Reply #33: I just reread "The Nature of Fascism" [View All]

[banana republican]

It was a compendium from a seminar held at Reading University in 1967 during the height of the Viet Nam War. Some of the quites are very telling:

Let us begin with a model that encompasses the major patterns that bring fascist systems into existence. Three patterns seem to characterize the period preceding the fascist power takeover:
1) Clearly detectable, long-range, rapid economic growth;
2) Large scale social mobilization with a heavy component of rural to city migration;
3) Vast and rapid political mobilization, particularly acute just before the fascist take power. This is understandable, because the fascist party is a form of mobilization in response to the mobilization of others, and fascist mobilization in turn triggers off a heightened mobilization of other political movements.

<snip>

The idea of class equilibrium within an imperialist economy sums up, in my opinion, the basic political conditions for the birth of fascism as a political system. This equilibrium is typified by a ruling class unable to settle the crisis by ordinary means and a working class unable to bring about a socialist revolution. That was the position of Italy at the beginning of 1920 and in Germany after the great crisis of 1929. the labor movement frightened the ruling class but was incapable of changing the existing order in any way. This situation drastically increased class conflicts, and particularly affected the middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie, crushed between monopolistic capitalism and the prospect of a socialist revolution which they found deeply repugnant.

<snip>

Fascism is therefore unstable and of brief duration. For the distribution of power that permits fascism to come to power is overturned as the modern sector is permitted to continue growing, and once it is no longer weaker it will no longer accept a secondary position in the society or constraints that prevent it from tapping the unused resources of the traditional sector. In view of the position of the society when fascism comes to power this period is relatively brief. It is unlikely that fascism will outlive its original leader.

<snip>

In conclusion fascism is part of the process of transition from a limited participation to a mass system, and, fascism is a last ditch stand by the elites, both modern and traditional, to prevent the expansion of a system over which they exercise hegemony. The attempt always fails and in some ways the fascist system merely postpones some of the effects it seeks to prevent.

The Nature of Fascism
Edited by S.J Woolf
Random House, New York, NY
1968