Re: [Marxism] Gluckstein, Abraham, the Nazis and big business

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Einde O'Callaghan wrote:
>
> [clip]
>  From what I can gather there is nothing in Abraham to disagree with
> this analysis - I can't see anything in this account that is in major
> conflict with anything that Donny Gluckstein says in his book. Big
> capital turned to an existing fascist organisation after all possible
> "democratic" capitalist solutions to the crisis had failed.

There were fascist movements in quite a few nations in the 1920s or
1930s -- but only in Italy and Germany did fascist movements actually
achieve power. See the review of two books on fascism in the current
(Nov/Dec) NLR.

----

Dylan Riley on Michael Mann, Fascists and Robert Paxton, Anatomy of
Fascism. Alternative versions of the rise of a paramilitary Right in
interwar Europe: were fascist movements ideologically coherent or
inchoate, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary?

DYLAN RILEY

ENIGMAS OF FASCISM

-------

I haven't been able to make a very useful set of extracts from Riley's
review, but perhaps his last three paragraphs will give some sense of
it.

*****
While Paxton's Anatomy provides an admirable overview of the respective
trajectories of Italian and German fascism, one fundamental dimension of
the 'epoch of fascism' is nevertheless missing from it, as it is also
from Mann's Fascists. There is no discussion in either work of
imperialism. Yet mass industrial warfare was at once a decisive
condition and consequence of fascist movements and regimes. As Paxton
writes, 'War played a circular role in fascist regimes. Early fascist
movements were rooted in an exaltation of violence sharpened by World
War i, and war-making proved essential to the cohesion, discipline, and
explosive energy of fascist regimes'. But neither he nor Mann explains
where early twentieth-century war came from. Mann has tackled the
origins of the Great War in the second volume of his Sources of Social
Power, while Paxton has shown how crucial considerations of overseas
empire were to the calculus of power in Vichy France. But, although
Paxton rightly stresses the location of fascism in the defeated or
frustrated powers of 1918, the overall context of inter-state
competition-obviously as fundamental in the outbreak of the Second World
War as the First-plays little role in either author's explanation of
fascism.

This failing has a common effect on the conclusion of both books. For,
after so many differences, they end in complete agreement that anything
like historic fascism is impossible in the advanced capitalist world
today, because of the basic solidity of liberal democracy in this
region. Each then looks outside the capitalist core in search of the
closest analogies to interwar fascism. If Latin America, the former
Soviet bloc, Central or Southern Asia appear to offer the most
favourable terrain for any future fascism, both Mann and Paxton take a
measured and sceptical view of its chances of revival even there. These
judgements are persuasive enough. But neither writer quite explains why
it should be so, for both fail-at any rate here-to register the
fundamental geopolitical differences between the contemporary period and
the fascist epoch. Historical fascism arose in an age of imperialism and
revolution, in which capital and the nation-state were symbiotic
structures; the fragmentation of the world market after 1914, amidst a
general turn toward protectionism, autarky and militarism, paved the way
not only for extreme forms of violent nationalism but also the Great
Depression.

But as often pointed out in the pages of this journal, most recently by
Giovanni Arrighi, since 1945 the basic political economy of the
capitalist world has differed profoundly from that of the interwar
period. Market integration and monocentric empire, rather than autarky
and plural imperialisms, now characterize the advanced capitalist zone.
There is no contemporary counterpart to the armaments race between
competing capitalist powers, or pressure to incorporate restive masses
through extreme nationalism, of the first half of the twentieth century.
What about the semi-periphery, which both Mann and Paxton identify as
the most likely breeding-grounds for new forms of fascism? In these
regions, especially the Indian subcontinent, a situation of roughly
balanced nation-states and geopolitical competition suggests some
analogies to the thirties. What is missing, however, is any threat from
a radicalized working class or peasantry. In India the bjp rose to power
instead through a political vacuum created by the erosion of Congress,
in the context of a global triumph of neoliberalism. In the end the
story is perhaps simpler than either Paxton or Mann would lead us to
believe. For it is the sway of the United States in both the capitalist
core and the semi-periphery that has removed any proximate possibility
of a return of fascism, both by eliminating the threat of a society
beyond capital, and by re-organizing relations among the capitalist
powers themselves on strictly pacific lines. How long the Pax Americana
will last is a more open question.
******

As the literature on inter-war fascist movements grows, it becomes
clearer and clearer that there are numerous quite different threats, in
different capitalist nations, to capitalist democracy, and that it is a
serious error to simply call all authoritarian threats "fascist."
Different threats require different strategies of resistance. Bush is
not a fascist just as tuberculosis is not leukemia. To respond to Bush
as a fascist threat is like treating treating a case of leukemia with
anti-biotics.

Carrol


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