Most of the people attending today could each individually be asked to introspect and provide some answer to the question, "What is fascism?" It is my hope that most people walking about the Perth CBD also have some intuition for being able to recognise fascism if they saw it.
I have been asked, however, not to recount a definition of fascism, but provide a small about of guidance for this forum about how to fight it, and win against it.
So, my main focus here is not to talk about fascism as it appears, but to cut right to the heart of the matter. We are accustomed to treating political and social behaviour in this day and age as a function of ideas inside human brain boxes.
This is a liberal attitude. It only gets one so far on this topic. Or any topic regarding politics and social behaviour for that matter. It is certainly *possible* to treat of fascism as a philosophy, on the terrain of political thought and ideology--but, here, much ink has already been spilled.
Fascism is a function of capitalism. Happily, this allows us to understand the historical function of fascism. Its purpose is to rescue capitalism from itself in times of crisis.
Where-ever capitalism begins to falter in its health, and cannot continue predictably, and, with some acceptable stability, persist in its ruthless exploitation and dispossession of the great mass of the subaltern--fascism ever more steadily begins to reanimate itself as a social and political force.
The destinies of the capitalist mode of production, and the fascist political project, are therefore intimately intertwined.
The fundamental organising principle holding together capitalism as a social system is the total mobilisation of society for the production of commodities. Open your eyes today as you wake today in this social system, and you will find that virtually everything is for sale.
This ambitious social system is not, however, without its problems. Every step in the process of accumulation of capital is prone to contradiction and failure.
On the question of whether this state of affairs should continue--i.e. the total and ruthless coercion of human activity into the production of commodities--fascism has very little disagreement with the global, regional, and local capitalist class. In fact, in their hubris, fascism thinks it can do better.
So, while capitalism, as an economic system, is quite comfortable entertaining the spectre of the dominance of fascism, there are important elements of fascism which, while proceeding from capitalism as its origin, are not to be found in common with capitalism's traditional conception.
Recall that, when everything is going well for the capitalist class, while it may always have some presence among capitalism's captains, fascism will not be dominant.
We know from historical example what to expect as a nation transforms itself into a fascist political system: economically, the former capitalist state and that nation's capitalist class, as a political institution, become more and more fused. This process, once completed, is known as Corporatism.
Every department of the economy is managed by a covenant between industry and some organ of fascist rule--a Supreme Council of Fascism, as in Italy, say.
Now this fact is not without its own misapprehensions. The compact between state and industry does not, as some would have you believe, amount to *any* form of socialism. This supposed compact between state and economy does not amount to anything that resembles the dictatorship of the working class.
This is a delicate issue. We can, luckily, be clear about the following judgements: (1) the fascist project does not call their grip on the economic levers of the modern technological society as a reality brought about by "nationalisation".
And, (2) a command economy does not a socialist republic make. Does not the dictatorship of the proletariat require the suppression of the law of value? I.e. Corporatism, in its intrinsic essence, is about the promotion, continuation, and indeed maintenance of capitalist production. The only difference is that the capitalist class is now no longer hidden--they are no longer "private" or independent from the state.
If only it were that simple! "Governments of the world: Nationalise! You have nothing to lose but your concept of the private citizen!" So sure as economic production is carried on through exploitation and dispossession, the mode of production of that social system presents itself as the control of private, and not democratic control of the means of production.
So: What is to be done?
I will not be dealing with counter-factuals in this piece. If, so they say, fascism is quite at home in the guise of an extractive, coercive, and selfish society, how can its lot be fought?
The answer lies in the necessity for a project of liberation and equality that is opposed diametrically not just to fascism, but *any* economic system which fails to embrace the need for a *publicly* and *democratically* controlled economy.
A fascist is like a chameleon. The fascist revels in the sophistry of career politics, and is wholly accepting of the notion that, in the last instance, truth is something that can be jettisoned from concepts of social organisation.
Fascism is a kind of thought system known as "Irrationalism". That is, whatever fascism admits of itself, self-consciously, has no connection with empirical reality. This is, as we have noticed above, because it proceeds from its parent system, capitalism, with one purpose, and one purpose alone--to maintain the dominance of the then-current ruling class.
Let us reflect on that for a moment. Perhaps this is reducing the analytical rigour of my message--but class society turns to fascism to attempt to continue its dominance, and recover some semblance of stability and order in society. When it cannot go on any further, capitalism resorts to "the stick". Naked and violent coercion are the watch-words of the day. Who cares about truth when "Might Is Right"?
Here lies the answer to the fight against fascism. Where-ever there is truth in this world, so far as it concerns human goodness and happiness, seek it out. We should not be despairing. We should, as a general principle, patiently and incessantly speak truth to power.
This is not a tender-hearted recommendation in the slightest. Those who have renounced the use of reason are already lost to humanity--and, as a rule, we do not administer medicine to the dead. Power without restraint, and disconnection from all rational judgement is exercised through the passions alone.
This is the lesson of Irrationalism--it is a capricious, blood-thirst, and unforgiving theory of politics.
Forgive me if you are squeamish, but, in support of my arguments, I am going to provide two particularly gruesome historical case studies to provide some concrete illustration about the nature of fascism.
After this, I will enter the final component of my talk in which I will make a few remarks about what I consider to be the fundamental element that any explicitly socialist struggle against fascism requires.
I will frame this last component as a "cookbook". I find cookbooks to be particularly powerful practical guides to action in many other contexts, and I do not see the fight against fascism to be any different. It is my hope such a way of framing this issue will allow anyone to commit some simple maxims to memory, which one will be able to draw upon if the time ever comes.
The lesson of this case study is that fascism is antithetical to the interests of the subaltern of society. Fascism is the opposite of justice. It does not speak of "harmony"--it prefers the *imposition of order*.
There is absolutely no moral or ethical foundation to fascism. Perhaps before their seizure of power, fascists will give the *appearance* that they have something to do with, or some interest in restructuring the economy.
This much is certain--fascism has no intention of helping anyone but the capitalist ruling class.
It is worth repeating what I have said above: the purpose of fascism is to rescue the privately controlled means of production from itself. Should capitalism enter crisis, all else held constant, out comes "the stick".
History is littered tragedy and betrayal. The Night of the Long Knives is a particularly horrific example.
Hitler was appointed the Chancellor of the then Weimar republic by President Paul von Hindenberg in January 1933. The Night of the Long Knives occurred in the middle of the next year. Hitler did not waste any time at all in consolidating the grip the Nazi Party had on power. Indeed, if we are to take Hitler's word for it, the Nazis were quite satisfied that their seizure of state control was successful within 6 months of Hitler's appointment as Chancellor.
The Night of the Long Knives, therefore, represents the completion of the consolidation of Nazi Party dictatorship over Germany. The plot was hatched over two weeks in the middle of 1934, and confirmed the personal nature of Nazi fascism: without the elimination of Ernst Rohm and his Brownshirts, Hitler would not have been able to combine forces with the historical ruling class of Germany, the Junkers, otherwise known as the Prussian aristocracy.
With characteristic zest, Hitler did not wait in order to carry out the betrayal of some of the Nazi Party's longest and most earnest leaders.
If anyone was holding out hope for some form of accommodation between the German working class and the Nazi Party, come July 1934, the emperor was truly revealed not to be clothed.
Indeed, the plot was successful. After the Nazi Party had purged itself of what could, rather awkwardly, be characterised as its "idealistic" or "class collaborationist" (or: "class sympathetic") leaders, the historical rulers of Germany, the Prussian aristocracy, fell into line behind Hitler.
We socialists should expect every single overture from fascism about having, or sharing the interests of the average, white, male "Aussie battler" to be complete lies.
The Holocaust was the deliberate and enthusiastic genocide of the European Jews by the German Nazi state during the Second World War, carried out during 1941 until 1945.
Other European social strata were included in this process of extermination, but, Jewish people taken alone, the victims number in the multiples of millions. Approximately two-thirds of the Jewish people of Europe were murdered by the Nazis.
Every trapping of modern capitalist industrial technology and method of bureaucratic social management was deployed for the explicit and conscious destruction of the European Jewish people.
So far as I am concerned, the irony was not lost on the Nazis that their supposed world-historic mission of world conquest required such an extreme and morally repugnant undertaking. The Nazis were constantly coming up against the human psychological and moral limits of their SS officers who were charged with the task of the Final Solution--the Einsatzgruppen.
To this end, consider what are known as the Posen Speeches by Heinrich Himmler, delivered on 4 October and 6 October 1943. There is a profound lesson to be derived from Himmler's frank discussion of the Holocaust in these speeches.
I will reproduce an English translation of a critical passage of the first speech:
Most of you here know what it means 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1 000. To have endured this and at the same time remained a decent person--with exceptions due to human weaknesses--has made us tough and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of.
The deeper meaning behind these words link back to the lesson of the purge of even enthusiastic and senior Nazi Party members. This meaning is that fascism will not stop for any reason in its quest to maintain class society and the dictatorship of the capitalist class. Indeed, as not just the Nazi Party shows, but any attempt at fascism clearly demonstrates, its complete and orgiastic adoption of *any* means necessary in maintaining the dominance of the capitalist class proves it is a fundamentally irrational social movement and worldview.
The Nazis made every attempt to deploy bureaucracy in order to quell the perfectly natural intuition humans have that murder of any kind is intrinsically repugnant. Complex systems of divisions of labour were confected to make sure not just the victims, but also the perpetrators of the Holocaust were brutalised and desensitised to the obscenity of these crimes.
Class society of any kind is unnatural. Fascism, in its quest for the renewal and further maintenance of the capitalist mode of production is the ossification and degeneration of the social relations of production as they had previously existed, before the ejection of the necessity of any form of political democracy. Fascism is the expression of the worst form of the imposition of class society over economic production.
RECIPE:
- The working class.
- A revolutionary socialist cadre.
Incessantly and patiently explain to all who will listen about the necessity for a society beyond capitalism.
Help people realise they have their own agency. This stems from their material interests in their position in the working class.
Classical Leninism
Economic organising.
At least 50% trade union density.
Political organising.
Form a political organisation able to function as a weapon which is able to destroy the capitalist state.
RECIPE:
For fascist ideologies:
Nationalism
Mysticism
Instinct and emotion
Racism
Chauvinist social hierarchy
Tradition
Passion
For socialist social science:
Science
Rationality
Democracy
Universal equality and fraternity
Progress
Logic