A Summary of Paxton's "Anatomy of Fascism" - Ch. 8
What is Fascism?
Introduction
Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism can be read here. Read my notes on chapter seven here.
This chapter is something of a culmination of the previous ones. In the first chapter, Paxton argued that he was setting aside a definition of fascism, and instead hoped to construct one after doing a deep analysis of readily identifiable fascist movements, especially of Germany and Italy where they had the most success. Given how dramatically the nature of fascism changes at these different stages of development, this also poses the interesting problem of constructing a definition that applies to all stages.
Paxton first dismisses a number of definitions that he considers inadequate, which is interesting in its own right and many of these arguments can still be seen today. The contrast between Hitler and Stalin is especially interesting.
Accusations of “red fascism” are pretty common today, and have been common among the anti-Soviet Left for quite a while. In 1922, the Italian anarchist Luigi Fabbri used this term directly in his essay “Preventative Counter-Revolution”:
“Red fascists” is the name that has recently been given to those Bolshevik communists who are most inclined to espouse fascism’s methods for use against their adversaries.
In 1938, the term was picked up by the Italian Marxist founer of the Communist Party of Italy and anti-Stalinist Bruno Rizzi. The German council communist Otto Rühle would also famously claimed that “the struggle against fascism must begin with the struggle against bolshevism,” arguing how the Bolsheviks had worked as an example for the fascists. The American Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas would similarly claim in 1948 that “communism, whatever it was originally, is today Red fascism.”
I think there is a lot of legitimacy to this naming and accusation, especially when we consider those “communist” movements that identify themselves and ally with the far-right explicitly. The “MAGA communists” like Jackson Hinkle or Haz of Infrared, as well as NazBol creeps like Caleb Maupin, especially stand out. There is a clear attempt to, at the very least, share the same space as fascists with a red coat of paint. Many of these figures I would say are fascists without qualification.
However, the contrast with fascism and Stalin’s actual rule is fascinating nevertheless. As has been built up in the previous chapter, there seems to be a real contrast between the two, especially in the existence of parallel institutions existing in tension with each other that Stalin didn’t have. We’ve seen how that tension also led to extremely different modes of behavior.
I think “red fascism” should continue to be used, but with the understanding of this distinction. It should be there to call out “communist” alliances with fascists, with the most extreme example being the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact made directly between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and fascists who merely adopt communist aesthetics. For authoritarian communists who cheer on the crushing of autonomous working class movements for emancipation, “tankie” and “state capitalist” serves as a much better identifier.
This all aside, Paxton’s definition of fascism is fantastic. It does a lot to focus on the nature of this nationalist movement and its conspiratorial obsessions, and what we have consistently seen with its path to power through conservatives. By avoiding the ideological commitments, which have always been extremely fluid and secondary for fascists, we can focus on how it actually functions practically.
Chapter 8: What is Fascism?
A strict definition of fascism was avoided at the start of this book to analyze it in action, and at each stage of its growth.
What is the “real” fascism”?
For some, only the first stage of intellectual expression, before it had to compromise with conservatives, constitutes “real” fascism. But it is obviously still fascism once in power, which is also where it has the greatest impact. A proper definition of fascism must apply to all stages. If later stages include compromises and gaining allies, we must include that too.
Fascism in power builds a powerful alliance between conservatives, national-socialists, and radical Right ingredients, bonded together by passion against a common enemy, pursued at any cost.
Fascism in action looks much more like a network of relationships than a fixed essence.
Conflicting Interpretations
Many interpretations of fascism have been proposed over the years.
We saw two of these first takes in chapter 1: (1) thugs in power, and (2) agents of capitalism. Both takes have serious flaws. If fascism is merely hoodlums in power, we cannot explain it as something new in the 20th century. Fascism arose from a failure of liberalism. If fascism is merely the agents of capitalism, as was the orthodox view of Stalin’s Third International, we miss its autonomous roots and authentic popular appeal.
This also ignores the important role of human choice. Closer empirical work also shows that capitalists have preferred authoritarians to fascists. While capitalists prefer fascism to socialism, they will take other solutions to socialism before fascism.
That there was some mutual advantage is beyond doubt. Capitalism and fascism made practicable bedfellows (though not inevitable ones, nor always comfortable ones).
The opposite view, of capitalists as the victims of fascism, takes the middle-level frictions far too seriously, as well as businessmen’s post-war excuses.
Some attempted to psychoanalyze fascism, as a kind of insane dictatorship. But Mussolini seemed too ordinary, while Hitler too bizarre. This also fails to explain why the public loved fascist leaders, if they were really insane, or how they ruled so effectively.
Perhaps we could try to psychoanalyze the fascist public, rather than its leaders. But explanations of fascism as coming from, say, sexual repression fails when we consider that Germany and Italy were likely no more repressed than Britain. This likely applies to other psycho-historical excuses for fascism too. The emphasis of fascists as psychotic in film also can mislead people, failing to realize the participation of “ordinary people” in their daily life.
Others have tried to explain fascism as a kind of uneven social/economic development. Germany and Italy industrialized later, so class tensions became especially acute. This has the benefit of the Marxist historical analysis, without its determinism. Ernst Bloch, a Marxist with an unorthodox interest in the irrational and religious, contemplated Nazi’s success in a different framework. He contrasted its violent “red dreams” of blood, soil, and a pre-capitalist paradise, with its reality of fealty to big business.
Another approach looks at fascism as a product of atomization of mass society. Simple hatred was then unrestrained by tradition or community. This is seen in Hannah Arendt’s mob, drunk on anti-Semitism and detached from moral moorings, allowing the formation of a limitless mass-based dictatorship. There is little empirical support for this view though. Weimar Germany was richly structured, and the Nazis recruited from carefully targeted appeals to specific groups. The Germans were well organized, with clubs for everything.
Some argue fascism is a developmental dictatorship, forcing saving and disciplining the workforce to rapidly industrialize. However, it is wrong to assume fascism pursued any kind of rational economic goal. Both Hitler and Mussolini preferred to bend the economy to political ends. If they were developmental dictatorships, they failed. Italy, the primary example here, grew faster before 1914 and after 1945. This analysis is often used to randomly call any third world dictatorship fascist if they have an ounce of popular support.
Others look at fascism by its social composition, especially of the lower-middle-class. According to sociologist Seymour Lipset, fascism is the “extremism of the center.” Once independent shopkeepers and artisans are squeezed by a well-organized industrial workforce, and big businesses. Empirical research also contradicts this theory though. Fascism seemed to appeal across all classes.
Lipset seems to have been focused mostly on only fascism’s first stage. Consequently, he missed the collaboration of other classes when it took power. Fascism has pretty high-turnover. And when it took power, a bunch of people bandwagoned into it. Fascist membership is too much in flux to make a coherent social explanation.
Some see fascism as a subspecies of totalitarianism. Mussolini, after being called totalitarian, turned it into a boast of the virtue of fascism. Ironically, when people analyze fascism as totalitarian, they typically exclude Fascist Italy due to its extensive collaboration with the Church and monarchy. Instead, theorists of totalitarianism looked to Hitler and Stalin. This was especially emphasized by western theorists that wanted to associate Stalin with Hitler as ‘destroyers of liberty,’ and deemphasize fascism’s association with capitalism. Fascism and communism in this view share a common evil.
Despite this campism though, we should look at the argument on its own merits. Nazi and Stalinist mechanisms share some similarities, in their arrests and prison camps, and demands for subordination to a higher cause. However, this overlooks important differences. Stalin ruled over a “simplified” society after the Bolshevik Revolution, without the old institutions. Hitler came to power with their assistance. Nazi Germany had a constant tension between the fascist party and elites. Stalin never had this. Hitler and Stalin also had very different aims. Stalin aimed at universal equality, while Hitler aimed for the domination of the master race.
The totalitarian model then overlooks the murderous frenzy boiling beneath fascism. The comparison between Hitler and Stalin usually just boils down to questions of “who was worse”. This compares Stalin’s reckless economic experimentation and paranoid persecution against Hitler’s exterminations in the name of medical and racial purity.
The strongest case for equating Stalin to Hitler is the famine of 1931, which allegedly was used to genocide Ukrainians. While this famine did result from criminal negligence, it affected Russians with equal severity. While Stalin killed whoever his paranoid mind convinced him was an enemy, Hitler killed “race enemies,” including newborns. Hitler aimed at killing entire peoples, and all evidence they ever existed, while Stalin did not.
This book acknowledges the repugnance of both terrors, but condemns even more strongly Nazi biologically racialist extermination because it admitted no salvation even for women and children.
More pragmatically, the totalitarian model overlooks the true chaos of Hitler’s rule. While fascist propaganda presents it as a well-oiled machine, it was anything but. Hitler had a government divided between personal fiefdoms, and Mussolini was unable to wrangle his party.
The idea of political religion pretty quickly applies to fascism. Fascism excited people with words and rituals towards its “truth”. But this concept is somewhat vague, and seems to apply better to certain stages of fascism in achieving and exercising power. If this concept of religion is meant to show fascism as a replacement for religion, it is not clear how secularization was any more severe in Germany or Italy than Britain or France. This framework also puts fascism and religion as enemies, which they are not. They may have a complex relationship, but they did cooperate.
Fascist leaders described their movements as ideological. However, fascism seems unlike other “isms,” being more rooted in these mobilizing passions than the idea of any professor.
Only fascism had such contempt for reason and intellect that it never even bothered to justify its shifts.
Cultural studies have become increasingly popular as a method of studying fascism, analyzing its film and propaganda. However, this approach generally does not tell us how fascism gained power over society in the first place, defeating its competition. Culture also differs so wildly between nations, it's hard to find a common thread between different fascist movements.
Machismo comes close to being a universal value, but Mussolini did argue for women’s suffrage in his first program, and Hitler ignored gender in his 25 points. This also fails to understand how some countries with a good deal of fascist propaganda, like France, only became fascist by conquest.
Boundaries
It is important to distinguish fascism from its superficially similar regimes. This is difficult, since so many regimes copied the aesthetic of fascism.
The simplest boundary is between fascism and classic tyranny. Fascism is a phenomenon of failed democracies, as free institutions are dismantled with popular acclaim. Rather than silencing citizens, it directed their passion into support into aims of national unity and purity.
We should not use the term fascism for predemocratic dictatorships. However cruel, they lack the manipulated mass enthusiasm and demonic energy of fascism, along with the mission of “giving up free institutions” for the sake of national unity, purity, and force.
Fascism is also easily confused with military dictatorship. They share a love of conquest, uniforms, and guns. But while all fascism is militaristic, not all militarism is fascist. Most military dictators are simply tyrants, and do not need popular excitement.
The distinction between fascism and authoritarianism is more subtle. While authoritarians like in Portugal or Spain are often brutal, they do not share fascism’s desire to eliminate the private sphere. Authoritarians use intermediary bodies of the church or economic cartels to dominate other spheres of life, rather than a single party.
Authoritarians leave the population demobilized and passive, rather than mobilized and active. Authoritarians cling to the status quo, instead of proclaiming a new way. This can be seen in Spain, Portugal, and Vichy France, even while brutally repressive or borrowing elements from fascism, shared power with the church, landowners, and army.
What is Fascism?
We come now to a definition of fascism.
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Fascism is a form of political behavior marked by
Obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood
Compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity
A mass-based party of committed nationalist militants
Working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites
Abandonment of democratic liberties
Pursuit of internal cleansing and external expansion, using redemptive violence without ethical or legal restraint
Fascist leaders have called their movement an ideology. Anti-fascists deny this, quickly pointing to the constantly shifting ideas of fascism and how it is quickly abandoned for expedience.
Despite this, fascists knew what they wanted. Fascism is neither its mere program, nor mere opportunism.
This aspect of fascism then is better understood by its “mobilizing passions” seen in chapter 2:
a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;
the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;
the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;
the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;
the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.
Fascism is still visible today. It exists at stage one in all democratic countries. Fascism does not require a spectacular “march” into power. The willingness of those in power to accept lawless treatment of national “enemies” is an important step here. Something close to Stage Two has arrived in several very troubled societies.
Further fascist advance is not inevitable though. It depends on the severity of the crisis, and it depends on human choice, especially of those in power.
Determining the right response to fascism is difficult. But we stand a better chance of stopping it if we understand how it succeeded in the past.