A Continuing Discussion on Fascism, Globalization, and the "Third World"

And the May 1968 events in France were only a prelude. Only if this wave should recede into failure, and if the disappointment of the younger generation should coincide with an upset in the economy, would fascism, in turn, have some chance of success.

Ernest Mandel, 1969¹

I want to begin my answer to "Reply to Pizzo" by thanking Achin Vanaik again for taking seriously this ongoing dialogue on the issues of fascism and "globalization." While it is clear that we differ on many issues, our exchange has been enormously fruitful for me in thinking about a problem that has far more significance than mere academic banter. Far too often, I feel that the debates about "globalization" both in the media and in the academy itself have been completely de-historicized and, indeed, almost entirely divorced form the realities of "The New Barbarism" that has come to characterize our world.² Drawing on his own work and on the most useful elements of Trotsky's Marxian theories of fascism, Vanaik has presented us with conceptual models and points of departure that avoid both of these intellectual pitfalls.

I feel I have a vast amount of intellectual terrain that I must cover in response to Vanaik's detailed comments, so I will therefore apologize in advance for keeping my points and the amount of empirical support I provide very brief. But as I said, I view this as an ongoing conversation that would profit enormously from the input of other scholars, and as such my claims are merely intended to stimulate further discussion among those willing to approach a topical issue that itself has been relegated to the "museum of history."

In my "The Museumization of Fascism"³ I attempted to highlight and explicate what I view as a "functional substitute for fascism" in the post-1945 era. I contend that the "recurring temptation of fascism" noted by Trotsky and Mandel must not only be examined in relation to events in the so-called Third World after de-colonization, but that this "recurrent fascism" must also be situated and understood in terms of the very real qualitative and quantitative changes that have occurred in the global economic, social, and political order since that time. It is certainly true that the "fascist situation" of the inter-war period was characterized by structural and conjunctural features dramatically different from the situation faced both locally and globally by post-war authoritarian movements and regimes and their professed targets. Fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s must be viewed spatially, structurally, and conceptually as products of their time and place. I would, however, argue that certain crucial features of the European fascist constellation remain viable and discernable in contexts other than inter-war Europe. The perceived need to liquidate organized opposition to the state and capital (at the time it was labor and the "red menace") violently and completely during a time of profound structural crisis has indeed arisen in other contexts, including in the "semicolonial countries."⁴ Regimes such as Chile under Pinochet and Indonesia under Suharto deployed massive amounts of repressive police and military force against all visible manifestations of the "communist threat," practically annihilating organized labor and other grassroots organizations within their borders. These civil wars and the radical "emergency surgery" that ended them were the result of deep contradictions and tensions in the global economy and more particularly inside the countries in question. Such internal "counterrevolutions from above"⁵ not only made use of the methods of the European fascist regimes and at times explicitly acknowledged their affinity and debt to them, they also aimed to save the crucial sinews and structures of accumulation in an even more naked way than their fascist predecessors. Furthermore, this radical surgery to save elite structures of political and economic power enjoyed even more material and ideological support from the "Western Democracies" than Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had in the early years of their respective regimes.⁶

While I agree with Vanaik that while it is difficult to situate "Third World fascism" (if there is such a thing...