Defining Fascism

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Jul 1 16:05:56 PDT 2001


Chip Berlet wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> So you are arguing that contemporary groups such as the British National
> Front or the US National Alliance are not fascist??? How about calling
> them neofascist?
>

(I know that in 1922 no one thought Hitler a menace either.)

I'll take your word for it that they fit a reasonable definition of fascism, but I'd still like to quibble some. There are also in France, I believe, Bourbonist, Orleanist, & Bonapartist groups, but no one really worries about classifying them. It is rather doubtful that at this time the Bourbons are going to reseize the throne of France. So by analogy (and I'm querying whether not asserting that the analogy holds) one might dismiss current "fascist" or "neo-fascist" groups as irrelevant, mere distractions from a focus on serious threats to bourgeois democracy.

Some elements of the U.S. ruling class did, if I recall correctly, play around with the idea of a military coup in the '30s, but made the mistake of thinking Smedley Butler might be their man. It seems to me that in thinking of serious right-wing authoritarian threats in the United States that probably a military coup, under conditions really threatening to capitalist rule, would be more likely than a mass movement grown from such (play yard?) "fascist groups." The core here is in the phrase, "really threatening to capitalist rule." Under ordinary conditions (and even quite extraordinary ones) the commonplace methods of repression available to a bourgeois democratic state seem to do the trick in England and the U.S. Death squads (dressed in blue) operate fairly freely even now in the black neighborhoods, and the prisons are brimming over. Who needs fascism when we've got Clinton, Bush, etc.

As I say, a quibble, but I would be interested in your response. You seem to be the only one on this list who has done serious empirical and theoretical research on this.

Carrol



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list