Category Archives: Fascism

Blog, Fascism, Features

Maddalena Gretel Cammelli: Reflections on contemporary fascism

Image 1: Building in Rome occupied by the CasaPound movement in 2003, photo by Barbicone

It was 2009 when, while living in a squatted house in the Montreuil, a leftist banlieue on the East side of Paris, I was asked how it was possible that there were people occupying buildings in Rome, Italy who self-defined as fascists. The activities of the CasaPound movement were coming to be known on the other side of the Alps as well, and French Leftists were asking me for explanations. Indeed, CasaPound activists used to call themselves third millennium fascists: they have de facto been the first movement to self-claim this label and assert a direct legacy with Fascism since 1945. It is important to remember that Italian law and the country’s constitution prohibit the re-formation of the Fascist party, so a claim of this kind has a certain weight.

Since that moment, I began to focus my research on this subject, first with my PhD dissertation on CasaPound (Cammelli 2015, 2017), and later by continuing to reflect on the place and significance the concept of fascism has been gaining in contemporary European landscapes (within the ERC project F-WORD).

In some ways, the fact that the activists I first engaged were using the label “fascist” to self-identify made things easier for me: my own reproduction of this category in the research was not a choice of political labelling, but simply an act of respecting the emic perspective claimed by the activists themselves. Nonetheless, the specific nature of such a categorization required unpacking.

It is important to recall that, at that time almost 15 years ago, very few people were taking this group seriously as a danger. CasaPound activists were not generally considered new exponents of a fascist-like identity. At an analytical level, it was suggested that I use the “integralist” category proposed by Douglas Holmes (2000) so as to indicate continuity with more traditional political forms, but without the demonizing consequences the label of fascism might trigger. Alternatively, they could be referred to as neo-nationalist, as suggested by Gingrich and Banks (2006) and Kalb and Halmai (Kalb and Halmai 2011) or populist as used by Kalb in his work on Poland (2009). I engaged with this literature to analyze the way this presence was affecting Italian political life, and indeed how cultural identities and political identities seemed to be playing a primary role in absorbing the disappointment experienced by people suffering the double devaluation (Kalb 2022) produced by the social crisis of European modernity – a crisis which, far from being exclusively economic, still continues today.

Almost fifteen years later, we may be in the position to add a few new pieces to the CasaPound puzzle, as the evolution of the political situation in Italy and Europe allows us to make some more specific arguments.

It is evident, as tellingly signalled by the 2022 election of the Meloni government, that the state of affairs once known as the cultural hegemony of the (so-called) left wing in Italy has lost its “momentum”. If there is anything like a cultural hegemony today in the sense outlined by Gramsci, it aligns with the consensus established around the Meloni government and reflects many of CasaPound’s own values. These activists are no longer at the margins; they now find themselves at the centre of the political imaginary of contemporary Italian society (as in other European countries). As confirmed by Douglas Holmes (2019), this not only means that the fascists of today are no longer the violent, skinhead-like people we would have imagined in the past; they have assumed a much more common and widespread profile. It also means that the people who twenty or even ten years ago appeared to be marginal groups of stigmatized militants now play a completely different role in the political arena, having become mainstream and widely accepted. This development may trigger important changes in the way new research on the topic is delineated, and we need to contextualise the rise of right-wing claims and populist nationalist drives more generally within the development of neoliberalism and its irrepressible hegemonic consensus in Europe and the Americas.

To return to the question of how the concept and word “fascism” are being used, therefore, we may look at the enormous body of literature produced by sociologists and political scientists about political parties and formations positioned on the “right” of the political spectrum. These formations are variously characterised as far-right, extreme-right, radical right or, more recently, populist radical right (Caiani Padoan 2020, Brubaker 2020, Froio et al. 2020, Mudde 2007, 2019). Italian historian Claudio Vercelli recently wrote that, while clearly the past never repeats itself, it is valid to say that the underlying motivations and behaviours evoking an ideological and subcultural substratum with specifically fascist roots does re-emerge (Vercelli 2021: 27). Shortly before (2019), historian Emilio Gentile pointed out the perils of what he calls writing “a-historiography”, that is, the practice of comparing different historical epochs to identify similarities and continuity with the Fascist past; such scholarship, he warns, risks rendering fascism banal and empty. Nonetheless, in view of current political developments in Europe, the USA and beyond, recent literature on EU and US contexts has focused on fascism and faced the f-word head on (Stanley 2018, Traverso 2017, Zetkin Collective 2020). This is not a matter of comparing different historical epochs or making ‘a-historiography’ (Gentile 2019). On the contrary, it is high time for anthropological research to bring its insights to bear on this topic, improving our understanding of the meanings behind the concept of fascism today, its use in social cultural life, and its multiple forms of reception and incorporation.

My argument is that, by silencing the word fascism (using populism, far-right, extreme-right, etc. instead), we risk overlooking the central place historical Fascism plays today as a “mythological machine” (Jesi 2011) and meaning-producer. Silencing this word runs the risk of mis-viewing the central place that the construction of mythological spectacle played historically in the formation of Fascism itself. As Simonetta Falasca Zamponi argues, such spectacle was pursued by using symbols and myths as tools for Fascism to define itself, thus contributing to forging Fascist identity (Falasca Zamponi [1997] 2003: 181). In other words, civic rituals, monuments, and public holidays offered myths and symbols that were instrumental for the self-representation of the nation (Mosse 1975: 145). Mythologies acted to normalise and naturalise meanings, containing them in an apparently permanent space. Historical Fascism used myths and rituals to form/perform a superior spiritual community capable of delineating a cosmology based on (what was asserted as) the natural order of things. Legitimizing the superiority of the virile Fascist man over any other subject, human or non, and with the tools of violence to impose the myth on history, Fascism manifested in history in a deeply pervasive and destructive way. With its future-oriented aspects developed in opposition to the sense of decay characterising the beginning of the last century, it went beyond a simple conservative movement born in reaction to the Bolshevik revolution. Overall, we need to address how memories, rhetoric, and symbols derived from historical Fascism help to constitute new political subjects today, regardless of whether they are ultimately best described as fascists or not (Levi Rothberg 2018: 357). This process is effectively illustrated and concretised by my ethnographic encounter with CasaPound activists (Cammelli 2015, 2017): I found that music and concerts served as gathering sites forging a community of destiny united by faith in the leader and obedience to his will. The community gathered behind this leader become a homogenized collective self, finding significance and reasons for their activism in symbols and images of Mussolini and the Fascist past.

An objective of anthropological investigation should thus be to explore the mythological machine (Jesi 2011) fascism produces of itself, the manifestations that make of this machine that contradictory yet mutable, violent yet meaningful contemporary presence that calls out to be explored in its multiple and differently situated manifestations. Anthropologists should try to find meaning instead of arguing over definitions, to search out lower-case fascism as a heuristic device (Holmes 2019) and violent human reaction to present-day social crises. Nonetheless, fascism is not monstrous, inhuman, or alien in any way. It is a phenomenon wholly entangled with modernity (Bauman 1989) and the way we use reason to justify multiple forms of supremacy.

To conclude, we should consider fascism as it has variously manifested across 1945 and the turn of the millennium, and in its connection with liberalism and the neoliberal turn. And we may need to look more widely around us as well as inside ourselves, not limiting our gaze to some stigmatised militant but instead paying attention to the more general culture of domination and violence that is feeding our contemporary world.

Maddalena Gretel Cammelli is Associate professor in cultural anthropology at the Department Cultures, Politics and Society of the University of Turin, and Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project The world behind a word. An anthropological exploration of fascist practices and meanings among European youth (F-WORD) (https://fword.unito.it/).

References

Bauman, Zygmunt. [1989] 2010. Modernità e Olocausto. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Brubaker, Rogers. 2020. “Populism and nationalism” in Nation and Nationalism, 26 (1), 2020, pp. 44–66.

Caiani Manuela, Enrico Padoan. 2020. “Setting the scene: filling the gap in Populism studies” In PACO Partecipazione e conflitto 13(1) pp. 1-28.

Cammelli, Maddalena Gretel. 2014. Millenial Fascism. Contribution à une Anthropologie du Fascisme du Troisième Millénaire. PhD diss. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

Cammelli, Maddalena Gretel. 2015. Fascisti del Terzo Millennio. Per un’Antropologia di CasaPound. Verona: OmbreCorte.

Cammelli, Maddalena Gretel. 2017. Fascistes du Troisième Millénaire. Un Phénomène Italien? Milan: Editions Mimésis.

Falasca Zamponi, Simonetta. [1997] 2003. Lo spettacolo del fascismo. Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino.

Froio Caterina, Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Giorgia Bulli, Matteo Albanese. 2020. CasaPound Italia. Contemporary Extreme-right Politics. London, New York: Routledge.

Gentile, Emilio. 2019. Chi è Fascista. Bari-Roma: Laterza.

Gingrich, André, Marcus Banks. 2006. Neo-Nationalism in Europe and Beyond. Perspectives from Social Anthropology. New York and Oxford: Berghahn.

Holmes, Douglas R. 2000. Integral Europe. Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Oxford, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Holmes, Douglas R. 2019, “Fascism at eye level. The anthropological conundrum”, in Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. 84 pp. 62–90.

Jesi, Furio. 2011. Cultura di destra. Roma: Nottetempo.

Kalb Don, Halmai Gabor (eds). 2011. Headlines of nation, subtexts of class. Working-class populism and the return of the repressed in neoliberal Europe. New York, Oxford: Berghahn.

Kalb, Don. 2009. “Conversations with a Polish Populist: Tracing hidden histories of globalization, class, and dispossession in post-socialism (and beyond)”. American Ethnologist 36(2): 207-223.

Kalb Don. 2022. “Double devaluations: Class, value and the rise of the right in the Global North.” In Journal of Agrarian Change. 23, 1: 204-219.

Levi, Neil, Michael Rothberg. 2018. “Memory studies in a moment of danger: Fascism, post fascism, and the contemporary political imaginary”, in Memory Studies Vol. 11(3) pp. 355–367.

Mosse, George L. 1975. La nazionalizzazione delle masse. Simbolismo politico e movimenti di massa in Germania dalle guerre napoleoniche al Terzo Reich. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Mudde, Cas. 2007. Populist Radical Right in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mudde, Cas. 2019. The Far-Right today. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Stanley, Jason. 2018. How fascism works. the politics of us and them. New York: Random House.

Traverso, Enzo. 2017. I nuovi volti del fascismo. Verona: OmbreCorte.

Vercelli Claudio. 2021. Neofascismo in grigio. La destra radicale tra l’Italia e l’Europa. Torino: Einaudi.

Zetkin Collective. 2020. Fascisme Fossile. Paris : La Fabrique éditions.

Cite as: Cammelli, Maddalena Gretel. 2024. “Reflections on contemporary fascism” Focaalblog 9 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/02/09/maddalena-gretel-cammelli-reflections-on-contemporary-fascism/

Blog, Fascism, Features

Giacomo Loperfido: Austerity, Charisma, and the Attacks on Reason

Image 1: Beppe Grillo in Piazza Castello in Turin for the campaign of the 5 Stars Movement Piemonte on 14 March 2010, photo by Giorgio Brida

I do not want to focus too much on the definitions of social phenomena because I find it more interesting to look at the structures (synchronic and diachronic) and contexts (at various scales) underpinning them. It is – I believe – analytically more productive to compare those, instead of sticking to what a categorical label (which is always, to an extent, arbitrarily attributed) does or does not include. Moreover, the word “fascism”, having become so morally laden in its century old history, is almost impossible to use it without falling into excessive generalizations (both moral and historical). With this in mind, my tendency towards what might or might not be classified as “fascism”, hinges on one simple principle: I use it either when referring to the movement founded by Benito Mussolini in 1919, or when the category is used “emically” by my research participants to describe themselves.

Consistently with the above, I’d like to focus on some systemic aspects I have been concentrating on in my recent work on populism and conspiracy theory within the Italian 5 Stars Movement (5SM), and put that into relation with insights from previous research. I do not at all intend to suggest that 5SM is a phenomenon of the fascist type, albeit one might notice, historically, a few overlapping tendencies. Rather, I look at the 5SM as a political grouping that was, at its origin, populist. Fascism, too, is an historically specific form of populism. But not every populism is fascist.

My main areas of interest in political anthropology have been concerned with: 1) The ideological innovations of Spontaneismo Armato: a radical and partly clandestine neo-fascist galaxy of small armed groups, active in Italy in the late 1970’s, and deeply engaged in the political violence of those years, (Loperfido 2018, 2022). 2) The constitutive processes, and subsequent collapse, of a specific socio-economic ideology of autarchy/self-reliance in Veneto, Italy. The latter was organized around an organicist understanding of the social relations of production which had also framed the sub-nationalist discourses of Lega Nord, another populist protest party, that had seen the light in Veneto and Lombardia in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Loperfido and Pusceddu, 2019, Loperfido 2020). 3) The above mentioned 5SM, with particular reference to the articulation of its early populistic functioning, and the fantasies of conspiracy against the people, very widespread in the early stages of the party formation (2005-2016). With Victor Turner, I analyze this articulation in terms of the anti-structural logics of charisma/enthusiasm, that informed the party’s constitutive process within the complex political economy of the long crisis unleashed by the financial breakdown of 2009.

All three of these political phenomena have been associated with fascism by variously distributed detractors in the media and at times in scientific discourses. Personally, I only dealt with Spontaneismo in terms of “Neo-fascism”, for the reasons listed above. However, one can notice that the three political formations shared a few ideological features with historical fascism.

Some of these features are:

1) All three – at least in their constitutional phase – claimed to represent various expressions of a third way between left and right, socialism and liberalism.

2) They all, likewise, claim(ed) to represent some form of revolt against the bourgeois world, while leaving unchallenged the system of property, market relations, and capital accumulation more generally.

3) They all were charismatic in nature, vitalistic and transgressive. One could say enthusiastic in the Durkheimian sense, or – more appropriately – anti-structural in a Turnerian perspective.

4) They all opposed action to theory and reason, giving to the former the moral edge over the latter. This created, in all four cases, a strongly anti-intellectual orientation, with attacks on rationalism, and to bourgeois idealist notions of foundational identity.

5) They all produced forms of organicist ideologies which were, more or less explicitly, obscuring class differences, and thus attempting to deny and repress class conflict.

Reflecting on similar ideological configurations, Susana Narotzky makes an important statement when saying that:

“most ‘third-way’ attempts at producing alternative social models have been of the ‘organic’ type, from the social doctrine of the church at the turn of the twentieth century through republican solidarism and fascism, to present-day third-way and social-capital proponents. They are similar in that they all aim at maintaining capitalist market-led relations of production while solving the ‘social question’, that is, the social unrest created by the necessary differentiation those very relations produce. They differ in the means employed to reach these common objectives and therefore in the procedural structures of governance developed. However, they all stress the importance of personalized relationships between agents and the specificity of community contexts” (Narotzky 2007:406, my emphasis).

Following in her footsteps, I would like to explore how third way postulations, and the processes of personalization/naturalization of socio-economic relations that are integral to it, could be related to the macro-context of austerity measures. Can this dynamic of personalization/naturalization be interpreted as the nexus determining a mutually constitutive relationship between austerity and charisma? The above might not give us certainties on what fascism is or is not, but could perhaps illuminate social processes, structures and constraints that elicited the emergence of fascism in its historical form, and that have – at other times – produced ideological tendencies that are – to an extent – comparable with it.

If we look at the historical context, our first realization is that all of these formations were constituted at moments of deep crisis of capital accumulation (historical fascism in the late 1910s, the Liga Veneta – then Lega Nord, then Lega – in the early 1970s, Spontaneismo in the mid 1970s, 5SM in 2009). This is not to say these political formations were reacting to economic crisis per se, rather, they all seemed to embody a reaction to what Stuart Hall has termed – with Gramsci – “a passive revolution”, a sort of reaction to a non-reaction: “when none of the social forces were able to enforce their political will and things go stumbling along in an unresolved way” (Hall and Massey 2010).

Another recurrent aspect in all of these situations is the emergency of austerity as a culturally hegemonic discourse. In a recent book Clara Mattei (2022) explores the relationship between austerity and fascism in Italy, as a process of reciprocal constitution. She sheds new light on austerity presenting it as a project elaborated by British and Italian think tanks at the dawn of the last century with the goal of liberating the forces of capital from the yoke of political control. She reminds us of how in his very first discourse as Prime Minister, Mussolini spoke the idioms of austerity, and promised to de-politicize the economy and remove all meddling of the state within it (Mattei 2022:205). Obviously, the other conjunctures in which the “idioms of austerity” were enforced as culturally hegemonic, were precisely the moments, named above, where the forces of capital appeared to be under severe threat (the 1970s and the 2010s).

Now, there are of course enormous differences, and neither Lega, Spontaneismo, or 5SM, embraced austerity the way Mussolini’s regime did. But I am not interested here in the direct relationship between these movements and austerity. Rather, I’m trying to suggest that austerity became a paradigm, powerful enough to establish a new representation of the relation between the economy and the state, where the possibility and the duty of the former to intervene in the latter and regulate the markets, disappears. This implies a set of consequences that, I shall argue, can be seen as co-responsible for the emergence and social establishment of the ideological configurations listed above.

Yesterday, like today, austerity seems to have the power to de-politicize issues, where these are “removed from the level of public accountability, and designated as ‘non-political’” (Hadjimichalis 2018: 108). Integral to austerity is what Don Kalb has termed “the unstoppable rule of experts” (2011: 3), whereby economic forces are not any longer the object matter of politicians (who govern things), but of technicians, scientists and technocrats (who study and manage things). This seems to inaugurate a process whereby the necessity to govern socio-economic forces is obscured. More than that: these are divorced from their social situatedness, their rootedness in the social process, and their being integral to the unequal relationalities between power holders and the subaltern classes. We could say that – with austerity – economic processes, social facts, power relations, develop a tendency to exit the social, and enter the domain of nature. Costis Hadjimichalis (2018) has shown how the discourse of austerity seems to be endowed with the magic power of making bloody attacks on social welfare, budgetary cuts for health and education, disappear beneath the idioms of flexibility, efficiency, and modernization. The result is “a culture of fear, alongside feelings of injustice and anger” (Hadjimichalis 2018: 108).

I was grappling with similar issues when faced with the problem of populism and conspiracy theories within the 5SM in the immediate aftermath of the 2009 economic breakdown, where not only the relation between the masses and the leader had become personalized, individualized, and as it were unmediated (Calise 2016, Comby 2014), but social and political forces were seen as personified and animated. The state had become a Vampire, the politicians were Zombies, while conspiracy theories about vaccines or organ removal during Covid-19 had come to represent the penetration of the extractive logic of capital down to the intimate sphere of the body itself.

We have known at least since Weber that “the social relationships directly involved in charisma are strictly personal, based on the validity and practice based on charismatic personal qualities” (1964 [1947]: 363-364). Yet, we can perhaps enrich this idea further by exposing a relationship that might connect personalized logics of charisma, 3rd way attempts, attacks on rationalism, with the larger systemic shift to hegemonic austerity. As we have seen, austerity deliberately dis-empowers the state as an abstract mechanism of social-economic regulation: a normative centre immanent over social relations, overseeing, governing, and intermediating social, economic and political interactions between actual persons, groupings, and different orders of institutions. The power of abstraction with which we endow the state, is key to that socially regulating function, tasked with emancipating social relations from their situated imbalances of power and their hierarchical relationalities. It is via these abstracting properties that the socially equalizing function of the state can be implemented via the establishment of a normative order. Obviously, when that function is removed not only is the field open again to the re-embedment of power relations into the given social hierarchy, but also to the general essentialization of social characters and social forces. It seems to me that this is the kind of context Gramsci alluded to, precisely when talking about fascism in austerity ridden Italy, when he saw, between the old that is dying and the new that cannot be born, an interregnum where “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.

Giacomo Loperfido is an ERC researcher in social and political anthropology for the PACT (Populism and Conspiracy Theory) Project, at the University of Tübingen. His research deals with questions of political violence, political radicalism, cultural enclavization, social and economic disintegration, in the wider context of global systemic crisis. He edited the volume “Extremism, Society and the State” (Berghahn Books, 2022).

References

Calise, Mauro. 2016. La Democrazia del Leader. Roma, Bari: Laterza.

Comby, Jean-Baptiste. 2014. “L’individualisation des Problèmes Collectifs: une Dépolitisation Politiquement Située.” Savoir/Agir:2: 45-50.

Hadjimichalis, Costis. 2018. Crisis Spaces. Structures, Struggles, and Solidarity in Southern Europe. London, New York: Routledge.

Hall, Stuart, and Doreen Massey. 2010. “Interpreting the crisis.” Soundings 44.44: 57-71.

Kalb, Don. 2011. “Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class. Working-class Populism and The Return of the Repressed in Neo-liberal Europe, Introduction”, inKalb Don and Gabor Halmai, Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class. Working-class Populism and The Return of the Repressed in Neo-liberal Europe. New York, Oxford : Berghan Books.

Loperfido, Giacomo. 2018. “Neither Left nor RIght. Crisis, Wane of Politics, and the Struggles for Sovereignty”, in Kalb, Don and Mollona, Mao, Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Struggles and Urban Commoning, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 118-141.

–. 2020. “The entrepreneur’s other: Small entrepreneurial identity and the collapse of life structures in the ‘Third Italy’”, in Narotzky, Susana, Grassroots Economies, Living With Austerity in Southern Europe. Pluto Press, 173-191.

–. 2022. “The Empire and the Barbarians: Cosmological Laceration and the Social Establishment of Extremism”, in Loperfido, Giacomo, Extremism, Society, and the State, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 87-108.

Loperfido, Giacomo, and Antonio Maria Pusceddu. 2019. “Unevenness and Deservingness: Regional Differentiation in Contemporary Italy.” Dialectical Anthropology 43:4, 417-436.

Mattei, Clara. The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Narotzky, Susana. 2007. “The Project in the Model. Reciprocity, Social Capital, and the Politics of Ethnographic Realism.” Cultural Anthropology, 48:3, 403-424.

Weber, Max. 1964 [1947]. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: The Free Press

Cite as: Loperfido, Giacomo. 2024. “Austerity, Charisma, and the Attacks on Reason” Focaalblog, 1 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/02/01/giacomo-loperfido-austerity-charisma-and-the-attacks-on-reason/

Blog, Fascism

Todd Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber: The Return of Fascism?

Image 1:
Chanting “White lives matter!” and “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” several hundred white nationalists and white supremacists carrying torches marched in a parade through the University of Virginia campus 11 August 2017, photo by
Evelyn Hockestein for The Washington Post

This discussion paper offers two contributions to our collective discussion on the theme of fascism: (a) an integrated set of elements comprising our definition of the concept; and (b) abbreviated notes on the applicability of each element to the present moment (see also Gordon and Webber 2023)

We argue that fascism is a mass movement rooted in the radicalizing petty bourgeoisie, or middle class. Fascist movements may participate in the bourgeois electoral arena, but ultimately the source of their strength and the centre of their political action is in the streets and the exercise of extra-legal violence. While outside of existential crises the bourgeoisie is not favourably disposed to fascists (some exceptions notwithstanding) the bourgeoisie may nevertheless appeal to them in an effort to impose order in such moments if political alternatives are unavailable or insufficient. The threat of fascism is co-extensive with capitalism – and not simply one of its stages – because capitalism systematically produces crises that profoundly destabilize the social order and its class relations. The possibility of fascism deepens when such crises reach a civilizational scale and become irresolvable on the terms of capital (i.e. the restoration of profitability and capitalist hegemony) either through bourgeois democratic means or other forms of authoritarianism, such as military dictatorship. Historically, a feature of those crises and obstacle to their resolution includes partially weakened but undefeated, mass revolutionary forces. As long as there is capitalism, then, the fascist threat remains alive. The intensity of the threat obviously has its ebbs and flows, but it never disappears.

As the definition outlined above would suggest, our preferred point of departure in what follows is a critical return to – but also extension beyond – the classical Marxist theories of fascism, particularly that of Leon Trotsky. In our view, two elements common to most classical Marxist theories of fascism need to be abandoned. The first is the unjustified view that fascism is specific to the kind of inter-imperial rivalry characteristic of the early twentieth century, and the related point that fascism is limited to countries of the imperialist core. The second is the connection of fascism to a “stage” of “monopoly capital,” a theory that was incorrect at the time and is equally without value today. Finally, we also believe that the interrelated phenomena of colonialism, racism, and white supremacy need to be fully integrated into the foundational elements of fascism identified by classical Marxists and synthesized below.

This is the master logic around which the seven elements of our concept of fascism and its potential development into a movement that can contest for power are articulated. We agree with Geoff Eley’s (2021) methodological point on the necessity of “portability” in any conceptualization of fascism that is to be of continued relevance across different historical periods, even as we disagree with his substantive characterization of the present conjuncture. Hence, we intend our concept of fascism as sufficiently abstract to be portable across different times and spaces of the industrial capitalist epoch, but nonetheless sufficiently coherent so as to be able to distinguish the phenomenon of fascism from other closely related phenomena.

First, with regard to context, the rise of fascism requires a severe and sustained crisis of capitalism beyond the mere immediate “conjunctural fluctuations,” and which makes the normal process of capitalist accumulation difficult if not impossible (Mandel 1971). Fascism’s historical role is to radically alter social, political, and economic conditions in order to facilitate a renewal of stable accumulation to the benefit, especially, of big capital. This is the master element whose logic articulates the other elements into a coherent totality. Clearly, the global crisis that erupted in 2008 and the economic stagnation that followed for much of the world – the worst slump in global production and trade since the 1930s, and one compounded by the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic – meets this contextual requirement.

Second, it is necessary that there be a foreboding sense of civilizational degeneration on the scale (but without necessarily the same content) that shaped the political zeitgeist from which classical fascism emerged. Such degeneration radicalizes the petty bourgeoisie. Most pertinent in the inter-war period was the crisis of global imperialism, culminating in the brutality and devastation of the First World War and inurement towards violence. Militarism crystallized in the European psyche generally, and especially among those who gravitated to fascism. The anxieties and traumas of postwar life, amidst economic volatility, were in turn successfully transformed by fascism into a focused hatred of Communism and alien others (Traverso 2017). Muted elements of this contextual factor exist in an incipient manner today, taking most dramatic form in the ecological crisis, the inurement to large-scale needless death and debilitation associated with the management of the COVID pandemic, the heightening of inter-imperial rivalries, the onset of major new wars, and a widespread cultural pessimism reminiscent of classically pre-fascist sentiment. Yet the sense of civilizational degeneration today is not yet comparable in scale to that of the era in which classical fascism was forged.

Third, the crisis of capitalist accumulation must develop into a crisis of bourgeois democracy. The historical context generative of the rise of fascism was one in which social classes deviated from their traditional political parties, and “the immediate situation became delicate and dangerous,” with an acute crisis of authority, “or general crisis of the state” (Thomas 2011). Today, clearly, there is a widespread international context of bourgeois democratic decline and weakening of traditional parties, but not yet the proliferation of the actual overthrow of bourgeois democratic regimes and the installation of military dictatorships – with some important exceptions, such as the counter-revolutionary wave in the Middle East – much less fascist dictatorships.

The fourth element of fascism – the inadequacy of traditional military dictatorship – flows immediately from the third. Traditional forms of police and military repression and dictatorial rule reveal themselves to be inadequate in the face of a strong working-class movement or an unreliable military. As a reactionary and militarized mass movement, with a capacity to mobilize supporters in the streets and electorally, fascism offers a solution. In the current context, by contrast, traditional forms of police and military repression within bourgeois democratic parameters, or in some cases military dictatorship (whether temporary, or longer term), have proved sufficient for the reproduction of capitalist rule.

The fifth component has to do with the petty bourgeois composition of fascism’s mass base. While inter-war European fascism drew cross-class support, at its core it was a petty-bourgeois movement of small business owners, rural landowners, managers, civil servants, professionals, and military and ex-military members. More and more, this radicalizing middle class was drawn to a revanchist politics premised on fortifying the nation, martial discipline, and order. Because of its precarious class location within the capitalist hierarchy, nestled uneasily between a globally ambitious set of large capitalists and an internationalist working-class movement, the petty bourgeoisie is disposed to conflating itself and its interests with those of the nation and to a conservative politics. The petty bourgeoisie is also a sufficiently large section of society to constitute the basis of a mass movement. The contemporary far-right draws heavily on petty-bourgeois radicalization, but the petty-bourgeoisie has not been mobilized and transformed into mass movements willing and capable of regularly engaging in organized paramilitary violence.

Sixth, before fascists are able to take power, with support from the bourgeoisie, they must first alter the balance of forces in their favor by inflicting partial setbacks on movements of the exploited and oppressed. We can call this the weakening, short of defeat, of the revolutionary threat from below.The revolutionary threat once posed by the proletariat may have dissipated, and any civil war scenario between the classes may have abated, but the organizational capacity of the workers’ movement to resist the depression of wages and increases in exploitation through normal means persists. In most of the world where the far-right has strengthened it has not done so in response to a revolutionary threat of any kind, so fascist violence has not been necessary to deliver a weakening-short-of-defeat of such a threat. In the major exception, the revolutionary wave in the Middle East, the counter-revolutions assumed traditional forms rather than fascist ones.

Seventh, and finally, there is assimilation into the bourgeois state and the restoration of capitalist stability. With its victory fascism is “to a large extent assimilated into the bourgeois state apparatus” and thus the most extreme, unassimilable elements of the movement, are of necessity liquidated (Mandel 1971: 20). Fascist rule is put to the task of restoring capitalist stability. Observing the sharp increase of capitalist profits under the Nazis, Mandel notes that while some capitalists, such as those in the arms industry, benefited more than their compatriots, “there clearly emerges a collective economic interest of the capitalist class” (Mandel 1971: 16). The winner in all of this was not a fraction of German capital but large German capital as a whole, which remained very much under the command of the German bourgeoisie, rather than the state or the fascists (Neumann 2009: 435-36, 613). Nowhere in the world have fascists captured state power, and so nowhere have they subsequently been assimilated into the bourgeois state. While some far-right parties with fascist roots have entered into government or hold the balance of power in government in parts of Europe, presently they act within the parameters of bourgeois democracy rather than seek to overthrow it (even if they wish to weaken it).

Todd Gordon is an Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and an editor of Midnight Sun. He has written on the Freedom Convoy for Midnight Sun and Studies in Political Economy.

Jeffery R. Webber is a political economist with research interests in Latin America, Marxism, social theory, the history of the Left, international development, capitalism and nature, imperialism, the politics of class and social oppression, and social movements.

References

Eley, Geoff. 2021. “What Is Fascism and Where Does It Come From?,” History Workshop Journal 91, no. 1: 1–28.

Gordon, Todd, and Jeffery R. Webber. 2023. “The Authoritarian Disposition: Capitalism, Liberalism, Fascism,” Spectre, Issue 8, Fall 2023: 42-55.

Mandel, Ernest. 1971. “Introduction,” in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, by Leon Trotsky. New York: Pathfinder.

Neumann, Franz L. 2009. Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.

Thomas, Peter D. 2011. The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Traverso, Enzo. 2017. Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945. London: Verso.

Cite as: Gordon, Todd & Webber Jeffery R. 2024. “The Return of Fascism?” Focaalblog, 29 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/01/29/todd-gordon-and-jeffery-r-webber-the-return-of-fascism/

Blog, Fascism, Features

Don Nonini and Ida Susser: Introduction: Fascism, Then and Now

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol_2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol_DSC09268-2_(50820738198).jpg
Image 1: The United States Capitol Building stormed by Trump supporters on 6 January 2021, photo by Tyler Merbler

On November 14, 2023, at the University of Toronto, we, the conveners of the Political Economy Discussion Group, an informal transnational group of anthropologists working in political economy, brought together an in-person group of more than 25 colleagues to discuss the question of the status of contemporary fascism. As part of this process, we invited five of us to sketch out their own ideas in short “position papers” on fascism which were pre-circulated. These papers, only slightly revised, now appear as a feature on fascism on FocaalBlog. We hope these will generate and encourage research among anthropologists on contemporary extreme right-wing formations, whether these are called fascism, proto-fascism, “authoritarian populism,” (Hall 1988), “authoritarian statism” (Poulantzas (2014 [1978]), “authoritarian neoliberalism” (Bruff 2014), “illiberalism” (Rosenblatt 2021), or by some other term. Certainly no one will argue that this topic is not timely or in urgent need of discussion today.

Fascism is fundamentally anti-democratic and violent. It attacks the rights of people to criticize its governance regime or to realize their different realms of freedom and relative autonomy in everyday life. Here we wish to think about contingency and alliances as this is where people agree that they are fighting for the right to exist and exercise realms of autonomy in their lives. We are far from sure that we are confronting the same fascisms as in the past, and we believe we need to generate new tools and new analyses as we face our current disasters. In order to contribute to such a discussion, we see it necessary to draw on a wide range of theoretical analyses from both Marxist and other sources. The effort is to illuminate the present and to prepare for what we expect may be coming in whatever way seems most constructive and strategically valuable.

We begin by considering Marxist analyses of fascism, alerted by the warning posed by Alberto Toscano in his brilliant Late Fascism (2023) that drawing historical analogies between the fascisms of the past (notably in Italy and Germany) and the fascism-candidates of the present is at best unrewarding, and at its worst, given the acceleration of the global rise of the ultra-right and the imperative to respond, a waste of time. But we also need to parse out, given the many Marxist theorizations and numerous Marxist theorists of and organizers against past fascisms – who were among fascism’s first victims! – what was most rewarding from those analyses and what needs to be left behind.

The Inter-war struggles by communist and socialist parties, both before and after fascist movements took state power, provoked insightful inter-war critical Marxist theorizations of the causes of the rise of fascism by Gramsci (1971), Trotsky (1971), Clara Zetkin (1923) and others over and against the conservative and liberal formulations that marked conventional scholarship in the West. These analyses were rich in their sense of contingency and their openness to the social contradiction arising from the economic crises brought on by the uneven and combined development of capitalism.

Among Marxists not all interwar theorizations of fascism were the same. Most held that capitalists were crucial to fascist movements in attaining state power and that, once these movements came to power, the fascist state worked to the benefit of capitalists, even if they did not directly lead it, while it consistently showed extraordinary violence against the organized working class and its supporters on the left. However, here agreement among Marxist conceptualizations ended.

Marxist theorizations that were politically dominant within the Comintern saw the growth of fascist movements and the fascist state as no more than a teleological outcome of hypertrophied capitalism at an inevitable stage of its development, with which these other classes came to be inexorably aligned (Renton 2020 [1999]: 79-84). These approaches, when put into practice, had catastrophic effects. To put not too fine a point to it, these interwar Marxist analyses of the German and Italian cases of fascism (i.e., those coming out of the Comintern after 1928 with the ascent of Stalin) were grossly flawed because they defaulted to an economistic and rigid evolutionist account of capitalism. They failed to offer adequate theoretical accounts of German and Italian fascism’s mobilization of their bases through racism, antisemitism, ethno-nationalism, anti-Leftism, and patriarchy associated with their past bourgeois-imperial and colonial histories. These after all were histories of repression, genocide (viz. Germany’s extermination of Hereros), and ethnic cleansing whose effects continue into the present.

We suggest following Toscano (2023) that instead of assuming that liberal capitalist states, including neoliberal states, provide universal safeguards against fascism, that the practices and ideologies of fascism are far from incompatible with liberalism and the liberal state – and in fact lie within them. After all Western liberalism had indulged in colonialism, slavery, and genocide for centuries before Central European fascists began creating their violently vengeful empires. The latter did so with explicit envy and admiration for the earlier white Atlantic expansionism. This means that instead of regarding fascist movements and even the emergence of fascist states as sudden and unpredictable eruptions of political violence incidentally associated with the economic crises of capitalism, we must go beyond the economistic analyses of fascism to explore the “fascist potential” (Toscano 2023) of what appear unexceptional, even “ordinary” features of contemporary liberal capitalist states (e.g., incarceration, police violence toward Blacks in the U.S.) if we wish to more critically explore the possibilities of fascism today.

We start by pointing out that like the prehistories of German and Italian fascism, the histories of other Euro-American political formations (U.S., Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands) are characterized by the racialized violence of colonization, enslavement, exterminism, and accumulation by violent dispossession of the non-European peoples they came to dominate politically. This has its theoretical corollary. Instead of only undertaking economic analyses of capitalism, there is the imperative of exploring the possibility that late neoliberal states already, like liberal democratic states before them, for historical reasons contain within them fascist potentials. We think, for example of the totalitarian treatment of huge numbers of incarcerated poor and racially marked populations in the United States, or the new state and popular violence against the Roma in central Europe or against North African, Turkish, and other immigrants in western Europe.

Marxist analyses of fascist potentials today must thus take into account the continuities and legacies of racialization, antisemitism, misogyny, and xenophobia that are associated with capitalism as a historical social order but are never merely reducible to its economic logics, in exploring the potential of new fascist emergences as these are occurring globally today. We must instead examine the racialized and gendered violence and ideologies encysted in neoliberal states today and think more of economic crises as the impetus and context for their emergence, instead of being their ‘cause’. In this regard, we could start by drawing on the concepts of racial capitalism, imperialist racism, and abolitionism within the Black radical intellectual tradition of Cedric Robinson, Aimé Césaire, W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter Rodney, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and numerous others (Toscano 2023: 25-48).

This might lead us, for example, to see fascist potential in the nostalgic imaginary by the Republican base (many of whom are not economically working class) of a golden age centered on a male “white working class” privileged by industrial employment and U.S. Cold War hegemony in the 1960s and 1970s (Toscano 2023: 8-9). Believers in this white supremacist imaginary, emboldened by Trump’s January 6, 2021 insurrection, form this base that he and the Republican Freedom Party elite now pander to with their MAGA cult of “popular” grievances — that the U.S. is being “invaded” by immigrant “rapists and murderers,” and that “the election was stolen” by “illegal” Black voting in Detroit and Atlanta as well as the age old theme of “the Jews will not replace us.” Above all, Trump and his elite have successfully incited violence against people of color, Jews, women, and trans people – those shut out of the golden age.

Going forward, while continuing to benefit from the classic analyses by Trotsky, Gramsci, Zetkin, et al. of capitalist crises, historical blocs and fascist formations while going beyond them to consider racialized and gendered fascist potentials, we can also draw from non-Marxist critiques of fascism to consider the ideas and practice of democratic freedoms and the ideologies of racism that deployed historical representations politicized in a fascist context. We need to take seriously, for example, the relationship between fascist formations and patriarchal structures as well as the diverse histories and forms of racism employed – from the racial ordering of color and US racism to the images of a Jewish race controlling global power and banks.

We are also attracted to other Marxist approaches which show more strategic openness to trying to tip the balance during periods of fascist ascent by attempting to build coalitions between the organized working class and other classes (e.g., the petty bourgeoisie, peasantry, lumpenproletariat) who could be converted to opponents to fascism, and who might otherwise join fascist movements. There were also strong democratic movements against fascism in many European countries, such as the Popular Front and the French and Italian resistance. These approaches have to be taken seriously in terms of questions of democracy and their possible effectiveness in different nations of the time which did not succumb to fascist domination. Some non-Marxist theories also viewed class relations and class struggle as relevant to the emergence of classical fascisms. However, many such analyses concentrated on fascist ideology or aesthetics, and lacked economic and social context.

For our November 14 session on fascism, we attempted to bring together a broad set of discussions, not in any way limited by the traditional Marxist debates but paying attention to them as part of crucial ammunition for addressing the threatening situation we face today. Are we confronting fascist movements at present that could assume state power by ostensibly democratic means, then transform radically into violent rule? Or are quite different right-wing formations from fascism ascending with very different trajectories if they assume state power?

For the November 14 session, we asked the authors of the blog pieces that follow not so much a factual as an epistemological question to engender discussion, leading off with “How would you know contemporary fascism when you see it, in the one or two cases you know best from your ethnographic or historical knowledge?” We also asked whether the formations in these cases might better be characterized by other terms and theories.

We concluded our questions by pointedly asking our authors about interventions in struggle. If the contemporary right-wing formations now in existence pose a risk to political democracy, peace, and the capacity of large populations to engage in social reproduction – as we believe they do – we asked, “What would be the most effective preemptive responses by the Left to them?” And lastly, “What would be the disposition of social and political forces and economic conditions that would make these responses feasible?” These last two questions were what we as conveners hope that these blogs will provoke the readers of FocaalBlog to respond to, given the grave political crises and economic and ecological contradictions now before us. There is already much practically at stake in these questions: theorists and organizers on the Left are already facing repression from the rising tide of extreme rightwing forces around the globe.

Don Nonini is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His latest book is Food Activism Today: Sustainability, Climate Change and Social Justice (New York University Press, 2024). His new research project examines racial capitalism and its eco-politics.

Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is currently studying urban social movements, class and commoning in France, Spain, and the United States.

References

Bruff, I. 2014. “The Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism.” Rethinking Marxism 26: 113-129.

Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith, eds. New York: International Press.

Hall, S. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso.

Poulantzas, N. A. 2014 [1978]. State, Power, Socialism. London: Verso.

Renton, D. 2020 [1999]. Fascism: History and Theory. London: Pluto Press.

Rosenblatt, H. 2021. “The History of Illiberalism.” The Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism. A. Sajó, R. Uitz and S. Holmes. New York: Routledge, pp. 16-32.

Toscano, A. 2023. Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. London: Verso.

Trotsky, L. 1971. The Struggle against Fascism in Germany. London: Pathfinder.

Zetkin, C. 1923. “Facism.” Labour Monthly, August 1923, pp. 69-78.

Cite as: Nonini, Don and Susser, Ida. 2024. “Introduction: Fascism, Then and Now.” FocaalBlog, 24 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/01/24/don-nonini-and-ida-susser-introduction-fascism-then-and-now/