Need to go beyond puerile ’definitions’ of Fascism | Aditya Nigam

Quite apart from the dinosaur-like CPI-M position on fascism, there is a genuine and serious problem with the way we discuss or study the phenomenon - exclusively with reference to the Italian and German experiences (more German actually). Even that experience is reduced to some unhelpful superficial formulas like Horkheimer’s largely misunderstood statement in 1939 ’if you aren’t willing to talk about capitalism, you had better keep quiet about fascism too’, or Dimitrov’s rendering of fascism as the ’open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most imperialist elements of finance capitalism’

If one wants to understand the phenomenon, it is necessary to go beyond puerile ’definitions’ of fascism. It’s relationship to capitalism is only one aspect and that too not a straightforward one. Dimitrov’s reduction of fascist phenomenon to an ’open terrorist dictatorship’ relates to only one aspect, completely ignoring the dimension highlighted very early on by Arthur Rosenburg (1934, more recently translated into English by Jairus Banaji) that underlines the dimension of fascism as a mass movement. This is crucial, for as a mass movement with its own demagogues and leaders and the fact that the masses are not really moved by their support for capitalism, fascism has to tread a complex ground (say by Nazism deflecting anticapitalist sentiments against the figure of the ’Jew’).

Why would ’the masses’ want to revolt on behalf of the most reactionary, imperialist elements of finance capital" Does it make any sense? The ’revolt of the masses’ actually had its own distinct/ discrete roots, which we cannot discuss here in detail. But two things stand out from various studies:

(1) the revolt of the masses was actually a revolt of the provincial ’little man’, scared by the new permissiveness in society and his own sexual anxieties (Wilhelm Reich); or of the same provincial man who is scared of being free and being responsible for taking decisions - as if the protection of the father (the Church, or family or community) is suddenly taken away from him and he needs to find a replacement (in different ways Erich From and Hannah Arendt would make this point).

(2) No less important, the revolt of the late 19th century masses was against the elitism and exclusiveness of the then existing representative democracies, where only the propertied and educated contested and voted. It was as Carl Schmitt put it, the revolt of mass democracy.

In either case, the masses in revolt were culturally antibourgeois and would not sit very easily with a project to save capitalism. They hated the intellectuals and the rationalist elite for destroying their cozy, comfortable, patriarchal world.

But even more complicated questions arise when we look at the ’political technologies’ of fascism. As Mahmood Mamdani has recently shown, the archetypal political technology of the ’concentration camp’ was developed in the ’Indian’ (Native American) reservations in the United States - along with genocide, the technology, par excellence, of the ’final solution’. There are clear connections between the Native American reservations, which is replicated in the Bantustans of Aparthied South Africa and finally reproduced in the heart of Europe. That is why Aime Cesaire mocked the Europeans when they talk of the ’singularity of the Holocaust’. Shades of what we see in Palestine - the endless Nakba - today.

The point is not to collapse everything into one thing called ’facsism’ but to understand fascism and Nazism as assemblages where different elements are sourced from different experiences of modern Europe and its colonial adventures. The ’ideology’ of fascism of course is only a pathological form that every nationalism carries within it and comes out the moment its civility becomes difficult to maintain. ’Fascism’ as we see it today is the is the political culture of intolerance of criticism and dissent, enforced not just through the state but through the stormtroopers a la the most recent Kunal Kamra episode.

It is urgently necessary to get out of the highly Europe-centric studies that focus on the singularity and uniqueness of the fascist experience by connecting the dots and writing more global histories - where the German and Italian experiences are not treated as the last word.