This is what modern fascism looks like
Neil Faulkner opens a debate on the nature of the threat we face from the far right in the wake of the Trump victory
Marxists are divided on a question of vital historical importance. If the modern far right is simply an extreme form of conservatism – if Trump, for example, is simply a radical Republican – then we are dealing with one type of threat. But if Trumpism is actually fascism – the modern, early 21st century form of fascism – then we are dealing with something far more dangerous.
This question might be expressed in a slightly more philosophical way. Does Trump represent a merely quantitative change in the radicalism of the Republican Party; or has incremental quantitative change now tipped over into a qualitative shift? That is, can you have, as it were, ‘creeping fascism’?
If we get this wrong, we are doomed. This is a life-and-death question for the labour movement and the left. If Trump and his kind are fascists, we face an immediate, all-out battle to defend the unions, the left parties, the minorities, women’s rights, and our civil liberties and democratic freedoms.
I am convinced that this is the case. I therefore regard the arguments of the ‘Lexit’ Left – that the far right is not fascist, that we are on the brink of a working-class upsurge, and that the breakup of the EU is to be welcomed – as a betrayal of the interests of the international working-class movement on a scale comparable with that of ‘Third Period’ Stalinism in the early 1930s.
I am aware that these are very harsh words. They are directed at a good many whom I consider friends and comrades; they are directed at a good many beside with whom I fought the Nazis, raised money for the miners, refused to pay the poll tax, and marched against the war. But the issue at stake is far too serious for nostalgia and personal sentiment.
To Remain or not to Remain
Many of us struggled to decide how to vote in the EU Referendum. Many of us remained conflicted and uncertain to the end. But it is now clear that the Lexit argument was all but inaudible, that it was the UKIP/Tory argument that dominated the Leave campaign, that the vast majority of Leave voters were influenced by a combination of vacuous ‘take back control’ rhetoric and anti-immigrant racism, and that the Brexit win was a clear-cut victory for the Far Right.
It matters not a jot that the EU is a bankers’ and bosses’ club, a neoliberal ‘international’, a vast machine hard-wired for austerity and privatisation that is hoovering wealth from the workers, the poor, and public services to further enrich the 1% and the corporations. It matters not because the Brexit vote was won on the back of a racist and xenophobic campaign led by right-wing millionaires. The Brexit vote was not a class vote for mass struggle and a radical alternative.
This is now clear. Serious Marxists are obliged to look reality in the face, to admit mistakes, and to adjust perspective and strategy accordingly. Brexit put wind in the sails of Trump. Now Trump puts wind in the sails of Marine Le Pen. This is an international mass movement of the Far Right. To continue arguing otherwise is ignorant and irresponsible.
The ‘Red Referendum’
An interesting parallel is the ‘red referendum’ of August 1931. This was a Nazi initiative (like Brexit was a Farage/Tory initiative). It was an attempt to overturn the discredited, right-wing, pro-austerity SPD (Social-Democratic) government of Prussia (for which read the EU). The KPD (Communists) put conditions on the SPD for supporting them.
When these were rejected, the KPD formed what was, in effect, an alliance with the Nazis to campaign against the SPD in the referendum campaign, proclaiming it to be a ‘red referendum’ (which is rather like proclaiming ‘Lexit’ and ‘People’s Brexit’ in the context of a right-wing attack on the EU).
The referendum was lost, but the Nazis raised their profile, gained popular support, and moved politics to the right. The KPD, on the other hand, had weakened itself and the labour movement by driving a wedge between the Communists and the SPD-supporting workers (just as Lexit has divided the far-left sects from the mass of progressive workers).
It is worth spelling this out. Lexit meant sections of the left forming an effective alliance with Farage, Johnson, and Gove, to take up a position opposed to that of the advanced workers in Britain, the European working-class as a whole, and the European left parties.
The advanced workers in Britain? Yes, because between two-thirds and three-quarters of the following groups voted Remain in the EU Referendum: Labour voters, Green voters, SNP/Plaid Cymru/Sinn Fein voters, trade unionists, minority voters, and young voters. It was a minority section of the working class that voted with the right-wing middle class for Brexit.
Trotsky – whose analysis of fascism is unsurpassed – denounced the ‘red referendum’ as sectarian madness: part of Stalin’s notorious ‘Third Period’ that split the German working-class movement between 1929 and 1933 and thereby smoothed Hitler’s path to power.
Classical Fascism
But the question remains: are we actually face-to-face with a form of fascism?
This question cannot be answered simply by reference to classical fascism in its most extreme form: that of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s. Trotsky had this to say about the situation in November 1931:
Considering the far greater maturity and acuteness of the social contradictions in Germany, the hellish work of Italian Fascism would probably appear as a pale and almost humane experiment in comparison with the work of the German Nazis.
He was right, of course: it was Hitler, not Mussolini, who murdered 12 million in the death-camps and ghettos – 6 million of them Jews – the terrible consequence of Nazism’s extreme anti-semitism and racial ideology . Why was German fascism so much more lethal? Because the economic collapse and social crisis in Germany in 1932 was more extreme than that in Italy in 1921, and because the German labour movement was bigger, better organised, and more rooted than the smaller Italian labour movement had been. It was the class struggle, in short, that required Hitler to recruit a paramilitary army of 400,000 Brownshirts in order to batter his way to power.
Trotsky makes a further point. The obstacles in Hitler’s way made the German ruling class wary of supporting him:
… at present [in November 1931] even influential layers of the bourgeoisie fear the fascist experiment, precisely because they want no convulsions, no long and severe civil war …
Fascism was risky: it might detonate working-class revolt. This, in fact, is precisely what did happen in Austria (1934), France (1934), Spain (1936), and, albeit only on a local scale, Britain (1936).
And as soon as we shift our focus from Germany and Italy, we see that interwar fascism took diverse forms. Let one example suffice: that of Spain. Here, the lead was taken not by the fascist bands, but by the conventional military. The Popular Front government faced a revolt of the generals and the Spanish army, backed by a right-wing alliance of Church, monarchists, traditional conservatives, and phalangists (the fascists proper). It was a military coup – not a fascist coup per se – that triggered the working-class revolution of July 1936 and the three-year civil war that followed.
The Crisis Today
What is the situation now? Civil society as a whole, and the labour movement in particular, have been hollowed out by a generation of neoliberal ‘counter-revolution’. Union membership is a fraction of what it was in the 1970s. The strike rate has been bumping along the bottom of the chart at mid 19th century levels since the defeats of the 1980s. Rank-and-file workplace organisation is effectively non-existent, even where there are still relatively high levels of formal union membership. Most Western workers are more atomised, more under the cosh, more at the mercy of management diktat than at any time since the Second World War.
Political polarisation is not the same as class strength. This is a basic error in the arguments of the Lexit left. Of course there are great swathes of bitterness against the political and corporate elite, and this can take a left form (support for Sanders, Corbyn, Syriza, Podemos, etc), just as it can take a right form.
This, as Trotsky observed, is characteristic of capitalist crisis. The centre cannot hold because ‘business as usual’ is intolerable when people’s lives are falling apart. Society moves instinctively towards radical, sharp, decisive ‘solutions’. And since society remains divided into two great class forces, you have ‘the party of revolutionary hope’ (the socialists) and ‘the party of revolutionary despair’ (the fascists).
In the crisis, workers may unite against the elite, or they may turn on each other. This is the essential difference between the socialist and the fascist. You therefore have solutions to the crisis based on collective organisation and solidarity, and you have the reactionary myths of nationalism, racism, and what Marx called ‘all the old shit’.
But whereas this struggle played out in the interwar period in a civil society cluttered with collective institutions, with high levels of public engagement, with strong class identities and cultural affiliations, it plays out today in a relative social vacuum; above all, it plays out in the context of labour organisation in a state of advanced decay.
In the social vacuum, in the absence of strong-points of resistance, political movements acquire exceptional velocity, and events unfold with great speed. The far right does not need Brownshirts, swastikas, and truncheons. It can advance to power wearing suits, peddling lies, spitting abuse, and collecting the votes of a disgruntled middle class and the backward section of the working class – those who are, at once, exploited, ground-down, and embittered, but also atomised, unorganised, passive, outside any tradition of solidarity, and thus open to ‘all the old shit’.
Fascism without Brownshirts
So Trump can advance directly to state power without the trappings of classical fascism. Who needs Brownshirts when you have control of the most powerful state machine in the world? Why would you want them? Their ‘excesses’ are liable to trigger violence on the streets that will alarm the middle class and the corporate elite. Their radicalism can be an impediment to their leaders’ freedom of action.
Consider, again, the example of the Nazis. The Brownshirts embodied the aspiration for radical change of a reactionary lower middle-class and the backward section of workers and unemployed. So once their essential role in the Nazi rise to power was played out, they were crushed by the newly established Hitler dictatorship (in the June/July 1934 ‘Night of the Long Knives’).
In control of the German state after January 1933, Hitler no longer had need of a paramilitary militia with its own dynamic. What he did need was a loyal party-based security apparatus; but this – the SS – was largely constructed after the Nazis had taken power, as a tightly controlled, highly disciplined, top-down adjunct to the existing state apparatus.
What is the implication? That paramilitaries are secondary, not essential, features of fascism; that they can be constructed both before and after the seizure of state power; and that where they exist, they never have the significance of the state apparatus itself.
So What is Fascism?
How, then, should we define fascism? It is a mass movement of the far right that arises in conditions of economic and social crisis. It constructs that movement around reactionary myths of nation, race, family, a traditional order, and an imaginary past. It seeks to fragment, disrupt, and destroy the resistance of organised labour and the left. It is an attempt to resolve the economic and social crisis of capitalist society through the authoritarian imposition of a right-wing programme from above.
Its particular form reflects the conjuncture (the whole current situation) and the class struggle (the degree to which the fascists face resistance from the labour movement and the left parties). Fascism, in short, is not a thing, but a process; not a political movement with fixed form, but a far-right response to the crisis that develops in specific ways according to its dialectical relationship with other social forces.
Modern fascism will not fight its way to power through violent street battles in the manner of 1921 or 1932. It does not need to. Today’s fascists are bullies in suits, not thugs in jackboots. And they are already upon us. We have already travelled far down the road to the abyss.
To repeat what I have argued before: the film of the 1930s is running in slow motion. If the 2008 crash has the significance for us of the 1929 crash for an earlier generation, I fear that the election of Trump in 2016 may turn out to have the significance of Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933.
There is still time. But we have to recognise the nature of the beast we face and build a mass movement against nationalism, racism, fascism, and the tidal wave of reactionary filth that has been unleashed on the world.
A good start would be to call things by their name: Trump, Farage, Le Pen, and the rest of them stand at the head of an international fascist movement that fits the circumstances and demands of the world capitalist crisis of the early 21st century. To refuse to accept this is to play word games with history. We do this at our peril.
Neil Faulkner is the author of A Marxist History of the World (2013) and A People’s History of the Russian Revolution (forthcoming in early 2017).
13 comments
13 responses to “This is what modern fascism looks like”
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What the fuck does Neil Faulkner know about the “Labour Movement” or the Working Class? I’ll tell you what – fuck all.
We are sick to death of the middle class using Socialism as a stick to beat us with.
The EU has legislated against Socialism. That should be enough for anyone calling themselves “Socialist” to vote to Leave. Talk about turkeys voting for christmas…
As far as the right taking control of the Leave vote, if the liberal left (fauxcialists?) hadn’t sided with the neoliberal multimillionaire boss class, maybe it would be a different story, no?
Maybe you should ask your mates in JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Price Waterhouse Cooper and all the other pro-remain asset strippers who have fucked this country over…
Of course Neil Faulkner is completely right. The suggestions hat that he anti immigration, Brexiteers’ vi Tory was anything. It a deaf eat for the left and the working class movement is demented. Brexit and the Trumph victory IS a lurch to the far right. It it’s NOT yet fascism. There are still significant left forces throughout Europe (Corbynite, Podemos, Syriza and currents also reflected in the anti-fascist green/ alliances and related nationalist currents. We urgently need a far more profound understanding of what developments in late, decaying capitalism represents and what kind of transitional, socialist strategy is called for.
Trump isn’t fascism, the state is.
So when is Neil going into clandestinity then? It’s the logical conclusion to draw from the article.
What methods of struggle does he propose from the underground?
Preposterous?
Not if you take ‘this is 1933’ seriously. You do take it seriously Neil?
I think Neil ignores the fact that there were progressive arguments for rejecting the EU, but no progressive arguments for voting for Trump (not withstanding the fact that many voted for Trump as a rejection of the political establishment). The question is, what do we do about it? If he is right and we are facing creeping fascism, the imperative for unity against racism becomes even more critical. This is why building Stand Up to Racism as a united front is the central task for socialists in the UK and why the SWP are doing just that.
challenging analysis – making a new (and contentious ?) framing of Trotsky’s ‘impasse of power’ argument – which is coherent and persuasive
Tom
Middlesbrough
This analysis is absolutely crazy and gives encouragement to those reformists who still have faith in the capitalist system to solve the crisis. Open the Guardian and Observer and there are still commentators who are absolutely blind to how the E.U. and the American Neo-liberals are so divorced from working class suffering that they are still defending Hillary Clinton as a feminist and hard-core anti-racist when her record shows complete subjection to the bankers and world capitalism. In the UK the same people, loosely Labour Party, Liberals or SNP , attack or sneer at Corbyn whilst at the same time are cutting the poorest workers’wages as with the teaching assistants in Durham and Derbyshire. Those that support such actions can not be described as advanced workers. Neither are those U.S. Democrats , workers or not , who support U.S. Neo-liberal economic trade deals and imperialist wars.
What concerns me about this article is that it spreads disunity among those genuine leftists who voted remain or leave, just like the splitters in the thirties in the KPD and SDP in Germany did.We need to build a mass opposition now but Neil with this shoddy analysis is not making a contribution.
I don’t reply to online abuse, so will ignore Pete Rose, except to say that there is, in my view, no excuse for the kind of gratuitous rudeness that I hope you would not subject me to if we were face-to-face. This is not how socialists – or anyone – should conduct a debate.
To David, I would say this. I think you are caricaturing Fascism. Hitler smashed all opposition in a year. Mussolini took several years. Gramsci, for example, was not incarcerated until 1926. Fascism is a process, and a more gradual one today than in the interwar period, essentially because the crisis of the system is shallower and more protracted. History repeats itself, but not exactly.
The problem, Jenny, with Stand Up To Racism is that it is not really fit for purpose. It is not a united front, but a party front, because the SWP is a rather unpopular sect that most on the Left are reluctant to work with. What we really need is an anti-fascist movement built from the bottom up. I think Left Unity could play a major role in helping to make that happen – partly because Left Unity has no aspiration to control anything in a top-down way – unlike, I regret to say, the SWP.
Jim: I wish we could drop the Brexit argument, but we can’t. The Lexiters made a mistake and won’t admit it. The result is that they are peddling a false perspective that is preventing us from recognising a) that the class struggle is at a very low ebb, b) that we face a tidal wave of racism and reaction, and c) that we have to build a mass movement that is essentially – initially at least – defensive in character. False perspective leads to erroneous strategy. That is why we are conducting this argument. We have to win the argument that the Far Right is a clear and present danger to the labour movement and the left.
I have to agree with Neil that certain elements of proto-fascist processes are already in swing. When you consider that the erection of highly militarised walls and defense complexes, will coincide with an obviously expanded military police/border guard and the flourishing of registration systems for minorities and immigrants you begin to see how the mass surviellance and confident chauvinism of the neoliberal era can swiftly morph into something far more sinister.
On the other hand it remains to be seen how the expansive military logic of fascism will fit the prevailing ruling class view on war and conquest. It seems to me that many proponents of the new fascism is going to want a smaller, more closed, more isolated America, leaving the outsiders to perish from proxy wars and climate change, rather than an expanding American war machine. There are tensions, here, that ought to be exploited. I also do not believe that The will to fight Trump is anywhere near as feeble in the USA as was the German left. I think long term slumber is not as terrifying as recent catastrophic defeat – and that is why there is still time. But serious resistance to the state will have to be a character of the movement from Day 1. That is what makes those who say “give Trump a chance” utter menaces.
This article is worth reading more than once. Some important issues are raised – worthy of serious debate not childish rants, sarky comments about going clandestine, or blatant plugs for some front organisation! Saying that, I think the analysis is confusing.
What is fascism, how and why does it arise (beyond a few gangs of cranks)?
It’s understandable to think of Nazi Germany, but that is a specific brand of fascism, very different to Italian fascism for instance, which is an important paart of the argument here.
However, the 1920s-30s fascist movements still arose for similar reasons IMO – the capitalists’ willingness to be regulated by a “Napoleon” out of fear of organised workers and the left, in a situation of economic crisis where there has been a “near thing” against capitalism.
Fascism can have some different variants and amorphous elements because it utilises the most sectarian and reactionary views existing in each particular region or country.
Where religion can be used, it was /is – whether Catholicism (Spain & Ireland in the past), anti-Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism (modern India) or even “secular” anti-clericalism. Anti-semitism was basically irrelevant in Italy but a major issue in Germany, in Britain anti-semitism was an issue later replaced by anti-black (Afro-Caribbean) racism then anti South Asian racism…. These are TOOLS used by fascism.
What does seem to be important for fascism is a veneer of “radicalism” “anti-establishmentism” & “anti-elitism” combined with “strong leadership” to cut through and deal with society’s INSECURITY, necessary to appeal to wotkers – and lower middle classes – being crushed by capitalism,
Was Franco’s Spain truly fascist, and what about Peronism? Idi Amin?
I think Neil’s “definition” of modern fascism would apply to Putin and Hamas, for example, as much as to Trump (probably more so!) but they are not mentioned.
SORRY this is rather disjointed, Neil has raised a lot of questions.
Brian and Thez are both making useful comments. There is a genuine working out of what we are dealing with going on here. I agree with a lot of what both Brian and Thez are saying. I’ll just pick up on a couple of points Thez is making.
I think you have to start with the international capitalist crisis. The crisis tears society apart and polarises politics. Fascism is, in essence, a reactionary mass mobilisation of the middle class and the unorganised/unconscious sections of the working class in support of the system. But this is disguised by the nationalism, racism, and other forms of divisive and oppressive politics that are so central to fascism; and of course by the fascist claim to be ‘anti-elite’, ‘anti-establishment’, etc.
On the other side is the working class as a conscious, organised force in society – represented by the labour movement, the social movements, the left parties, etc.
So the question becomes whether a political movement is ‘objectively’ pro- or anti-capitalist, or, if you like, pro- or anti-imperialist. You simply can’t, in my view, class Hamas – to take the example Thez mentions – as in any sense whatsoever akin to fascism, because it is engaged in a popular struggle against Zionism and imperialism.
Putin is a completely different matter, because the state apparatus is being used to crush dissent, and sections of Putin’s reactionary mass base do have an at least semi-paramilitary character. Here, it seems to me, we are looking at a position on the same broad spectrum.
Maybe I am being a bit disjointed, too, so let me sum up with this: to understand a mass political phenomenon like Trumpism, you have to start with the whole (‘the truth is the whole’: Hegel), and that means starting with the crisis of international capitalism, the political imperatives to which this gives rise, and the relationship to it of the concrete political forms with which we are confronted.
One of the elements of fascism often overlooked is imperialism. Fascism arose in Germany and Italy, in part, because it was an important element of conquering an empire (new markets) in Eastern Europe, the Horn of Africa, etc. It had an international dimension. How does Trump, fit in with that comparison to the 20th century example? Hamas and Peron certainly don’t, that’s a really unhelpful comparison on many levels.
Another question, is fascism without brownshirts actually fascism, not just an authoritarian imperialist government? Isn’t a response to a left threat to the establishment a key element, not just a general crisis of confidence in neoliberalism? You could, on this point, say that Trump was the establishment’s answer to Sanders. Perhaps they were quietly saying to each other “only Trump can beat Sanders!”. But that might be giving a bit too much credit to Bernie and it probably all happened a bit too quick for it to have been planned like that.
Certainly, on the topic of brownshirts, I’d be concerned that the far right supporters of Trump might organise to smash leftwing mobilisations, whether through sympathetic police departments or their own thugs. But I’m not in the US so I don’t really have a clear handle on whether that sort of thing is happening. I do think it’s always risky to try and ram our understanding of current events through historical analogies like “the 30s in slow motion”.
I agree that understanding the international situation is extremely important here. Far Right governments and ideologies are coming to dominate in a range of key economies and reaction is in ascendancy. On the other hand we see very little of mass movements threatening the system as was the case in, say, the Biennio Rosso. But that would be to give the ruling class credit for being able to tell the difference between a real crisis and an imagined one. The nature of the ruling class is that it is often incapable of doing so – seen most recently with climate change. An imagined crisis will suffice for them, so that fascist squads can become of use to the state. We have seen that the state often permits far-right thugs to go on the rampage in areas with Muslims/Asians in England, for example, as the state is generally sympathetic to their supposed grievances. That does not mean, though, that they are prepared to abandon sacred neoliberal truths for a fasist state, but it does meaning something. The growth of fascism might simply be the qualitative shift that comes from this quantitative increase in tolerance to those squadrons and other non-state actors that can “solve” questions for them.
In the USA, however, I think we are dealing with something slightly different. The “threat” – the imagined one – is not the mobilised working class, but the existence of a diverse working class in itself. The menace is the demographics of non-whites, which certain sections of the ruling class see as a virtually unstoppable growth. Those elements are not powerful enough to pull off a coup capable of centralising power in the president’s hands. But they can control the branches of American bourgeois democracy for sufficient amount of time to see off the demographic “time-bomb” that threatens their white America – by closing the borders, incarcerating, deporting and sending poor people elsewhere to die. The markets, worryingly, appear to be totally cool with this prospect – even though it comes with a massive downside for world trade, stability, diplomacy, ecology and so on. But the Republican establishment know that the worst outcome for them is a humbling of the office of the president (that it has been tainted by a madman and will never have the same domestic prestige again). They are happy at this prospect because winning it will be increasingly difficult in the future, so Trump represents a last ditch attempt to restore the fundamentalist, therefore imagined, past.
Just how far along the road this goes towards “classical” fascism (and I think everything I have described is American Fascism as one would imagine it to look like) will depend, therefore (as Neil rightly points out) the balance of forces globally. Will China and Mexico serve as sufficient hate figures to constitute an external enemy? Will the global anti-war movement respond to Trump as it did to Bush?
Here’s another massive question – Will we finally get to live out the true meaning of our creed? That is to say – might the second amendment really become the legal authority for a well regulated militia? Can fascism thrive in a society were the population is self-armed rather than armed through state discipline? I think most Marxists would say that it can, but I’m not so sure. If you consider the “resistance” that already exists through the use of weaponry and how it might burgeon under a Fascist government, it is easy to see a society in prolonged armed conflict. Almost like the low-level civil war that far-right nutters are always fantasizing about.
This makes the action in Britain and France so important. Resistance to fascism here has proved decisive (if belated) in the past. If Le Pen were to be elected, the European Union would surely descend into constant chaos, where the stage would be set for a very different kind of world. Not one anybody I know wants to live in.