The main feature of fascism, usually ignored or obscured in bourgeois societies, is that it has a material-- rather than a cultural or ideological -- base. Fascism infects capitalist economies as the military accumulation of capital becomes increasingly dominant and other means of profit-seeking dry up.
In such circumstances, the dominant capitalists turn to military profiteering, which requires inventing enemies, provoking conflicts, stimulating hatreds, etc., etc. Everything we're now seeing. Read up on two of history's pioneering analysts of fascism, Georgi Dmitrov of Bulgaria and George Seldes of the USA. (See the Amazon Books synopsis of Seldes's 1943 FACTS AND FASCISM. He laid it all out there, yet our top US academic "experts" on fascism ignore him and his work, and obscure the discussion with clouds of abstract pretentious terms,
Well, USA has dedicated massive perceangage -- like 57% -- of federal discretionary spending to the Pentagon system for many, many decades but it's only really in the last decade that one of its two dominant capitalist parties has gone fascist - this driven largely by revanchist racism, patriarchy, and Christian fundamentalist white nationalism. And here now we are talking about neoiberal era fascism without mustaches not the classic historical fascism of the Fordist era and interwar years+WWII.
There's no one way that fascism comes, nor does it shape itself into the same forms. It's creative and adaptive. There's no predictable tipping point as to when the bourgeoisie of a militarily dependent capitalist state seek fascistic solutions. The seeds are always there and always being resown, and it's up to anti-fascists to recognize when they threaten to take over and to figure out how to uproot them. If antifascists can't form a broad and effective coalition to do so, they're going to go down in ruin with their like-minded contemporaries.
The main feature of fascism, usually ignored or obscured in bourgeois societies, is that it has a material-- rather than a cultural or ideological -- base. Fascism infects capitalist economies as the military accumulation of capital becomes increasingly dominant and other means of profit-seeking dry up.
In such circumstances, the dominant capitalists turn to military profiteering, which requires inventing enemies, provoking conflicts, stimulating hatreds, etc., etc. Everything we're now seeing. Read up on two of history's pioneering analysts of fascism, Georgi Dmitrov of Bulgaria and George Seldes of the USA. (See the Amazon Books synopsis of Seldes's 1943 FACTS AND FASCISM. He laid it all out there, yet our top US academic "experts" on fascism ignore him and his work, and obscure the discussion with clouds of abstract pretentious terms,
Well, USA has dedicated massive perceangage -- like 57% -- of federal discretionary spending to the Pentagon system for many, many decades but it's only really in the last decade that one of its two dominant capitalist parties has gone fascist - this driven largely by revanchist racism, patriarchy, and Christian fundamentalist white nationalism. And here now we are talking about neoiberal era fascism without mustaches not the classic historical fascism of the Fordist era and interwar years+WWII.
There's no one way that fascism comes, nor does it shape itself into the same forms. It's creative and adaptive. There's no predictable tipping point as to when the bourgeoisie of a militarily dependent capitalist state seek fascistic solutions. The seeds are always there and always being resown, and it's up to anti-fascists to recognize when they threaten to take over and to figure out how to uproot them. If antifascists can't form a broad and effective coalition to do so, they're going to go down in ruin with their like-minded contemporaries.
You are in the vanguard with your warning, sir. Few want to acknowledge this . You are our Paul Revere.