This theme repeatedly recycles and I think not just as a result of sloppiness of ignorance. I suggest a key concept in the transition from precapitalist to capitalist societies and from them to socialism is that of bourgeois democratic rights. People are not being wholly unscientific in looking at regimes that drastically restrict these, as fascist.
Some sort of strong collectivist ideology used by the ruling forces and a populist appeal is important.
In the case of Afghanistan, if you wish to see any merits in a loose definition of fascism, you have the conjuncture of old largely self sufficient economic activity (I have forgottern the term that Marx used for the German peasant household but I suspect it could be stretched here), such activity at the point of breakdown, plus new rising capitalist forces, strongly promoting an ideology with some populist appeal. It sounds as if the idealistic sons of the Arab bourgeoisie are a key component of the Taliban regime.
A loose definition of fascism allows us to see there is a danger of a fascist reversal of existing bourgeois democratic norms in many countries. I also feel intuitively that there is a fascist streak to US society - it seems to me plausible that Hitler got his idea of Nazi salutes from watching films of US baseball cheerleaders.
Now I do not expect to convince anybody by this comment, which could be torn to shreds rapidly by those who prefer a narrow definition of fascism, in a few short lines.
I agree with Carrol in his repeated reproof of people who use the term "middle class", but not his repeated objections on this theme.
[BTW these comments are independent of a judgement on the present political confrontation. I mainly think of the Taliban regime as a sort of primitive communistic one and much as leftists object to its repression of womens rights etc, I think a wider internationalist view must see it as a reaction to the severe contradictions that the Afghani people are facing. It is folly from the point of view of global finance capital, as well as undemocratic from the point of view of the interests of the working people of the world, just to use some code word to mean that it is wholly evil and deserves whatever comes to hit it. ]
But I am for a loose use of the term fascism.
Chris Burford
London
At 11/10/01 15:51 -0400, you wrote:
>
>On Thu, 11 Oct 2001 15:09:50 -0400 Doug Henwood
><<mailto:dhenwood at panix.com>dhenwood at panix.com> writes:
> >
> > We're playing word games to some extent, but what does it mean to
> > apply the same term to Germany under Hitler and al-Qaeda? One is
> > big,
> > hierarchical, and centralized and the other isn't. One fought
> > conventional wars, the other doesn't. They have different social
> > roots, different ideologies, and different enemies. I don't see the
> >
> > point of using the same word for both.
> >
> > Doug
> >
>
>This is the kind of thing that Carrol has been pointing out here
>forever. Many leftwing people like to apply the term "fascist"
>to all sorts of governments and political movements that they
>find repulsive but this strips the term of any useful scientific
>meaning, so that it becomes little more than a political
>swear word. The fact is that there are many different kinds
>of political regimes that can take on a repressive and authoritarian
>manner including good old fashioned bourgeois - liberal democracy.
>
>Chip has been calling the Taliban "clerical fascists" but I don't
>think that I can buy that unless he can provide us with an analysis
>of the ideology and class roots of the Taliban that can link them
>to the types of regimes that everyone agrees were fascists - i.e.
>Mussolini's in Italy, the National Socialists in Germany. I have
>seen the term "clerical fascist" applied to the rightwing Catholic regime
>that governed Austria following the suppression of the Social
>Democrats in Vienna, and prior to the Anschluss
>with Nazi Germany, but I am not at all sure that the Taliban
>bear any ressemblence with that regime.
>
>Jim F.
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