The People Must Lead: What is Fascism and How Do We Defeat It?

From The New York Times

In March 2024, unknown antisemites hung a banner reading “Save Ireland from the Jews” over Columbia Parkway in Cincinnati, Ohio. Days later, a resident of suburban Colerain flew a Nazi flag in their front yard. Meanwhile, far-right groups, after weeks of harassment, succeeded in causing the cancellation of a storytelling event by the drag collective Cincinnati Sisters in the northern suburb of Milford. Fascists and racists, now as always, seek power through cultivating fear and hatred of the weak, the marginalized and the different. Fascist provocations—like mold, bedbugs and other pests—can be difficult to fight, but they can be opposed, and even eliminated. However, in order to combat the far right effectively, we must also understand how capitalism itself—even in its most liberal and progressive forms—gives rise to fascist sentiments and actions. Capitalism fosters the growth of fascism in two ways. First, the economic crises, wars, pandemics, industrial disasters and other emergencies engendered by the contradictions of capitalism produce a continual cycle of uncertainty and anxiety. In response, fascism offers security, tradition and order in the face of chaos. Second, the capitalist war of each against all—especially in the so-called labor market—militates against human solidarity. Where capital makes human life alienated and lonely, fascism offers solidarity based on nation and race, and on a shared struggle against scapegoats and outsiders. 

Historically, fascism is a family of political ideas and stances, a fringe political subculture and a mass movement capable of seizing state power. From a purely philosophical or intellectual point of view, we can see fascism as a vulgarization of the European Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. European Romanticism revolted against the ideas of universalism and progress that characterized the European eighteenth century. Against the Enlightenment emphasis on cosmopolitanism and natural law, Romantics celebrated the individuality and specialness of local culture. Thinkers like Johann Gottfried von Herder advocated the social ideal of das Volk, or a society united by organic bonds of loyalty, kinship, language and tradition. However, Romanticism was not necessarily a politically conservative movement. Romantic thinkers could be strongly anticapitalist and anticolonial, and Romanticism influenced the thought of American Abolitionists, Latin American revolutionaries and Black intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois.

The reactionary aspects of Romanticism, however, have often found a hospitable audience among the middle classes of capitalist societies. As early as 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels identified the simultaneously “reactionary and Utopian” character of what they called “petty-bourgeois socialism” in the Communist Manifesto. The class of small proprietors and independent “artisans” is “constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society.” The middle classes, that is, suffer along with the working class under the constant social upheavals and crises of capitalism. However, they do not imagine a complete overthrow of capital, which would spell doom for their existence as a class, but the restoration of a more “humane” and “traditional” kind of capitalism. 

Petty-bourgeois radicals aspire either to restore the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations and the old society, or to confine the modern means of production and  exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. Petty-bourgeois radicalism, therefore, tends to mix militant demands with nostalgia, sentimentality, anti-intellectualism, provincialism and paranoia. In 1923, German communist Clara Zetkin linked the social chaos of the interwar period to the emergence of European fascism. She highlighted fascism’s opportunist and incoherent character, showing how fascists appealed at one minute to the capitalist rulers, and the next to the exhausted and downtrodden workers. Instead of seeing the interests of these classes as antagonistic, they proclaimed that only state violence and ruthlessness could reconcile them. She wrote that

fascism has different characteristics in every country, based on specific circumstances. Nonetheless, in every country it has two essential features: a sham revolutionary program, which links up in extremely clever fashion with the moods, interests and demands of broad social masses; and the use of brutal and violent terror.

Pushed to the brink, the middle social layers seek change, but on their own reactionary terms. The social layer of small property owners, middle managers, technicians, cops, petty bureaucrats, clergymen and other half-independent, half-exploited types thereby become—with the assistance of demagogues like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Sean Hannity—fascism’s vanguard. It’s easy to see why the conservative aspects of Romanticism—its comforting emphasis on the specialness of one’s own state, nation and religion—would appeal to them. 

However, neither fascist ideas nor a fascist movement (no matter how well organized or fanatical) can bring about fascist power by decree. Historically, fascist capture of political power has depended on certain objective conditions arising within capitalism—namely, a crisis in the legitimacy of the state, usually brought about by economic crises like mass unemployment or runaway inflation. In bad economic times, many people beyond the fascist base may come to distrust liberal democracy and traditional political parties. This distrust and uncertainty provides an opening for antisocial elements, crackpots, and fringe movements. Under such circumstances, fascists and semi-fascists may offer themselves as an alternative to the failing choices of liberal and conservative politics. Zetkin wrote, “Fascism, with all its forcefulness in the prosecution of its violent deeds, is indeed nothing else but the expression of the disintegration and decay of capitalist economy, and the symptom of the dissolution of the bourgeois State.”  

Since fascism seeks refuge from the crises of capitalism in the chimerical solidarity of race and nation—a solidarity that, as we have seen, cannot be a bulwark against the violence of capital—it follows that for fascism those crises must have their origin outside both the nation and capitalism. The underside of the fascist utopia is therefore inevitably a war on all perceived outsiders. The fascist overcomes the pain and anxiety of marginalization and immiseration by blaming the even more marginalized, the most immiserated. Historically, immigrants, intellectuals, people of color, religious minorities, sexual minorities and women have all served the far right as scapegoats and targets of violence. Marxism, conversely, clearly shows that all workers are outsiders from the point of view of capital—disposable, despised objects and not subjects of history. As V.I. Lenin wrote, “Freedom in capitalist society always remains just about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics—freedom for the slaveowners.” Hence, while the fascist solution to capitalism’s inherent violence against the dispossessed is simply more violence against the dispossessed, Marxists teach the unity of the people and the overthrow of all enslavers. Fascism promises liberation from the contradictions of capital, but it merely delivers more of the same. Some people think that fascism and socialism are merely two different species of a genus called “totalitarianism.” Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, fascism and bourgeois liberalism are the true siblings. Both fascism and bourgeois liberalism offer the people the false promise of a cheerful modus vivendi, a mythical and purely imaginary social equilibrium based on the private ownership of capital, between the working classes and the capitalists. In fact, only by breaking free of this very illusion can we put an end to the threat of fascism.

In the short term, we must foster, through organization and solidarity, the collective power of the masses. We must forge stronger connections, not only within oppressed communities, but across all working-class communities. We must publicly, emphatically and consistently announce that the people will not tolerate Proud Boys or any other semi-fascist organizing in our midst. We must study and understand the origins of the divisions among the working class and oppressed peoples, the divisions both structural and ad hoc that fascists seek to turn into even bigger divisions. Finally, we must accept that any permanent victory over fascism must be a victory over capitalism. This means that while we seek to cultivate the largest possible and most democratic movement against the far right, we cannot become mere foot soldiers for bourgeois political parties, liberal NGOs, or any élite enterprise. The people must lead, and they must lead vigorously and on their own terms. As Zetkin wrote

The worst thing we could do would be to allow our historical understanding of fascism to sway us toward inactivity, toward waiting, or toward the postponement of arming ourselves and struggling against fascism. Yes, fascism is surely condemned to decay internally and to fall apart. Only temporarily can it serve the bourgeoisie as a tool of class struggle; only temporarily can it reinforce, whether legally or illegally, the power of the bourgeois state against the proletariat. Still, it would be disastrous for us to fall into the role of clever and refined observers of this process of decay. On the contrary, it is our bounden duty to drive this process forward and hasten it by every possible means.