Deleuze-Guattari

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Harry Cleaver:
> Your characterization of fascism as "a mass movement of the
>petty-bourgeoisie that seeks to destroy all vestiges of the working-class
>movement" certainly grasps some aspects of that pheonmenon. But except for
>reminding people that it IS anti-working class, I don't think it is very
>helpful. I don't find the concept of "petty-bourgeoisie" helpful at all,
>but even if it did denote some meaningfully distinct group, the label
>doesn't help us understand what was going on in the genesis of fascism.
>You say D&G's discussion of "how it came about" is superficial, but you
>offer no alternative. Defining it doesn't explain its genesis.
>

Louis Proyect:
The genesis of fascism? Do you mean where Hitler got his ideas, or do you
mean how these ideas gathered a mass following? The first question does not
exactly interest me. I imagine that you could find the strands of "Mein
Kampf" in German nationalist and racialist ideology going back to the late
19th century, just as you could have traced Father Coughlin's ideas back to
some of the more retrograde aspects of the American Populist movement and
Catholic theology.

The important question for Marxists is why these irrational ideologies get
a mass following. I explain this in terms of economic crisis. Fascism
arises at a time when there is great unemployment and/or hyperinflation and
in societies that have a rather well-developed working-class movement, such
as Italy, Spain and Germany. The fascist movement gains a middle-class base
because it stresses a "national socialism", one that rises above the class
antagonisms of Bolshevism. This message has an enormous appeal to the
shopkeeper and farmer, who were ruined by the capitalist class and
inconvenienced by working-class militancy. A mobilized middle-class and
lumpen-proletariat is financed and supported by the big bourgeoisie through
the back-door. This mass movement attacks the trade unions and left parties
until the workers are defeated. The regime that arises out of this violent
struggle soon cuts its ties to the middle-class mass movement. This is a
historical materialist presentation of the rise of fascism which I find
useful. I can of course fill in the details, if you'd like.

>What D&G are trying to theorize is precisely the emergence of that body of
>behaviors and policies that we call fascism. They are offering a
>formulation which interconnects what's going on at the "molecular level",
>i.e., with individuals, families, schools, etc., and the emergence of a
>social movement. This seems to me to be exactly what is required to
>understand how fascism came about as such a devastatingly destructive
>social force.

What happens at the "molecular level" is largely secondary. For example,
you can study the psychology of a fascist and make all sorts of interesting
observations about the authoritarian personality, sexual repression, etc.
Reich did a nice job on this. But the important question is how fascism as
a *movement* arises. We have to use the same criteria as we do in
understanding any other social or political mass movement. For example, I
find it useful to understand black nationalism in terms of the rise of a
black proletariat in the northern states, the impact of imperialist war on
the rising expectations of returning black GI's, etc.

 What came together in 1789, in 1848, in 1870, in 1905, in
>1910, in 1917 and so on in such a way as to explode? We can perhaps find
>limits to D&G's analysis, but what they are offering, it seems to me, is
>exactly the KIND of analysis we need. In comparison, to return to the
>earlier point, HM comments about contraditions between base and
>superstructure strike me as rather empty formalisms.
>

I find Trotsky's analysis of 1905 and 1917 quite useful myself. It is that
old moldy fig historical materialism once again, but a rather adroit
application of the method if I say so myself. Trotsky explained these
revolutionary upsurges in terms of the impact of imperialist war, among
other factors. (Imperialist war has a way of focusing one's attention in a
rather dramatic fashion, as my memories of 1967 draft notices come back to
me.) The other important factors were hunger and poverty. The explanation
for hunger and poverty is that the Russian ruling class spent everything on
guns and not butter. So the combination of four years of trench warfare,
strike-breaking, police repression and rural deprivation made socialism
seem like a good idea to millions of suffering Russians. I regret that this
lacks philosophical profundity, but it sort of makes sense to me.

>
> "Domination" is certainly a useful term, but it implies precisely
>the limitation and perversion of desire in all its forms. This is another
>way of talking about living labor --which in Marx appears as a moment
>of kind of primordial life force-- which is "dominated" by capital, i.e.,
>limited, constrained, alienated, used as a vehicle of social control
>instead of being a form of self-realization. The term "desire", like the
>generic term "self-valorization" draws our attention to our own being
>for-itself beyond being which-resists-capital.
>

Okay, domination...desire. You say tomatoes; I say tomahtoes.

>What they [Deleuze-Negri]  are talking
>about here is the development of the working class subject, or
>subjectivities, i.e., self-deterimining, self-directed being for-itself,
>which not only reacts to domination and exploitation but affirms itself.

I can't argue with the above. It is a philosophical statement and utterly
harmless.