[WS:] True. But this can be said of many concepts, for example civil society. While vague and imprecise, it nonetheless played a very useful role in Gramsci's analysis, explaining quite a bit (i.e. why communist revolutions in Western Europe failed) and what is to be done for those revolutions to succeed. The analytic usefulness of the term fascism comes from the fact that there is a fundamental difference between "ordinary" conservative movements and what for the lack of better terminology can be called fascist reaction. Ordinary conservatives merely preserve the status quo, whereas fascist reaction is a revolutionary - so to speak - movement that aims at overhauling the status quo by revolutionary means (just as left wing revolutionaries want) but in the direction opposite to that desired by left wing revolutionaries. Corey Robin had it right on the target.
We can of course argue whether the use of an ambiguous and emotionally charged term is appropriate for denoting the phenomenon dubbed "fascist reaction" - and I will be more than happy to use another term as long as it clearly expresses the nature of the beast as fundamentally different from "ordinary" conservatism.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."