It is a difficult time to be thinking about ideas like fascism, but it’s also more important than ever to figure this whole thing out. What is it? How do we stop it? How do we prevent it from coming back? We’re always defining and re-defining, and I’m not going to change that. But I do have a point. To be presumptuous, I would like to deliver what Umberto Eco did not deliver.
I have been critical of Eco’s Ur-Fascism before. It’s not that Eco was wrong, it’s more that his descriptions can be applied to anybody. But it’s more than that. What Eco presents is fascism as a series of abnormalities. He is not driving at an accurate description of fascism as a political project, he is driving at an image of fascism as the supreme evil. I don’t disagree that fascism is a supreme evil, at least as far as political philosophy goes. What I disagree with is the idea that the typology of Ur-Fascism is useful.
What the “Ur-Fascism” (or “eternal fascism”) that Eco describes is about is the general atmosphere that gives rise to fascism. He uses the common format of a list that is a list of symptoms rather than a schematic: the more you have, the more likely it is that you are a fascist.
What I’m going to present is “general fascism”, with a similar meaning as Eco’s but not the same thing. Again, the difference isn’t so much in the goal but in the approach. Reading Eco’s piece, it’s clear that his analysis is based primarily on his experience of fascism. My approach is much more historicist. For that reason, while I do think I can deliver on a useful description of fascism, I won’t present exactly what Eco did.
Eco’s Ur-Fascism presents a list of symptoms for fascism. I want to present the general program of fascism. This is not a list of symptoms like Eco’s, this is the ideology. These are its aims. These will be the five key tenets that are within every general fascist movement. I will define the term “general fascist” better in a bit. Before that, I do need to walk through a bit of history.
I do enjoy shitting on scholars who I do not know and generally respect, so it’s not exactly out of character for me to simply bring Eco up, but there is more of a point here, and it has to do with the little journey my brain took to finally codify these points. This is a topic I have been thinking about for a while, but sometimes you finally get the finally burst that makes it all click. What made it click for me was corporatism. I’ll explain.
Almost out of nowhere, after thinking about Ur-Fascism again for a second, I started to wonder what exactly a good basis for my “general fascism” would be. It’s been an idea that I’ve worked with but not been able to pin down. As I was watching some videos about Italian fascism to pass the time, the mention of corporatism hit me again and I decided to actually try to make sense of it to myself. I had heard of corporatism before and knew vaguely what it was – organizing society into social or working groups which would work together on a non-class or class-collaborationist basis – but I’d never tried to really get it. Now I did.
What I discovered both surprised me and made sense. Corporatism is not a real ideology, it’s just anti-communist propaganda.
Just to start, for those who have not heard of corporatism, this does not mean the rule of business corporations like Microsoft. The “corporates” involved are typically labor groups or religious groups; in history, family groups, castes, and clans were types of corporates.
When I say that corporatism is anti-communist propaganda, I don’t mean to say that corporatism was used primarily as a propaganda slogan. Obviously, real people did and do support corporatist ideas. Some socialists even support corporatism. Though I don’t know of communists who are openly corporatist, I think this has more to do with the fact that communism already features collectivism, so corporatist ideas aren’t necessary. My guess is that many communists would disagree with this and say that their major difference is that workers should govern, but that simply isn’t where I see the issue.
Figuring out how to order this next part is a bit tricky: whether to do history or definition. Let me begin by saying that corporatism as an ideology (or as a concept borrowed by ideologies) supports itself in large part by appeals to pre-modern life. In particular, they point back to systems of guild, caste, or clan as ways to organize a society’s economy. Ideological corporatism is said to be an attempt to revive elements of these systems in the modern age, on the presumption that there was no class conflict in pre-modern times, so this form of organization could “get beyond” class conflict nowadays.
The reason that this is wrong is not that times have changed, it’s that class conflict is not negotiable.
Modern corporatist ideas are primarily based on what I am going to call the big meeting approach. In this approach, everybody involved in a decision – for instance, an auto maker rolling out a new engine – gets into a big meeting and they just make their decision together. Usually, this at least means that the workers and employers meet together. Rather than seeing themselves as workers vs. employers, the workers and employers are on the same side, their interests united.
The problem with the big meeting approach is not that you meet, it’s that everyone meets as they are. Workers come as they are and employers come as they are. And this is, in fact, the same situation that everyone was in before they entered the meeting. When they get into the meeting, the employers are still going to bully the workers. Worker exploitation doesn’t happen because workers were not able to have a big meeting with the bosses, it happens because the bosses have the power to change conditions in such a way that benefits them and harms the workers. Forcing everyone into a big meeting doesn’t change anything, and the truth of this is shown in that it never did. From the open fascists to Franco and Peron, corporatism only delivered more wins for the bosses at the expense of the workers. To the extent anything was won for the workers, it came out of typical unrest and whatever labor actions were available given the government’s restrictions in those countries.
The “neo-corporatist” model is just all society. I’m trying very hard not to be too condescending. But it is simply society. Government, employers, workers, all finding a way to work together, that’s society. There’s nothing different. There’s nothing new. All “corporatist” in these terms seems to mean is “we have organized unions and we don’t hate them as much as other places do”. That is not a political ideology. That is nonsense. And that is what I mean when I say corporatism is just anti-communist propaganda.
The only reason to call yourself a corporatist is to be able to justify having strong unions or worker collectives while rejecting any accusation of communism. The “third way” does not exist. There cannot be a third way. I don’t say that there can’t be a third way out of spite (though I have plenty of it for them). I say this because the idea of a “third way” comes out of a complete misperception of the reason that capitalism and socialism-communism are opposed.
The reason corporatism exists (which is the “third way”, that’s always what it is in state politics, no matter how it’s dressed up) is that people recognized that individualist capitalism clearly had issues but did not want to commit to socialism-communism (just “socialism” from here on) because socialism means expropriation from the wealthy. That’s the bottom line. You cannot do socialism without expropriation and many simply rejected that idea. So, in essence, they decided to take the ideas of socialism and leave out the attempt to remove the exploiter class. That’s corporatism.
Corporatism allows people to tell themselves that they are doing something different than capitalism and socialism. This implies that capitalism and socialism were like two opposing sides, two clear existing choices which governments simply selected between. Very specifically, this conception views capitalism as the ideology of the ruling rich and socialism as the ideology of the subjugated poor, and it pitches corporatism as a way to unite them.
But that isn’t how capitalism and socialism are related. While this will annoy some capitalists, capitalism and socialism aren’t red and blue, A and B; capitalism is “2 + 2 =” and socialism is “4”. Socialism is the answer to the problem posed by capitalism. It isn’t an answer. It is the answer.
How can socialism just be the answer like that? To give the most obvious response: socialism is not one thing. Socialism is simply recognizing that society as a whole, generally through government, has to consciously orient itself to benefit the majority of people; the alternative is to allow exploitation. This can be organized in a number of ways: communism, cooperative anarchism, syndicalism, etc. But it must involve a realization that the products of particular interests (like business owners and corporations) are, in actuality, the result of the entire society, and therefore should first be distributed to the society rather than being hoarded by those who can make up some particular claim to it. If you do not achieve that, you do not have socialism. And doing that is the answer to exploitation.
Corporatism says that it provides a different answer – “2 + 2 = D”, let’s say – which will work as well, if not better. The problem is that it does not solve the problem. As I’ve said, corporatism is just society as it is. Workers have issues with employers, employers have issues with workers, government attempts to mediate. Already, corporatism is not providing anything different than the capitalist system where unions were able to emerge without any specific ideology. Further, corporatist systems usually result in reduced worker power because the workers are no longer able to coordinate their activities against the employers, who can still freely use their control over pay and policy to dictate terms to the collective.
Any system which would meaningfully restrict employers from exploiting their workers (which is to say, restrict them more than they would in a typical capitalist system) would be considered socialist, not corporatist. The preservation of the model of employer control which makes exploitation possible is the main point of modern corporatism.
Now, am I saying that everyone who espouses corporatism is a fascist? No. I am also not saying that corporatism is strictly incompatible with socialism. The point I’m making is that the reason corporatism flourishes as an idea is due to the tensions of capitalism and distaste with socialism. If those two conditions didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be a need for a cover philosophy for “capitalism with unions”.
After I basically disproved corporatism to my own satisfaction, I had another issue: now what was going to be the basis of “general fascism”? It hit me as I was thinking about corporatism’s place as a tool against socialism. Modern individualist capitalism and modern socialism both come out of liberalism, but socialism more so. The two stages in Marx’s two-stage revolution are not socialist and communist, after all: they are bourgeois democrat (or liberal) and socialist-communist. Liberalism doesn’t just allow for socialism, it leads to socialism as its obvious consequence. If the purpose of general fascism is to eliminate socialism (which is the primary goal of every fascist movement), the most basic definition of “general fascism” must be “anti-liberalism”.
Before we can better define general fascism, then, we have to define liberalism. When I say “liberal” I am not using it in the American-centric way, to mean “neoliberal associated with the Democratic Party”. I mean liberal in its classic sense, but not as in “classical liberal”. Liberal, for me, means anti-aristocratic; or, in other words, rational. Edgy socialists will immediately see these two things as being equal, but most people won’t, so I’ll make it more clear. (To be clear, this is a dig at the socialists who don’t know what I’m going to say but reflexively hate aristocracy; not a bad impulse but not what I mean.)
Take a date in your head and mark it as “the beginning of the modern era”. You can put it wherever you’d like; you know what modern is. Did you pick the French Revolution? Good. Before modern times, rule of land was determined by divine right. There were exceptions to monarchy and oligarchy but not divine right. This is important. Modern atheism did not exist in pre-modern times, and I don’t mean that as a word puzzle. No one on a broad scale simply “did not believe” in divinity. Without exception, rulership in pre-modern societies was underpinned by some appeal to supernatural divinity. Even in areas where rule was relatively secular by our standards, the government was still legitimized through the appeal to divinity.
The main consequence of this is that government was simply not the problem of those who were not able to make such an appeal. People did not consider themselves to be governed according to reasoned laws but according to divine will. This is not how those doing the governing felt about it; they knew that their decisions were having specific effects. But it was not the kind of thing that “regular people” were expected to think about, in part because they had no access to the decisions being made. This is not to say that people had no thoughts about economics, their leaders, how things should be done, etc. Political associations did not arise based on “issues” in the way that we know them, though; we don’t have any evidence for things similar to “political parties” in Europe until just before the French Revolution, and I haven’t heard about similar institutions elsewhere in the world.
In these pre-modern times, political thought of the regular people was based on outcomes, not issues or processes. If there were repeated famines, people might favor a rival to their current leader if the rival promises food; just as an example. If there was any political organizing, it was around specific figures who made specific promises, not on abstract political ideas. To the extent that such ideas did exist, they were usually indicated by religious practice; in places with philosophical traditions, these may also have influenced the rulers, but were less likely to be known by the regular people. Regardless, what attracted people were not these specific ideas but the promises that they motivated, and what kept them loyal was the achievement of those promises.
Politically, the main development separating modernity from the time before was liberalism. To lean on its etymology, the reason for the term “liberal” is as a reaction to the seeming restriction of political and social achievement to particular people: those favored by the divinity (or the ruler). People like the French revolutionaries wanted society to be made more liberal so that (more) regular people could take part in the system. This began a long spread of liberalism which has gotten into every society which encountered it. Why? It’s very simple. People are people and they do not want to be oppressed, which is what happens under illiberal systems.
The problem with liberalism for the rulers is that it diluted their control. They now had to worry about having to make decisions that would not only benefit them and their friends. This was because regular people now became interested in the process of government as a matter of course. People understood that they could understand government and that their opinions could be as good as any ruler’s, possibly even better. The full results of government couldn’t be hidden anymore for the primary reason that people were interested now, more than they were before. This is what I mean when I say that liberalism is about rational government. When I say that, I am not calling pre-liberal rulers stupid. What I mean is that liberalism implies that the government must present its reasons (and processes) to the regular people who will judge their rightness. A liberal government has to appeal to the reason of the people.
Setting aside for the moment ideas about community and collectivism, each person wants self-determination. It is an innate desire. Even those who wish to be subsumed or spiritually annihilated want to make that choice. Unless they have ethical or aesthetic reasons against it, people will attempt to occupy and express themselves how they want and in every possible medium. In political terms, this means that people want the ability to make political choices. Liberalism therefore implies that people will take the opportunity it affords to make more choices and act politically. The natural state of a liberalized society will push and strain against any restrictions that are imposed on it from above.
It’s the ruling class which opposes liberalization. The problem is that a liberalized society is not easily made illiberal (in the sense I’m using it in here). People do not simply give up their desire to understand the world and act. This is the reason that even the most absolute governments have had to make some concession to popular input and rational policy. It is also why modern autocrats generally do not seek to fully suspend the liberalized government structure, instead adapting to it by permitting parties and running elections. Even if it all has to be rigged, the admission is there that political power can no longer come from the divine, it must always come from one’s relationship to the people.
These kinds of arrangements always carry the risk of falling apart, however. If an election is lost somehow, all effort has to be put into retaining power. A still-liberalized population will probably be eager to rise up at the first opportunity. In order to truly introduce an illiberal order, one must move beyond simply controlling the government. One must attempt to reshape the entire society. This is what fascists always attempt to do, but this is a symptom; socialists try to change their societies as well, after all. I bring it up here because it shows a difference between fascism and “simple” authoritarianism. An authoritarian can be liberal or anti-liberal, but their main goal is to control the government and rule without opposition. A fascist hopes to create an enduring illiberal order, not simply a personal dictatorship but a completely captive society.
To give a clean definition: general fascism is any political ideology which attempts to impose an illiberal order on a liberalized society. This may appear to be broad but is actually fairly narrow. It does not include, for example, the Ku Klux Klan before the 1990s. It doesn’t include most modern African dictators. It doesn’t include Juan Perón. It doesn’t include Stalin or Mao. It does include the original fascists, of course, as well as Imperial Japan. It includes Francisco Franco and possibly Mobutu Sese Seko.
The reason that general fascism can be boiled down to a few necessary points is that its goal is always the same: to reverse liberalism. This cannot be achieved by simply rejecting liberalism; this is why we haven’t had a resurgence of divine right monarchies, and why even modern autocracies have to have some element of appeal to the people for authority. What fascism seeks to do is not to reject liberalism but to reorient and dissipate it. Despite being anti-liberal, fascism is also post-liberal; it doesn’t exist without liberalism coming first, unlike feudal or priest-ruler ideas. The five points of general fascism are therefore not exactly the outward program of fascists. Rather, these points are essential elements which must be brought into the fascist ideology by some means. For the German nazis this was usually race, for the falangists it was Catholicism. I’ll note examples along with each point.
1. “The ruling class is natural.” This is an easily recognizable point if we view it through the lens of nazi race theory: for the nazis, the ruling class is their constructed Aryan race, and entry into this race is dictated by birth – nature – rather than particular talent, skill, etc. We also see this in divine right ideas such as those of Catholic Integrists/Integralists who promote themselves as being chosen by the divine and doing the divine’s will. The exact justification is less important than the idea that the position of the rulers is not subject to debate. While its ideas can theoretically be challenged, the only acceptable challenge would come from within the ruling class, not from without. Communism is not immune from this concept but it is ideologically resistant to it; since “rightness” in communism is associated with learning, it’s harder to argue that politics can be restricted to one group. Still, racism is used in many communist systems to achieve this effect.
2. “There must be a clear moral foundation for the whole society.” For most people, morality is good. This is not really true. Morality as a concept on its own is neutral. Morality exists to tell people what good and evil are, but that doesn’t mean that every morality is helpful, or even that morality will be used in a consistent way. When fascists say that there must be a clear moral foundation, what they mean is that the rules must be known and expected to be adhered to for a reason which is accepted by everyone. Again, the German nazis leaned heavily on race to provide this, but also on their Fuhrerprinzip: the elevation of Hitler’s will beyond all others, which meant that morality was associated with finding Hitler’s approval. For many others, religion has provided this moral foundation; Spanish falangists embraced Catholicism immediately while Italian fascists had to be brought to it but eventually did employ it. In Mobutu’s Zaire, the Authenticité idea served a similar purpose. National interest is also strongly employed as a basis for this moral foundation, something which can be found explicitly in the German nazis, Italian fascists, and Authenticité.
3. “Liberal concerns have to be secondary to the greater good.” The first two points are critical but not strictly functional. This is the first plank of the fascist platform which directly aims to erode the liberal order. By “liberal concerns”, I mean ideas like due process, responsive government, respect for privacy (especially of thought), fair opportunity, and the like. The greater good is not always the same, but most of the specific claims can be bundled into the category of “national interest”. I don’t want to spend a lot of time dissecting this point, but I think it does bear stating that this idea is based on a false opposition between liberal concerns and other matters. In many cases, the point of liberal concerns is to be more certain that actions will have the effect that they are stated to have. I say stated rather than intended because, in terms of governing, the ruling class often intends something entirely different than what they put on paper. And this is at the core of this plank. By making the ruling class natural and enforcing a moral code for society, this means that the ruling class now has full authority to determine what the “national interest” is. By exercising that authority, the ruling class once again gets to say one thing and do another. By making the fact that they do not care about liberal concerns explicit, fascists give themselves permission to override those concerns when they are in a position of power; if people did not want fascists to do this, they shouldn’t have voted for them, so the thinking goes. I don’t say this to cast blame. This is a game of deception that the fascists are playing; it is the fascists who are casting blame, or rather, they are the ones pushing the blame for illiberalism off of themselves and onto their voters.
4. “We must distribute the country’s resources according to the greater good.” Here, it’s important to stress that when I say “greater good” I don’t mean an objective good. The “greater good” is a stand in for whatever a particular ideology would say is the goal of the state. Importantly, this is used by fascists as the bait which is then switched out. The “greater good” is used to justify an unequal distribution of goods and services. Whereas socialism collectivizes in order to give each person a benefit which is relatively equal, general fascism permits inequality to extremes as long as they can claim the overall society is not hurt. While socialism does view itself as a force for the betterment of people, and therefore it could be argued that they work for a “greater good”, the goal of a socialist system is to be equal in an obvious and outward manner. As a liberal philosophy, it does not intend to hide its decision-making. General fascism uses the idea of the greater good in order to defeat liberal scrutiny.
5. “Society must be organized into sub-groups with specific roles and functions.” This is the aspect of general fascism which, on paper, appears to be supporting corporatism. But, like I said, corporatism isn’t real, and that only superficially has to do with this particular point. The basic fascist society has three explicit parts: a ruling class, an underclass, and the citizenry. This does not align with the “neo-corporatist” structure of government-workers-employers: most of the citizens will be workers while much of the ruling class will be employers rather than government. In Nazi Germany, the basic categories were Nazi Party member, non-German, and German citizen. The important point about this categorization is that there are legal outcomes. A member of the ruling class has different rights than a member of the citizenry, who also has different rights from those in the underclass. Now, while the fascist and “corporatist” structures don’t align, there are obvious class differences visible in the fascist state. The ruling class naturally lives better lives with more opportunity than those in the citizenry, and ditto for the citizenry versus the underclass. Though both citizens and underclass members are generally workers, the jobs of citizens will be easier or less dangerous than those of the underclass. Because these groups are explicit, and because their membership is explicitly policed (by the government and by society), they become sites of both privilege and precarity. Each group becomes controlled in different ways according to their different expectations. Solidarity between the citizens and the underclass gets strained because citizens feel that any step out of line will pitch them into the underclass, meaning a huge loss of security and a rise in personal crisis. Those at the bottom often become eager to police those around them in order to justify being lifted out. Rather than a strategy for classes working together, fascist social categorization is a tool for keeping each group tame and separate at best, and actively hateful of the others at worst. Racism is one of the most common tools used to achieve this, enacted first culturally and then through the legal system. Sexism is also a major tool; though it is often made invisible in political discussions, one of the primary divisions in society is that between men and women, one which is reinforced through patriarchy and almost universally supported by general fascists, even if they disavow some forms of racism or other bigotry.
One thing that you may have picked up if you’ve read a bit of my work is that I am not great at the dismount. My point is done and I have little left to say.
I would like to stress the importance of reading through each point, however, and not just looking at the first sentence. That first sentence in quotes is how the fascists would present it, but the breakdown of these ideas gets the fullness of the concept in fascist thought. If you read only the first sentence, you may convince yourself that fascism is not much different than other ideologies (though even then there are clear elements which should give you pause). But that is how fascism works. It is always a bait and switch, it appeals to things you want and then subverts them in order to leave you with nothing.
We have all been liberalized and that is a good thing. Communist governments are fundamentally liberal governments, as are most constitutional monarchist, while republican democratic governments are possibly the best representation there is of the classical liberal ideology. Authoritarianism does not necessarily mean an abandonment of liberalism; again, this is about definitions, it’s not an endorsement of authoritarianism. My point is that fascism is more than just authoritarianism. It’s not even enough to call fascism a totalitarian authoritarianism. General fascism is about totally subverting liberalization in order to suppress it. People should no longer have a say in or even an understanding of how they are ruled, that is the creed of the fascist. It comes in many flavors but it always seeks out the same five points, and it does this because this is the way in which one can successfully defeat liberalism.
Now, of course, this has not worked fully. As far as I am aware, no government which could be called fascist has survived even to a second generation of leaders. But while fascism flourishes, these points are the means by which they are able to keep liberalism shoved down and out of the way.
Especially in America, it is common on the left to insult and abuse liberals for cutting off their noses to spite their faces. This isn’t wrong to do. “Liberals” in the American sense (whether the people are American or not, I’m not letting everybody else off the hook) are the greatest obstacle to socialism, which is the answer to capitalist exploitation. I bring this up because we should keep in mind that broad liberalism is an unequivocal good. We cannot become so frustrated with the people we call “liberals” that we come to accept illiberalism as the way out. Liberalism is the base state of modern society. Liberalism is the justification for popular sovereignty. General fascism is its opposite.
Mussolini was the one who said that fascists were against the liberals and he was right. This is what he meant.
For my academics: if divine right was the pseudo-Hegelian thesis of the ruling class and liberalism is the antithesis, fascism is their synthesis.