Comments on Fascism and "Functional Substitutes" for Fascism

Achin Vanaik's theory of fascism, ably articulated in his "Situating the Threat of Hindu Communalism: Problems with the Fascist Paradigm,"¹ and in his "Reply to Pizzo," [above] includes structural conditions, i.e. a profound crisis of capitalism — in the classical case, the one that decimated inter-war Europe — on the one hand, and on the other, all manner of conjunctural conditions associated with a particular period of history not easily replicable in others.

The conjunctural conditions in which fascism arose in inter-war Europe include a strong working class movement, inter-imperialist rivalries for geopolitical hegemony of the world (in which conditions it is hard to see why emergency surgery to save global capitalism would emerge from any particular national bloc; why wouldn't they destroy each other, even at the expense of further accumulation?), not to mention strong petit-bourgeois mass movements. They also include, perhaps not explicitly, particular socio-cultural tectonics which were surely unique to Germany or Italy (taking only the obvious examples) and produced within a broad type of reaction very specific forms, all of which are now thrown together under the category of fascism. If all of the above are required, then one is not sure how much purchase a theory of fascism has.

That is, the theory assumes: (i) a structural condition of crisis in capitalism that repeats itself from time to time; (ii) class contradictions that flow from the structural condition; and (iii) their resolution via class struggles and the victory of the personifications of capital and the more or less decisive defeat of the working class, the structural antagonists of capital. But, if Vanaik's description of the conditions — structural and conjunctural — in which fascism arose is right, then it is better seen as a moment in world-historical time, coincident with what Perry Anderson calls "modernity,"² in which political conflict is shaped not merely by the crisis of accumulation (though that is almost certainly the most important element) but also by the confrontation of elements — ideological and socio-economic — uneasily poised between the remnants of the ancien régime and the new order of capital. If this is indeed the case, the historical circumstances that produced fascism are surely unrepeatable and in a later epoch other socio-political denouements can be imagined to "resolve" a capitalist crisis and restore the conditions for capital accumulation. That is, a Marxist "theory" of fascism that takes world-historical time seriously must conclude that fascism is a limited historical phenomenon.

Vanaik rightly disputes that fascism is repeatable under a wider range of historical circumstances, especially within the primarily "domestic" circumstances of the peripheral countries of the world system, leaving at least a theoretical possibility that global circumstances could see a resurgence of it within the core countries of capital. He might further argue that emergency surgery to save national capital does not qualify as fascism. Arguably, even on this ground, there could be serious problems of squaring the historical record. In Europe itself there was more than one kind of fascism: taking only the most obvious examples, a semi-peripheral kind as in Italy, in which what was being saved was a fairly ramshackle kind of capitalism with considerable survivals of the ancien régime as spelled out by Arno Mayer;³ a second kind as in Germany, corresponding to a more purely industrial economy, though here again it might be noted, as Pizzo does above, that the Nazi movement originated in the more agrarian south.

In the climate of the time, one might reasonably argue that both kinds of fascism arose as a result of a domestic impasse, fueled by local class contradictions, and arose to save accumulation in the national economy. Even if there were significant spillover effects across the European national divides, that might be regarded as an unintended consequence. And one might maintain, further, that there is no reason to presume that fascist attempts to restart the engines of capital accumulation were bound to succeed. Contra Trotsky, Bauer, and Thalheimer, there should be no presumption that an attempt, however radical, to resolve a very specific...