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  • "Functional Substitutes for Fascism" in the Era of Globalization:Reply to Pizzo
  • Achin Vanaik

In welcoming David Pizzo's critique of my views on fascism I am not simply engaging in a formal courtesy.1 For I discern in that critique a motive and purpose that I respect and appreciate and which stands in striking contrast to the way in which most Indian Marxists have dealt with the issue of fascism here. The latter have treated the issue of fascism in third world countries in an utterly unproblematic manner. The history of actually existing fascisms in inter-war Europe has been "raided" at various levels — cultural, political, economic (sometimes with considerable sophistication affording illuminating but partial insights) — to justify fascist characterizations in India. The number of Indian Marxist intellectuals who have been troubled by the idea that this might constitute a serious theoretical departure from classical understandings of Marxism can barely be counted on the fingers of one hand.

But then, the starting point for their own Marxist theorizations is not the classical tradition represented by the likes of Trotsky, Bauer, Thalheimer but the understandings of fascism propagated by the Stalinist Comintern from 1924 onwards, with the 1928 thesis plus amendments in the 1935 Congress, constituting their basic pole of reference. Gramsci has been appropriated by Indian sympathizers, supporters and apologists of Stalinism and Maoism for his specific insights into the character of Italian fascism and his general insights into the cultural-ideological dimension of fascism but without using him to directly challenge that Comintern theoretical tradition. Though Trotsky is the single most important reference point in the classical Marxist tradition for an understanding of fascism, he is effectively ignored (when not excoriated) by most such Indian Marxists. Such Marxists, unconcerned as they are by the need for reassessing or revisiting that classical tradition, when talking about Indian fascism do not for the most part qualify their characterization by talking of "neo-fascism" or "semi-fascism" or of "functional substitutes for fascism." With great confidence and self-assurance they talk simply of fascism and the "fascist threat" in India.

In refreshing contrast, Pizzo is much more circumspect and perfectly willing to emphasize the significance of the differences between such "third world fascism" and "classical fascism" rooted in the study of metropolitan fascism by using such qualified nomenclatural forms even as he insists that commonalities justify their emplacement within a wider, more universal and general theory of fascism. Moreover, fully conscious of the need to develop Marxist theorizations of fascism to suit our times, Pizzo self-consciously tries to do just that. He recognizes that there is a theoretical problem and seeks to address it. This is something that I can only endorse and welcome and wish others, especially Indian Marxists, [End Page 115] would emulate.

I have many points of both agreement and disagreement with Pizzo but I will not try to explore all or even most of these. Instead, I will isolate what I believe to be the most fundamental points of difference so that contrasting perspectives in theorizing fascism, even among Marxists, can be clearly posed. It is not quite accurate to claim as Pizzo does, that I have relegated the "fascist situation" to the museum of history, or that I believe fascism is a phenomenon "that only applies to a narrow set of events in one place during one brief period." Even for classical Marxism, fascism was seen as a recurring possibility, i.e. capable of temporal extension. Both in chapter five of my book and in the introductory chapter one, I acknowledge this point and pronounce myself agnostic but skeptical about the possibility of such temporal extension. But I am not categorical in ruling out the possibility of such fascist recurrence in the capitalism of our times precisely because I have great respect for the power of that classical tradition of Marxism which believed in this recurrent possibility.

Pizzo is certainly correct in stating that my central point of reference in discussing the contemporary relevance of fascism is that tradition. But also because of my respect for the explanatory power of that tradition I do categorically rule out any spatial extension of the applicability of the...

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