Re: Is Patrick Buchanan a fascist?

["Bryan A. Alexander" <bnalexan@xxxxxxxxx>]

There's a crucial point here, and one that our seminar has brought to the
fore: fascism is a strategic and systemic response to a capitalist crisis
(specifically, a combination of financial upsets and proletarian
challenges with significant strength).  Our current candidates -
Buchanan, the militias, Farrakhan - are all at best incipient fascists.



Bryan Alexander                                 Department of English
email: bnalexan@xxxxxxxxx                       University of Michigan
phone: (313) 764-0418                           Ann Arbor, MI  USA    48103
fax: (313) 763-3128                             http://www.umich.edu/~bnalexan

On Mon, 29 Jan 1996, Louis N Proyect wrote:

> On Mon, 29 Jan 1996 ROSSERJB@xxxxxxx wrote:
>
> >      Sorry to be so Americo-centric, but I am wondering
> > what people out there think about the politics of Patrick
> > Buchanan?  Is he a fascist, a crypto-fascist, or what?
>
> Louis: No, he is an ordinary garden-variety ultrarightist. Fascism is
> only a meaningful category when capitalism is in deep crisis and requires
> a violent mass-movement of the petty-bourgeoisie to defend itself.
>
> Joe McCarthy was not a fascist either. In a week or two, I am going to
> report on some fascinating discussions that took place in American
> Trotskyism in the early 1950's that attempted to come to grips with this
> question. They reached a mistaken conclusion that McCarthy was a fascist
> because they weren't able to see American politics in a framework
> different from the 1920s and 1930s.
>
> We must not make the same mistake. We are not living in a period of
> capitalist crisis. The period we are in has much more of an analogy to
> the gilded age of the late 1800s. The 1950s and 1960s were an exceptional
> time for the working-class. They enjoyed upward mobility.
>
> That period is no longer with us. We are living in a period of rising
> class tensions. That has led some radicals to view things
> apocalyptically. They view the militias and Louis Farrakhan through the
> prism of Mussolini and Hitler. This is a mistake.
>
> This does not mean that major apocalyptic battles are not coming at some
> future time. They will. But we will screw up if we don't know what time
> it is on the class-struggle clock.
>
>
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>


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