There’s much media discussion about the rise of fascism. We all sense it. Feel it. Fear it. Describing the features with superficial analysis is not enough. The following entries written by Darryl “Waistline” Mitchell in a recent edition of Marxist Glossary provide the foundation for deeper and more accurate understanding of what we are dealing with now.
Cynthia
[Marxist Glossary 3.0]
Fascism (historical, Europe):
Fascism is a form of state power that originates in capitalist property relations, and whose class basis is the capitalist class. Fascism in power was the nullification and overthrow of a country’s bourgeois democratic norms and openly placed financial-industrial-corporate interests, not simply generalized bourgeois property interests, as the goal of the state and country. In Europe, fascism’s ascendancy to power occurred in combat with a section of the working class in a state of unrest that was open to revolutionary ideas.
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.
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.)
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm
This definition expressed the essence of 1930s European fascism. Fascism is a political form of state power that corresponds to various forms of bourgeois private property. European fascism expressed the political agenda of a sector of finance capital: the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist sector that sought colonies and new markets for its industrial production.
Fascism (present, US):
Twenty-first century fascism in power is the open terroristic dictatorship of the mega-corporate state. 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 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.
[These two paragraphs from entry on American Revolution 2.0 in Glossary 3.0.]
The counter-revolution in the South was the open terroristic dictatorship of finance-industrial capital, Wall Street imperialism. The US birthed fascism, a political form of state power that supported and buttressed the changing forms of private property. In the South the changing form of private property was from capitalist-slavery to peonage and the sharecropping system with generous portions of neo-slavery –- slavery by another name.
This political force, constructed and funded by finance capital, which overthrew, and/or nullified a legal bourgeois democratic government—the Reconstruction governments—and substituted in their place a form of rule that was the open terroristic dictatorship of finance capital was fascism. The political state that existed in the South after the overthrow of the Reconstruction governments is properly called fascist.
[Commentary by Waistline]
Former president Donald Trump represents an oligarchic form of fascism while President Joe Biden represents a constitutional form of fascism. These two forms of fascism are based in the old slave oligarchy on the one hand and the rise of Wall Street imperialism.
The primary form of Oligarchic fascism remains extra-legal terrorist organizations, such as during the period of the overthrow of Reconstruction (KKK and Redeemer movement), and today organizations such as the Proud Boys. In the past as is the case today the Oligarchic fascists rely upon mass voter disenfranchisement, which ended up purging more white voters from the roles than blacks.
The Constitutional form of fascism, which grew up in the Anglo (northern) nation based on its bourgeois democratic norms, officially conforms to constitutional authority but relies upon the legal police state, police violence, national guards and the military authority to hold the working class in check. In the context of the specific form of Marxism that grew up in the Communist Labor Party, USA bourgeois democracy was a very reactionary bourgeois democracy based in control by intelligence, the FBI and Pinkerton men.
