Essentials
Fascism? For what?
The far right is being discussed almost everywhere with great agitation: the American Republicans, the Rassemblement National, the Fratelli d’Italia, Fidesz, Sanseitō, the BJP, and here in Germany the AfD. People argue about ban proceedings and firewalls, convert polling numbers into scenarios of power, compare speeches with speeches from 1932. In the process, the historical interwar fascism is severed from its economic role; what remains for purposes of comparison is merely the idea, which in bourgeois discourse is understood simply as “the opposite of democracy.” Hitler and his associates ruled by perverted means because they were evil, and with their malice they were able to win over their masses. Today there are evil people again, and they must not be allowed to take power, because then one would once again have to submit to non-democracy. Such is the theory of bourgeois anti-fascism. We consider this formula wrong, and we ask instead: what would a fascist regime actually have to offer the economy it would have to administer today?
That the question is open is conceded by the loudest of those sounding the alarm. Paul Mason, whose book Faschismus (2022) sets out to found a new anti-fascist alliance, writes in its opening pages: “no serious faction of high finance wants or needs fascism.”[1] For Mason this is a riddle; the right is returning although nobody ordered it. For us it is the starting point: if nobody needs fascism, one must be able to say why. What did it accomplish when it was needed, and who accomplishes that today?
Whoever skips the question ends up with the formula that Konrad Hecker takes apart in Der Faschismus und seine demokratische Bewältigung: that the democratic constitutional state is legitimate simply because it prevents something worse. Hecker objects:
“When a political system claims recognition precisely on the strength of the magnificent achievement that it spares its subordinates the fascist tyrant, provided they remain loyally devoted – when it therefore threatens them with him – then caution is called for.”[2]
We therefore examine the warning according to its use value. What would a modern capitalist nation state gain from turning fascist, and what does it have without doing so?
To anticipate our argument:
Fascism had the task – a rational one for a class state – of pacifying the class antagonism. Labour and capital were to be forced under the national programme of success, so that the dispute over distribution would no longer obstruct the nation’s competitiveness. The name of this forcible incorporation is corporatism.
This corporatism tried to accomplish its task by command and terror. That method has three costs: an order is recognisable as an order, and therefore makes enemies for itself. Whoever abolishes legal certainty deprives accumulation of its foundation. And whoever cannot earn competitiveness must conquer it, which means war. All three bills were settled in 1945: fascism was unable to accomplish its task.
Bourgeois democracy achieves the same pacification without those costs. It does not order the class compromise, it organises it as competition; it does not suppress discontent, it channels it into the vote; and it has no need of violence at home, because it has shifted that violence to the margins. This is why a fascism of the interwar type is not prevented or banned in the Global North, but functionless. It would have nothing to accomplish that is not already being accomplished.
From this follows the verdict on Trump and the AfD, which we come to later.
Guaranteed Profits, Banned Strikes
What was fascism economically? Bourgeois economics answers: command economy, Gleichschaltung, corporative state. That is not wrong, but it mistakes the form for the content. Private ownership of the means of production was never touched by the fascist state. It took that property into service, on terms that were nothing to complain about. Hecker describes the procedure as follows:
“Of the condition that a capitalist economy insists on having met if it is to produce – production and trade must yield sufficient profit – fascist economic policymakers on principle want to know very little. […] They suspend that condition by guaranteeing its fulfilment.“[3]
Put differently: the state stops asking whether something pays and simply sees to it that it does. It prescribes what is produced and takes on the risk through purchase guarantees, price fixing, directed investment and public debt. That “‘big capital’ took a liking to Hitler” is, under these circumstances, no surprise.[4]
Corporatism was not invented by the fascists. Its model was the medieval guild, in which masters and journeymen regulated their own affairs. The notion that producers rather than parliaments should decide about production had been at home on both political wings since the late nineteenth century: among the syndicalists, whose theorist Sergio Panunzio later went over to fascism, and in Catholic social teaching, which from Leo XIII to the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno saw in the corporative order a remedy against class struggle and communism.[5] The Irish constitution of 1937 likewise provides for vocational representation in the Senate, and West German Christian Democratic social partnership lives off the same idea.
It was Alfredo Rocco, Mussolini’s justice minister and author of the trade union and strike law of 1926, who spelled it out for Italy. He sets himself apart from the model: the guild, he says, regulated “production only in their own selfish interests” and “existed outside the state and sometimes in opposition to it.” The fascist corporation, by contrast, is “not organised outside but within the state, as a state body.”[6] With that the purpose is named: the corporative idea promises self-administration, and Rocco builds from it a body of representation through which the state issues its commands.
On paper it looked like this: in every branch of the economy, representatives of employers and of workers sit together with officials of the Ministry of Corporations created in 1926 and decide on wages, working conditions and training. Strikes and lockouts are forbidden, wage disputes go before a labour court. Class collaboration under supervision, the nation as a single enterprise in which every estate has its place and its voice.
Looking at the practice of this overwrought reformism, one arrives at a curious finding. In 1934 R. Palme Dutt counted them up in Fascism and Social Revolution: eleven years after the seizure of power, not a single corporation existed in Italy, apart from that of the entertainment industry.[7] Only in May 1934 were 22 of them decreed at one stroke. Ignazio Silone, an Italian in Swiss exile, wrote in the same year:
“The fascist leaders are still debating about the structure and functions of the corporations — but the corporations do not exist. […] I cannot even inform the reader about them — they simply do not exist.”[8]
What did the work were the syndicates, and there the matter was settled unambiguously: the only bodies admitted to represent employees were those the state recognised, and organising a tenth of the workforce in a branch sufficed to speak for all of it. The corporations had an advisory function. Decisions were taken by the employer in the firm and by the state above him.[9]
Dutt observes: “This is the sole new feature of the Fascist Corporate State.”[10] What he means is the destruction of independent workers’ organisation and the abolition of the right to strike, Article 18 of the syndicate law of 3 April 1926, one to two years’ imprisonment for organisers. Everything else, he says, could be exchanged between the liberal debate on economic councils and Mussolini’s Carta del Lavoro without noticeable difference.[11]
The rest is arithmetic. Wages in Italy fell by twenty per cent in 1927/28, by ten in 1929, by eighteen to twenty-five in 1930, and in cotton by as much as forty; purchasing power dropped by nineteen per cent by 1933; social spending stood at three per cent of the state budget, against nine in Britain.[12] More recent scholarship confirms this without any Marxist intent: the fascist economy was rather “a series of improvisations” than a system, and “corporatism has always looked better on paper than in practice.”[13]
Corporatism, then, was not a new economic order. It was a procedure for pacifying the class antagonism by decree: property remains, the return is guaranteed, the wage is cut, and resistance is forbidden. That describes the method. What it was supposed to be good for remains open.
What It Was Good For
Otto Bauer, writing from exile in 1936, determines the starting position thus: the fascist dictatorship comes into existence “as the result of a unique balance of class forces.”[14] What is meant is a twofold incapacity. The bourgeoisie is too weak to subjugate the labour movement by legal means, yet strong enough to afford a private army; reformism is too strong to be attacked without violence, and too weak to defend itself. A balance of weakness.
Bauer also names the aim: “not so much to suppress revolutionary socialism as to smash the achievements of reformist socialism.”[15] This is decisive for our chain of argument. A revolution had long ceased to be on the agenda in Italy in 1922 and in Germany in 1933. What was attacked was the class compromise itself, in the shape it had until then: collective agreements, regulated working hours, social insurance, union power. Fascism did not want to abolish the compromise, it wanted to dictate it anew on cheaper terms.
That the smashing then went so smoothly also says something about the condition of what was smashed. The functionaries were persecuted, as Hecker puts it, “without the many organised members putting up any resistance, as workers do when they are convinced that what is being taken from them along with their organisation is the means to improve their working and living conditions.”[16]
Up to this point everything can be told more conveniently: fascism was the tool of finance capital. Georgi Dimitrov canonised this reading in 1935 when he called the regime an “open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”[17] The formula is not complete. Such accounts deny “the sovereignty of the class state – before as after the Third Reich, but above all within it.”[18] Dimitrov’s agent theory also flatters fascism. If Hitler was merely the bookkeeper of Ruhr industry, then as a “successful promoter of ‘growth’ and chancellor of a business-friendly ‘deficit spending’ […] he would be positively a model for his democratic great-grandchildren.”[19] Well, which is it now?
The fascist will was its own. It was directed against every regard for economic conditions, for the world market, profitability and material constraint counted for it as signs of weakness.[20] How this squares with the interests of the owners is answered by August Thalheimer: the fascist dictatorship is “the dictatorship of large capital in terms of its social content. But in terms of its political form, it is a dictatorship over the big bourgeoisie and its parties.”[21] Capital thus surrenders political power and keeps economic power. It lets others govern.
Fascism, then, was not commissioned work; it had a programme of its own. But sovereignty does not mean unconditionality. A state that resolves not to care about profitability has not thereby abolished it. It has merely resolved to settle the bill later.
Rubble
What was all this for? Hecker answers with an inventory of what was missing:
“A successful accumulation of capital, business interests established in every country under the sun, the duty and the capacity to apply superior force that follows from it […] all of this the fascist state lacked; the basis for it was first to be created through conquest.“[22]
Fascist expansionism substituted for a successful accumulation instead of following from one. What the established imperialist powers possessed – colonies, shares of the world market, foreign currency and fleets – the German state wanted to conquer, precisely because it did not have them. Hecker therefore calls the policy of autarky “such an uncapitalist economic programme.”[23] The armaments boom was an advance payment on a victory.
The victory, however, failed to arrive. “For such a pax germanica the war would, after all, have had to be won. What remained was a defeated state and a ruined economy.”[24] Germany, Italy and Japan lay in rubble in 1945 – the very states whose competitiveness corporatism was supposed to establish.
As late as 1934, Dutt wrongly held that Germany was “nearer to the final victory of the proletarian revolution than any country in the capitalist world.”[25] Remarkably, it was Karl Kautsky, the aged reformist, who recognised this contradiction of the fascist economy early on. He wrote in 1933:
“The victory would be a Pyrrhic one. This is because in the long run the progress of democracy just cannot be prevented in a modern state. And where it is temporarily retarded, this can only be achieved by means which are immensely damaging to economic life, and which depress the state which uses them to a lower level within the family of nations.“[26]
What he means is this: capital is invested only where property and person are secure.[27] Whoever abolishes legal certainty saves himself conflicts in the short run and loses the foundation of accumulation in the long run. One need not share Kautsky’s confidence in the progress of democracy to establish that he was right and Dutt was wrong.
All three costs of the method of command materialised. Open coercion created enemies, the suspension of law undermined the basis for investment, and the replacement of accumulation by conquest ended in war. Fascism did not fail because it was evil, but because its fundamental way of running an economy simply did not work out. Which raises the question that carries the rest of this piece: if the task has remained, who performs it today?
Competition Instead of Command
The usual answer to the question of what the democratic state does differently runs: it permits contradiction. That is true and explains nothing. What is interesting is why it can afford to. In Hecker the difference does not lie where anti-fascism looks for it:
“What distinguishes the fascist programme from the respectable bourgeois administration of the class antagonism and its yields is its theoretical as well as practical critique of competition between the classes and within them. […] The ‘silent compulsion’ of economic relations appears to it as an unreliable source of national success.”[28]
The fascist does not trust competition. That entrepreneurs and wage-earners, each on his own account and against one another, will in the end nevertheless produce the growth the state lives on is too uncertain for him. He wants to order the result, and to tame at the same time the consequences of a sharpening class antagonism, which he sees clearly enough. Market-economy policy, by contrast, “relies on the competition between the classes set to work by the state according to the measure of private property.”[29]
An order is recognisable as an order and makes enemies for itself. A relation of competition appears as a state of affairs and makes participants for itself. Whoever competes for a job in the firm fights not against the conditions but against his colleague. Whoever negotiates three per cent in a wage round has not suffered the compromise but achieved it. Precisely what Rocco had to enforce by decree establishes itself here of its own accord.
What democracy achieves in this way Hecker calls the “emancipation of political rule from the claims of those who come off badly.” The government no longer has to take account of those who lose out.[30] The fascist charge was that unpopular measures cannot be pushed through by the rule of law. On which Hecker, on the post-war period:
“…that with the means of parliamentarism and constitutional self-restraint one could perfectly well obtain powerful leadership in the state and the successful suppression of all ‘social conflicts’ […] And the proof was furnished.“[31]
The decisive instrument for this is the periodic vote. Every four years it gives the wage-earner the impression of having had a hand in writing the conditions under which he works the rest of the time. His discontent thereby finds its target in whichever government is in office, while the success of the nation remains uncontested as the basis of the whole business. That is the heart of the matter: resistance against fascism was directed against the state, resistance in a democracy is directed against the governing party. Wilhelm Reich registered this soberly in The Mass Psychology of Fascism: parliamentary democracy is “a formal democracy; masses of people elect their representatives, but they do not govern themselves.”[32]
What a form of rule looks like that can dispense with laying hands on the body was described by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialektik der Aufklärung. They quote Tocqueville:
“Under the private monopoly of culture it is indeed the case that »tyranny leaves the body free and goes straight for the soul. The ruler no longer says: think as I do or die. He says: you are free not to think as I do; your life, your goods, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a stranger among us.« Whatever does not conform is struck with an economic impotence.”[33]
Whoever does not join in is not arrested; he finds no work and cannot reproduce himself. “The formal freedom of everyone is guaranteed,” the passage continues, but in return each finds himself “enclosed from an early age in a system of churches, clubs, professional associations and other relationships which constitute the most sensitive instrument of social control.”[34] The choice between ideologies, too, “proves in every branch to be the freedom to be always the same.”[35]
Added to this is the bond of consumption. Amusement, they write, is “the prolongation of work under late capitalism”; “to be pleased means to say yes.”[36] In the preface it is put without circumlocution:
“In an unjust state of affairs, the impotence and pliability of the masses increase with the quantity of goods allotted to them.”[37]
Reich describes the same connection from the other side in 1933. Improvements won in struggle, such as shorter working hours and social insurance, strengthened the working class, “but at the same time a contrary process set in: with the raising of the standard of living, there was a structural assimilation to the middle class.”[38] From this he draws a conclusion that nobody in the KPD wanted to hear:
“The lower middle-class bedroom suite, which the ‘rabble’ buys as soon as he has the means, even if he is otherwise revolutionary minded; […] the ‘decent’ suit of clothes for Sunday; ‘proper’ dance steps and a thousand other ‘banalities,’ have an incomparably greater reactionary influence when repeated day after day than thousands of revolutionary rallies and leaflets can ever hope to counterbalance.”[39]
The class compromise, then, is in place, and it is far more stable than the fascist one. It is not decreed but operated by the participants themselves: in the competition for jobs, in the wage round, at the ballot box and in consumption. This is why nobody has to stand guard over it.
Where the Violence Went
An objection suggests itself: why should a state manage without violence? It does not, of course.
The violence a nation state needs for its competition hardly takes place in the imperial centre any more. It takes place at the margins, in the supply chains, at the borders, and historically most clearly in the military dictatorships the West installed and maintained in the Global South during the Cold War. Where fascist techniques of rule remained useful, they were exported.
Aimé Césaire put the connection into a formula in 1950: Nazism was the application of colonising procedures to Europe.[40] Even mainstream scholarship cannot get around it: “Looked at from some perspectives, the fascists merely exploited pre-existing foreign policy concerns and magnified them.”[41] What Europe did to itself under fascism it had long practised outside Europe.
The class compromise in the centre is available only if there is something to distribute. And whether there is something to distribute does not depend on the constitution. What mattered for the success of the Bonn Republic, as Hecker notes, was not the five-per-cent threshold and the constructive vote of no confidence, but rather “that the resolute deployment of state power, and of a […] new currency, for the overhaul and export orientation of national capitalism met with success.”[42] The state of the world market, the Marshall Plan, the military licence. Post-war prosperity is not a consequence of the democratic form but its precondition. Democracy is the political form that a sated imperialism can afford.
The Reckoning
Fascism wanted four things, and all four have been achieved by the democratic state of the Global North with less violence (and counter-violence) at home, with a more self-possessed subject, and without isolation from the world market.
It wanted to eliminate the labour movement as a political danger. In a democracy it no longer is one: the trade union is a negotiating partner in a procedure whose framework it does not dispute, and the party that once belonged to it administers the country’s competitiveness.
It wanted to guarantee returns. Democracy does that too, only not by decree but through competitiveness policy: tax rates, infrastructure, energy prices, subsidies, trade agreements. Nobody calls this compulsory corporatism, because nobody has to be compelled.
It wanted to convert discontent over distribution into assent to the nation. The vote accomplishes this better than any Volksgemeinschaft, because it does not forbid the discontent but uses it up.
And it wanted competitiveness on the world market. The Global North has that, and it has it without a war of conquest, because the post-war order organised its access to foreign labour as trade.
From this follows the central claim of this piece. A fascism of the interwar type would meet with redundancy in the Global North. It would have nothing to offer that is not to be had more cheaply, and to obtain it it would have to give up precisely the legal certainty that accumulation lives on. There is no buyer for this deal. That is why Mason is right in saying that no serious faction of high finance (or of any other sector of the Western nation state) needs fascism.
The Shift to the Right
The consequence of their vote we have now answered soberly. The other question remains open: who votes for the far-right forces, and why?
The liberal answer is familiar: “fears of decline” as a result of “crisis-ridden changes,” and from these a “longing for ‘simple solutions’.” Against this sociological theory of immiseration, GegenStandpunkt objects in its study of the AfD that it blanks out “the content of the patriotic super-morality that is so successful worldwide […] almost completely.”[43] It seems to escape many that right-wing voters want something quite specific.
They want the very thing that every government has been teaching them for decades: that their personal welfare depends on the competitiveness of their country as a business location. The class compromise is not offered as a compromise, after all, but as the logic of competitiveness. If German industry does well, you do well. Whoever believes this – and he is told it daily – must look for someone to blame when the balance sheet is bad, and not in the class society he knows nothing about, but in the politics that administers the country’s competitiveness:
“The right-wing populist parties […] see to it that their nation’s entanglement in a world of imperialist competition strikes the affected citizens as something negative, and is charged to those responsible for it as a treasonous surrender of the Volksgemeinschaft, with a thick equals sign drawn between the ‘hard-working’ people of virtue and national sovereignty.”[44]
The impositions come from the world market but count as the fault of one’s own government, because people and state are thought of as the same thing. That is the consistent form of democratic consciousness, not its collapse. And when the established parties subsequently take up the concerns – Hecker ironically calls this the service the democrats render “to the ‘integration of marginal groups'” – then the far right can have itself “cited as a crown witness for official government propaganda.”[45]
For the psychological side there is a term in Reich: nationalistic self-confidence, the self-assurance the individual derives from the “greatness of the nation.” “The wretchedness of his material and sexual situation is so overshadowed by the exalting idea of belonging to a master race and having a brilliant führer that, as time goes on, he ceases to realize how completely he has sunk to a position of insignificant, blind allegiance.”[46]
We say that the right-wing voter miscalculates his interest. Reich, by contrast, has a theory of character structure in which sexual repression brings the subject to “act, feel, and think contrary to his own material interests.”[47] Adorno and Horkheimer recognise no kernel of interest at all; for them it is precisely the economic futility of antisemitism that proves its true nature, for “it does not help human beings, but their drive to destruction.”[48] Their term for the modern electoral decision is the ticket: “Voting still goes on, but only between totalities.”[49]
We nonetheless hold our explanation to be the more workable one, because it answers what both of them have to presuppose: why it is the nation, of all things, that false consciousness fastens onto. The answer is banal and material. Because the state that decides over living conditions is a national one, and its personnel says so every day.
Trump and the AfD
If our reckoning is correct, it ought to be demonstrable from the programme of today’s right that it does not attack the class compromise but demands it. Let us look.
What the AfD demands is the combustion engine and nuclear power, cheap energy, less bureaucracy, guaranteed pensions, closing the borders. What Trump demands is tariffs, the reshoring of industry, deregulation, tax cuts, deportation. One may call this reactionary, and reactionary it is. But one ought to see what is missing from it. Not a word against the right to strike, no compulsory syndicate, no directed investment by decree, no smashing of the trade unions, no abolition of the collective agreement. Rocco abolished collective bargaining. Trump and the AfD promise their voters better outcomes in collective bargaining, achieved through national protection. That is less a rejection of the class compromise than an offer to renew it.
GegenStandpunkt formulates the same finding about the AfD: what it puts forward is “no alternative programme for the better management of Germany’s established paths to success,” but “a refusal of a general kind” directed against “the manner of the established politics of imperialism.”[50] Against the manner, not against the matter. And further: “No critical gaze falls upon the necessary harshness of bourgeois politics that belongs to the enforcement, by state power, of the system of capitalist business and sovereign rule.”[51] What the AfD comes forward with is the charge that the establishment tends the country’s competitiveness badly and hypocritically. Its positive offer to the people is the role the people already has. What Weidel asserts “in the form of praise for the ‘hard-working’ population is the role of the people as a resource of the nation.”[52]
The fascist Volksgemeinschaft demanded that the worker renounce the wage struggle and organisation, and offered him in return existence in the service of the nation. Today’s right demands nothing at all of him; it assures him that his diligence ought to be earning him more. Nor does it have any reason to demand more. The worker barely organises anyway, rarely strikes, and identifies his interest with the country’s competitiveness. A state whose people serves it voluntarily as a resource has no need of a labour front.
This is why this programme requires no change of system. Tariffs are imposed by regulation, social benefits are cut by law, deportations are organised with agencies that have long existed. The Basic Law has emergency powers, American presidential practice has executive orders. There is no point in this programme for which one would have to abolish parliament.
One thing must nevertheless be taken into account: these parties really do attack something. Courts, the press, the administration, the legal protections available to migrants. For our reckoning this changes nothing, because the attack strikes the administration and not the compromise. A state that has to deport faster and justify less does not become fascist thereby. It makes governing more convenient for itself, and in that it has had predecessors in every democratic government.
In the United States, raids, deportations without due process and camps have by now become government policy. Anyone who thinks this harmless has not been looking. Only it does not prove what it is supposed to prove. The democratic state is a monopoly on violence; that is its definition, not its decay. Police, prisons, borders, emergency provisions and the power of expulsion it has had for as long as it has existed, and it has used all of them: against the colonised, against strikers, against communists barred from public employment, against migrants in camps. Violence belongs to the normal operation of the thing.
The fascist state struck at its own wage-earners, at union halls and picket lines, and it had to do so because it wanted to dictate the class compromise on new terms. Trump and the AfD strike at people whom they have previously declared to be non-members. That is what decides the function. Whoever persecutes the excluded thereby confirms the inclusion of everyone else. An American worker who sees the raid at the plant next door learns from it that he belongs. It occurs to nobody to take his right to strike away from him. There is no need to, as long as he does not strike anyway.
That leaves Putin. Here the question becomes serious, because here someone who would know claims the opposite of what we do. The Russian socialist Ilya Budraitskis, who went into exile from Moscow after the invasion of Ukraine, calls the regime a fascism, and he argues for it not with images of comparison but with a determination akin to our own.[53]
His starting point: fascism is to be determined as a form of rule, not as a worldview and not as a movement. “The key to understanding what fascism is may therefore be in understanding what fascist rule is,” he quotes Alexander Motyl. From Karl Polanyi he takes the point that fascism was not a revolt from below but a “move” by the elites in a crisis of democratic institutions, aimed at eliminating every form of self-organisation in society. And from Franz Neumann, whose Behemoth we already know, the decisive economic point: the transition to Nazism was predetermined by the position of German capital, “deprived of external markets in an era of imperialist redivision of the world.” Under fascist rule, property is then “guaranteed not by law but by administrative act.”
One recognises in this, from another tradition and in another vocabulary, our own inventory of what was missing. A state that cannot earn competitiveness reaches for command. Budraitskis applies this to Russia: it became “the weakest link” of this epoch of crisis, which is why Putin traded managed democracy for fascism. Until 2011, he argues, the regime relied on depoliticisation through rising consumption and the promise of “stability” – that is, on precisely the arrangement we described above. Only when the waves of protest came and oil revenues fell away did the rebuilding take its place.
Russia is thus not a counter-example to our reckoning but a test of it. Where trade organises access to foreign labour and the standard of living rises, nobody needs a command. Where both fall away, the option returns.
We must say, however, where we disagree with Budraitskis, for he draws the opposite conclusion from the same observation. His sentence runs: “Contemporary fascism no longer needs mass reactionary movements. It does not need to use civil war methods to grind down the organized working class and reduce it to an ‘amorphous state’ by means of violence. This work has largely been done over decades since the neoliberal turn in Western countries.” All that is needed, he says, is the “move” from above. We share the premise entirely: the grinding down has been done, and done without violence. Only for us what follows from it is not an imminent rebuilding but its pointlessness. Who is to pay for it, and what for? As long as competitiveness policy delivers, there is no buyer for this deal. The dispute is therefore empirical, not conceptual, and it will be decided by whether the reckoning continues to work out.
Two things Budraitskis concedes himself, and both support our verdict on today’s right. Trump’s term in office, he writes, is “impossible to consider” a fascist regime, since “the US political system itself has not been fundamentally altered”; Modi, Erdoğan and Orbán stand (or, in Orbán’s case, stood) for the potential, not for a transition already completed. And methodologically he warns against using the concept as a “synonym for absolute evil, against which the ‘free world’ should unite” – that, he says, is a return to the binary oppositions of the Cold War (and ultimately a consent factory for imperialist assaults). It is the very author who calls Putin a fascist who thereby forbids the usage that Western public opinion lives on.
And the AfD’s sympathy for Putin? Nobody there is yearning for the strong man (individuals perhaps, but that is not the core of it): what is at stake there is a dispute about the country’s economic orientation – cheap energy and eastern markets against the tie to Washington. It is the same charge against the manner of established imperialism that we had above, only turned outward. Trump conducts it with tariffs against allies. A different course for the same nation.
How much unanimity democracy brings about without anyone ordering it was observed by GegenStandpunkt in 2014 in the German newsrooms, which produced their image of the enemy “in rare closed ranks, without any führer’s order, and from every barrel at the disposal of the organs of pluralistic opinion formation.”[54] What a propaganda ministry had to compel comes about here of its own accord. So what is fascism still for?
That leaves the question of what would have to happen for us to be wrong. The answer is in a footnote in Hecker, which we return to at the end: the reckoning with the efficacy of democratic, rule-of-law government would have to stop working out. As long as competitiveness policy delivers, fascism is an expensive procedure for a problem already solved.
Two Objections
First: corporatism was superior for capital.
This is claimed by the contemporaries themselves. Silone writes that the essential superiority of corporatism over democracy in the sight of capitalism lies in the fact that under democracy the exploitation of the workers is “continually exposed by the freedom of criticism and public accountability,” whereas in the corporatist system the worker loses all his rights as a citizen.[55] Bauer goes further: “In fact democracy hinders the bureaucratic regulation of the economy.”[56] In short: where contradiction is not permitted, governing goes faster. All these judgements date from the years 1934 to 1938 and assess the speed of enforcement, not the durability. Kautsky’s argument still stands. Richard Löwenthal, who advanced the same thesis of superiority in 1935, concedes it in the same text: the fascist compulsory organisations “have no life of their own,” their crisis is “chronic […] the weakest point of the fascist system.”[57]
Second: fascism was no instrument of capital at all.
The Routledge Companion files the criticised position – that fascism was the executor of monopoly capital – under “Orthodox Marxism,” but writes in the same chapter that its representatives, Dimitrov, Palme Dutt and Togliatti, “took their line from Stalin and the Communist International in the 1930s.”[58] It is worth looking at when this line took which shape, for it changed three times.
It began in November 1922, a few weeks after the March on Rome. The Fourth World Congress interpreted fascism as a reactive counter-revolution, called forth by the strike wave and the factory councils of the biennio rosso, and thereby fitted it, as Roger Griffin notes, “without too much soul-searching” into a scheme that predicted the imminent collapse of capitalism.[59] Two years later came the addition: the Fifth World Congress declared social democracy and fascism to be “two sides of a single instrument of capitalist dictatorship,” and Stalin spoke of twins.[60] With the programme of 1928 the version was complete that would guide the KPD until 1933: fascism as the “terrorist dictatorship of big capital,” social democracy as the main enemy.[61] David Beetham calls this a regression behind what had already been achieved, for Clara Zetkin, Karl Radek and later Gramsci and Togliatti had by that point already examined fascism as a mass movement with a dynamic of its own; and he explains the regression not economically but from Stalin’s domestic politics.[62]
For all the criticism, the thesis must be granted a correct kernel. It saw that social democracy and fascism work on the same task: taming the class antagonism for the purpose of the nation. They work on it in opposite ways, however. Social democracy puts means into the hands of the workers’ side – the collective agreement, social insurance, the right to strike – and thereby brings the dispute into a form that no longer endangers accumulation; the conflict is not eliminated but transferred into a procedure. Fascism takes those same means away again and puts in place of the procedure the decreed unity of capital and labour, which has to subordinate itself to the sovereign purpose of the nation.
The error lies not in this observation but in the conclusion drawn from it. A shared function was turned into a political identity, the analysis into an image of the enemy, and from that came the refusal to form a united front against the NSDAP. What was lost in the process was precisely the difference that mattered in practice, and it is the same one that Dutt would later describe as the sole new feature of the corporative state: whether workers may organise and strike legally. Under social democracy they could (again, not for the sake of striking as such, see above).
The defeat of 1933 changed nothing about this line. Dutt holds to it in his second edition of November 1934 as though nothing had happened. The change came only in 1935, at the Seventh World Congress. There Dimitrov’s famous sentence was spoken: fascism is the dictatorship “of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” That sentence is more narrowly framed than it appears at first reading. It names only one part of capital: if the most reactionary elements stand behind fascism, then there are also the less reactionary ones, and with those one can work together. That is exactly what had been resolved at the same congress: the Popular Front, the alliance of communists with social democrats and bourgeois anti-fascists. The definition supplied the justification for it. It said less about what fascism is than about whom one allies oneself with from now on.[63]
That does not settle the question of capital. The same volume records in its chapter on the economy that fascism and big business had “essentially identical interests,” that “one hand washed the other,”[64] and it quotes Horkheimer’s sentence that whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism. Nothing, however, was dictated to the state. Sovereign means: the state pursues its own purpose, the power of the nation, and treats the economy as a means to it. That is why it could override profitability, order production, guarantee profits, direct investment. But overriding is not abolishing. The laws by which this wealth comes about remained in force: no profit, no accumulation; no accumulation, no tax base; no world market, no raw materials and no foreign currency. The state ordered a war economy whose material foundation it did not possess and intended to conquer.
This is where the two half-explanations part company. The agent theory has to assume that the regime did what served profit; then it remains inexplicable why it left German industry in ruins. Whoever, conversely, sees only the sovereign will of the state has no means of saying what that will broke on. Together they yield the explanation. Hitler could order that tanks be built, and he could order that this be made to pay. What he could not order was that the ore, the oil and the foreign currency for it be there. Those he intended to conquer, and that is what he failed at. The state commands production. The outcome it does not command.
The Correct Position
Let us summarise what the chain amounts to. Fascism had a task, it performed it by command, and the command ruined it. Democracy performs the same task through competition, the vote and consumption, and it performs it better. This is why no fascist alternative is available today for which there would be any demand.
Trump and the AfD are ultra-reactionary. Only: the state they want to administer needs no authoritarian turn for its purposes. It has pacified the class antagonism, secured property, organised competitiveness and shifted violence to the periphery, all in the normal democratic run of things. The fascists would not have to rebuild the place at all.
This is why a ban on the AfD and anti-Trump campaigns fall short. They are understandable, because they are directed against the most reactionary parts of bourgeois politics. But they ignore the material reasons why an AfD succeeds in the first place, and they leave untouched the purpose served equally by a non-Trump America and a social-democratically governed Germany: the competitive interests of the nation and private property. Hecker on this:
“For if moral vigilance contents itself with saying no to fascism, then an enormous amount has been approved: the entire ordinary use of state power.“[65]
Whoever rejects only fascism has waved everything else through. Accordingly, democrats concede “with their endless anti-fascist indignation that, on an objective view, democrats find nothing at all to criticise politically in fascists – which is why in this respect they prefer to leave it at a feigned incomprehension.”[66]
Our thesis is not that fascism is finished for good, but that it is superfluous at present, and it names the condition under which it falls. Hecker marks that condition too:
“One would rather not put it to the test how durable such a prosecutorial no to fascist techniques of rule remains once the reckoning with the superior stability and efficacy of democratic, rule-of-law government fails to work out.“[67]
As long as democracy delivers, saying no to fascism comes cheap. What is left of it once it stops delivering, nobody knows. Whoever really wants to make fascism impossible must go after the foundation that makes it an option, and not after the party that does not even need it.
Therein lies the correct position. The bourgeois state does not have to become authoritarian in order to be dangerous; its normal democratic operation is entirely sufficient. Whoever defends it against the fascists without attacking it defends the arrangement that produces the fascists. Whoever wants to ban the AfD and keep the country’s competitiveness has not understood the object, and will end up losing both.
[1]Paul Mason, Faschismus. Und wie man ihn stoppt, Suhrkamp, Berlin 2022, introduction. Cited from the German edition; our rendering.
[2]Konrad Hecker, Der Faschismus und seine demokratische Bewältigung, GegenStandpunkt Verlag, Munich 1996, preliminary remark “Zum richtigen Vergleichen”. Our translation.
[3]Ibid., Part 1 B, “Staat und Kapital: Von der Verantwortung des Eigentums”. Our translation.
[4]Ibid.
[5]Peter Davies / Derek Lynch, The Routledge Companion to Fascism and the Far Right, Routledge, London 2002, ch. “The Economy”; on Panunzio ibid., biographical section.
[6]Alfredo Rocco, report on the Corporations Bill, quoted in Davies/Lynch, op. cit., ch. “The Economy” (there after J. Whittam, Fascist Italy, Manchester 1995, pp. 158f.).
[7]R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, London 1934 (reprint Proletarian 1974), p. 205.
[8]Ignazio Silone, “The Corporations and State Capitalism” (1934), in: David Beetham (ed.), Marxists in Face of Fascism, Barnes & Noble, Totowa/N.J. 1984, p. 323.
[9]Dutt, op. cit., pp. 204f., drawing on Fausto Pitigliani, The Italian Corporative State (1933).
[10]Ibid., p. 209.
[11]Ibid.
[12]Ibid., pp. 212–214, drawing on Turati, Biagi and the ILO survey of 1933.
[13]Davies/Lynch, op. cit., ch. “The Economy”, drawing on S. J. Woolf.
[14]Otto Bauer, “Fascism” (1936), in: Beetham (ed.), op. cit., p. 295.
[15]Ibid., p. 294. Emphasis in the original.
[16]Hecker, op. cit., Part 1 B. Our translation.
[17]Cf. Beetham, op. cit., introduction, p. 22. The wording comes from Dimitrov’s speech to the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern, 1935.
[18]Hecker, op. cit., Part 1 C. Our translation.
[19]Ibid.
[20]Ibid., Part 1 B.
[21]August Thalheimer, in: Beetham (ed.), op. cit., p. 196. Emphases in the original.
[22]Hecker, op. cit., Part 1 C. Our translation.
[23]Ibid.
[24]Ibid., Part 2, entry “Kapital & Wehrwirtschaft”.
[25]Dutt, op. cit., p. 293.
[26]Karl Kautsky, in: Beetham (ed.), op. cit., p. 250.
[27]Ibid., p. 249.
[28]Hecker, op. cit., Part 1 B, “Der Umgang des faschistischen Staates mit den Klassen”. Our translation.
[29]Ibid.
[30]Ibid.
[31]Ibid., Part 4 A, “Nie wieder eine schwache Demokratie!”.
[32]Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 3rd edn., Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York 2000, ch. IX.
[33]Max Horkheimer / Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1969, “Kulturindustrie. Aufklärung als Massenbetrug”. Our translation; the embedded quotation is from Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique.
[34]Ibid.
[35]Ibid., closing paragraph of the chapter.
[36]Ibid.
[37]Ibid., preface.
[38]Reich, op. cit., ch. II.
[39]Ibid.
[40]Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, Paris 1950; quoted after Mason, op. cit., ch. 9.
[41]Davies/Lynch, op. cit., ch. “Diplomacy and International Relations”.
[42]Hecker, op. cit., Part 4 A. Our translation.
[43]“Die AfD im Höhenflug”, in: GegenStandpunkt. Our translation.
[44]Ibid.
[45]Hecker, op. cit., Part 1 A and Part 4 E respectively. Our translation.
[46]Reich, op. cit., ch. II, “Nationalistic Self-Confidence”.
[47]Ibid., ch. I.
[48]Horkheimer/Adorno, op. cit., “Elemente des Antisemitismus”, thesis II. Our translation.
[49]Ibid., thesis VII.
[50]“Die AfD im Höhenflug”, op. cit. Our translation.
[51]Ibid.
[52]Ibid.
[53]Ilya Budraitskis, “Putinism — a new form of fascism?”, International Viewpoint; the quotations that follow are all from this text. It was written after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
[54]“Die Deutschen – ein Volk von ‘Putinverstehern’?”, in: GegenStandpunkt 2-14. Our translation.
[55]Silone, op. cit., pp. 324f.
[56]Otto Bauer, in: Beetham (ed.), op. cit., p. 343.
[57]Richard Löwenthal, in: Beetham (ed.), op. cit., pp. 336f.
[58]Davies/Lynch, op. cit., ch. “Historiography”.
[59]Roger Griffin, quoted ibid.
[60]Fifth World Congress of the Comintern, 1924, quoted in Beetham, op. cit., introduction, p. 19.
[61]Programme of the Communist International, 1928, quoted in Dutt, op. cit., p. 92.
[62]Beetham, op. cit., introduction, pp. 17 and 20f.
[63]Ibid., p. 22.
[64]Davies/Lynch, op. cit., ch. “The Economy”, after Martin Kitchen. Togliatti’s variant of Horkheimer’s sentence is given there as: “You can’t know what fascism is if you don’t know imperialism.”
[65]Hecker, op. cit., Part 4, introduction. Our translation.
[66]Ibid., Part 4 C, “Konjunkturen des Antifaschismus in der alten BRD”.
[67]Ibid., Part 3 B, note 3.
