What is the definition of fascism?

[Cobbles]

Cobblers, your basic problem is that you're only looking at the end result of the two totalising systems (repression, misery, death) instead of how those systems are constructed.

......both constructed the same way - e.g. take one self perpetuating clique, prop it up with a decent secret police and embellish the whole crock with some made-up politico-babble that lets the average prole think that by brown-nosing hard enough and agreeing publicly with the drivel they're fed, they'll end up with a seat at the top table.

 

[ViolentPanda]

So, are BA or PM going to give us a reason why the cold-war communist regimes can't be descibes as fascist, other than sust saying it's stupid?

If it's stupid then please say WHY.

1) I can't think of any "Communist" regime that was corporatist.
2) Although "Communist" regimes had limited participation in world capitalism (preferring bi- and multi-lateral trade agreements where possible), they didn't engage fully with it, whereas fascisms invariably do/have accommodated capital.
3) Most "Communist" regimes were overtly anti-nationalist (China perhaps being an exception).

 

[Rod Sleeves]

1) I can't think of any "Communist" regime that was corporatist.
.

China? Is not was.

 

[kyser_soze]

Not with regards to the basic relationship between individual and private property. Under the fash you wouldn't have had your home collectivised (unless you were a social undesireable); in the USSR, PRC etc you weren't allowed to own your home, land, factories etc.

Basically, you'd have been happy to live under the fascists because they'd allow you to pretty much continue on with your life as before - own a home, drive a car, buy whatever you're told to, never look beyond your nose at the world around you. Under the communists, you'd have been fucked.

Again, you're mistaking the external appearance being the same as the interior. There are a remarkable number of similarities between the two - no surprise, they were both authoritarian regimes, and that kind of regime will have some basic requirements in order to function. The model for despotism has been around milllenia, it's not like they offered anything really new in authoritarianism...

I understand why you're making this mistake tho - to the person on the end of a visit from the secret police, whether it's the state or a capitalist who owns the means of production is a bit of a moot point.

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

No they're not. Do you think nazism was imposed against the will of the masses?

Well, when I said the "masses" I was originally going to write about the fascist disdain for "democracy" but thought better of it because democracy itself is not without faults - 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner etc.

However, Nazism specifically wasnt desired by the majority, Hitler needed a coalition in 33 and had to pull off a false flag to ban the popular communists as well you know.

Neither did Franco get in with the masses on side, he couldnt have done it without the church, foreign support, large sections of the bourgoise and some spectacular fuckery by Stalin and his clowns.

not so sure about Il Duces rise to power, but I bet it was massively opposed too.

Anyway, I found this interesting quote from Orwell which kind of backs me up in theory at least:

In the long run--it is important to remember that it is only in the long run--the working class remains the most reliable enemy of Fascism, simply because the working-class stands to gain most by a decent reconstruction of society.
Unlike other classes or categories, it can't be permanently bribed.


http://www.george-orwell.org/Looking_Back_On_The_Spanish_War/0.html

 

[ViolentPanda]

Yes it can.

Moseley – Chesterton – Tyndall – Griffin

Except that the "lineage" is nowhere near that simple, and there were/are severe doctrinal differences between each of them.

 

[Idris2002]

Chew on this: could a Gorbachev figure have emerged in the Third Reich?

 

[JimW]

China? Is not was.

I've said on here before that I think Unger and Chan are on to something with their idea of an emerging East Asian corporatism in reform-era China, but part of what that tells you is that it was in no way a fascist state during the collective era - Mao wasn't a blood-and-soil nationalist (famous for not really giving a shit about national territorial integrity etc) and the way the 'mass line' was implemented in the campaigns of the Maoist era - the willingness to unleash popular forces with minimal direction or just a few goals - seems not to fit with the kind of orchestration I think characterises fascism. The constructers of today's maybe-corporatist model were (on one take) the bourgeois nationalists (Deng was purged a couple of times as a capitalist roader - not wrong, were they?) who'd crept into the Party when it was the winning ticket in the civil war and bided their time until Mao died to launch their coup and institute counter-revolution.
The anti-communists imagine that the 49-79 period is some dark nightmare, whereas from one still commonly-held Chinese point of view it saw year-on-year economic growth despite a few wrong turns, a dramatic drop in the death rate, doubling of life expectancy, hitherto-unknown security for millions of rural people previously landless and living it uttermost precarity including healthcare provision and schooling, national independence secured and imperialist depredations ended for good, an honourable role as selfless internationalists in Africa and supporting the Vietnamese despite traditional enmity etc etc.

 

[ViolentPanda]

As it is so hard to define fascism is it not silly to accuse Nick Griffin of being a fascist?

I thought from history that Hitler was a nazi and Mussolini a fascist.

Fascism isn't a unitary concept. There isn't a fascism, there are many fascisms, all shaped around the particular social, political and economic constructions of each state that a fascism emerges in.

 

[kyser_soze]

Chew on this: could a Gorbachev figure have emerged in the Third Reich?

Impossible hypothesis - we don't know what the 3rd Reich would have looked like 40/50 years on. In 1945 Soviet Russia, could you have said that a Gorby would arise? Hell, even a Kruschev?

 

[JimW]

Quick source to back up the assertion that that's how many Chinese people look back at those days:

Dongping Han's The Unknown Cultural Revolution challenges the established narrative of China's Cultural Revolution, which assumes that this period of great social upheaval led to economic disaster, the persecution of intellectuals and senseless violence, and for this reason the book makes a great companion piece to Mobo Gao's The Battle for China's Past and Paul Clark's The Chinese Cultural Revolution - both of which I reviewed here on this site last year.

While Clark focusses on creativity and innovation in the arts, Dongping Han offers instead a powerful account of the dramatic improvements in the living conditions, infrastructure, and agricultural practices of China's rural population that emerged during this period. Drawing on extensive local interviews and records in rural Jimo County, in Shandong Province, Han shows that the Cultural Revolution helped overthrow local hierarchies, establish participatory democracy and economic planning in the communes and expanded education and public services. The political convulsions of the Cultural Revolution "democratized village political culture and spurred the growth of rural education," writes Han, "leading to substantial and rapid economic development." (p.1)

According to Han, ordinary villagers, "being at the very bottom of the Chinese social hierarchy," were "accustomed to oppression and abuse." (p.18) Abuse and corruption during the years immediately following the coming to power of the Chinese Communist Party "took place in rural China not only because the laws and regulations banning abuses of power and corruption were insufficient," but also because "the common people did not know how, or were not predisposed, to use the existing laws and regulations to fight corrupt and abusive officials. In order to empower ordinary villagers it was necessary to transform their political culture of submissiveness and to increase both literacy and political awareness." (p.19)

The Chinese Communist Party also inherited the legacy of pre-1949 policies that had financed urban education at the expense of the countryside. "While the Communists had denounced the social injustices inherent in this educational system when they were in opposition," notes Han, "once in power, CCP officials began to entrench themselves and their families in urban areas and began to see the existing educational inequality in a different light." (p.23) Without appropriate supervision from the people, adds Han, "the Party bosses at all levels possessed the human tendency to become arrogant and corrupt." (p.49)

The Cultural Revolution then, insists Han, was launched by Mao with the aim of empowering the masses so as to prevent the Party from being transformed into a corrupt institution under bourgeois control. "China's pre-Cultural Revolution political culture had provided fertile soil for the growth of tuhuangdi (local emperors)," says Han, pointing out that former rebel leaders in Jimo County like Lan Chengwu and Wang Sibo at the time viewed the Cultural Revolution as something that had been introduced by Mao "because he wanted to cultivate a more democratic political culture in order to eradicate the tuhuangdi phenomenon." (p.55)

http://chinabookreviews.weebly.com/...nown-cultural-revolution-by-han-dongping.html

 

[ViolentPanda]

Both effectively ended up with it. If you belive that the business owners in Germany had the option of reacting against the Nazi party you are very deluded. One may have been written into the system, the other was due to the effetive situation. There was NO DIFFERENCE in the end. Your tiresome arguement about state ownership is not changing anything about the comparison about authoritarianism versus fascism. I still contend that both regimes were fascist because they were authoritarian, putting the regime's existance well beyond that of it's populace and willing to sacrice the co-existance of their neighbours.

Mike, I suggest you read Adam Tooze's "The Wages of Destruction", and when you've done so, use the book to beat yourself around the head for being such a twat as to argue that German business owners had no choice.
The truth, as any moderately-informed person knows, is that without the active participation of independent business in bringing the Nazis to power and keeping them there, Hitler wouldn't have troubled the world.
As for reacting, if any of the large combines had shown that they had no confidence in a Nazi dictatorship, that dictatorship would have had great difficulties in retaining the degree of power they had, but as it was the two concerns fed one off the other.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Danny - you're flattering me by suggesting I'll read three books about anything but I'll be sure to put Kee's trilogy on my, err, list.



Unless there's some sort of missing word in that paragraph, I think you may be barking up the wrong tree. Nationalities and languages policies in Central Asia, university and employment quotas, deportations of the Estonians, Chechens, Ingush, Russocentric policies etc. And I may be missing the point in how prohibiting Jews' employment in certain jobs fights racism and nationalism.

But I may be missing the point entirely here. Am I? It wouldn't be the first time.

You say "Russo-centrism", and I agree that if we look back, it appears that "Russo-centrism" was in play, but the idea behind a unitary culture and language was originally and specifically anti-nationalist. That it later congealed into "Russo-centrism" may well have been inevitable, but it wasn't originally intended.
As for the point about Jews, the Tsarist empire prohibited us from some of the professions and trades, disallowed us from owning property in most of the empire, stigmatised our places of worship and turned a blind eye to the frequent indulgence of racist murderousness by Christians on Jews within the empire. The Soviet Union dissolved the legislation, treated pogroms and religio-culturally motivated attacks as cases of violence and murder rather than tolerating them, and treated Jews as well or as badly as any other citizen of the Soviet Union. If we died in the Soviet Union, the reason was vary rarely anything to do with being a Jew, which couldn't be said during Tsarism. Even when hundreds of thousands of us died in the famines, it was because we were Ukrainians, not because we were Jews.

 

[ViolentPanda]

China? Is not was.

Well, I'd argue that they're quasi-corporatist rather than fully so, in that it could be said that the Chinese "Communist" regime created (and in some cases exercises control over) Chinese corporate activity.

 

[audiotech]

You'r comment of "some will always be more equal than others" does not explain how that situation comes about. I would suggest that there is a an equal Darwinian process to rise to that point. In this respect the regimes are equal.

Corruption brings it about.

So Lenin took the Darwinian approach? Stalin also? Mikhail Gorbachev even?

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

A friend of a friend works for one of the Green MSPs and happened (god knows how) to have a conversation with the Cyclops Fuhrer. Although he is a climate change denier, he thinks they will be in power in the 2020s because of peak oil.

 

[butchersapron]

You're an idiot - fuck off.

 

[JWH]

Chew on this: could a Gorbachev figure have emerged in the Third Reich?

Yeah, sure, why not? You just need someone that's a true believer in fascism but also a bit pragmatic and doesn't like the more flamboyant excesses and doesn't have the popular touch.

You say "Russo-centrism"...but the idea behind a unitary culture and language was originally and specifically anti-nationalist....

The Soviet Union...treated Jews as well or as badly as any other citizen of the Soviet Union. If we died in the Soviet Union, the reason was vary rarely anything to do with being a Jew

I'm sorry, but this is complete and utter nonsense. This "unitary language and culture" suggestion is an invention - there was no intent to develop some kind of Communist lingua franca that just "went wrong" or anything like it. Ostensible Soviet policy throughout was to respect and encourage the development of the hundreds (dozens?) of languages and nationalities within the USSR; actual policy was Russian control and cultural dominance everywhere (Stalin himself being a massive Great Russian bigot, despite the obvious flaw in that...), with just enough tokenism and divide-and-rule locally to keep minority populations from getting any great ideas.

Similarly - the idea that Jews suffered only as much as anyone else in the Soviet Union is laughable when a great number of them were imprisoned and/or killed qua Jews.

 

[Pickman's model]

it is easy enough to explain why the sky is blue. a workable definition of fascism is rather more difficult to arrive at due to the numerous fascisms there have been. as is clear from this thread, there's widespread confusion about what fascism is, even to the basics, which is obvious from the shitfer fuckwittery about communist states being fascist.

even within the british experience fascism can mean a number of things, from the outright nazism to the international third position and national anarchism.

however, there are some features common to many fascisms. for example, rather than coming from conservatism fascism springs from, and is attractive to, the left-wing. it is populist. it is nationalist, seeing the nation as degenerate and in need of renewal. the party is the agency of this renewal, with the leader awarded a special position, whether that leader is franco, hitler, mussolini or griffin. within the party there will be a wide range of opinion and factions - it is not a communist party, where everyone is singing from the same texts, but a much broader church. there is something within fascism for everyone, the very vagueness of its political programme allowing its vehicle to be all things to all men. the body plays a special place within fascism, with the mens sano in corpore sano taken to extremes. a twisted view of history is engaged to prove the degeneration of the nation, and to justify the means by which the party will remedy the situation. an other, or various others will be deployed to unite against. fascist parties often thrive on an anti-party party image, like the bnp's (self-)perception.

i did think someone would have taken issue with some or all of this.

although i have seen some people posting up bits which i've said in here as though they were in some way introducing a new point.

 

[Hadjibashi]

Well, when I said the "masses" I was originally going to write about the fascist disdain for "democracy" but thought better of it because democracy itself is not without faults - 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner etc.

However, Nazism specifically wasnt desired by the majority, Hitler needed a coalition in 33 and had to pull off a false flag to ban the popular communists as well you know.

Neither did Franco get in with the masses on side, he couldnt have done it without the church, foreign support, large sections of the bourgoise and some spectacular fuckery by Stalin and his clowns.

not so sure about Il Duces rise to power, but I bet it was massively opposed too.

Anyway, I found this interesting quote from Orwell which kind of backs me up in theory at least:

In the long run--it is important to remember that it is only in the long run--the working class remains the most reliable enemy of Fascism, simply because the working-class stands to gain most by a decent reconstruction of society.
Unlike other classes or categories, it can't be permanently bribed.


http://www.george-orwell.org/Looking_Back_On_The_Spanish_War/0.html

You're mental.

 

[JWH]

made-up politico-babble that lets the average prole think that by brown-nosing hard enough and agreeing publicly with the drivel they're fed, they'll end up with a seat at the top table.

I don't think that social mobility was a big theme of fascism or Communism.

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

You're an idiot - fuck off.

What was idiotic of me was posting that comment about NG on the wrong thread. I meant to put it on the one about the his party getting power in this country

What would be idiotic of you would be to suppose that very many of your points will make it through the thick fog of bitter arrogance which pollutes your posts.

 

[Pickman's model]

What was idiotic of me was posting that comment about NG on the wrong thread.

yeh that is pretty fucking daft

 

[butchersapron]

What was idiotic of me was posting that comment about NG on the wrong thread. I meant to put it on the one about the his party getting power in this country

What would be idiotic of you would be to suppose that very many of your points will make it through the thick fog of bitter arrogance which pollutes your posts.

I think they get through - you loon.

 

[durruti02]

no time now

But they do both smash the w/c's organisations. Not starting from the same point, not with the same ends, but smash the w/c they do.

This is all missing the point in the here and now anyway, which is - what is fascism and how if it manifests itself should it be countered. AFAIK we don't have stalinism to deal with, making much of this thread one of historical interest only

yes agree but to me the issue is clear .. the BNP is fulfilling the role of a 'fascist' party in 2009 BUT for those who try to oppose it by identyfing it with historic fascism, they will fail as they have missed the point .. fascism in 2009 can easily be anti-nazi (as in the 'foreign' german nsdap) , pro-israel, conservative (not futurist), isolationist not expansionist .. to attack it on the basis that it shares the same identifiers as something decades ago is nonsense and fails

and it is also key that the destruction of fascism comes from understanding its role within capital and the state. fascism is destroyed ( in the w/c ) by creating a sustainable popular progressive alternative ( or by other forms of capital aborting it!)

 

[Cobbles]

I don't think that social mobility was a big theme of fascism or Communism.

Like I said - you let the proles think that they can get ahead (e.g. if they spout enough nonsense at local committee meetings, then they might score an apartment with a heater or a nicer uniform with sparkly epaulettes). You don't actually let them rise above their station, though.

 

[JWH]

Like I said - you let the proles think that they can get ahead (e.g. if they spout enough nonsense at local committee meetings, then they might score an apartment with a heater or a nicer uniform with sparkly epaulettes).

I'm sceptical. Can you give any sort of source or reference that suggests this or demonstrates it in action (propaganda etc)? Social mobility is a huge claim in capitalism, of course, and easy to find. I mean, the American Dream is exactly that.

 

[Cobbles]

I'm sceptical. Can you give any sort of source or reference that suggests this or demonstrates it in action (propaganda etc)? Social mobility is a huge claim in capitalism, of course, and easy to find. I mean, the American Dream is exactly that.

http://www.answers.com/topic/apparatchik

Definition of apparatchik:

"Like other terms deriving from the USSR such as nomenklatura (list of important positions to be filled by people from the party), apparatchik is always used pejoratively. It suggests a bureaucrat who willingly follows and implements the party line, either in a spirit of blind obedience or one of cynical ambition."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union

"Membership in the party ultimately became a privilege, with a small subset of the general population of Party becoming an elite class or nomenklatura in Soviet society. Nomenklatura enjoyed many perquisites denied to the average Soviet citizen. Among those perks were shopping at well-stocked stores, access to foreign merchandise, preference in obtaining housing, access to dachas and holiday resorts, being allowed to travel abroad, sending their children to prestigious universities, and obtaining prestigious jobs (as well as party membership itself) for their kpss children. It became virtually impossible to join the Soviet ruling and managing elite without being a member of the Communist Party."

There was less kudos in being a local organiser for the Nazis, although as you climbed the ranks towards Gauleiter, you did tend to get a better dagger.

During the same period in the UK and USA, membership of the ruling party only tended to confer a temporary benefit as the ruling party changed like a revolving door, depositing ex ministerial non-executive directors in its wake.