Clerical Fascism & Totalitarianism

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Oct 17 13:22:20 PDT 2001


Chip, Perhaps what bothers me in your take on fascism can be expressed in the old formal terms of genus & species. First at the merely verbal level: your term "clerical fascism" in effect treats fascism as a genus, _clerical_ fasicism as a species distinct from _______ fascism (Mussolini, Hitler). Fascism for you is a generic term. But

In several of your posts you focus (and this sounds right to me) on organicism as a generic trait of (your) fascism: it is shared by Mussolini & bin Laden but not by Ben Bella. So far, so good. That is, I would agree that an organic conception of the state is indeed vicious, and (not really having extensive empirical knowledge of my own here) I'll accept your argument that bin Laden's politics manifest an organic view of the state. So, incidentally, does Plato -- and in fact Bertrand Russell called Plato a fascist. But I think we would both agree that it is not too useful to hall Plato into our taxonomy of fascism.

But Mussolini's fascism came to power under quite specific historical conditions. And though those conditions could be described in a number of quite different ways, I don't think those descriptions would apply, without great stress, to the conditions in which bin Laden's "fascism" emerged. I'm not drawing any particular conclusion here, just pulling on some loose strings (or what appear to me to be possible loose strings). Both Hitler's and Mussolini's movements emerged, and seized power, in nations that were essentially modern capitalist states but with varying [I don't know the accurate phrase] ?remnants of feudal attitudes?; and both states had in addition been defeated in a great war. (Italy was only nominally among the victors.) And in addition both states had large and active communist parties, with significant support from the new communist power to the east. And that war, moreover, had emerged from a period of nearly half a century which had seen the last great competitive drive among European powers to stake out their claims to the colonized or subordinated worlds of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Fascism was one of several different political responses to that complex of conditions. Roosevelt's New Deal was another response. Japan's Co-Prosperity Sphere was a third. In other words, we _could_ have as our genus (though we don't have a name for it) political-response-to-capitalist-crisis), and note that one of those specific responses _also_ belonged to the genus of organicist theories or practices. (This is pretty clumsy, but I hope makes some sense.)

Now, shifting from history to politics, I would presume our primary concern here in 21st c. U.S. is the question, Can It Happen Here, the "It" being something like "organicist response to capitalist crisis"?

And for me there is another worry behind or beside that question: does there exist some _other_ route to the suppression of bourgeois democracy and the working class, not "organicist," differing as much from either Hitler or bin Laden as they differ from Napoleon III or from the Japanese ruling class that built the Coprosperity Sphere?

I've never given this a lot of thought, so I'm not claiming to have provided any particular argument, but perhaps I have muddied the pool a bit.

Carrol



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