But I wonder if we can't find a more minimalist definition that changes the assessment to a quantitative one rather than a qualitative one. Let me try this: fascism is simply ultra-nationalism. As such it manipulates the available cognitive and emotive resources, such as 'national symbols', race, ethnicity, religion, culture, etc. So the question then is not whether each of these manipulations is present as a criterion, but simply how nationalist is this thing, in other words what degree of fascism is there.
By ultra-nationalism I simply mean the subordination of the interests of the individual to the interests of the nation. 'Nation' here is understood as inherently capitalist. Taking these two points together, one will therefore also find an opposition to transnational 'finance' capital, at least in the early stages of the movement. I can imagine a non-racial, non-religious, etc., fascism but not a non-nationalist one. The nationalist element then explains why things like imperialism and colonialism are closely associated with fascism although not inherent to it. They simply arise when a fascist state is able to pursue its national interest beyond its borders, but you don't have to be expansionist to be fascist and you don't have to be fascist to be expansionist.
The advantages of looking at it this way is that several of the problems that we have been grappling with cease to appear as difficulties. Firslty the checklist of criteria disappears. Always a good thing. The the problem of classifying a regime as fascist disappears. So the question of whether Franco, Peron, Thatcher, Chamberlain, apartheid South Africa, Bush, Iran, Iraq, etc. were/are fascist disappears and the question simply becomes to what degree were/are they fascist. In other words to what degree did they suppress and cramp the subjectivities of their subjects into ultra-national allegiances. Another advantage is that it enables us to see how the movement changes from a popular mass movement to a ruling class one. So we don't get into silly debates as to whether fascism really is a strategy of international finance capital or something.
The case of Franco is a good paradigm. The qualitative analysis would have it that Franco's nationalist alliance was only one third fascist (the falange) - the other elements, monarchism and clericalism, prevented that regime from being 'purely' fascist. But I am suggesting that the clericalism and monarchism notwithstanding, the true measure of Franco's fascism is simply the extent to which it was a movement of national salvation, aimed against the various kinds of internationalists: cosmopolitan liberals, anarchists, communists. Looking at it in this way the answer would be, not that Franco was 'purely' fascist or some such thing, but that he was pretty damn fascist.
Now one of the more interesting consequences of this way of looking at the matter is that one overcomes the rather spurious dichotomising of populist movements into fascism and communism. We can legitimately and without fear of embarrassment ask also: how fascist is/was Castro's Cuba, North Korea, Mao's China, Pol Pot, Mariam's Ethiopia, Mugabe's Zimbabwe, etc, etc.? Why not? If national salvation is the key then this question takes on an interesting aspect. It enables us to cut through the ideology, the discourse and the rhetoric and get to the real stuff. Bordiga said: Capitalism is the revolution in agriculature. OK so in various, mostly backward or stagnant countries, an iron surgeon is necessary to carry out the capitalist revolution from above and to establish an industrial base, to discipline the workers and to turn the peasants into proletarians, etc., why do we need to distinguish between the red and brown varieties in such rigid ways?
Personally I think Lenin had a lot to answer for here. I don't think that the Pol Pots, etc., would have emerged if marxism had not been reworked to accommodate itself ideologically to the nationalist project. Let's look at it like this: Would the motley republicans have done a better job than Franco in turning Spain into some sort of modernist capitalist country (it was certainly their project)? And at the end of the day surely one needs to ask whether the projects of Castro and Franco were really that different. I think we can ask which one was more fascist - sure my answer would of course have been Franco - but aren't the similarities of the national state-capitalist project striking?
Now some clever analysts tell us that there is no longer such a thing as nationalist imperialism. That we live in a world in which the nation state is becoming just a hollow shell and that the real action is somewhere else. I don't think so. The upsurge in nationalism (maybe not yet ultra-nationalism) in the US tells me that the nation state is still big - maybe it will be until capitalism is no more. The question then, as always, is just this: HOW fascist is the US (not IS it fascist or not)?
One last point: I don't think that fascism will disappear within a capitalist order. It just ebbs and flows. The significance of this: democratic anti-fascist movements are futile in the the longer view of things; they just preserve the social order which will bring back fascism again at some later stages and in some other places.
Put this all down to my training in semantics.
Tahir