So You Want a Definition of Fascism
As Liberals reckon with the realities of the corner in which they have painted themselves, the debate to ease their souls rages on.
Classic Fascists
Does fascism exist? Seriously, that seems to be the question we are reckoning with this morning as liberals, facing the blatant blowback to their wanton expansionist bloodlust, seek a way to justify themselves through—if nothing else—an appeal to definitions and intentionally obfuscated history.
"Fascism didn't exist then," they cry when confronted with the groundwork upon which the ideology is based; "just because it is an imperialist, capitalist nation doesn't make it fascist." Well, it is my contention that this mode of thought is nonsensical and intentionally ignorant of the material realities of the world—a method by which the ever-evasive liberal can move the goalposts through clever wordplay and recenter the narrative away from their own moral indefensibility.
Can something be named without existing prior? How do we recognize something enough to create a name for it if it is not a pre-existing phenomenon? Did gravity exist before it was contemplated and reasoned over by philosophers? Likewise, did capitalism—as a key pillar of what would become fascism—exist before it was identified in economics, sociology, and theology? To the leftist, the answer is "of course." The material conditions of capitalism existed long before it was confined to a definition that could be argued over, the underlying principles key to the ultimate manifestation of fascism in the 20th century.
Slavery existed before we named the system; the idea of stolen labor is a fundamental principle of capitalist ideology, yet it predates the invention of the definition by millennia. In fact, it was chattel slavery—the reduction of human beings to a class of livestock—that truly sowed the seeds for what capitalism is today. Indeed, the East India Trading Company was established in 1600, and what, if not capitalist, was it other than the seizure of the means of production and distribution from the commoner for the benefit of the lords and financiers of Europe? What was the Slave Triangle if not the express theft of the means of production in its rawest form for the use of landed elites in both the Old World and New? If, today, there was a company that used slave labor in its factories, that used the stolen wages of worker and consumer to enrich a small group of ultra-rich individuals and institutions, we would see it for what it is. Acting otherwise—like the concept of exploitation of the masses for the betterment of an extreme minority is something novel from the industrial revolution—is ridiculous.
And to those who say that capitalism couldn't exist before the advent of the Industrial Revolution's creation of ownable and—more importantly—restrictable machines of production, I refer you once more to chattel slavery, the natural beginning of any socially valuable production. If you think that simply because the feudal system was populated by small artisans it therefore could not be capitalistic in nature, I ask what the ownership of the lands and the means of distribution of both materials and finished products through them equates to if not ownership of the means of production itself. Just because a man can create a chair of his own free will, it means nothing if he is not the one who receives the profits of the endeavor—if the social value of the chair is determined by he who decides its ultimate sale and destination. For this is what the East India Trading Company was, as much as it was the case for peasants in feudal Europe despite romanticized notions otherwise.
"The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative. Individuals and groups are admissible in so far as they come within the State. Instead of directing the game and guiding the material and moral progress of the community, the liberal State restricts its activities to recording results. The Fascist State is wide awake and has a will of its own."
—Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)
Can you see the machinations of the United States and its corporate drivers in the words from the horse's own mouth? Read that without envisioning Chevron or United Fruit Company, I dare you. Can you?
And that is the thing about fascism: it is not something unique but an express outcome of the capitalist mindset, a recognition that the only way for a state to maintain power over corporations is to subsume them within itself; for a corporation to prevent the natural blowback of their expansionism and extractionism, they must become the state itself.
It is likewise telling that the express goal of expansionism is that which is embodied in every US business today: grow or die. A business that is not incessant in its exploitation of peers and workers is seen as somehow lesser, an unnatural abomination in an environment populated by cutthroat economics and razor-thin margins. A company that closes its doors after 35 years serving its community is, nonetheless, seen as a failure to the capitalist no matter the value the business may have created for its customers and workers in the meantime. If it isn't growing, it is a failure; if it isn't expanding, it is worthless.
When a state serves a syndicate of corporate interests, when its laws and society are structured in support of those entities exclusively, is it anything other than fascist? Does a country built upon capitalist extraction and bourgeois rebellion, which has spent its entire brief history exploiting the masses for profit and building an ideological ethno-state around the most influential names in manufacturing and finance, deserve to be called anything other than fascist by definition?
According to Mussolini himself:
"The Fascist State expresses the will to exercise power and to command. Here the Roman tradition is embodied in a conception of strength. Imperial power, as understood by the Fascist doctrine, is not only territorial, or military, or commercial; it is also spiritual and ethical. An imperial nation, that is to say a nation which directly or indirectly is a leader of others, can exist without the need of conquering a single square mile of territory. Fascism sees in the imperialistic spirit—i.e., in the tendency of nations to expand—a manifestation of their vitality."
—The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)
The framing is key, especially today. Like the United States, the fascination with the Roman fasces—its use in our popular political mythology—is a key tenet of fascism as it appeared in Italy some 150 years after it was similarly used in the establishment of the new American government of the 18th century. The idea of an imperial nation that "directly or indirectly is a leader of others," that can "exist without the need of conquering a single square mile of territory," is a direct expression of the expansionist nationalism of the Monroe Doctrine and the East-West Schism of the Catholic Church; it is the ideology of McDonald's and Starbucks and Wells Fargo and Amazon, the underlying religiosity of consumerism that perpetuates the machine itself.
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