Like Germany in World War II, we in the US today also have a crazy man heading up the government. But the problem of fascism is much deeper than that. It’s not caused by one insane person; the great man theory of history would point at one great leader (good or bad), but that is not a Marxist analysis.
Fascism is a form of state power that originates in capitalist private property, and whose class basis is the capitalist class.
Fascism in power in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s was the nullification and overthrow of each country’s bourgeois democratic norms and openly placed financial-industrial-corporate interests as the goal of the state and country.
In the past century, Europe was completing the final stage of transition from agrarian to industrial society, in an environment where the Soviet Revolution of 1917 had brought the proletariat and poorest peasants to power and pulled the Soviet Union outside the capitalist system. Beginning in Italy, fascism arose as bourgeois Europe’s response to the 1917 October Russian socialist revolution, whose proclaimed goal was the overthrow of bourgeois property relations.
Marxist literature of that era identified fascism with the most reactionary elements of 1930s financial-industrial capital. At that time finance capital had two wings: manufacturing (in favor of the direct colonial system and seizure of resources) and banks (in favor of the domination by finance rather than the direct colonial system). The Communist International at the time said:
Comrades, fascism in power was correctly described by the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.
(G. Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism, 1935; bold added.)
Most people don’t know that the first form of fascist rule arose in the post-Civil War US. After Lincoln died, the Southern elite found a way to return to power. To some degree their interests were aligned with the financial-industrial oligarchy, and they accepted Wall Street’s domination.
The result was counter-revolution in the core South and the world’s first fascist form of state power.
Today fascism’s base is not merely the industrial wing of finance capital but the entire capitalist class and all who fight to hold onto private property relations.
Thus calls to fight “the right” are outdated as much more than one reactionary section of capital is involved.
Twenty-first century fascism in power is the open terroristic dictatorship of the mega-corporate state headed by the billionaire class and its generals. The mega-corporate state is the merger of the social, economic and political power of the mega-corporations with government and state. Fascism is state power, hence political, and can be defeated based on political will. Fascism is militarization of the police and state intervention in every aspect of the economy and society to protect and enrich the rule of private property.
The purpose of fascism in power, in the past as well as in the new robotic economy, is domination and perpetuation of three interrelated aspects of productive relations: private property, private wealth and privilege. Today fascism thrives in an economy increasingly torn from its historical foundation in human labor.
Twenty-first century fascism consolidates and evolves as society is undergoing social revolution. The social revolution is transition from the industrial system to the robotic economy.
Fascism as a system means death and war domestically and internationally. Through war and genocide Germany killed 30 million people, including 6 million Jews. Like the Germans turned the Jews into scapegoats to cover up the imposition of rule by millionaires, in the US today blacks and browns are subject to increasing police murders and are used as a rallying point for the fascist movement and to obscure the fact that this is a class battle. The fight against US fascism today is a fight to end private property. In the 1903s and 1940s it was a fight to restore bourgeois democracy. Today it is a fight to end bourgeois rule and property.
