

Later, accusations of electoral fraud were completely debunked by the same journals that initially reported on them, trusting the OAS.

The new government, led by Jeanine Añez, established a military junta in the country so as to dismantle popular support for MAS (Morales' party). They pushed elections back three times, eventually having them take place in November 2020, a full year after the coup. Their efforts failed, as MAS won the presidential election in 2020 with 55% of all votes (under candidate Luis Arce).

Since his election, Arce's government has announced that they would effectively purge the military's leadership, as their treason was pivotal in letting the coup succeed.

The United States of North America

After World War II, the settler-colonial United States of North America is the new main perpetrator of orientalism, and, unsurprisingly many Fascist currents are initially developed there before being replicated internationally. Contemporary fascists such as the White House cabinet member and close advisor to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, have publicly quoted Julius Evola. Evola was an Italian fascist ideologue, spiritualist, and orientalist influenced by theosophy and Nietszche who (like Mussolini) called for a restoration of the ancient Roman empire, but fully rejected modern Western society and predicted its accelerationist collapse and the return of pre-"rational", "fuedal", "mystic" society in his own Esoteric Fascist theory. Fascist New Agers have been found storming the capitol building of the United States of North America.

See also

• Neoliberalism
• Greater German Reich
• Far-right politics
• Genocide

References