Fascism

chlamor
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Fascism

Post by chlamor » Wed Jan 01, 2020 6:31 pm

Fascism

Fascism is a real ideology, and an all too real political movement. It was born fairly recently, in the right-wing literature of now faded pre-Fascist Portuguese, Italian and Spanish writers toward the end of the 19th century. Their common threads were both a lament for the failed Imperial ambitions of their respective states - losers in the competition for Empire waged against far stronger nations - and a program to focus the power of the "nation" to renew that competition on a more even footing.

Sitting behind this theory is the ever present fear that failure to renew that competition will inevitably result in the decomposition of the current society, internally through class struggle, and externally through an ever less favorable balance of forces which will "enslave" the nation. Thus the common form of the initial political program of Fascism is to sound the alarm and arouse the nation - Arise Spain! ("Arriba Espagna!"), etc.

Often, this is practically reinforced by the identification of internal enemies whose isolation presents a convenient rallying cry (Jews, Reds, Moskals). Under-pinning the whole is the Fascist Theory of the State, borrowed from the bourgeois theories of the state but significantly elaborated. According to this theory, the State exists above class society as does a "national interest". The realization of that interest requires the mobilization of the entire society and its corollary, the suppression of the "petty squabbles" between classes, the elimination of the decrepit institutions which undermine the unity of the Nation (such as political parties, law, elections, etc.) and whatever decadent forms may weigh on that unity (in its populist form, this often includes a criticism of the bourgeoisie but from a national standpoint).

Whatever its local variations, the Fascist program always ends in the militarization of society. This however is a two edged sword. While mobilization focuses national resources, it also freezes them and starts a stop watch on the resolution of the national issues which brought Fascism to power. Almost always, this means war - the resolution of the class contradictions of the Nation at the expense of the classes of surrounding Nations.

In the 1930s, the Comintern described the whole as, "Fascism, Militarism and War". The slogan sounds vague but instead it is a very precise definition of the Nazi Trinity which is inevitably woven together. The Comintern also added one other criteria required for Fascist regimes.*

The appeal of the Fascists for certain segments of the society - the petite bourgeoisie, endangered shop keepers, expropriated small holders, petty officials, the lumpen proletariat, demobilized soldiers etc. is obvious, even if it requires an abnormal degree of desperation. Stronger or weaker concentrations of these form the foot soldiers of Fascism in every country.

But, none of these strata "owns" the State. To take state power requires the support and active participation of a significant part of the most reactionary section of finance capital. Without this, the Fascist State is impossible (and this also renders moot any populist slogans which the Fascists may entertain).

The question then is, why would the capitalists entertain the inefficiency, the riskiness, the ticking time bomb, and the reduction of personal prerogatives accompanying their association with the Fascists? The fact is that in normal conditions, the capitalists wouldn't. They need no partners to run the State. What is implied here is an abnormal desperation among the capitalists who have already exhausted all other means to resolve their competitive battles in the ordinary way.

Finally, there is an international aspect to all this. Historically, since finance capital is international, the creation of Fascist regimes as clients of external capitalists has always been a feature of Fascism. Thus, Franco's Spain became a client of NATO after WW2, Metaxas' Greece was a British client and several, mostly Latin American Fascist regimes were clients of the US.

Thus we get to my favorite quote of the Indian Congress Party that the political policy of the Imperialists was "Democracy at home; Fascism abroad". It's a great quote, but it isn't quite true. The decaying element of Fascism is not eliminated by the existence of foreign patrons, the transformation of local capitalists into compradors actually undermines the Fascist state and creates a potential opposition and, in the end, a new contradiction is introduced between the Ultra-nationalist program and the reality of the client state. Thus, even here, a certain degree of desperation and a plan for quick resolution are preconditions.

It is a mistake to see liberalism and Fascism as alternate "policies" for the bourgeoisie (and this is also central to the "radical's" narrative).

Militarism is a policy. War is a policy. Fascism ain't a policy. It is an alliance between the most reactionary portion of Capital and the rabid storm troopers of the Right. As such it is a means to an end - a political coalition - which only exists after all other means are exhausted. It requires the suspension of the political institutions of the bourgeois state with no obvious path by which they are recreated. The national bourgeoisie bets the whole bundle on lucky-seven and rolls...

Obviously, the agreement of a significant portion of the bourgeoisie is required in the end.


~ by Anaxarchos

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blindpig
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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Sat Dec 19, 2020 3:15 pm

The Éminence Grise of Third Positionism: The Neofascist Ideologue Gabriele Adinolfi
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on DECEMBER 18, 2020
FOIA Research

[i/[This is the first part of a three part series that intends to shed light on Third Positionism, a far-right ideology that has given birth to a whole cluster of neofascist and neo-Nazi groups in Europe. Current-day Third Positionism continues to be strongly influenced by the neofascist ideologue Gabriele Adinolfi, whose activities will serve as an example to understanding the bigger picture of this ultraright political current.][/i]

Since in much of post-WWII Europe explicit Nazi activity was illegal many resurgent far-right groups hid behind moderate sounding names, and in many cases adapted their rhetoric in order to draw younger generations into the “brown” orbit. It is against this backdrop that in the late 1970s the term “Third Position” (Terza Posizione) emerged in Italy: to denote a neofascist or neo-Nazi political position that attempted to blend the irreconcilable ideologies of nationalism and socialism into a “third” position. This was done in order to lure in a gullible youth drawn to leftist, progressive, and anti-capitalist ideas, just as Hitler had recognized the popularity of socialist ideas among large parts of the working class, and thus calling Nazism “national socialism”—a con job.

In the postwar era, there emerged several variants of Third Positionism that have assumed different names, reaching from Claudio Mutti’s and Franco Freda’s Nazi-Maoism to Alexander Dugin’s version of “neo-Eurasianism,” and current-day Identitarianism.

The ideology of this particular current of “Third Positionist” neofascism and neo-Nazism generally stays within the narrow limits of an inherently völkisch (pagan) and racist worldview, and thus only cosmetically differs from openly and explicitly pro-Nazi substructures replete with swastikas and photographs of Hitler. This “pagan camp” differs from Christian (not pagan) post-war neofascist and neo-Nazi currents, including Christian White supremacists and Catholic integralist groups, but all of the above’s linear antecedents are in the fascist and Nazi parties of the 1930s.

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Image Source: https://m.facebook.com/adinolfigabriele/photos/a

A note on nomenclature:

The term Terza Posizione (“Third Position”) first appeared in Italy with the emergence of a short-lived organization of the same name (1978-1982), whose co-founder was Gabriele Adinolfi. In France, where Adinolfi lived for nearly a decade following his flight from Italy after the 1980 neo-Nazi terror bombings in Bologna, this current is called Troisième Voie (“Third Way”). In Germany the term Querfront (“Lateral Front”) is used, and denotes an ideology that ostensibly combines far-right with left discourses (“Third Positionism”), as well as an alliance of far-right and left political forces (“Red-Brown alliance”). In Germany, there also exists an explicitly Third Positionist minority party, Der III. Weg, founded in 2013.

In trying to be clear about what a term like “neo-Nazi” means today it is important to understand the nature of the original Nazi movement itself as an extreme form of the fascist movements growing at the time across Europe and the US out of the devastation of WWI and the general crisis of capital culminating in the Great Depression.

The original Nazi movement was largely an umbrella term under which several currents can be identified, including Catholic, Lutheran (Protestant-Evangelical), and pagan adherents along with the interests of capitalists and feudalist landlords (Junkers), who never gave up their hatred for the modernist rise of capitalism which challenged their feudal world order and social positions. These feudal interests were often allied with conservative Church, most notably Bavarian Catholic, structures. Added to this were both right-wing elements of the military around General Ludendorff and “lumpenized” and unemployed workers suffering under the economic crisis of the global depression.

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Otto Strasser Image Source: http://cdn.images.dailystar.co.uk/dynamic/1/photo

Hitler, having recognized the attraction of socialist ideas to significant members of the working class, added the term “socialist” to the Nazi title, and deployed the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser to organize a Nazi Labor Front of workers in support of his movement (see Strasserism). It was this mix of “anti-capitalist” Nazi workers and “anti-capitalist” feudalists that provided a profoundly reactionary “anti-capitalist” and violently hostile counter-movement to the progressive anti-capitalism embodied in the communist and left social democratic parties and workers movement.

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Gregor Strasser (to the right of Hitler) participating in the party congress on the occasion of the reestablishment of the NSDAP in early 1925. To the right of Strasser: Heinrich Himmler. To Hitler’s left: Franz Xaver Schwarz, Walter Buch and Alfred Rosenberg.
Image Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Strasser#/me

This tendency of Nazi “anti-capitalism” was embodied in the völkisch (pagan) racism of the Sturmabteilung (SA) of Ernst Röhm, which was demolished at the demand of the modernist Krupp-allied1 members of the Nazi movement and its allied military during the “Night of the Long Knives” (June 30 – July 2, 1934). The purge of the SA was carried out by Heinrich Himmler’s SS, although the core völkisch (pagan) racism persisted within the SS and particularly its Ahnenerbe unit, responsible for racial purity and Nordic mysticism. (It was with this unit that the Italian fascist writer Julius Evola was associated, who was the arch-inspiration for the Italian Third Positionists.)

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Julius Evola (1889-1974) was an Italian fascist writer, conspiracy theorist and occultist. He has been described as a fascist intellectual, a radical traditionalist, antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, antipopular, and as the leading philosopher of Europe’s neofascist movement. [Source: wikipedia.org] Image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org

Indicative of the truly anti-worker intent of the leaders of this Nazi Labor Front “anti-capitalist” tendency, both Otto and Gregor Strasser, along with Rudolf Hess, Ernst Röhm, Hans Frank and other important Nazis, had joined the bloody Freikorps unit of the genocidal racist Colonel, and later Nazi Generalmajor, Franz Ritter von Epp. The Freikorps carried out the bloody and murderous assaults against the progressive, left, socialist and communist workers movements in 1918 – 1919 and in the crushing of the Munich Soviet in 1919. Otto Strasser’s work in the labor movement was specifically to create an anti-socialist, anti-left Nazi Labor Front grounded in the medieval Nazi mysticism of the SA and its allied forces.

Red-Brown alliance

Just as in the fascist and Nazi movements of the 1920s and 1930s capitalist and reactionary pseudo-“anti-capitalist” positions co-existed, although tensions certainly persisted, today the post-war neo-Nazi and broader neofascist movements also have formed (and dismantled) varying alliances. The persistence of the pseudo-anti-capitalism of the 1930s Strasserite movement has had an appeal to certain unstable elements who claim to be “leftists.” The resulting alliance is what is referred to as “red-brown,” i.e. left “red” allied with right neofascist/neo-Nazi “brown” against the capitalist/bourgeois “center.”

Unable to distinguish the evident problems of Weimar from the horrors of the Third Reich, unstable elements of the so-called Left today are being drawn into a trap by the more sophisticated and deadly Right into abandoning the flawed Center without building a capacity to challenge the greater power of the Right.

In fact, of course, it is no more a Red-Brown alliance than was the Strasserite movement to create a Nazi Labor Front a genuine workers movement. Brown can only take power if the Center is weakened and the Right is perfectly willing to recruit naive, angry or frustrated “leftists” into its war on the center, just as the Strasser brothers did nearly a century ago.

The website of the influential Russian Third Positionist neofascist Alexander Dugin used to carry the phrase “Left and Right Against the Center,” and to facilitate this there has been an effort to deny that “left” and “right” are useful terms at all, thereby breaking down the conceptual dichotomy, while pretending that both wings are really united in the fight against the bourgeois capitalist center.

Far from being a fringe phenomenon, this train of thought reaches into current discussions in the so-called Left. On October 19, 2018, Alexander Dugin led a conference in Moscow where the young American “leftist” Caleb Maupin played the “red” foil to Dugin’s demand for a left-right populist alliance against the capitalist-bourgeois global center.2 Recently Nick Brana, a former leader of the Bernie Sanders movement in an interview with pro-rightist Kim Iversen called for merging the US Rightwing into his “leftist” Movement for a Peoples’ Party.3

With no serious Communist Left able to clarify the true goals of this rightist ploy, the mainstream centrist parties in Europe and the US have been continuously weakened and the more structured – and armed—right forces are growing. What we saw in Italy during the violence of the late 1960s and 1970s was how a group of young neofascists inspired by Julius Evola and others, reformulated their image as militant ultraleftists and carried out a series of violent provocations under a false flag—all to the benefit of the Right. In order to retrace the history of this so-called Third Positionism, the story of Gabriele Adinolfi, one of its preeminent leaders, may serve as an example.

***
The Italian brand of Third Positionism (Terza Posizione) has its roots in the postwar Italian neofascist scene, but seamlessly builds on the old fascist and Nazi networks of WWII, from which it inherited some key ideological elements. Its explicitly pan-European outlook can be traced back to the early 1940s, after the Nazi regime had launched its invasion of the USSR, and for strategic reasons decided to readjust its propaganda along a pan-Europeanist platform.4 In order to rally foreign legions and volunteers, Germanic supremacy or emphasizing racial inequalities could no longer serve as a propaganda narrative, and the myth of European supremacy was deployed to rally non-German support for the Axis powers. The collaborationist units of the Waffen-SS in various European countries became the heroes and models for the pan-European myth of many postwar neofascists, such as Oswald Mosley and his Europe a Nation vision, and their network the basis for a regrouping of postwar fascists and Nazis. This regrouping, as we know now, has in many instances been supported by Western secret services during the surging Cold War, in order to instrumentalize these networks in an anticommunist capacity.

Initially, Germany’s first secret service was entirely made up of former Nazi military intelligence agents, and key figures in Konrad Adenauer’s government (1949-1963) were Nazi criminals. In France, collaborationist elements that have gathered in groups such as the Organisation armée secrète were supported in the war against Algeria’s liberation movement. In Italy, neofascist groups and parties, such as Movimento Sociale Italiano, Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale, were supported to defame the left, going as far as the deployment of domestic false-flag terrorism and murders. The instances of support of postwar fascist and Nazi networks by Western intelligence are too numerous to be recounted here, but the previous examples may give a glimpse of the immediate postwar reality, where both “Atlanticists,” Nazis, and fascists entered a dangerous liaison, facing the same enemies: the rise of communism and the national liberation movements in the “Third World.”

In Italy, whose history in this regard has been well studied,5 several neofascist groupings have been involved in what became known as the Strategy of Tension. The term has emerged in the Italian context as a designation for a strategy whereby tension is created to which average citizens would react with a wish for a “strong hand,” or a more authoritarian rule, and which should serve as a pretext for state militarization under the protection of NATO.

To kill three birds with one stone, a series of domestic terrorist attacks, which were to be blamed on the Left, was to be staged to create that tension.6 For their execution, networks nurtured in the context of a project commonly known as Operation Gladio were relied on, coordinated by American and several European secret services, as well as elusive NATO substructures, such as the Clandestine Planning Committee, and the Allied Clandestine Committee.7 Gladio foresaw the recourse to former Nazi collaborationists and right-wing extremist networks all over Europe with a two-fold purpose: as a “stay-behind” network in the case of a war with the Soviet Union and to stop by all means the surging Left. Gladio was only revealed in 1990, after Italy’s prime minister Giulio Andreotti had been forced to admit its existence under immense pressure; its revelation led to the passage of a joint resolution of the European Community against Gladio.

While on a political level death threats, blackmail and bribery were to stop an advance of the Left (Operation Demagnetize), the Italian Gladio network was looking to far-right extremist groups to break up the Left through various more violent means, including terror attacks, murder, infiltration, defamation, and street battles. Instrumentalized were predominantly gullible youngsters, some of whom were paid for pretending to be leftists, in order to infiltrate leftist, and to create pseudo-leftist, groups. In April 1968, 51 Italian neofascist students participated in a trip to Greece, together with around 60 students from the “League of Greek Fascist Students in Italy,” organized in collaboration with Italian military intelligence and the Greek junta. According to journalist and author Frédéric Laurent “more than half of the Italians (…) returned from Athens suddenly converted to Anarchism, Leftism, or to Communism, preferably Chinese,”8 and started to infiltrate leftist groups.

The first major false-flag attack occurred on December 12, 1969, in a bank on Piazza Fontana in Milan, where a bomb explosion resulted in 17 people dead and many more injured. The attack initially was attributed to anarchists of the obscure Circolo anarchico 22 marzo that had only been created in October of that year, inter alia by former Avanguardia Nazionale (AN) member Mario Merlino, most likely for the sole purpose of having a leftist group to blame. Only later the terrorists Guido Giannettini and Stefano Delle Chiaie were identified as the local masterminds of the attack, supported by members of the neofascist groups AN and Ordine Nuovo. Both were agents of the Portuguese Aginter Press, a fake press agency that was basically a mercenary terrorist organization, consisting in large part of Organisation armée secrète members, doing dirty work for various Western secret services. Aginter not only had instructed members of Delle Chiaie’s in the use of explosives,9 but it also provided them with fake identities to help them escape justice. Twenty years later, questioned by an investigation commission, Delle Chiaie revealed that AN had been implicitly involved in an operation ordered by an organization linked to the CIA and certain Italian anti-communist circles.10

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Inside the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura after the Piazza Fontana bombing in 1969. Image Source:https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anni_di_piombo#/med

According to a 2000 report by the German broadcaster ZDF, “Aginter agent Giannettini was also working with the CIA and BND [German foreign secret service Bundesnachrichtendienst]. His task: to destabilize the political system with attacks. Right-wing terrorism that should appear as terror from the left.”11

It is against this backdrop that our protagonist, Gabriele Adinolfi, comes into play. He was born in Rome in 1954 and, by his early twenties, had joined Avanguardia Nazionale in the period after the 1969 bombing (1973-1975?),12 when Delle Chiaie was already living in hiding in Francoist Spain, and Adriano Tilgher had taken over the leadership of the group. When the two most important militant extra-parliamentary groups, AN and Ordine Nuovo, were outlawed and dissolved in 1976, this opened a vacuum in the right-wing-extremist arena that resulted in the creation of several extra-parliamentary far-right groupings.

With a sentiment that the “old guard” of the “black fascist international” behind the early Strategy of Tension (Ordine Nuovo, Avanguardia Nazionale, etc.) had been instrumentalizing the far-right youth by having them execute the most dangerous actions, while taking advantage of the fruits, many younger far-right cadres went their own ways. This development was paralleled on a political level by a loss of consensus among the youth of the neofascist party Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement, MSI), parts of which deemed the strictly anti-communist and pro-Atlanticist direction of MSI leader Giorgio Almirante as outdated bloc thinking. Furthermore, seeing the successes of left agitation in the course of the student protests in the late 1960s, some far-right youngsters looked for a new format that would combine fascist doctrine with the modern appeal of left agitation strategies and social discourses.

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Terza Posizione’s logo is a variation of the Wolfsangel (“wolf trap”) symbol, widely used in the Nazi era, with the central bar substituted by a fist holding a hammer. Image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terza_Posizione#/me

In view of the above, Adinolfi, as a teenager affiliated to MSI’s youth group Giovane Italia, became a founding member of the neofascist “movement” Terza Posizione (“Third Position,” TP) in the late 1970s. TP had grown out of the far-right student organization Lotta Studentesca, founded in 1976 by Adinolfi together with fellow neofascists Walter Spedicato, Giuseppe Dimitri and Roberto Fiore in 1976. In 1978 Lotta Studentesca renamed itself Terza Posizione, by then mainly composed of ex-members of previously existing neofascist, and partly terrorist, groups, such as Ordine Nuovo, Avanguardia Nazionale, Lotta di Popolo, and Fronte Studentesco. Peppe Dimitri was the leader of the group, while Roberto Fiore and Gabriele Adinolfi were TP’s most important ideologues. TP was a very short-lived “movement” (outlawed 1980; dissolved 1982), ideologically oriented toward traditionalism, nationalism, anti-parliamentarism and militarism. TP rejected both capitalism and communism, pledging instead for a political and economic “Third Position.” But despite the conciliatory sounding name, TP was clearly a right-wing extremist organization, drawing its inspiration mainly from (neo)fascist ideologues, such as Julius Evola, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Corneliu Codreanu. With some TP members increasingly pledging for an armed struggle, they joined in parallel another group, the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, NAR), which turned into the militant arm of TP within a short period.

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Logo of the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (1977-1981), the acronym NAR being underlined with the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol.
Image Source: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclei_Armati_Rivol

The history of TP radically changed its course after August 2, 1980, the day when a bomb explosion caused a massacre at the Bologna train station, killing 85 people and wounding 200. Within hours of the attack, then Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga saw a fascist matrix behind the massacre. With all leads pointing to members of TP and the NAR, an arrest warrant was issued against Adinolfi, Fiore, and others. Fiore fled to London, while Adinolfi fled to France, where he subsequently lived for almost 20 years underground. During that time, however, Adinolfi traveled back and forth between Italy, the United Kingdom and France, where he lives today. How Adinolfi (and several of his colleagues) could live undetected for almost 20 years, and what were his means of subsistence, remain unknown.

His whitewashing account13 of his life during the later phase of the Years of Lead certainly did not clarify the matter. The escape of the TP executives abroad after the 1980 Bologna massacre was deemed cowardly behavior by the NAR toward the other militants, which was also followed by accusations against Fiore and Adinolfi of having taken with them the “cashier” of the movement. Letting it be understood that TP’s leaders had left the movement in disarray, a behavior no longer acceptable by the NAR, the group even tried to kill Fiore and Adinolfi on more than one occasion.14

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Ruins of the Bologna station west wing after the bombing on August 2, 1980.
Image Source: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Strage_di_Bolo

While living underground, first in France, then in the UK, and then mostly moving back and forth between France and Italy, Adinolfi was involved in the publication of several magazines (Terza Posizione, Dixie). During this early period in France he became acquainted with the French fascist Christian Bouchet who played an important role in the French far right and helped launch the French Troisieme Voie (Third Way) which was ultimately dissolved by order of the French government in 2013. Bouchet had been a close associate of the Russian neo-Nazi Alexander Dugin for many years. From 1985 to 1995 he ran the “Study Center for Orientation and Research” (Centro Studi Orientamenti & Ricerca), together with TP co-founder Walter Spedicato, dedicated to developing and spreading neofascist Third Positionist ideology. In over a decade, the Centro published several political documents as well as a quarterly. After Spedicato’s death in 1992, the Centro continued for three more years before ceasing its activities. What else Adinolfi was involved in throughout the 1990s remains obscure. When in March 2000 the arrest warrant against him was finally dropped, and he (officially) returned to Italy,15 Adinolfi intensified his publishing activity. The same year he released an ideological tract on Third Positionism, Noi Terza Posizione (“Our Third Position”), written together with the notorious self-identified fascist Roberto Fiore, followed by several other books on far-right politics and history.

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Roberto Fiore posing in front of a Wolfsangel flag
Image Source: https://espresso.repubblica.it/attualita/2017/12/

Former NAR member Fiore, who after his flight following the Bologna bombing had managed to live underground in the UK, has been instrumental in anchoring Third Positionism there, and had a “catalytic influence on the new ideological direction of the [British] National Front,” according to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, a researcher of the far right. “Roberto Fiore and his colleagues helped the NF forge a new militant elitist philosophy that foreswore electoral strategies in favor of educating and training a fanatical, quasi-religious ‘New Man’ in select cadres for a national revolution.”16 Fiore also helped to build the International Third Position, formed by members of the “Political Soldier” faction of the British National Front under Derek Holland and Nick Griffin. Upon Fiore’s return to Italy in 1997, he founded the neofascist Forza Nuova party.

In contrast to Fiore, Adinolfi did not get directly involved in politics, but concentrated on extra-parliamentary activities, such as the creation of several journals and websites in the early 2000s. In 2001, he was instrumental in reinvigorating and reconceptualizing the Italian far-right magazine Orion during a “summer university” program in Lombardy. Since 2004, Adinolfi has been managing the news website www.noreporter.org, and around that time also founded the think tank and publishing house Centro Studi Polaris, which remained active until about 2016. The Centro Polaris organized several national and international conferences and meetings, and has a long list of publications“including a DVD series, three books (Geopolitics of drugs and oil, Immigration, and Earthquakes), multi-level communication courses, cadre courses and a quarterly magazine.”

Meanwhile, Adinolfi also started to write articles for various far-right newspapers, including the French extreme right-wing and antisemitic magazine Rivarol. From 2003 onward Adinolfi was involved in the organization of the notorious “Honor Guard of Benito Mussolini (Guardia d’Onore Benito Mussolini), which is keeping watch over Italy’s former fascist leader’s grave.

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Honor Guard of Benito Mussolini Image Source: https://elcierredigital.com/investigacion/2468063

It was also from 2003 onward that Adinolfi started to appear frequently as a speaker at far-right events, and got involved in the creation of the neofascist movement CasaPound. On his online schedule, Adinolfi has painstakingly documented his activities since 2003, the founding year of CasaPound (CP), which started out with the occupation of empty houses by far-right squatters. It reveals that Adinolfi attended the inauguration of CP on December 27, 2003. The entry for this day reads: “Inauguration – together with approximately hundred people – of the newly occupied CasaPound: allocation of vacant premises to families, creation of a center against usury and the high costs of living.”

When the CP was established, Adinolfi did not publicly appear as a figurehead of the movement, and called himself a mere “patron,” but his central role in its creation is certainly acknowledged by prominent figures of the far right. In 2010, the German New Right magazine Sezession (Götz Kubitschek) published a long feature about CP written by Martin Lichtmesz, in which he traces the movement back to Adinolfi: “Among the exposed heads of CasaPound are the mastermind Gabriele Adinolfi, co-founder of the group Terza Posizione, which was active in the seventies and closely linked to ‘black terrorism,’ and the 1973-born Gianluca Iannone, a bearded, tattooed giant who cultivates the image of a rough motorcycle rocker and has additional cult status as the head of the hardcore band Zetazeroalfa.”

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CasaPound’s headquarters in Via Napoleone III n. 8, Rome. Image Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/th

In 2004, Adinolfi held 13 lectures at CP, including one on the fascist ideologue Julius Evola (“Julius Evola, the Empowering Legend”), whose importance in the Third Positionist context cannot be overemphasized. Most of the events were “experimental courses” (corsi sperimentali) developed in the framework of his Centro Studi Polaris. In CasaPound several of the most nasty currents of the Italian far right come together. The movement interfaces with dozens of other far-right projects, which have been meticulously listed in an article by Patria Independente, reaching from far-right sport and mixed martial arts clubs, to commercial and cultural projects.

Until 2008, CP was closely linked to the neofascist party Fiamma Tricolore, a far-right split-off from the neofascist MSI party, whose first leader, Pino Rauti (1926-2012), was implicated in the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing. But after an internal dispute in 2008 they split, and CP appeared as a social association.

In 2012 CP turned into a party, and from early on supported the Alliance of European National Movements (AENM), an ultranationalist far-right European party founded in 2009 and led by Jobbik’s Béla Kovács. When the Centro Studi Polaris ceased its activities around 2016, Adinolfi opened a new think tank, EurHope, which was supported by the AENM, and in the run-up to the 2019 European elections, CP, which in the meantime had ceased its status as a party, was openly supporting the AENM.

Adinolfi and his close collaborator, Pascal Lassalle, apparently have very good contacts to Ukrainian neo-Nazis. Although not having appeared on Ukrainian far-right platforms himself, close colleagues of Adinolfi from France and Italy have, among them former Mouvement d’action sociale figurehead Lassalle and Alberto Palladino. In 2017, Lassale had delivered a “special message” by Adinolfi to Ukrainian nationalists in the framework of the neo-Nazi Third Positionist Paneuropa Conference in Kyiv. In a report written by one of the organizers, Olena Semenyaka, the “coordinator of the Department of International Relations of the ‘Azov’ regiment ‘Azov Reconquista,’” one can read in regard to Adinolfi17:

… [Lassalle] recited an honorable address to the Ukrainian revolution by this legendary co-founder of Italian Terza Posizione who back in times of the Maidan revolution was far-sighted enough to see that “Eurasia is a Utopia, the Kremlin and the White House are the Heirs of Yalta.” … [The] Current European Union, undoubtedly, is the very opposite of the traditional empire: it’s artificial, maintained by the police control and devoid of the cultural foundation. In full accord with Gabriele Adinolfi, Pascal Lassalle underlines that Europe hasn’t really broken free from the post-war Yalta world’s partition into the Washington-dominated (along with its Brussels puppets) and Moscow-dominated areas. Notwithstanding the ongoing chauvinistic encroachments of the neo-Soviet Russian Federation, Ukrainians, in his opinion, should also beware the threat of American globalization.

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Members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. Source: Belltower News.
Image Source: https://i.imgur.com/sDrYIa8.jpg

The speech touches upon a sensitive contradiction of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion (now part of Ukraine’s gendarmery National Guard, and of a political party called National Corps), which on the one hand received funds from the U.S. government, but at the same time has an unmistakably Third Positionist outlook. This becomes clear when analyzing the organizations the participants of the Paneuropa Conference were hailing from, including CasaPound, Der III. Weg, Bastion Social (formerly Groupe Union Défense), or the now defunct “neo-bolshevik” Mouvement d’action sociale. Just as a reminder: the Azov Battalion formed during the Western-backed coup against Ukraine’s government under Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, but has its roots in a Ukrainian neo-Nazi hooligan group dating back to the 1980s. There has surfaced ample evidence that the Azov Battalion had received support from the U.S. government, which has armed and advised the neo-Nazis in its proxy war against Russia. Trump’s impeachment campaign was in part based on the 2018 provision passed by the U.S. Congress that blocked military aid to Azov.

Parts 2 and 3 of this dispatch will look into Adinolfi’s current entanglements in France and Greece, including the so-called Lansquenets, a fascist elite cadre, whose figurehead he is. They reveal his involvement with proponents hailing from long existing and new right-wing extremist groups, such as the Groupe Union Défense, Ordre Nouveau, Bastion Sociale, and Dissidence Française.

1. The Krupp family, a prominent 400-year-old German dynasty, is famous for their production of steel, artillery, ammunition and other armaments. The family business was the largest company in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, and was the premier weapons manufacturer for Germany in both world wars.
2. “Conference ‘The alternatives to globalism: the strategies of the multipolar world.’ Part 1,” geopolitica.ru, April 29, 2018, https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/studio/co ... rld-part-1. (defunct)
3. “A Movement For A Viable Third Party, A People’s Party – Nick Brana,” Kim Iversen on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9f1izqMtnI.
4. Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017).), 9–10, 38.
5. Nicola Rao, Trilogia della celtica. La vera storia del neofascismo italiano (La fiamma e la celtica; Il sangue e la celtica; Il piombo e la celtica) (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2014); Pauline Picco, Liaisons dangereuses : les extrêmes droites en France et en Italie (1960-1984) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016); Franco Ferraresi, Threats to Democracy: The Radical Right in Italy after the War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
6. Instrumental in the organization of these attacks was a colloquium on “revolutionary warfare” on May 3-5, 1965, in Rome, “quasi-exclusively financed by the SIFAR,” then Italy’s military intelligence agency. According to René Monzat, “this colloquium provided the theoretical framework for the strategy of tension.” René Monzat, Enquêtes sur la droite extrême (Le Monde-éditions, 1992), 91. Monzat quotes François Duprat, L’Ascension du MSI (Paris: Edition les Sept Couleurs, 1972). Among the 20 students who participated, several had already been on SIFAR’s payroll to infiltrate and break up left-wing groups and demonstrations (among them, Stefano Delle Chiaie, Guido Giannettini, and probably also Mario Merlino). Eduardo González Calleja, “Entre dos continentes. Estrategia de la tensión desde la ultraderecha latinoamericana a la europea,” in Tiempo Devorado, Vol. 4, No. 1, 172, https://revistes.uab.cat/tdevorado/arti ... eja/pdf_91.
7. Daniele Ganser, “Terrorism in Western Europe: An Approach to NATO’s Secret Stay-Behind Armies,” in Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, South Orange, NJ, Winter/Spring 2005, Vol. 6, No. 1, www.php.isn.ethz.ch/kms2.isn.ethz.ch/se ... Europe.pdf.
8. Frédéric Laurent, L’Orchestre noir: Enquête sur les réseaux néo-fascistes (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2013), 75.
9. It has also transpired “that instructors of Aginter Press… came to Rome between 1967 and 1968 and instructed the militant members of Avanguardia Nazionale in the use of explosives.” Judge Guido Salvini hearing before the Italian Parliamentary Commission of investigation on terrorism in Italy, 9th session of 12 February 1997 (9ª SEDUTA – MERCOLEDI 12 FEBBRAIO 1997, Presidenza del Presidente PELLEGRINO), https://web.archive.org/web/20160303175 ... steno9.htm, quoted in Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies. Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (Routledge, 2005), 120.
10. Nicola Rao, La fiamma e la celtica (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2010) 57.
11. Egmont Koch and Oliver Schröm, “Kennzeichen D: BND-Schmiergeld,” ZDF, February 16, 2000, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqCFYC6nF7I. A transcript of the English translation is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20160412154 ... glish-Subs.
12. Nicola Rao, Il sangue e la celtica (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2008), 45.
13. Gabriele Adinolfi, Années de plomb et semelles de vent (Paris: Les Bouquins de Synthèse Nationale).
14. Giovanni Bianconi, A mano armata. Vita violenta di Giusva Fioravanti (Milan: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2007), 44, 269.
15. Emanuele Del Medico, All’estrema destra del padre: tradizionalismo cattolico e destra radicale : il paradigma veronese (La Fiaccola, 2004), https://books.google.de/books?id=TuvZAA ... 26+Ricerca”.
16. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 68-69.
17. “1st Paneuropa Conference Report,” Reconquista Europe (undated), http://reconquista-europe.tumblr.com/po ... -paneuropa. Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20180825221 ... -paneuropa
Neo-Nazi Parties Swiftly Acquiring Power Throughout Europe by Slyly Posing as a “Third Way”

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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 12, 2021 12:37 pm

Fascism, Fascisation, Antifascism
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 11, 2021
Ugo Palheta
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All over the world, from the United States to Brazil and India, Italy and Hungary, the question of fascism has returned to the forefront. Not just because of the advance – or electoral victories – of far-right organisations, but also because of undeniable authoritarian thrusts and accelerating policies of destruction of workers’ rights, coupled with the rise of identitarian nationalisms and processes of radicalisation and legitimisation of racism.

In recent years, this dynamic has been particularly visible in France: as witness the hardening of police and judicial repression (against migrants, immigrant neighbourhoods and social mobilisations), the systematic nature (and impunity) of police violence and the inability of the state to even acknowledge its existence, or again the media and political mainstreaming of Islamophobia even at the highest political level, as seen in the current pseudo-debate on ‘separatism’.

Ugo Palheta, author of La Possibilité du fascisme (La Découverte, 2018), offers elements for reflection on fascism (past and present), on processes of fascisation and on the antifascism that is needed, in the hope that this may contribute to a wider understanding of present and future battles.


1 – On fascism

Fascism can be classically defined as an ideology, a movement and a regime.

It designates above all a political project for the ‘regeneration’ of an imaginary community – generally the nation1 – involving a vast operation of purification, in other words, the destruction of everything that, from the fascist point of view, is seen as hindering its phantasmagorical homogeneity, impeding its chimerical unity, depriving it of its imaginary essence and dissolving its profound identity.

As a movement, fascism grows and gains a wide audience by presenting itself as a force capable of challenging ‘the system’ as well as re-establishing ‘law and order’. It is this deeply contradictory dimension of reactionary revolt, an explosive mixture of false subversion and ultra-conservatism, which allows it to seduce social strata whose aspirations and interests are fundamentally antagonistic.

When fascism succeeds in conquering power and becoming a regime (or more precisely a state of exception), it always tends to perpetuate the social order – despite its ‘anti-systemic’ and sometimes even ‘revolutionary’ pretensions.

This definition allows us to establish a continuity between historical fascism, that of the inter-war period, and what will be called here neo-fascism, that is to say, the fascism of our time. As we shall go on to see, asserting this continuity does not imply blindness to differences in context.

2 – Crisis of hegemony (1)

If its rise requires the background of a structural crisis of capitalism, economic instability, popular frustrations, deepening social antagonisms (class, race and gender) and identity panic, fascism is only on the agenda when the political crisis reaches such a level of intensity that it becomes insurmountable within the framework of established forms of political domination, in other words, when it is no longer possible for the ruling class to guarantee the stability of the social and political order by the ordinary means associated with liberal democracy and a simple renewal of its political personnel.

This is what Gramsci called a crisis of hegemony (or ‘organic crisis’), the central component of which is the growing inability of the bourgeoisie to impose its political domination through the fabrication of majority consent to the order of things, i.e. without a significant increase in the degree of physical coercion. In so far as the fundamental element characterising this crisis is not the impetuous rise of popular struggles, let alone an uprising that creates deep fissures within the capitalist state, this type of political crisis cannot be characterised as a revolutionary crisis, even if the crisis of hegemony can, under certain conditions, lead to a situation of a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary type.

This inability on the part of the bourgeoisie proceeds, in particular, from a weakening of the links between representatives and represented, or more precisely, of the mediations between political power and citizens. In the case of neo-fascism, this weakening results in the decline of traditional mass organisations (political parties, trade unions, voluntary associations), without which ‘civil society’ is little more than an electoral slogan (think of the famous ‘figures from civil society’), encourages the atomisation of individuals and thus condemns them to impotence, making them available for new political affects, new forms of enlistment and new modes of action. Yet, this weakening, which makes the formation of mass militias largely superfluous for neo-fascists, is precisely the product of bourgeois policies and the social crisis they unfailingly engender.

3 – Crisis of hegemony (2)

In the case of the fascism of our time (neo-fascism), it is clearly the cumulative effects of the policies carried out since the 1980s in the framework of ‘neoliberalism’, the response of the Western bourgeoisies to the revolutionary upsurge of 1968 and after, which led everywhere – at uneven rates depending on the country – to more or less acute forms of political crisis (increasing rates of abstention, gradual erosion or sudden collapse of ruling parties, etc.), creating the conditions for a fascist dynamic.

By launching an offensive against the organised workers’ movement, and methodically breaking all the foundations of the post-war ‘social compromise’, which depended on a certain relationship between classes (a relatively weakened bourgeoisie and an organised and mobilised working class), the ruling class became progressively incapable of building a composite and hegemonic social bloc. To this must be added the very strong instability of the world economy and the difficulties encountered by national economies, which deeply and durably weaken the credit of ruling classes among their respective populations, and the confidence of these in the economic system.

4 – Crisis of hegemony (3)

To the extent that the neoliberal offensive has made it more difficult to mobilise in the workplace, particularly in the form of strike action, weakening trade unions and increasing precariousness, this disaffection increasingly tends to be expressed elsewhere and in different forms:

– a growing electoral abstention everywhere (though sometimes less so when a particular election happens to be more polarised), reaching levels often never seen before;

– the decline, either gradual or sharp, of many of the dominant institutional parties (or the emergence of new movements and figures within them, such as the Tea Party and Trump in the case of the Republican Party in the United States);

–the emergence of new political movements or the rise of formerly marginal forces;

– the emergence of social movements developing outside traditional frameworks, i.e. essentially outside the organised labour movement (which does not mean without any link to the political Left and trade unions).

In some national contexts, neo-fascists manage to insert themselves into broad social movements (Brazil) or generate mass mobilisations themselves (India); their ideas may also permeate certain fringes of these movements. However, this is generally not enough for neo-fascist organisations to become militant mass movements, at least at this stage, and extra-parliamentary struggles tend more towards ideas of social and political emancipation (anti-capitalism, anti-racism, feminism, etc.) than towards neo-fascism. Although they lack strategic cohesion and a common political horizon, sometimes even unified demands, these mobilisations generally point towards the objective of a break with the social order and the practical possibility of an emancipatory advance.

In every case, the political order is profoundly destabilised. Yet it is clearly in this type of situation that fascist movements can appear – to different social groups and for contradictory reasons – as both a basically electoral response (at this stage at least) to the decline of the hegemonic capacity of the dominant classes and an alternative to the traditional political game.

5 – Crisis of the alternative

Contrary to popular belief (in part of the Left), fascism is not just a desperate response of the bourgeoisie to an imminent revolutionary threat, but the expression of a crisis of the alternative to the existing order and a defeat of counter-hegemonic forces. While it is true that fascists mobilise fear (real or simulated) of the Left and of social movements, it is rather the inability of the exploited class (proletariat) and oppressed groups to constitute themselves as revolutionary political subjects and engage in an experiment of social transformation (however limited), that allows the far Right to appear as a political alternative and win the adhesion of very diverse social groups.

In the present situation, as in the inter-war period, confronting the danger of fascism implies not only defensive struggles against authoritarian hardening, anti-migration policies, the development of racist ideas, etc., but also (and more profoundly) that the subaltern – exploited and oppressed – manage to unite politically around a project of rupture with the social order and seize the opportunity presented by the crisis of hegemony.

6 – The two moments of the fascist dynamic

In the first stage of its accumulation of forces, fascism seeks to give a subversive turn to its propaganda and present itself as a revolt against the existing order. It proceeds by challenging the traditional political representatives of both the dominant classes (the Right) and the dominated classes (the Left), all supposedly guilty of contributing to the demographic and cultural disintegration of the ‘nation’ (conceived in a phantasmagorical way as a more or less immutable essence). The Right is alleged to favour ‘globalism from above’ (to use Marine Le Pen’s words), that of ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘stateless’ finance (with the anti-Semitic overtones that such expressions inevitably carry), while the Left supposedly fuels ‘globalism from below’, that of migrants and racial minorities (with the whole range of the far Right’s traditional and inherent xenophobia).

By making the ‘nation’ the solution to all ills (economic crisis, unemployment, ‘insecurity’, etc., being invariably attributed to what is considered foreign, especially everything related to immigration), fascism claims to be an ‘anti-systemic’ force and a ‘third way’: neither right nor left, neither capitalism nor socialism. The bankruptcy of the Right and the betrayals of the Left give credit to the fascist ideal of a dissolution of political cleavages and social antagonisms in a ‘nation’ at last ‘regenerated’ because politically unified (i.e. in reality under the control of fascists), ideologically unanimous (i.e. deprived of the means of publicly expressing any form of protest), and ethno-racially ‘purified’ (i.e. rid of groups considered intrinsically ‘allogenic’ and ‘unassimilable’, ‘inferior’ but ‘dangerous’).

In a second phase, however, when what could be called its ‘plebeian’ or ‘anti-bourgeois’ moment has passed (a character that fascism never totally renounces, at least in discourse, which is one of its specificities), fascist leaders seek to form an alliance with representatives of the bourgeoisie – usually through the mediation of bourgeois political parties or leaders – to seal their access to power and use the state for their own benefit (for political purposes but also for personal enrichment, as all fascist experiences have shown and as legal verdicts against figures of the far Right regularly illustrate), while promising capital the destruction of all opposition. Nothing remains of the initial claims to a ‘third way’, since what fascism proposes is precisely to make capitalism work under a regime of tyranny.

7 – Fascism and the crisis of relations of oppression

The crisis of the social order also presents itself as a crisis of relations of oppression, a particularly acute dimension in the case of contemporary fascism (neo-fascism). The perpetuation of white domination and the oppression of women and gender minorities is indeed destabilised and even endangered by the rise on a global scale (although very unevenly from country to country) of anti-racist, feminist and LGBTQI movements. By organising collectively, by revolting respectively against the racist and hetero-patriarchal order, by speaking with their own voice, non-whites, women and gender minorities are increasingly constituting themselves as autonomous political subjects (which in no way prevents divisions, especially if a political force capable of unifying subaltern groups is lacking).

This process inevitably arouses a reaction in terms of racist and masculinist radicalisations, which take various forms and directions but find their full political coherence in the fascist project. This project combines the delirious representation of relations of domination as being already reversed (with the various mythologies of ‘Jewish domination’, ‘the great replacement’, ‘reverse colonisation’, ‘anti-white racism’, ‘the feminisation of society’, etc.) with the fanatical desire of oppressor groups to maintain their domination whatever the cost.

While far-right extremists are everywhere opposed to feminist movements and discourses, and never break with an essentialist conception of gender roles, they may occasionally adopt, depending on political needs and national contexts, a rhetoric of defending the rights of women and sexual minorities. They may even go so far as to tone down some of their traditional positions (ban on abortion, criminalisation of homosexuality, etc.), so as to enrich the range of their nationalist discourse with new tones: in this way, ‘foreigners’2 and/or “muslims” are held responsible for the violence suffered by women and homosexuals. Femo-nationalism and homo-nationalism make it possible to target new segments of the electorate, to gain political respectability, and in passing to divert any systemic criticism of hetero-patriarchy.

8 – Fascism, nature and the environmental crisis

The crisis of the existing order is not simply economic, social and political. It also takes the form of an environmental crisis, particularly given the ongoing climate collapse.

At the moment, neo-fascism appears divided by the morbid phenomena associated with the capitalocene. A large part of neo-fascist movements, ideologues and leaders notably minimise global warming (or even deny it altogether), arguing for an intensification of extractivism (“carbo-fascism” or “fossil fascism”). On the other hand, some currents that can be described as eco-fascist claim to offer a response to the environmental crisis, but do little more than revive and disguise as ‘ecology’ the old reactionary ideologies of a ‘natural order’, still associated with ideas of traditional roles and hierarchies (such as gender) and of closed organic communities (in the name of ‘purity of race’ or under the pretext of ‘incompatibility of cultures’). Similarly, they often use the urgency of the disaster to call for ultra-authoritarian (eco-dictatorship) and racist solutions (a neo-Malthusianism that almost always justifies increased repression of migrants and an almost total prevention of immigration).

While the latter remain largely in the minority compared to the former and do not constitute mass political currents, their ideas are undeniably developing to the point of permeating neo-fascist common sense, so that an identitarian ecology emerges and environmental struggles become a crucial terrain of struggle for antifascists. This divide also refers to an intrinsic tension in ‘classical’ fascism, between a hyper-modernism that exalts heavy industry and technology as markers and levers of national power (economic and military), and an anti-modernism that idealises land and nature as the home of authentic values which the nation needs to reconnect with in order to find its essence.

9 – Fascism and social order

Especially when fascism is emerging and developing, it wants to appear as an alternative to the existing order (and it succeeds at least partially in this), even sometimes as a (national) “revolution”. But when it comes to power, fascism appears not simply as a spare wheel for the current state of affairs, but the means to suppress all opposition to ecocidal, racial and patriarchal capitalism; in other words, an authentic counter-revolution.

Unless we take literally – and thus validate – its claims to stand on the side of the ‘little people’ or the ‘unskilled’, to mobilise ‘the people’ and advance a programme of social transformation in their favour, or unless we adopt a purely formal/institutional definition of the concept of ‘revolution’ (reducing this simply to regime change), fascism cannot in any way be described as ‘revolutionary’. On the contrary, its entire ideology and practice of power tends towards the consolidation and reinforcement, through criminal methods, of relations of exploitation and oppression.

At a deeper level, the fascist project consists in intensifying these relations in such a way as to produce a social body which is extremely hierarchical (in terms of class and gender), normalised (in terms of sexualities and gender identities) and homogenised (in ethno-racial terms). Imprisonment and massive crime (genocide) are therefore by no means unintended consequences of fascism but potentialities inherent in it.

10 – Fascism and social movements

Fascism, however, has an ambivalent relationship with social movements. Insofar as its success depends on its ability to appear as an ‘anti-systemic’ force, it cannot be satisfied with frontal opposition to protest movements and the Left. Fascisms both ‘classical’ and contemporary constantly borrow some of their rhetoric from these movements to shape a powerful political and cultural synthesis.

Three main tactics are employed in this sense:

i) the partial recapture of elements of critical and programmatic discourse, but deprived of any systemic dimension or revolutionary aim. For example, capitalism is not criticised in its foundations, i.e. as being based on a relation of exploitation (capital/labour), presupposing private ownership of the means of production and coordination by the market, but only in its globalised or financialised character (which makes it possible, as mentioned above, to play on old anti-Semitic tropes of classical fascist discourse, which still have their appeal to certain sections of the population). From this point of view, it is understandable that criticism of free trade, and even more so the call for ‘protectionism’, if they are not coherently linked to the goal of a break with capitalism, have every chance of ideologically strengthening the far Right,

ii) hijacking the rhetoric of the Left and social movements for use as a weapon against ‘foreigners’, i.e. in fact against racial minorities. This is the logic of femo-nationalism and homo-nationalism referred to above, but also of the ‘nationalist’ defence of secularism. While the far Right has throughout its history opposed the principle of secularism as well as women’s and LGBTQI rights, some of its currents (notably the current leadership of the Rassemblement National but also the Dutch far-right) now claim to be its best defenders, which has meant a complete redefinition of secularism in an aggressive sense towards Muslims, including discriminations (inseparably ethno-racial and religious) that are unavowed and presented as a defence of major republican principles threatened by an alleged Muslim ‘separatism’ or ‘communautarism’.

iii) the reversal of feminist or anti-racist criticism, claiming that the oppressed have become the oppressors. Thus, we see the whole cloud of reactionary ideologues, at an international level, asserting not only that racism and sexism have disappeared, but that it is women, non-whites and LGBTQI who today not only exercise domination over men, whites and heterosexuals respectively, but also contradict the natural order of things. This type of discourse is the best way to call for a supremacist operation of white or masculine ‘reconquest’ without being too explicit.

11 – Fascism and liberal democracy

Liberal and fascist regimes are not opposed to each other in the same way as democracy and domination. In both cases, the submission of proletarians, women and minorities is achieved; in both cases interwoven relations of exploitation and domination are deployed and perpetuated, along with a whole series of forms of violence inevitably and structurally associated with these relations; in both cases, the dictatorship of capital over the whole of society is maintained. In reality, these are two distinct forms of bourgeois political domination, in other words two different methods through which subordinate groups are subdued and prevented from engaging in an action of revolutionary transformation.

The transition to fascist methods is always preceded by the successive abandonment of certain fundamental dimensions of liberal democracy by the ruling class itself. Parliamentary arenas are increasingly marginalised and bypassed, as legislative power is monopolised by the executive and methods of government become ever more authoritarian (decree-laws, ordinances, etc.). But this phase of transition from liberal democracy to fascism is above all marked by increased restrictions on the freedoms of organisation, assembly and expression, and on the right to strike, but also the development of state arbitrariness and police brutality.

This authoritarian hardening may take place without great proclamation, making political power rest increasingly on the support and loyalty of the repressive state apparatuses and dragging it into an anti-democratic spiral: increasingly tight patrolling of working-class and immigrant neighbourhoods; prohibition, prevention or harsh repression of demonstrations; preventive and arbitrary arrests; summary trials of demonstrators and increasing use of prison sentences; increasingly frequent dismissals of strikers; reduction of the scope and possibilities of trade-union action, etc.

To assert that the opposition between liberal democracy and fascism is between political forms of bourgeois domination does not mean that anti-fascism, social movements and the Left should be indifferent to the decline of public freedoms and democratic rights. To defend these freedoms and rights is not to sow the illusion of a state or a republic conceived as neutral arbiters of social antagonisms; it is to defend one of the main conquests of the popular classes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, i.e. the right of the exploited and oppressed to organise and mobilise so as to defend their basic working and living conditions as an indispensable basis for the development of a class, feminist and anti-racist consciousness. But it also means asserting an alternative to the de-democratisation that is the very essence of the neoliberal project.

12 – Fascism and liberal democracy (2)

Fascism characteristically proceeds by crushing all forms of protest, whether revolutionary or reformist, radical or moderate, global or partial. Wherever fascism becomes the practice of power, i.e. a political regime, within a few years, or sometimes just a few months, little if anything remains of the political left, the trade-union movement or forms of minority organisation, i.e. of any stable, lasting and crystallised forms of resistance.

While the liberal regime tends to deceive subordinates by co-opting some of its representatives, incorporating some of their organisations into coalitions (as a minor partner with no voice) or negotiations (so-called ‘social dialogue’ in which trade unions or voluntary associations play the role of stooges), or even by integrating some of their demands, fascism aspires to destroy any form of organisation which is unassimilable into the fascist state and to uproot even the aspiration to organise collectively outside the fascist or fascisised organisational frameworks. In this sense, fascism presents itself as the political form of an almost complete destruction of the self-defence capacity of the oppressed – or its reduction to molecular, passive or clandestine forms of resistance.

It should be noted, however, that in this work of destruction fascism cannot ensure the passivity of a large part of the social body purely by repressive means or discourse targeting this or that scapegoat. It only manages to stabilise its domination by actually satisfying the immediate material interests of certain groups (unemployed workers, impoverished self-employed, civil servants, etc.), or at least those within these groups who are recognised by the fascists as ‘truly national’. In a context of the abandonment of the working classes by the Left, the power of attraction of a discourse promising to reserve jobs and social benefits for the so-called ‘truly national’ (who, it cannot be sufficiently stressed, are defined in the fascist or neo-fascist vision not by a legal criterion of nationality but by an ethno-racial criterion of origin) cannot be underestimated.

13 – Fascism, ‘people’ and mass action

If fascism is sometimes falsely described as ‘revolutionary’ because of its appeals to the ‘people’, or because it proceeds by bringing ‘masses’ into action (in a superficial analogy with the workers’ movement), it is because very different things are mixed up under the terms ‘people’ and ‘action’.

The ‘people’, as the fascists understand the term, designates neither a group which shares certain conditions of existence (in the sense that sociology speaks of popular classes), nor a political community including all those unified by a common will to belong, but an ethno-racial community fixed once and for all, grouping together those who are ‘really from here’ (whether the criterion of belonging to the people is pseudo-biological or pseudo-cultural). This basically amounts to the social body stripped of supposed enemies (the ‘foreign party’, as the leading French neo-fascist ideologue Eric Zemmour follows the 19th century anti-Semitic polemicist Édouard Drumont in saying) and traitors (the Left) who have taken the side of this ‘foreign party’.

As for fascist action itself, it oscillates par excellence between punitive expeditions led by armed squads (extra-state gangs or sectors of the repressive state apparatus that are already or in the process of becoming autonomous),3 military-style marches and electoral plebiscites. If the first of these attack social struggles and more generally the oppressed (striking workers, ethno-racial minorities, women in struggle, etc.), in order to demoralise their adversaries and to clear the ground for fascist implantation, the second aim to produce a mass symbolic and psychological effect, in order to mobilise affects in favour of the leader, the movement or the regime, while the third aim to make a group of atomised individuals passively ratify the will of the leader or the movement.

If fascism does have this kind of a mass appeal, it is by no means by stimulating autonomous action on the basis of specific interests, favouring for example forms of direct democracy where people discuss and act collectively, but by enlisting support for fascist leaders and giving them a weighty argument in negotiations with the bourgeoisie for access to power. Popular participation in fascist movements, and even more so under fascist regime, is for the most part ordered from above, in its objectives as well as in its forms, and presupposes the most absolute deference to those chosen by nature to command.

Nevertheless, forms of mobilisation from below can be found in the initial moment of fascism, on the part of the plebeian branches of fascism that provide its shock troops and take seriously its anti-bourgeois promises and pseudo-anticapitalism. Nevertheless, when the political crisis deepens and the alliance of the fascists with the bourgeoisie is sealed, tensions inevitably arise between these branches and the leadership of the fascist movement. The latter then inevitably seek to get rid of the leadership of these militias,4 while at the same time channelling them by integrating them into the fascist state under construction.

In reality, fascism has never offered the masses anything in terms of action but the alternative between acquiescence, noisy or passive, to the desires of the fascist leaders, or the manganello,5 i.e. repression (which, in fascist regimes, often goes as far as torture and murder, even against some of its most fervent supporters).

14 – A posthumous and preventive counter-revolution

Fascism constitutes a ‘posthumous and preventive’ counter-revolution.6 Posthumous in the sense that it feeds on the failure of the political Left and social movements to rise to the level of the historical situation, to establish themselves as a solution to the political crisis and engage in an experience of revolutionary transformation. Preventive because it aims at destroying in advance everything that could nourish and prepare a future revolutionary experience: not just explicitly revolutionary organisations but also trade-union resistance, anti-racist, feminist and LGBTQI movements, self-managed living spaces, independent journalism, etc., in other words the slightest form of contestation of the order of things.

15 – Fascism, neo-fascism and violence

It is undeniable that extra-state violence, in the form of mass paramilitary organisations, has played an important (though probably overestimated) role in the rise of fascists – an element that distinguishes them from other reactionary movements that did not seek to organise the masses militarily. Yet, at this stage at least, the vast majority of neo-fascist movements are not built on the basis of mass militias and do not have such militias (with the exception of the Indian BJP and to a lesser degree, in terms of mass implantation, the Hungarian Jobbik and the Golden Dawn in Greece).

Several hypotheses can be put forward to explain why neo-fascists are unable or do not aspire to build such militias:

– the delegitimisation of political violence, especially in Western societies, which would condemn political parties with paramilitary structures to electoral marginality;

– the absence of equivalent experience to that of the First World War in terms of the brutalisation of populations, i.e. habituation to the exercise of violence, which would provide fascists with masses of men willing to enlist and exercise violence within the framework of armed fascist militias;

– the weakening of workers’ movements in their capacity to structure and organise the popular classes, in trade unions and politically, which means that the fascists of our time no longer have a real adversary in front of them, which they would imperatively have to break by force to impose themselves, and which would necessitate equipping themselves with an apparatus of mass violence;

– the fact that states are much more powerful today and have at their disposal instruments of surveillance and repression of a sophistication that is out of all proportion to that of the inter-war period, so that the fascists of our time may feel that state violence is quite sufficient to annihilate all forms of opposition, physically if necessary;

– finally, the strategically crucial necessity for neo-fascists to distinguish themselves from the most visible forms of continuity with historical fascism, and especially this dimension of extra-state violence. In this connection, we should recall that parties such as the FN in France or the Austrian FPÖ were created on the basis of strategies of ‘respectabilisation’ developed and implemented by notorious fascists, who had collaborated very actively in Nazi domination during the Second World War.

These hypotheses make it possible to conclude that the formation of mass militias was made necessary and possible for fascist movements in the very particular context of the inter-war period. But neither the constitution of armed bands, nor even the use of political violence, is the hallmark of fascism, either as a movement or as a regime. While these were centrally present, other movements and regimes not belonging in any way to the constellation of fascisms also resorted to violence in order to gain or maintain power, sometimes by murdering tens of thousands of opponents (not to mention the legitimate use of political violence by liberation movements).

The most visible dimension of classical fascism, its extra-state militias, are, in fact, an element subordinate to the strategy of the fascist leaderships, who use them tactically according to the demands imposed by the development of their organisations and the legal conquest of political power (which presupposes, in the inter-war period and still more so today, that they appear to be somewhat respectable, and thus distance themselves from the most visible forms of violence). The strength of fascist or neo-fascist movements is then measured by their ability to wield, depending on the historical conjuncture, both legal and violent tactics, both ‘war of position’ and ‘war of movement’ (to use Gramsci’s categories).

16 – Fascism and the process of fascisation

The victory of fascism is the joint product of a radicalisation of whole sections of the ruling class, out of fear that the political situation is escaping them, and a social entrenchment of fascist movement, ideas and affects. Contrary to a common representation, well suited to absolve the ruling classes and liberal democracies of their responsibilities for fascists’ rise to power, fascist movements do not conquer political power by a purely external action, in the way that an armed force seizes a citadel. If they generally manage to obtain power by legal means, which does not mean without bloodshed, it is because this conquest is prepared by a whole historical period that can be called fascisation.

It is only through this process of fascisation that fascism can appear – obviously today without saying its name, and by disguising its project, given the universal opprobrium that has surrounded the words ‘fascism’ and ‘fascist’ since 1945 – both as a (false) alternative for various sectors of the population and as a (real) solution for a politically desperate ruling class. It is then that it can go from being essentially a petty-bourgeois movement to a real mass, inter-class movement, even if its sociological heart, which provides its cadres, remains the petty bourgeoisie: self-employed, liberal professions, middle management.

17 – The forms of fascisation

Fascisation is expressed in many ways, through a wide variety of ‘morbid symptoms’ (again using Gramsci’s expression), but two main vectors can nevertheless be highlighted: the authoritarian hardening of the state and the rise of racism.

While the former is expressed mainly through the repressive state apparatuses (the police trade unions being a specific actor of fascisation), we must not forget the primary responsibility of the ‘extreme centre’s political leaders. And, if police violence is part of the long history of the capitalist state and the police (generally welcoming the most racist and authoritarian elements), it is the crisis of hegemony, that is to say, the political weakening of the bourgeoisie, which makes it more and more dependent on its police and increases both the strength and the autonomy of repressive state apparatuses:7 the Minister of the Interior no longer tends to direct (and control) the police, but rather to defend them at all costs, increase their resources, etc.

The rise of racism also combines the long history of the state, particularly in the case of the old imperial powers in which colonial and racial oppression continues to occupy a central place, with the recent history of the political field. Faced with a crisis of hegemony, the far Right and sectors of the mainstream Right – on the understanding that these political forces represent distinct class fractions – have the project of solidifying a white bloc under bourgeois hegemony, capable of establishing a form of social compromise on an ethno-racial basis through a policy of systematic ousting of non-white people: in other words, racial preference. Moreover, by constantly pointing out the danger that migrants and Muslims represent for both public order and the cultural integrity of the ‘nation’, these forces justify the licence given to the police in immigrant districts, the increase in the repression of social movements, in a word, state authoritarianism.

We can indicate here what Aimé Césaire called a ‘savageification [ensauvagement]’ of the dominant class, visible above all through practices and mechanisms of repression aimed first of all at ethno-racial minorities and then at social mobilisations (gilets jaunes, trade unionists, anti-racists, antifascists, ecologists, etc.). However, this ensauvagement is also increasingly common in the form of public declarations of ideologists calling for the use of lethal weapons against social mobilisations and immigrant districts, and those who have turned media and editorial Islamophobia into a flourishing industry.

18 – What fascisation of the state means

The fascisation of the state should, therefore, under no circumstances be reduced, especially in the first phase before the fascists conquer political power, to the integration or rise of recognisable fascist elements in the apparatus of law and order (police, army, justice, prisons). It functions, rather, as a dialectic between endogenous transformations of these apparatuses, as a result of political choices made by bourgeois parties over nearly three decades (all oriented towards the construction of a ‘penal state’ on the ashes of the ‘social state’, to use the categories of the sociologist Loïc Wacquant), and the political power – mainly electoral and ideological at this stage – of the organised far Right.

To put it simply, the fascisation of the police is not expressed and explained primarily by the presence of fascist militants among them, or the fact that the police vote massively for the far right (in France and elsewhere), but by their reinforcement and empowerment (especially in those sectors assigned to the most brutal tasks of maintaining order: in working-class and immigrant neighbourhoods, against immigrants, and secondarily in mobilizations). In other words, the police are becoming increasingly emancipated from the state and the law, i.e. from any form of external control (not to mention the non-existent popular control).

So the police are not fascising in their functioning because they are gradually being subverted by fascist organisations. On the contrary, it is because the entire functioning of the police is fascisised – obviously to unequal degrees depending on the sector – that it is so easy for the far Right to spread its ideas and establish itself within them. This is particularly visible in the fact that the last few years (in France) have not seen a growth of the police union directly linked to the organised far Right (France Police-Policiers en Colère) but rather a double process: the rise of artificial mobilisations coming from the base (but shielded from above, in the sense that they have not been subject to any administrative sanctions) and the right-wing radicalisation of the main police unions (Alliance and Unité SGP Police-FO).

19 – A contradictory and unstable process

Insofar as it derives primarily from the crisis of hegemony and the hardening of social confrontations, the process of fascisation proves to be eminently contradictory and therefore highly unstable. There is by no means a royal road for the fascist movement.

The dominant class can indeed manage, in certain historical circumstances, to have new political representatives emerge, to integrate certain demands coming from the oppressed and thus build the conditions of a new social compromise (which allow it not to have to cede political power to the fascists in order to keep its economic power).8 It is nevertheless unlikely in the present context that the dominant classes will be led to accept new social compromises without a sequence of high-intensity struggles imposing a new balance of power less unfavourable to the working-class.

If the process of fascisation does not necessarily lead to fascism, it is also because both the fascist movement and the ruling classes face the political Left and the social movements. The success of the fascists ultimately depends on the ability – or, on the contrary, the powerlessness – of the subaltern to successfully occupy all the terrains of political struggle, to constitute themselves as autonomous political subjects and impose a revolutionary alternative.

20 – After an electoral victory of the fascists: three scenarios

If the fascists’ conquest of political power – and we repeat again, generally by legal means – constitutes a crucial victory for them, that is not the end of the story. A period of struggle necessarily opens up in the wake of this victory, which – depending on the political and social balance of power, on the struggles fought or not, on whether they are victorious or defeated – can end up with any of the following outcomes:

i) the construction of a dictatorship of the fascist or military-police type (when popular movements suffer a historical defeat and the bourgeoisie is politically too weakened or divided);

ii) bourgeois normalisation (when the fascist movement is too weak to build an alternative political power and there is a popular response that is strong but not enough to go beyond a defensive victory);

iii) a revolutionary sequence (when the popular movement is strong enough to coalesce major social and political forces around it and engage in a showdown with bourgeois forces and the fascist movement).

21 – Antifascism today (1)

If antifascism appears initially and necessarily as a reaction to the development of fascism, therefore as defensive action or self-defence (working-class, anti-racist, feminist), it cannot be reduced to hand-to-hand combat with fascist groups; all the less so since the tactics of building fascist movements in our time give less room for mass violence – except perhaps in India as mentioned above – than in the case of ‘classical’ fascism (see thesis 15). Anti-fascism makes the political struggle against far-right movements a central axis of its struggle, but it must also set itself the task of promoting the common action of the oppressed and halting the process of fascisation, in other words, undermining the political and ideological conditions in which these movements can flourish, take root and grow, and breaking down everything that promotes the spread of fascist poison in the social body. Now, if this double task of antifascism is taken seriously, it must be conceived not just as a struggle against the organised far Right, waged independently of other struggles (trade union, anti-capitalist, feminist, anti-racist, ecological, etc.), but as the defensive complement to the struggle for social and political emancipation, or what Daniel Bensaïd called a politics of the oppressed.

22 – On antifascism today (2)

There is obviously no question of making the constitution of an antifascist front conditional on adherence to a complete and precise political programme; this would in fact mean renouncing any unitary perspective, as it would then be a question of each force imposing its own political and strategic project on the others. It would be still more unwise to demand that those who aspire here and now to fight fascism or the dynamics of fascisation mentioned above should present proof of revolutionary militancy. However, anti-fascism cannot have as its sole compass opposition to far-right organisations if it really aspires to roll back not just these organisations, but also and above all the fascist ideas and affects that spread and take root far beyond them. It cannot renounce linking between the anti-fascist struggle with the need for a break with racial, patriarchal and ecocidal capitalism, and the goal of a different society (which we here call ecosocialist).

This is a complex matter, as it is not enough for antifascism to assert its feminism or anti-racism, to criticise neoliberalism or call for the defence of ‘secularism’, to make the reactionary character of neo-fascism apparent. Insofar as the far Right have taken over at least part of the anti-neoliberal discourse, increasingly tend to adopt a rhetoric of defending women’s rights, use a pseudo-antiracism of defending ‘whites’ and set themselves up as the protectors of secularism, anti-fascism cannot be satisfied with vague formulae in this area. It is imperative for it to specify the political content of its feminism and its anti-racism, and explain what it means by ‘secularism’, otherwise it will leave blind spots that neo-fascists unfailingly occupy (‘femo-nationalism’, denunciation of ‘anti-white racism’ or falsification/instrumentalisation of secularism), and will also risk following in the footsteps of the neoliberals (who have their own ‘feminism’, that of the 1 per cent, and their ‘moral anti-racism’, generally in the form of a call for mutual tolerance). Likewise, it must specify the political horizon of its opposition to neoliberalism or its criticism of the European Union, which cannot be that of a ‘good’ national capitalism that is properly regulated.

Moreover, the last few years have brought to light the need for antifascism to be fully involved in the political battle against the authoritarian thrust, which is necessarily a unitary one. Whether this is waged against thousands of Muslims, dragged through the mud, registered, surveilled, discriminated against, publicly discredited, sometimes imprisoned because they are suspected of ‘radicalisation’ (thus of being ‘enemies of the nation’, real or potential), against immigrants (disenfranchised and harassed by the police), against the inhabitants of working-class and immigrant neighbourhoods (policed by the most fascisised sectors of the forces of repression, who enjoy impunity in these areas), or against social mobilisations that are increasingly severely repressed by the police and the judiciary (movement against the French labour law, gilets jaunes, etc.).

We can see now how the challenge for antifascism is not simply to forge alliances with activists of other causes that leave each partner unchanged, but to redefine and enrich antifascism from the perspectives that emerge within the trade-union, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist or ecological struggles, while nourishing the latter with antifascist perspectives. It is on this condition that antifascism will be able to renew itself and progress, not as a sectoral struggle, a particular method of struggle or an abstract ideology, but as a common sense permeating and involving all emancipation movements.

Originally published at:

https://www.contretemps.eu/fascisme-fas ... ifascisme/

N.B. I would like to thank the members of the editorial comrades of Contretemps, in particular Stathis Kouvelakis, for their many remarks and suggestions based on earlier versions of this text.

Translated by David Fernbach

Image:

Modified from GeniesserGraz, CC BY 2.0

<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons



1. Civilisation – ‘white’ or ‘European’ – can also play this role, as can race (‘Aryan’ in Nazi ideology), even if the latter has been made politically untenable on a mass scale by the genocide of the Jews of Europe.
2. An eminently extendable category since it includes all those who, whether or not they have the nationality of the country in question, are not considered genuine natives (in the case of France the so-called ‘indigenous French’, ‘true French’, etc.). From this point of view, a recent European immigrant – whether naturalised or not – is viewed by the far Right as less foreign, at least if he or she is white and of Christian culture, than an individual born French in France to parents who were themselves born in France but whose grandparents came, for example, from Algeria or Senegal.
3. For example, in the contemporary French case, the ‘anti-criminality brigades’.
4. In this respect, reread Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.
5. The name for the club with which Italian fascists beat up working-class militants or anyone else who opposed them. The manganello and its use were the object of a kind of cult in fascist Italy.
6. Here we take up the formula of Angelo Tasca in his classic book The Rise of Italian Fascism, 1918-1922.
7. This allows them, in the French case, to attack political forces directly (for example, a demonstration by police unions in front of the headquarters of the main left organisation La France Insoumise), and to demonstrate without authorisation, often hooded, with weapons and service cars, without risking any administrative or judicial sanction.
8. For example, the case of Roosevelt and the New Deal in the United States in the 1930s, which did not really succeed in overcoming the crisis of US capitalism (that was not until the war), but suspended the political crisis.

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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Wed Jan 13, 2021 12:49 pm

Raising Their Banner High: Fascism, Imperialism, and Anti-Communism at the Capitol Hill Riots
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 12, 2021
Qiao Collective

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The flags of U.S. client states, anti-communist regimes, and pre-revolution puppet states dotted the sea of MAGA hats and Confederate flags at the Capitol Hill mobs. Making sense of why requires understanding the convergence between imperialism abroad and fascism at home.

On January 6th, 2021, in a premeditated plan of action to “stop the steal” of the November presidential election about to be certified by Congress, thousands of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Met with a conciliatory Capitol Police force who literally “opened the gates” with a wink and a nod, the mob swarmed the seat of U.S. power, occupying the House and Senate chambers and taking selfies in the abandoned offices of Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic opponents.

The “insurrection” was a naked declaration of white supremacist extremism: from Auschwitz sweatshirts to absurdist Viking costumes, the aesthetics of racial fascism dominated the landscape. Yet, in addition to explicit symbols of white supremacy, the landscape was littered with curious symbols of international solidarity: flags representing the former South Vietnam, India, Japan, pre-revolution Cuba, and Hong Kong and Tibetan independence, among others, were all spotted in various footage of the chaos.

This multicultural dimension of an overtly white supremacist demonstration is not a contradiction: rather, it reflects the convergence between imperialism abroad and fascism at home. Liberal commentators expressed self-righteous dismay at the vandalizing of “our” “iconic symbol of democracy,” worrying about what the events would do to the U.S.’ hallowed image as the shining “city on the hill.” Republican detractors were perhaps more explicit in their deployment of a racist American exceptionalism: Marco Rubio likened the events to that of a “third world country,” while former U.S. President George W. Bush compared the chaos to a “banana republic.”

The smattering of international flags from U.S. client states, overthrown monarchies, and anti-communist bastions conveys a bitter truth: the Capitol “insurrection” marks not the importation of some decontextualized trope of Third World instability, but the return of the very tactics the U.S. empire has used to enforce its will across the globe.

But the smattering of international flags from U.S. client states, overthrown monarchies, and anti-communist bastions conveys a different truth: the Capitol “insurrection” marks not the importation of some decontextualized trope of Third World instability, but the return of the very tactics the U.S. empire has used to obstruct elections, seed color revolutions, and depose left-leaning political leaders across the world during the so-called era of “Pax Americana.” In Malcolm X’s famous conception, the storming of the Capitol is not an unfathomable assault on U.S. democracy, merely the “leader of the free world’s” imperialist chickens coming home to roost.

Eurocentric World History As Fascist Apologia

Liberal commentators have framed Trump and his supporters’ “assault on democracy” as antithetical to U.S. democratic norms, likening their violence to a creeping authoritarianism from which the real authoritarians—China, Russia, Iran, or Venezuela—ostensibly seek to profit. But the liberal framing of fascism as antithetical to U.S. democracy sidesteps the rich body of radical thought which identifies imperialism and colonialism as the through lines between liberal democracy and fascism.

Writing in 1950, Martinique anti-colonialist Aimé Césaire eviscerated the self-righteous Western repudiation of Nazism, arguing that the Allied powers—the leaders of modern imperialism—had in fact “tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them…because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.” As agents of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery, the so-called bastions of democracy in the post-WWII era had in fact “cultivated” the very Nazism they posed as irreconcilable with their own political economic systems. Indicting capitalist exploitation as the guiding logic of fascism, Césaire declared: “At the end of capitalism…there is Hitler.”

Césaire wrote in a political moment in which the Allied powers, under the leadership of the ascendant U.S. empire, scurried to conflate the horrors of Nazism and fascism with the international communist movement. Consolidating a hegemonic capitalist-imperialist system with the U.S. at its helm required painting communism—epitomized by the Soviet Union—as a form of “totalitarianism” nearly identical in form to Nazism. Such a move enabled the U.S. to pose growing movements for decolonization and socialist revolution in Korea, Cuba, Indonesia, China, Vietnam, and beyond as forms of creeping totalitarianism, justifying the U.S.’s endless stream of Cold War invasions, occupations, mass killings, and embargoes as a righteous defense of “freedom.”

President Harry Truman, who oversaw the closing of World War II and its transition into the Cold War, consistently conflated the fights against Nazism and communism. Contrasting Western inaction to Hitler’s rise with the “courage and decisiveness” with which the U.S. “moved against the Communist threat,” Truman praised U.S. intervention in Korea, declaring: “Where free men had failed the test before, this time we met the test.”

In reality, Truman’s lofty rhetoric concealed the U.S.’s ready deployment of fascist forces to cement its imperial authority. Under the pretenses of global democratic leadership, the U.S. actively recruited and rehabilitated German and Japanese fascists who proved useful for the U.S. empire. For instance, Japanese war criminals who conducted biological experiments on Chinese prisoners and facilitated the “comfort women” system of sexual slavery over China, Korea, and the Philippines evaded trial by the Soviet Union in exchange for sharing research secrets with the U.S. Meanwhile, the political infrastructure of Japanese colonialism in “postcolonial” South Korea and the Philippines was often retained and redeployed under U.S. leadership, offering a near-seamless transition between Japanese colonial fascism and U.S. “democratic stewardship” in East and Southeast Asia. And under Operation Paperclip, thousands of high-ranking Nazi scientists were airlifted from Germany to the United States to work for the U.S. military in the campaign for U.S. scientific supremacy over the Soviet Union in the Cold War space race.

The historical collaboration and convergence between German and Japanese fascism and U.S. imperialism continues to be suppressed through counterfactual renderings of World War II and Cold War history. For instance, in 2019 the European Parliament adopted a resolution “on the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe,” promoting the historical memory of “crimes committed by communist, Nazi and other dictatorships” as the basis of “the unity of Europe.” Left out of this “historical” rendering, of course, are some inconvenient truths: that for every U.S. soldier killed fighting the Germans, 80 Soviet soldiers died doing the same; or that at the time of Japan’s surrender, more than half of the Japanese military’s 3.5 million deployed soldiers were occupied fighting Chinese communist and nationalist troops.

Western imperial history has rendered communism the ideological successor of fascism rather than the primary actor responsible for its defeat. But as the Trump era exposes the blurred line between bourgeois democracy and fascism, these anti-communist myths are finally collapsing under their own weight.

International Fascism Comes Home

In footage livestreamed just before Trump supporters took the U.S. Capitol building, Jake Angeli—the “Q Anon shaman” who donned a horned fur hat and would soon strut behind the Congressional dias—offered a dubious call for internationalist action:

“To the people of Venezuela: know you can take your country back too. We are setting the example…you can put an end to communism and globalism. You, too can take back your nation from this evil. You can win your country back!”

The irony should not be lost: the same Trump extremists who have been condemned by the great majority of both Democrats and “rule of law” Republicans express solidarity with the bipartisan project of U.S. regime change against Venezuela’s democratically-elected president Nicolas Maduro. Though President-elect Biden has labeled Capitol Hill rioters as “[bordering] on sedition,” he nonetheless shares their conviction that socialist figures such as Maduro are, in his own words, “thugs and dictators.” That the interests of far-right insurrectionists and the status quo power elite coalesce around support for anti-communist regime change speaks to imperialism’s thorough monopoly on the spectrum of political possibility in the U.S. landscape.

Liberal media has clung to a comical obtuseness about the internationalist identifications of the Trump rioters, refusing to read the appearance of South Vietnamese, Hong Kong independence, and Batistan Cuban flags as a convergence of U.S. imperialism abroad and white supremacy at home. Quartz, for instance, mused that “it’s unclear why many of these flags appeared.”

But it is no surprise that the flags of U.S. client states, anti-communist regimes, and pre-revolution puppet states accompanied the sea of MAGA hats and Confederate flags at the Trump riots. Writing from San Quentin prison before his murder in 1971, Black revolutionary and political prisoner George Jackson described U.S. fascism as a logical outgrowth of U.S. imperialism and anti-communism. In Blood in My Eye, Jackson opined:

“We have been consistently misled by fascism’s nationalistic trappings. We have failed to understand its basically international character…One of the most definite characteristics of fascism is its international quality.”

If fascism, as Jackson argued, “is international capitalism’s response to the challenge of international scientific socialism,” then anti-communism is the glue that binds the broad fascist coalition behind the pro-Trump mobs. Take, for instance, the small crowd in Miami’s Little Havana that gathered on January 6th. Waving flags of the Republic of Cuba, which until the 1959 revolution functioned as a de facto colony of the U.S. under legislation such as the Platt Amendment, protesters condemned what they considered a “stolen” election. Across the country in San Jose, California, which is home to a large population of the Vietnamese diaspora, organizers of the “Vietnamese Movement for Trump” similarly waved signs saying “America will never be a socialist country,” with many a testimony about their “escape” from communists at the close of the Vietnam War. In uncritically embracing the language of American freedom (“We’re lucky we’re here”), these actors wilfully obscure the use of “democracy” at home to facilitate fascist U.S. occupation and intervention the world over.

The Trump coalition has long brought together a “diverse” assemblage of immigrants and “exiles” who hear in Trump’s MAGA slogan echoes of their own restorationist agenda to reinstate the U.S.-backed puppet governments of their various countries of origin.

Indeed, the Trump coalition has long brought together a “diverse” assemblage of immigrants and “exiles” who hear in Trump’s MAGA slogan echoes of their own restorationist agenda to reinstate the U.S.-backed puppet governments of their various countries of origin. From “Iranians for Trump” who wave the flag of the Pahlavi dynasty—a monarchy widely understood to be a puppet of British and U.S. neocolonialism—to Hong Kong interventionists’ calls for Trump to “make Hong Kong great again,” these right-wing actors wield the language of “diversity” and “authenticity” to add a veneer of progressivism to their programs of imperialist clientelism.

Sinophobia and fascist anti-communism

Likewise, it is no surprise that the flags of India, Japan, and Australia—which together with the U.S. comprise the “Quad” anti-China security alliance—also appeared at the Capitol Hill mobs. If anti-communism binds this diverse group of Trump sympathizers, anti-Chinese sentiment appears to be a driving engine powering the dangerous coalition.

That Tokyo’s “stop the steal” rally brought together both explicit homages to Imperial Japan (and the colonial occupations and Nazi alliance it oversaw) and a popular slur conflating Nazism with the rule of the Communist Party of China only speaks to the depraved logic and willful ahistoricism inherent to both fascism and anti-communism.

Perhaps the most explicit symbol of the convergence of fascism and Sinophobia was found not on Capitol Hill, but in Tokyo, Japan. Hours before the “stop the steal” convening took Capitol Hill by storm, Japanese sympathizers held a parallel march through downtown Tokyo. There, a myriad of pro-Trump, Imperial Japanese, and anti-China regalia decorated the crowds, with U.S. and Japanese flags alongside the “rising sun” flag of imperial Japan and “anti-Chinazi” flags popularized by the right-wing Hong Kong protests. That Tokyo’s “stop the steal” rally brought together both explicit homages to Imperial Japan (and the colonial occupations and Nazi alliance it oversaw) and a popular slur conflating Nazism with the rule of the Communist Party of China only speaks to the depraved logic and willful ahistoricism inherent to both fascism and anti-communism.

Similarly, the presence of flags representing Tibetan, Hong Kong, and “East Turkestan” independence movements at Trump rallies across the country is yet another symptom of the convergence between imperialism abroad and fascism at home (ironically, protesters waved the Hong Kong flag designed by the Communist Party of China in preparation of Hong Kong’s return to China). Just as Hong Kong protesters waved signs calling on President Trump to “make Hong Kong great again,” Trump rioters on Capitol Hill waved the Hong Kong flag, forming a visual shorthand reflecting a transnational alliance of right-wing agitators, colonial nostalgists, and white supremacists.

Confronting a “multicultural” empire

Understanding the international quality of fascism and anti-communism is crucial to confronting the lies that the U.S. tells about itself, including its role as a proud “watchman on the walls of world freedom.” A closer look, however, reveals the “walls of world freedom” to be merely the window dressing of a multicultural empire.

On January 7, Indian American Republican activist Vincent Xavier tweeted photos of a diverse crowd at the Capitol Hill protests. The caption read: “American patriots – Vietnamese, Indian, Korean & Iranian origins, & from so many other nations & races, who believe massive voter fraud has happened joined rally yesterday in solidarity with Trump.” The far-right, like the U.S. empire more generally, has succeeded in instrumentalizing right-wing diaspora populations to provide a multicultural facade to what remains fundamentally a project of racial capitalism.

That a select cross-section of native informants and compradors are willing to prostrate their countries of origin to the U.S. machine in exchange for political power will never change the reactionary nature of American exceptionalism and its Trumpian iterations. If we are to move from the facile belief that “it” cannot happen “here,” we must first grasp the international dimension of fascism and its primary manifestations in U.S. imperialism, settler colonialism, and racial slavery. Behind the gross conflation of fascism and communism is a more unsettling truth: if liberalism breeds fascism, anti-communism ignites it.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/01/ ... ill-riots/

There is no fascist 'International', other than the US State Dept and it's various apparatus. The various diaspora fascists are the bitter losers of civil war and revolutions. Without support of the US government for imperialist purposes they would crawl back in their holes. There is little more to understand.
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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 22, 2021 3:02 pm

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Allegations of Fascism Distract from the Real Danger
January 21, 2021
By Samuel Moyn – Jan 18, 2021

The same system that often rendered Trump harmless fails most Americans.

The absolute height of fascism talk in recent US history took place at the beginning of June, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing. It occurred amid America’s largest-ever popular mobilization against white supremacy and racist police violence. Allegations of fascism inadvertently testified to the possibility of change; it had been generations since so many people demanded an end to American state brutality. Those same charges of fascism, however, provided no help in effecting that transformation.

It is undeniable that Donald Trump’s presidency gave the notion of fascism cultural prominence in American politics. In the last 15 years, the term had entered public discourse only three times before this past summer: when Trump’s candidacy broke through among Republicans in March 2016; after he beat Hillary Clinton and took office in January 2017; and when the disgusting Unite the Right rally was held in Charlottesville, Va., in August of the same year.

This shows that nothing Trump actually did sparked the discourse—unless one counts the rhetorical fuel he added to the fire of outrage and violence set off in Virginia by several hundred punks. The fascism frame was a choice that activists, commentators, and politicians made, and June 2020 proved it again and conclusively. No comparable talk—especially about Barack Obama—happened in response to the police slaying of Michael Brown on the streets of Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014. So the real questions are: Why did we make that choice? And are there better ones now?

Asking them is not to deny that America experienced a kind of fascism during the Jim Crow era, that fascism in one of its varieties across the world could return, that America could host it, or even that fascism is latent so long as injustice lasts. All true, but so what? To insist on hypothetical possibilities or eternal fascism is to dodge the obligation to provide a responsible inquiry into contemporary American politics. Instead, most people who have denounced fascism over the last four years wish to return to the status quo ante Trump and restore the failed policies that provided him the opportunity to win the White House.

A factual approach to the Trump years shows that those crying “fascism” tended to rely on the first half of every frightening news cycle. But the second half showed Trump shying away from any fascist endgame, changing his mind under pressure, or finding himself blocked by his own servants. And that was before any heavier weaponry in the American system came into play.

I am more sympathetic to the claim that fascist elements in civil society became emboldened with Trump in charge. But racist militias are anything but new, and the white boys of Charlottesville and the Proud Boys hardly constitute a fascist uprising. (In the March on Rome, Benito Mussolini had tens of thousands of Blackshirts at his command, while in 1933, Adolf Hitler had personal goons in the millions.) The disgusting events of January 6, 2021 illustrate frightening new potentialities for the future, while also reinforcing the end of this presidency—assuming it even lasts until January 20. Indeed, the culmination (so far) of Trump’s parodic coup staged by “a mob of angry white dudes”—as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor put it—led the inevitable outcome of Joe Biden’s installment to be even swifter and more widely supported.

We need theories that capture both the Trump years’ continuity with the past as well as their novelty. But the allegations of fascism too often distract us from the need and possibility for America to diverge from the trajectory that led to them.

The Trump administration’s most serious evils were either rhetorical and symbolic, or came in adjusting the already obscene American immigration regime in an even more exclusionary direction. Trump’s national security record, based on that same unchecked executive power, is more mixed. Under Trump, America killed fewer foreigners overall than it did when his two predecessors were in office. Even as he extended some of their worst choices and made grievous new mistakes, there was no resemblance to the hyper-imperialism of historical fascism.
None of this is to say that Trump wasn’t a terrible president, let alone that “the system” worked. Just the opposite: The same system that often rendered Trump harmless continues to fail most Americans. The most graphic proof of this lies in the latest election returns, which embarrass the fascism paradigm. The most shocking thing about them is that, after four years of delegitimation, Trump increased his support among the presumed victims of fascism, while the Democratic Party faltered. Biden broke through, thanks to the wealthy and powerful. The state where I live, Connecticut, is among the most unequal, with some of the country’s worst poverty. Biden fared worse among urban workers, including Blacks and Hispanics in my city of New Haven, than earlier Democrats—but far, far better among the wealthy denizens of Greenwich and Westport.

If we are lucky, the fascism debate will become a historical curio, allowing Americans who want to overcome structural injustice and political impasse to focus where it matters. Far from reflecting any real intellectual dilemma, it marks a missed opportunity. It also poses a risk for a future in which too many progressives spend their time fretting about the end of American democracy, allowing the mainstream to shirk responsibility for its enduring flaws and the right to keep on fooling too many of its longtime victims.


Featured image: A carnival float in Germany mocks Donald Trump with the phrase “Make fascism great again” written on his hair. (Sascha Steinbach / Getty Images)

Samuel Moyn teaches law and history at Yale. His most recent book is Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Harvard University Press).(The Nation)

https://orinocotribune.com/allegations- ... al-danger/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

solidgold
Posts: 68
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2017 7:36 pm

Re: Fascism

Post by solidgold » Fri Jan 22, 2021 5:03 pm

blindpig wrote:
Fri Jan 22, 2021 3:02 pm
Image

Allegations of Fascism Distract from the Real Danger
January 21, 2021
By Samuel Moyn – Jan 18, 2021

The same system that often rendered Trump harmless fails most Americans.

The absolute height of fascism talk in recent US history took place at the beginning of June, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing. It occurred amid America’s largest-ever popular mobilization against white supremacy and racist police violence. Allegations of fascism inadvertently testified to the possibility of change; it had been generations since so many people demanded an end to American state brutality. Those same charges of fascism, however, provided no help in effecting that transformation.

It is undeniable that Donald Trump’s presidency gave the notion of fascism cultural prominence in American politics. In the last 15 years, the term had entered public discourse only three times before this past summer: when Trump’s candidacy broke through among Republicans in March 2016; after he beat Hillary Clinton and took office in January 2017; and when the disgusting Unite the Right rally was held in Charlottesville, Va., in August of the same year.

This shows that nothing Trump actually did sparked the discourse—unless one counts the rhetorical fuel he added to the fire of outrage and violence set off in Virginia by several hundred punks. The fascism frame was a choice that activists, commentators, and politicians made, and June 2020 proved it again and conclusively. No comparable talk—especially about Barack Obama—happened in response to the police slaying of Michael Brown on the streets of Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014. So the real questions are: Why did we make that choice? And are there better ones now?

Asking them is not to deny that America experienced a kind of fascism during the Jim Crow era, that fascism in one of its varieties across the world could return, that America could host it, or even that fascism is latent so long as injustice lasts. All true, but so what? To insist on hypothetical possibilities or eternal fascism is to dodge the obligation to provide a responsible inquiry into contemporary American politics. Instead, most people who have denounced fascism over the last four years wish to return to the status quo ante Trump and restore the failed policies that provided him the opportunity to win the White House.

A factual approach to the Trump years shows that those crying “fascism” tended to rely on the first half of every frightening news cycle. But the second half showed Trump shying away from any fascist endgame, changing his mind under pressure, or finding himself blocked by his own servants. And that was before any heavier weaponry in the American system came into play.

I am more sympathetic to the claim that fascist elements in civil society became emboldened with Trump in charge. But racist militias are anything but new, and the white boys of Charlottesville and the Proud Boys hardly constitute a fascist uprising. (In the March on Rome, Benito Mussolini had tens of thousands of Blackshirts at his command, while in 1933, Adolf Hitler had personal goons in the millions.) The disgusting events of January 6, 2021 illustrate frightening new potentialities for the future, while also reinforcing the end of this presidency—assuming it even lasts until January 20. Indeed, the culmination (so far) of Trump’s parodic coup staged by “a mob of angry white dudes”—as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor put it—led the inevitable outcome of Joe Biden’s installment to be even swifter and more widely supported.

We need theories that capture both the Trump years’ continuity with the past as well as their novelty. But the allegations of fascism too often distract us from the need and possibility for America to diverge from the trajectory that led to them.

The Trump administration’s most serious evils were either rhetorical and symbolic, or came in adjusting the already obscene American immigration regime in an even more exclusionary direction. Trump’s national security record, based on that same unchecked executive power, is more mixed. Under Trump, America killed fewer foreigners overall than it did when his two predecessors were in office. Even as he extended some of their worst choices and made grievous new mistakes, there was no resemblance to the hyper-imperialism of historical fascism.
None of this is to say that Trump wasn’t a terrible president, let alone that “the system” worked. Just the opposite: The same system that often rendered Trump harmless continues to fail most Americans. The most graphic proof of this lies in the latest election returns, which embarrass the fascism paradigm. The most shocking thing about them is that, after four years of delegitimation, Trump increased his support among the presumed victims of fascism, while the Democratic Party faltered. Biden broke through, thanks to the wealthy and powerful. The state where I live, Connecticut, is among the most unequal, with some of the country’s worst poverty. Biden fared worse among urban workers, including Blacks and Hispanics in my city of New Haven, than earlier Democrats—but far, far better among the wealthy denizens of Greenwich and Westport.

If we are lucky, the fascism debate will become a historical curio, allowing Americans who want to overcome structural injustice and political impasse to focus where it matters. Far from reflecting any real intellectual dilemma, it marks a missed opportunity. It also poses a risk for a future in which too many progressives spend their time fretting about the end of American democracy, allowing the mainstream to shirk responsibility for its enduring flaws and the right to keep on fooling too many of its longtime victims.


Featured image: A carnival float in Germany mocks Donald Trump with the phrase “Make fascism great again” written on his hair. (Sascha Steinbach / Getty Images)

Samuel Moyn teaches law and history at Yale. His most recent book is Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Harvard University Press).(The Nation)

https://orinocotribune.com/allegations- ... al-danger/
I think I agree. Admittedly, I thought it was uniquely dictator-esque when Trump dispersed peaceful protestors so he could take a picture for two seconds. The “fascist” talk only bothers me when it’s substituted for a historical analysis. “Fascism” and even particular definitions of “white supremacy” border on buzzwords that give easy answers to complicated questions.

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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 23, 2021 12:34 pm

I think I agree. Admittedly, I thought it was uniquely dictator-esque when Trump dispersed peaceful protestors so he could take a picture for two seconds. The “fascist” talk only bothers me when it’s substituted for a historical analysis. “Fascism” and even particular definitions of “white supremacy” border on buzzwords that give easy answers to complicated questions.
Yeah, too many use the term too freely, I'm guilty too, but it does have a specific meaning. Saw a piece in the Trot-leaning Oaklandsocialist where it was used twice in same sentence to describe two antagonistic groups. I think state power is the necessary qualifier. Before that nationalist/racists whatever. They wanna establish a fascist agenda but require control of the state to do so and that cannot happen without ruling class connivance, either internal and/or external.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

solidgold
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Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2017 7:36 pm

Re: Fascism

Post by solidgold » Sun Jan 24, 2021 2:45 pm

blindpig wrote:
Sat Jan 23, 2021 12:34 pm
I think I agree. Admittedly, I thought it was uniquely dictator-esque when Trump dispersed peaceful protestors so he could take a picture for two seconds. The “fascist” talk only bothers me when it’s substituted for a historical analysis. “Fascism” and even particular definitions of “white supremacy” border on buzzwords that give easy answers to complicated questions.
Yeah, too many use the term too freely, I'm guilty too, but it does have a specific meaning. Saw a piece in the Trot-leaning Oaklandsocialist where it was used twice in same sentence to describe two antagonistic groups. I think state power is the necessary qualifier. Before that nationalist/racists whatever. They wanna establish a fascist agenda but require control of the state to do so and that cannot happen without ruling class connivance, either internal and/or external.
It’s like two people are having a conversation about rap and rock music, then a third interjects, “man, it’s all just blues music!” Yeah, they’re kinda right, but they’re downplaying historical specificity. What if the left spends so much time on historical analogs that it fails to see a new type of movement arising—or, maybe the “neoliberal” program is worse with a larger body count than anything fascists and neo-nazis have done post-WW2. This isn’t just semantic: Lenin didn’t need to see Russia as France or Britain to stage a revolution; Mao didn’t need to see China as Russia to mobilize the peasants. Personally, I think the historical check list has been tossed out long ago.

So is it fascism? Probably yes and no... so now what?

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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Sun Jan 24, 2021 7:42 pm

solidgold wrote:
Sun Jan 24, 2021 2:45 pm
blindpig wrote:
Sat Jan 23, 2021 12:34 pm
I think I agree. Admittedly, I thought it was uniquely dictator-esque when Trump dispersed peaceful protestors so he could take a picture for two seconds. The “fascist” talk only bothers me when it’s substituted for a historical analysis. “Fascism” and even particular definitions of “white supremacy” border on buzzwords that give easy answers to complicated questions.
Yeah, too many use the term too freely, I'm guilty too, but it does have a specific meaning. Saw a piece in the Trot-leaning Oaklandsocialist where it was used twice in same sentence to describe two antagonistic groups. I think state power is the necessary qualifier. Before that nationalist/racists whatever. They wanna establish a fascist agenda but require control of the state to do so and that cannot happen without ruling class connivance, either internal and/or external.
It’s like two people are having a conversation about rap and rock music, then a third interjects, “man, it’s all just blues music!” Yeah, they’re kinda right, but they’re downplaying historical specificity. What if the left spends so much time on historical analogs that it fails to see a new type of movement arising—or, maybe the “neoliberal” program is worse with a larger body count than anything fascists and neo-nazis have done post-WW2. This isn’t just semantic: Lenin didn’t need to see Russia as France or Britain to stage a revolution; Mao didn’t need to see China as Russia to mobilize the peasants. Personally, I think the historical check list has been tossed out long ago.

So is it fascism? Probably yes and no... so now what?
Hell, I don't even like 'neoliberal', all liberals to me. Certainly a worse body counts since WWII but they've had a lot more time and this is a function of 'consent'. As far as the current crop of miscreants goes let's see them do something different than their precursors have done. Hindsight is golden....But so far Dimitrov is still correct else the so-called insurrection would have been successful and the liberal constitution would have been overthrown.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Tue Jun 22, 2021 1:49 pm

Fascisation as an Expression of Imperialist Decay: Rajani Palme Dutt’s Fascism and Social Revolution
ALFIE HANCOX MARCH 23, 2021

Imperialism and fascism march hand in hand; they are blood brothers.1

These are the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India and a longstanding political colleague of Rajani Palme Dutt (1896-1974), the leading theoretician in the Communist Party of Great Britain. In his day Dutt was one of the most influential communists in the English-speaking world, primarily known for his analysis of colonial underdevelopment, but his magnum opus was his full-length study of the rise of fascism.2

Intended as a sequel to Lenin’s Imperialism, Dutt’s Fascism and Social Revolution (1934) is remarkable for its global perspective, locating the conditions of fascist ascendancy in the “intensified conflict of the imperialist powers”.3 The imperial dimension of fascism, and its continuities with liberal colonialism, have only recently begun to receive serious scholarly attention. Yet Dutt is absent from the most notable published collection of interwar Marxist writings on fascism, and he does not even get a mention in Trotskyist historian David Renton’s newly revised classic Fascism: History and Theory.4 Dutt’s fealty to Stalin and the Communist International (Comintern) has largely consigned his works to obscurity, but charges by his detractors on the left that he was just an opportunistic “shyster lawyer” overlook his deep-seated commitment to anti-imperialist causes.

Empire, “the British form of fascism”

While conventional accounts stress the exceptional character of fascism, owing to national and cultural peculiarities, when contextualised within the long history of European colonialism, the horrors of the 1930s-40s appear less of an aberration. As the son of a Bengali immigrant residing in the metropolitan heart of darkness, Dutt viewed the great social turmoil of the interwar years through an anti-colonial lens – the “alien eye” as he called it – and as early as 1923 he argued that “the Empire is the British form of Fascism”.5 He elaborated on this conviction in the book, which highlights how in the poems of Rudyard Kipling and the Boer War agitation of the Daily Mail, “the spirit of Fascism is already present in embryonic forms.” Dutt exposed the hypocrisy of the “democratic” imperialists, noting that “bourgeois critics of Fascism in Western Europe and America express their shocked indignation as if Fascist Germany and Fascist Italy were the first and only countries to go in for jingoism, wholesale war-incitement and war-preparation, and as if England, France and the United States were innocent angels of peace”.6 In the British Empire, the 1930s was a decade that witnessed the suppression of anti-colonial labour rebellions in the Caribbean, and the crushing of the Indian independence movement.

Having experienced imperial racism first-hand in England, Dutt identified that fascism’s “national-chauvinist ideology, the anti-Semitism and the racial theories are all borrowed, without a single new feature, from the stock in trade of the old Conservative and reactionary parties”.7 He pointed out that Britain’s home-grown fascists led by Oswald Mosley took their inspiration from not only Mussolini’s Black Shirts but also the perpetrators of the Amritsar massacre in India, and the paramilitary Black-and-Tans in Ireland. The American ruling class was “equally adapted to Fascism”, having “had plenty of experience in their own domain in the suppression of the twelve million Negroes within the United States and of the heavily exploited immigrant populations”. Dutt singled out the Scottsboro trial, Red-baiting, Haymarket hangings and Ku Klux Klan lynchings as examples of “the plentiful basis for Fascism in American bourgeois traditions”.8 The Nazi race laws indeed drew directly on the precedents of Jim Crow, as well as the genocide of Native Americans.

A parallel analysis was advanced by the Trinidad-born communist George Padmore (a regular contributor to Dutt’s Labour Monthly), who wrote after Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 that slaughtered 275,000 Africans, that “the Colonies are the breeding ground for the type of fascist mentality which is being let loose in Europe today”.9 This interpretation was most famously advanced in Aimé Césaire’s 1950 Discourse on Colonialism, which argued that Hitler’s real crime in the eyes of “civilised” Europeans was “that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘n****s’ of Africa”. Years earlier, Dutt had already suggested that Nazism was the rogue child of conventional European imperialism: “If Hitler applied the match to the gunpowder, it was the British and French ruling class that laid the trail of gunpowder and placed the match in his hand”.10 Hitler referred to his hoped-for German Lebensraum in Russia as “our India”, and the Nazis learned from previous colonial atrocities such as the Herero and Nama genocide in Namibia.11

Colonial rivalry and hungry imperialists

The book also cuts through Britain’s patriotic mythos of WW2 as a straightforwardly anti-fascist war fought in the name of democracy. At the time Dutt was writing, it was “the widespread hope of imperialist circles, especially in Britain, to use a re-armed Fascist Germany, in unity with Japan, for war on the Soviet Union”.12 So long as the Nazis faced eastwards they were financed by the British ruling class, which backed Hitler’s rearmament programme in the Anglo-German naval agreement. Former Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George described Hitler as a bulwark against Bolshevism, while Churchill declared that if he were Italian he would “wholeheartedly” support Mussolini’s counterrevolution.

Unlike the more influential Marxist theorists of fascism including Georgi Dimitrov and Leon Trotsky, Dutt situated its rise in the crucible of inter-imperialist rivalry for colonial markets in the context of a global economic crisis like that which preceded WW1. The arrival of fascism, Dutt argued, can “only be correctly understood in relation to its general social role as the expression of the extreme stage of imperialism in break-up”. The divergent national trajectories were principally accounted for by the fact that while Britain and France were “sated” colonial powers “gorged with world-plunder,” Germany, Italy and Japan were “hungry” imperialists “intent on an aggressive policy of expansion”.13 A similar conclusion was drawn by the German left-social democrat Richard Löwenthal, who identified the essence of fascism in “an imperialism of paupers and bankrupts”.14 Mussolini himself described Italy as a “proletarian nation” in Europe unjustly denied its share of colonial possessions.15

In a misfortune of history, Dutt’s farsighted anti-imperialist analysis was marginalised only months after the book was published – when the Soviet Union turned towards courting alliances with the “democratic” Allied powers – and downplayed its previous anti-colonial commitments. Dutt resorted to ideological contortions to justify the Comintern’s volte-face, but the notion he was merely “Stalin’s mouthpiece” in Britain is simplistic. For instance, during the “People’s War” phase after the German invasion of Russia he argued – in contradiction to the Soviets’ conciliatory approach – that support for Britain’s anti-fascist war effort should be “combined with continued struggle against Churchill and British imperialism”.16

Dutt’s insights have sustained relevance in our present era of far-right resurgence and renewed antagonisms between the “core” capitalist powers with a principle difference being that today, there are only hungry imperialists. While contemporary incarnations of fascism require special attention, the danger of exceptionalism remains: as Joshua Briond reminds us in his article titled “Hitler Is Not Dead” (a nod to Césaire), the mass incarceration and deportation of migrants, anti-black police brutality and imperialist wars in West Asia “occurred long before Trump and will continue to escalate long after Trump”.

From social imperialism to “social fascism”

Dutt also analysed the internal “fascisation” of bourgeois democracy. Following Lenin’s framework of “the law of unequal capitalist development”, he noted that social contradictions were sharpest in the “poorer” imperialist countries, where the ruling classes were no longer able to purchase social peace, and thus had to rely on increasingly authoritarian measures to keep workers at heel.17 Dutt was off the mark in arguing that the entire capitalist world was entering a state of “pre-fascism”, but his apocalyptic tone can be excused given the circumstances – few living through the calamity of the thirties could have anticipated capitalism’s post-war recovery.

The book presents the most systematic defence of the controversial “social fascism” thesis, showing how social democratic parties helped pave the way for fascism through implementing emergency powers, refusing anti-fascist alliances with communists, and forestalling proletarian revolution. The social fascist position was promoted by the Comintern during its Third Period (1928-34) when it designated reformist politicians as class enemies. Dutt glossed over the undoubted sectarian excesses of this policy, but those who write it off as “ultra-left idiocy” too readily forget the line was solidified only after a series of fatal betrayals by governing social democrats, climaxing in the 1929 shooting of May Day demonstrators in Berlin.18

Whereas Trotskyist accounts tend to overstress the middle class base of fascism, Dutt correctly saw that it was able to mobilise and deceive swathes of the “demoralised working class” disaffected from social democracy. This dynamic enabled fascism to become a truly mass movement with the capacity for self-radicalisation, distinguishing it from previous “dictatorships from the right”.19 The purported “twinned” character of fascism and social reformism was more sophisticated than is often implied: the argument was not, as Renton suggests, “that social democracy was just another kind of fascism”.20 Both are in the last instance “instruments of the rule of monopoly capital”, both attempt to place “the state above classes”, but their methods differ. Where fascism “shatters the class organisations of the workers from without”, social democracy “undermines [them] from within”. For Dutt, what was novel in the fascist dictatorship was that rather than incorporating the existing labour movement into the imperialist state, it aimed at “the violent destruction of the workers’ independent organisations”.21

More originally, the book argues that fascism was specifically indebted to a western socialism that had betrayed class internationalism, and “left the masses an easy prey” to far-right demagogy.22 Dutt recognised that European social democracy itself had “been built on the foundation of colonial slavery; as was strikingly demonstrated when the Labour Government, the champion of ‘democracy’, brought in a reign of terror to maintain despotism in India and jailed sixty thousand for the crime of asking for democratic rights”. The fascist conception of imperial “self-sufficiency” was a familiar one among the reformist left in the 1930s. Dutt noted that when the Labour MP and future fascist Oswald Mosley advanced his programme for national economic growth based on “socialistic imperialism”, prominent left-Labour politicians, including Aneurin Bevan (the later architect of the National Health Service), “rallied to his support and assisted his campaign.”23

Like many communists, Dutt had been radicalised when the reformist parties of the Second International succumbed to the jingoist frenzy and backed their respective governments in the imperialist First World War. He observed that the ultra-nationalist rhetoric of “war-socialists” such as Robert Blatchford in England and Alexander Parvus in Germany “reveal many striking resemblances with subsequent Fascism”.24 In Italy, a number of prominent fascists including Paolo Orano were erstwhile revolutionary syndicalists, who saw their country’s participation in WW1 as a moment of national redemption.25 The early pseudo-socialism of Nazism, as articulated by the Strasser brothers, also borrowed from the “semi-Fascist conceptions of nationalism, imperialism and class-collaboration”, which were long fostered by the chauvinist wing of social democracy.26

Within the western left of today, a reinvigorated class politics remains stuck in the social-imperialist cul-de-sac. Emblematically, in 2018 the prominent journalist Paul Mason – soon to publish a book on “how to stop fascism” – called for Jeremy Corbyn to advance “a programme to deliver growth and prosperity in Wigan, Newport and Kirkcaldy – if necessary, at the price of not delivering them to Shenzhen, Bombay and Dubai”. By pandering to nativism and anti-immigrant sentiments, social democratic and liberal parties throughout Europe and North America have continued to play into the hands of right-wing populism. Dutt should be recognised alongside the likes of Padmore, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Amílcar Cabral for demonstrating that the only effective counter to creeping fascisation lies in the path of anti-imperialism and socialist internationalism.

https://liberatedtexts.com/reviews/fasc ... evolution/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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