The Fascist Virus: Defeat

[navkat]

Wilhelm Reich's "The Mass Psychology of Facism" makes a very good case that Facism did not arise because of Marxism, but it arose when the Marxist revolution failed in the 1930s.

It's going on the list. I will not try to argue this with you until I've read that book.

[Cain]

Dave Renton's Fascism: Theory and Practice
Nigel Copsey's Contemporary British Fascism: The British National Party and the Quest for Legitimacy
Peter Davis and Derek Lynch's Routledge Companion to Fascism and the Far Right
Alexander J. De Grand's Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: The 'fascist' style of rule (2nd edition)
Lorna Waddington's Hitler's Crusade: Bolshevism and The Myth of the International Jewish Conspiracy
Cyprian P. Blamires et al's World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia
Philip Morgan's Fascism in Europe 1919-1945
David Neiwert's blog, Orcinus http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/

Some of the above texts might be available on http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks but its very possible the links will have expired.

[Cain]

Wilhelm Reich's "The Mass Psychology of Facism" makes a very good case that Facism did not arise because of Marxism, but it arose when the Marxist revolution failed in the 1930s.

Slavoj Zizek also made this case several times, going as far as to say that every successful Fascist revolution was a sign of a failed Communist revolution.

Which ties back into my whole point that fascism is a club that comes out to beat down on the revolutionary left when everything else fails (see the introductionary piece and next one for more on that).

[LMNO]

I also thought it was interesting that Reich correctly identified that the Soviet Union was no longer a communist state back in 1935.

[Cain]

Well, that varies on your definition.  I mean, if you want to focus on the Young Marx, then you can dismiss pretty much every Communist Party in the world, which is normally Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist or Maoist.  It very much turns into a heresy/true believer thing after a while, which is not helped by Marx's own prodigious output.  The work which has built from Marx over a century and a half makes that even worse.

Noticing things was seriously wrong, from the outside, is pretty impressive though.

[navkat]

I'm going to read the Reich book and if you could pick the best two or three off your list for me to start with, the ones where if you HAD to make your case...burning building, all that stuff?

[Cain]

Renton's, World Fascism and Orcinus.

[navkat]

Also: history aside, how do you define a nation whose Progressive ideals carries them into a state where (successful and efficient or not) many aspects of people's lives are governed by a system of punitive taxation or outright legislation that makes "unhealthy" choices either prohibitively expensive or prohibited altogether?

I'm not arguing, I'd just like to know what your side is. Is that not Totalitarianism? Is not Totalitarianism a sort of Fascist state?

[LMNO]

I'd call that a "stupid electorate", but that's just me.

[Cain]

Fascism is a form of totalitarianism, but totalitarianism is not always fascism.

Small diagram

                              Totalitarianism
                              /         |         \
                   Communism   Nazism     Phalangism

All of them are (arguably) totalitarian, but not a single one has a monopoly on the term.  I also say arguably because within both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, interest group-based social models work better, and I have read a good case for decentralized authoritarianism in China.

Given progressive is usually a name for Third Way politics (a mix between social democracy and neoliberalism) it would be very hard to envision a Progressive Totalitarian state.  It would have to collapse into something like Communism or like Fascism to make that transition, since becoming totalitarian (in terms of state terror, a controlled mass media, single party etc) would involve massive violation of their stated beliefs.

[Cain]

I also thought it was interesting that Reich correctly identified that the Soviet Union was no longer a communist state back in 1935.

I also found this interesting, in an interview I was reading of Zizek's:

It was typical in philosophy after World War II to evoke Nazism and the Holocaust as the most radical evil. You cannot comprehend it with any rational strategy. The idea is also that the experience of the Holocaust is something which undermines the entire traditional philosophy, which was basically the divine regulation, the idea that even if things appear thwarted, failed, and so on, ultimately, in some kind of rational totality, all of these tragedies are relativized as part of a harmonious project. It can be a divine plan; it can also be the development of humanity or whatever. The idea is that the Holocaust cannot be rationalized philosophically here.

Of course, I think that the Holocaust was horrific (my god, it is gross to even have to say that), but for me, Stalinism was even a greater philosophical problem than Nazism. For example, there is a basic difference between Stalinist and Nazi victim status, from a simple phenomenological approach. Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. You are guilty for who you are, you are a Jew, you are killed, that's it. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. Nonetheless, there is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.

BLVR: So your line of questioning is of the functioning of the system?

SŽ: Yes. Why this strange need to make them confess? And why the total absence of this in Fascism? In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being. The very fact that you had to confess makes Stalinism paradoxical and perverse. The idea is that, in a strange way, it admits that you are still a free human being, you had a choice. You are guilty, you have to confess. This does not make Stalinism cause any less suffering; nonetheless, this pure quarrel of radical objectivization, "You are a Jew, you are guilty for who you are," was absent in Stalinism. In a totally perverted, thwarted, and twisted way, some margin of human freedom was acknowledged under Stalin. So the result is that in Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.

BLVR: So your interest is not to forget Nazism, but to reexamine Stalinism.

SŽ: To put it in simplistic terms, Fascism is relatively easy to explain. It is a reactionary phenomenon. Nazism was some bad guys having some bad ideas and unfortunately succeeding in realizing them. In Stalinism the tragedy is that its origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. In the origins you had a kind of workers' uprising; the true enigma is how this project of emancipation went so wrong. This is a much greater enigma. The most representative orientation of Marxism in the twentieth century—critical theory of the Frankfurt school—obsessed over Fascism, anti-Semitism, and so on, and simply ignored the topic of Stalinism. Sure, there are a couple of small books, but there is no systematic theory of what Stalinism is. So for me, the key phenomenon to be accounted for in the twentieth century is Stalinism. Because again, Fascism is simple, conservative reaction going wrong. The true enigma is why Stalinism or communism went wrong.

BLVR: Any conclusions?

SŽ: It is very difficult; I am still working on it. My conclusions are not some kind of conservative or liberal vision according to which Stalinism should be pointed out as kind of a logical demonstration of any project of our so-called post-political era: the idea that the time for projects is over, all we can do is accept capitalist world-market economy, globalism, and so on. Today, whenever somebody tries to risk something politically, you immediately get, "Oh, didn't you learn the lesson from history, this will end up in Holocaust." This is the eternal topic of modern liberal-conservative skeptics, that the lesson of the twentieth century is that every radical attempt at social change ends up in mass murder. Their idea is a return to pragmatism, "Let's strictly distinguish politics from ethics, politics should be limited, pragmatic, only ethics can be absolute." What I aim at in my rethinking of all of these problems is precisely not to draw this conclusion.

[Cain]

I'd also like to state, for the record, that I got about 4 hours sleep last night, got up at 8am and its now 7pm in the evening.  If I am making mistakes, then that is why.

I will correct tomorrow.

[navkat]

I'd call that a "stupid electorate", but that's just me.

Well okay, since I did meant that as a consideration of fears of that happening here, let me explain:
The basis for the fear is a growing feeling of powerlessness and "Us vs Them" in our present government structure.

It seems (to me) that there is a growing trend of The People being "sold" on Legislative solutions to problems with
A. little regard to the big picture
B. too much "bloatware" contained in the actual legislation put in place to appease the representatives/members of government voting on it to be effective at all
C. such legislation only serves (intentional or not) to restrict the private sector and create more of a "market" for government bureaucracy to handle the new rules.

These pieces of legislation-once sold and passed-are usually damned-near impossible to repeal--even once the sales pitch wears off and buyer's remourse sets in, it's basically an uphill battle to wind back the clock because so many new departments, so many paycheques rely on them staying precisely where they are (Patriot act and Drug war, I'm looking at you).

This had led to more than a few of us having nothing but suspicion for any charismatic "Warshington-type" who shows up with a smile on his face and huge stack of "solutions" to our problems. This includes Ron Paul. This includes Obama and McCain and Bob Barr and basically anyone else who's doesn't have the balls to stand up and say "we're all full of shit but I got the majority of people in the House to sign this piece of paper swearing to outright abolish x, y, and z that isn't working and we don't give a good goddamn WHO we have to lay off."

Can you see why the tinfoil habberdashery somewhat?

[navkat]

I'm making mistakes too. I'm on chronic pain Rx, bear with me.

[LMNO]

I think it should be noted, however, that the so-called "free market" solutions have increased wage disparity and made the social/economic structure extremely fragile and vulnerable.