21 Fascism
George Orwell wrote in the 1940s:“The word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.”
Fascism is the concentrated expression of the general offensive undertaken by the world bourgeoisie against the proletariat.
The definition from the source (Benito himself): merging of corporate and state power.
Max Horkheimer’s famous pronouncement: “He who wishes not to speak of capitalism, should hold his peace about fascism”.
Edobo
Fascism must be taken to refer to a particular form of authoritarianism that brings out and emphasizes the tools of external and internal violence of capitalism and of the social structures characterized by the industrial mode of production. Fascism is the organized violence of the hierarchical capitalist state in its pure form.
Fascism is a deep-seated and ubiquitous tendency within the social order of modern civilization. It’s in the source code; it’s in the DNA of our society and its constituent roles and relations of production. It’s in the stories we tell to make sense of ourselves and the world. It’s in our very identities. Yeah, what’s probably most important of all, it’s an essential part of the authority structure to which we as semi-infantilized denizens of industrial society are attached and submit to. Yet this part is hidden in plain sight. The deeper structural facts do not align with the more palatable stories we like to tell ourselves and our children, no matter how important those fundamental facts happen to be.
Fascism is thus in a sense a key part of the collective Shadow of modern society.
21.1 Fourteen Steps to Fascism (Eco)
Kilian
Umberto Eco’s 14 steps to fascism:
The cult of tradition, which involves a blending of old religions and values. “Truth has already been spelled out once and for all,” Eco writes, “and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.” This might apply to the U.S. obsession with the precise interpretation of the Constitution, but it doesn’t seem to fit Canada.
The rejection of modernism, by which Eco means the values of the Enlightenment and evidence-based rationality. That’s very Trumpian, and in a recent book Gen. Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA and National Security Agency, defends U.S. spy agencies as founded on Enlightenment values. While Canadian conservatives dislike the evidence for climate change, we generally respect free expression and scientific evidence.
The cult of action for action’s sake. “Just do it” is OK for suburban joggers, but not for Canadian politicians. It’s impossible to imagine a Stephen Harper or Justin Trudeau even considering an impulsive stunt like a summit with Kim Jong-Un or Vladimir Putin.
No analytical criticism. “In modern culture,” says Eco, “the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.” Apart from kicking an occasional malcontent out of caucus, Canadian politicians tolerate a lot of disagreement, though the Harper Conservatives certainly disliked talkative scientists.
Fear of difference. We got a whiff of this in late-stage Harperism, what with “barbaric cultural practices” and anti-hijab bylaws. But most Canadians appear to thrive on cultural, ethnic and sexual variation.
Appeal to a frustrated middle class. When the middle class has been frustrated by 40 years of economic stagnation, everyone tries to offer something. Justin Trudeau keeps promising help especially to those trying to become middle class, but that may backfire: “In our time,” Eco wrote presciently in 1995, “when the old ‘proletarians’ are becoming petty bourgeois … the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.”
Obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged,” Eco wrote, “but the plot must come from the inside.” In the Cold War, it was Reds under the beds. Now it’s useful to raise the alarm about fellow citizens who support immigration and “illegal” migrants, who write “fake news,” or work for the “deep state.” This is a tougher sell in Canada than in the U.S., but some Canadians do love a good plot.
Anti-elitism. “The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies,” Eco wrote, and plenty of Canadian politicians have invoked some supposedly privileged group as the source of all our woes.
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. For the fascist, “life is permanent warfare,” Eco says, so the desire for peace amounts to treason. The U.S. is literally in a permanent war, but Canada still likes to present itself as a peacekeeper, honest broker and very discreet arms merchant.
Contempt for the weak. Trump’s mockery of a journalist with a disability has become a meme. His backers don’t much care if migrant families are separated and traumatized. But they themselves feel weak and hard done by. Fascism offers what Eco calls “popular elitism,” and what Americans call “American exceptionalism”— the belief that they live in the best country in the world, especially if they are “real Americans” who trace their descent back to Europe. Again, Canada has flirted with this attitude, turning away Jewish refugees before the Second World War (“one is too many”) and fretting about “illegal border crossers” crossing into Quebec, Ontario or Manitoba.
The cult of heroism. “The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die,” Eco wrote. “In his impatience, he more frequently sends others to death.” The closest that we ever got to that idea was during our Afghan involvement, when Stephen Harper turned part of the Trans-Canada into a “Highway of Heroes,” a path of glory leading to Canadian graves.
Machismo, “which implies both disdain for women and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.” Many right-wingers decline to march in Pride parades, but every sensible Canadian politician shows up for them waving a rainbow banner.
Selective populism. “Individuals as individuals have no rights,” said Eco, and a majority is meaningless. Instead, individuals form a monolithic people; “the Leader pretends to be their interpreter.” Parliamentary governments are, by fascist definition, rotten. Eco prophesied that “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” Today we call them bots and trolls.
Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak, drawing on “an impoverished vocabulary and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” Anyone who’s seen videos of Donald Trump at a rally, or read any of his tweets, knows how fluent he is in Newspeak. Canada has not abandoned English to quite such an extent, but our politicians are far too fond of talking points. Evidently they think Canadians can’t follow an idea developed through several related and grammatical sentences.
21.2 Liberalism breeds Fascism
[Tooze (2022) The centenary of Mussolini’s “March on Rome” and the dilemmas of the liberal expert class. ](https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-166-19222022-the-centenary]
21.3 Fascism as a way to end Capitalism?
Milanovic on Victor Serge
I would like to finish with Serge’s observations on two fascists whom he personally knew at the time when they were communists: Jacques Doriot (“Zinoviev liked him”) and Nicola Bombacci. They were both killed in retribution at the end of the War. Bombacci was one of the fifteen executed together with Mussolini. Their transition from communism to fascism is explained by the need for restless activity, great organizational skills, and ambition. But there is one interesting, small ideological detail: both, Serge thinks, might have seen fascism within Marxist scheme as a ruse of history where decrepit capitalism adopts fascism as a way to save itself; yet fascism, by imposing a strong state rule over private sector, gradually transforms it, and creates an economy that can, in a future evolution, be readily taken over by workers. In such a bizarre way, fascism was, he believes, seen by the former communists, as a way to end capitalism.
21.4 Hitler’s Volkstaat
Tooze
The debate over Götz Aly’s controversial book Hitler’s Volksstaat (2005), which appeared in English as Hitler’s Beneficiaries. It is a fascinating book that seeks to offer a sweeping overall assessment of the balance of costs and benefits of the Nazi regime to the German population.
Hitlers Volksstaat reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of Aly’s scholarship. It is brilliantly original in its microscopic reconstructions. It takes a particular type of genius to realize the significance of Reichsbahn baggage allowances for the history of World War 2. But it was the bigger picture that really caused the sensation. Looking at the fiscal account, what Aly claimed was that ordinary Germans had paid only 10 percent of the costs of the Hitler’s wars. Their share was so low because they had benefited from two types of redistribution. A much larger contribution, 20 percent of the total, had been taken from the profits of businesses and higher-income groups in the Reich by means of progressive taxation. The Nazi regime had, in short, made good on some of its social promise. The rest - 70 percent - was paid for by plunder, first of the Jews in Germany and Austria and then of the entire economy of the rest of Europe.
the fact that the regime demanded so little from the German population, confirmed that they were not in fact fanatical Nazi’s willing to sacrifice for their beliefs. Nor, however, were the majority of Germans coerced, as the left had claimed on behalf of the German working-class. They were, Aly claimed, bought off. They were the beneficiaries of a Nazi wartime welfare state funded by redistribution and plunder – first from the Jews and then from the entire population of occupied Europe.
Rather than heaving a sigh of relief and rejoicing in the fact that the Nazi regime was not sustained by fanatical ideological loyalty, for Aly this was cause for resigned despair. He was a veteran of radical politics in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. For him the data confirmed that the true continuity of German history was not fanatical beliefs of any kind, but rather the the persistence of a depoliticized populace clamorously dependent on the state.
His critique was directed at the holy cow of redistribution itself. The welfare state, Aly wanted his readers to realize, was in Germany closely linked to predation.
Very ordinary people were capable of doing extremely violent things for very ordinary reasons.
Aly’s attempt to demonstrate the redistributive effect of fiscal policy in the Third Reich was rendered misleading by his failure to consider the underlying development of income shares.
Once one allows for the underlying dynamics of income shares, which vastly outweighed the impact of taxation, his revisionism falls flat. It was not the working class but German business that was the big beneficiary of Hitler’s regime.
Many of the territories that Germany occupied, like Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and France were rich. They clearly contributed on a large scale. Those exactions particularly of labour were the material driver of resistance to the Nazi occupation. But could they really have been large enough to provide 70 percent of the resources needed for total war? The answer, is clearly no.
So how did Aly get the thunder of world history so wrong? He arrived at his topsy turvy conclusions, by treating war borrowing as though it imposed no burden on the German population. It would be repaid in the future out of reparations to be imposed on the defeated enemies of Germany.
The magical idea that borrowing allow societies to shift economic burdens into the future, or conversely, resources from the future to be teleported into the present, is by no means peculiar to Aly. It recurred a few years later in the equally wrong-headed argumentation offered by Wolfgang Streeck in his Adorno lectures, published as Buying Time. The fallacy originates in a conflation between micro and macroeconomic perspectives. An individual borrower may transfer purchasing power across periods, but societies as a whole cannot, unless they borrow from the “outside” i.e. from other societies. For everyone “buying time” there must be someone “selling” it. At a deeper level the attribution of such metaphysical powers to debt echoes the uncanniness of debt relations, a feeling of unease which is shared on the left, by folks like Aly and Streeck, as much as it is by conservatives.
One of the first to truly skewer the alchemical fallacy of war finance by means of treasure was John Maynard Keynes in his pamphlet on How to Pay for the War published in 1940. But we should not fall into the fallacy of thinking that it took a surpassing genius of Keynes’s ilk to figure this out. Hitler’s Finance Minister Schwerin von Krosigk spelled out the argument perfectly clearly in his memoirs Bilanz des Zweiten Weltkrieges.
The contribution of German society to the Nazi war effort was not 30 percent, as suggested by Aly, but 72-75 percent.
Consumption in Nazi Germany was not at the level of modern affluence. Nor did it prioritize consumption as the main driver of growth as was the case in the US or the UK for much of the recent past. But nor was the experience of Nazi Germany in the 1930s in any way akin to that in the Soviet Union. No Volksgenossen starved for rearmament, or even for the war effort. Indeed, the regime systematically awakened the promise of a German socialism to come, not the reality supposedly diagnosed by Aly, but a promise of an “economic miracle” that lay in the future, after victory and conquest were complete.
Tooze (2023) Chartbook #186 Solicitous dictatorship. The political economy of authoritarianism