Over the nearly eight years that I’ve been posting these
weekly essays on the shape of the deindustrial future, I’ve found that certain
questions come up as reliably as daffodils in April or airport food on a rough
flight. Some of those fixate on topics I’ve discussed here recently, such as
the vaporware du jour that’s allegedly certain to save industrial civilization
and the cataclysm du jour that’s just as allegedly certain to annihilate it.
Still, I’m glad to say that not all the recurring questions are as useless as
these.
One of these latter deserves a good deal more attention than
I’ve given it so far: whether the Long
Descent of industrial society will be troubled by a revival of fascism. It’s a
reasonable question to ask, since the fascist movements of the not so distant
past were given their shot at power by the political failure and economic
implosion of Europe after the First World War, and “political failure and
economic implosion” is a tolerably good description of the current state of
affairs in the United States and much of Europe these days. For that matter,
movements uncomfortably close to the fascist parties of the 1920s and 1930s
already exist in a number of European countries. Those who dismiss them as a political
irrelevancy might want to take a closer look at history, for that same mistake
was made quite regularly by politicians and pundits most of a century ago, too.
Nonetheless, with one exception—a
critique some years back of talk in the peak oil scene about the
so-called “feudal-fascist” society the rich were supposedly planning to ram
down our throats—I’ve done my best to avoid the issue so far. This isn’t
because it’s not important. It’s because
the entire subject is so cluttered with doubletalk and distortions of
historical fact that communication on the subject has become all but
impossible. It’s going to take an entire post just to shovel away some of the
manure that’s piled up in this Augean stable of our collective imagination, and
even then I’m confident that many of the people who read this will manage to
misunderstand every single word I say.
There’s a massive irony in that situation. When George
Orwell wrote his tremendous satire on totalitarian politics,
1984, one of the core themes he explored was the debasement
of language for political advantage.
That habit found its lasting emblem in Orwell’s invented language Newspeak,
which was deliberately designed to get in the way of clear thinking. Newspeak remains fictional—well, more or
less—but the entire subject of fascism, and indeed the word itself, has gotten
tangled up in a net of debased language and incoherent thinking as extreme as
anything Orwell put in his novel.
These days, to be more precise, the word “fascism” mostly
functions as what S.I. Hayakawa used to call a snarl word—a content-free verbal
noise that expresses angry emotions and nothing else. One of my readers last
week commented that for all practical purposes, the word “fascism” could be
replaced in everyday use with “Oogyboogymanism,” and of course he’s quite
correct; Aldous Huxley pointed out many years ago that already in his time, the
word “fascism” meant no more than “something of which one ought to
disapprove.” When activists on the
leftward end of today’s political spectrum insist that the current US
government is a fascist regime, they thus mean exactly what their equivalents
on the rightward end of the same spectrum mean when they call the current US
government a socialist regime: “I hate you.”
It’s a fine example of the way that political discourse nowadays has
largely collapsed into verbal noises linked to heated emotional states that drowns out any more
useful form of communication.
The debasement of our political language quite often goes to
absurd lengths. Back in the 1990s, for example, when I lived in Seattle,
somebody unknown to me went around spraypainting “(expletive) FACISM” on an
assortment of walls in a couple of Seattle’s hip neighborhoods. My wife and I
used to while away spare time at bus stops discussing just what “facism” might
be. (Her theory was that it’s the prejudice that makes businessmen think that
employees in front office jobs should be hired for their pretty faces rather
than their job skills; mine, recalling the self-righteous declaration of a
vegetarian cousin that she would never eat anything with a face, was that it’s
the belief that the moral value of a living thing depends on whether it has a
face humans recognize as such.) Beyond such amusements, though, lay a real
question: what on earth did the
graffitist think he was accomplishing by splashing that phrase around
oh-so-liberal Seattle? Did he perhaps think that members of the American
Fascist Party who happened to be goose-stepping through town would see the
slogan and quail?
To get past such stupidities, it’s going to be necessary to
take the time to rise up out of the swamp of Newspeak that surrounds the
subject of fascism—to reconnect words with their meanings, and political
movements with their historical contexts. Let’s start in the obvious place.
What exactly does the word “fascism” mean, and how did it get from there to its
current status as a snarl word?
That takes us back to southern Italy in 1893. In that year,
a socialist movement among peasant farmers took to rioting and other extralegal
actions to try to break the hold of the old feudal gentry on the economy of the
region; the armed groups fielded by this movement were called
fasci, which might best be translated “group” or “band.”
Various other groups in the troubled Italian political scene borrowed the label
thereafter, and it was also used for special units of shock troops in the First
World War—Fasci di Combattimento, “combat groups,” were the
exact equivalent of the Imperial German Army’s
Sturmabteilungen, “storm troops.”
After the war, in 1919, an army veteran and former Socialist
newspaperman named Benito Mussolini borrowed the label Fasci di
Combattimento for his new political movement, about the same time
that another veteran on the other side of the Alps was borrowing the term
Sturmabteilung for his party’s brown-shirted bullies. The
movement quickly morphed into a political party and adapted its name
accordingly, becoming the Fascist Party, and the near-total paralysis of the
Italian political system allowed Mussolini to seize power with the March on
Rome in 1922. The secondhand ideology
Mussolini’s aides cobbled together for their new regime accordingly became
known as Fascism—“Groupism,” again, is a decent translation, and yes, it was
about as coherent as that sounds. Later on, in an attempt to hijack the
prestige of the Roman Empire, Mussolini identified Fascism with another meaning
of the word fasci—the bundle of sticks around an axe that
Roman lictors carried as an emblem of their authority—and that became the
emblem of the Fascist Party in its latter years.
Of all the totalitarian regimes of 20th century Europe, it
has to be said, Mussolini’s was far from the most bloodthirsty. The Fascist
regime in Italy carried out maybe two thousand political executions in its
entire lifespan; Hitler’s regime committed that many political killings, on
average, every single day the Twelve-Year Reich was in power, and when it comes
to political murder, Hitler was a piker compared to Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong. For that matter, political killings in some
officially democratic regimes exceed Italian Fascism’s total quite
handily. Why, then, is “fascist” the
buzzword of choice to this day for anybody who wants to denounce a political
system? More to the point, why do most
Americans say “fascist,” mean “Nazi,” and then display the most invincible
ignorance about both movements?
There’s a reason for that, and it comes out of the twists of
radical politics in 1920s and 1930s Europe.
The founding of the Third International in Moscow in 1919
forced radical parties elsewhere in Europe to take sides for or against the
Soviet regime. Those parties that joined the International were expected to
obey Moscow’s orders without question, even when those orders clearly had much
more to do with Russia’s expansionist foreign policy than they did with the
glorious cause of proletarian revolution; at the same time, many idealists
still thought the Soviet regime, for all its flaws, was the best hope for the
future. The result in most countries was the emergence of competing Marxist
parties, a Communist party obedient to Moscow and a Socialist party independent
of it.
In the bare-knuckle propaganda brawl that followed,
Mussolini’s regime was a godsend to Moscow. Since Mussolini was a former
socialist who had abandoned Marx in the course of his rise to power, parties
that belonged to the Third International came to use the label “fascist” for
those parties that refused to join it; that was their way of claiming that the
latter weren’t really socialist, and could be counted on to sell out the
proletariat as Mussolini was accused of doing. Later on, when the Soviet Union
ended up on the same side of the Second World War as its longtime enemies
Britain and the United States, the habit of using “fascist” as an all-purpose
term of abuse spread throughout the left in the latter two countries. From
there, its current status as a universal snarl word was a very short step.
What made “fascist” so useful long after the collapse of
Mussolini’s regime was the sheer emptiness of the word. Even in Italian,
“Groupism” doesn’t mean much, and in other languages, it’s just a noise; this
facilitated its evolution into an epithet that could be applied to
anybody. The term “Nazi” had most of the
same advantages: in most languages, it sounds nasty and doesn’t mean a thing,
so it can be flung freely at any target without risk of embarrassment. The same can’t be said about the actual name
of the German political movement headed by Adolf Hitler, which is one reason why
next to nobody outside of specialist historical works ever mentions national
socialism by its proper name.
That name isn’t simply a buzzword coined by Hitler’s flacks,
by the way. The first national socialist
party I’ve been able to trace was founded in 1898 in what’s now the Czech
Republic, and the second was launched in France in 1903. National socialism was
a recognized position in the political and economic controversies of early 20th
century Europe. Fail to grasp that and it’s impossible to make any sense of why
fascism appealed to so many people in the bitter years between the wars. To grasp that, though, it’s necessary to get
out from under one of the enduring intellectual burdens of the Cold War.
After 1945, as the United States and the Soviet Union
circled each other like rival dogs contending for the same bone, it was in the
interest of both sides to prevent anyone from setting up a third option. Some
of the nastier details of postwar politics unfolded from that shared interest,
and so did certain lasting impacts on political and economic thought. Up to
that point, political economy in the western world embraced many schools of
thought. Afterwards, on both sides of
the Iron Curtain, the existence of alternatives to representative-democracy-plus-capitalism,
on the one hand, and bureaucratic state socialism on the other, became a taboo
subject, and remains so in America to this day.
You can gain some sense of what was erased by learning a
little bit about the politics in European countries between the wars, when the
diversity of ideas was at its height. Then as now, most political parties
existed to support the interests of specific social classes, but in those days
nobody pretended otherwise. Conservative parties, for example, promoted the interests
of the old aristocracy and rural landowners; they supported trade barriers, low
property taxes, and an economy biased toward agriculture. Liberal parties furthered the interests of
the bourgeoisie—that is, the urban industrial and managerial classes; they
supported free trade, high property taxes, military spending, and colonial
expansion, because those were the policies that increased bourgeios wealth and
power.
The working classes had their choice of several political
movements. There were syndicalist parties, which sought to give workers direct
ownership of the firms for which they worked; depending on local taste, that
might involve anything from stock ownership programs for employees to
cooperatives and other worker-owned enterprises. Syndicalism was also called corporatism;
“corporation” and its cognates in most European languages could refer to any
organization with a government charter, including craft guilds and
cooperatives. It was in that sense that
Mussolini’s regime, which borrowed some syndicalist elements for its eclectic
ideology, liked to refer to itself as a corporatist system. (Those radicals who
insist that this meant fascism was a tool of big corporations in the modern
sense are thus hopelessly misinformed—a point I’ll cover in much more detail
next week.)
There were also socialist parties, which generally sought to
place firms under government control; this might amount to anything from
government regulation, through stock purchases giving the state a controlling
interest in big firms, to outright expropriation and bureaucratic management.
Standing apart from the socialist parties were communist parties, which (after
1919) spouted whatever Moscow’s party line happened to be that week; and there
were a variety of other, smaller movements—distributism, social credit, and
many more—all of which had their own followings and their own proposed answers
to the political and economic problems of the day.
The tendency of most of these parties to further the
interests of a single class became a matter of concern by the end of the 19th
century, and one result was the emergence of parties that pursued, or claimed
to pursue, policies of benefit to the entire nation. Many of them tacked the
adjective “national” onto their moniker to indicate this shift in orientation.
Thus national conservative parties argued that trade barriers and economic
policies focused on the agricultural sector would benefit everyone; national
liberal parties argued that free trade and colonial expansion was the best
option for everyone; national syndicalist parties argued that giving workers a
stake in the firms for which they worked would benefit everyone, and so on.
There were no national communist parties, because Moscow’s party line didn’t
allow it, but there were national bolshevist parties—in Europe between the
wars, a bolshevist was someone who supported the Russian Revolution but
insisted that Lenin and Stalin had betrayed it in order to impose a personal
dictatorship—which argued that violent revolution against the existing order
really was in everyone’s best interests.
National socialism was another position along the same
lines. National socialist parties argued that business firms should be made
subject to government regulation and coordination in order to keep them from
acting against the interests of society as a whole, and that the working
classes ought to receive a range of government benefits paid for by taxes on
corporate income and the well-to-do. Those points were central to the program
of the National Socialist German Workers Party from the time it got that
name—it was founded as the German Workers Party, and got the rest of the
moniker at the urging of a little man with a Charlie Chaplin mustache who
became the party’s leader not long after its founding—and those were the
policies that the same party enacted when it took power in Germany in 1933.
If those policies sound familiar, dear reader, they should.
That’s the other reason why next to nobody outside of specialist historical
works mentions national socialism by name: the Western nations that defeated
national socialism in Germany promptly adopted its core economic policies, the
main source of its mass appeal, to forestall any attempt to revive it in the
postwar world. Strictly speaking, in
terms of the meaning that the phrase had before the beginning of the Second
World War, national socialism is one of the two standard political flavors of
political economy nowadays. The other is liberalism, and it’s another irony of
history that in the United States, the party that hates the word “liberal” is a
picture-perfect example of a liberal party, as that term was understood back in
the day.
Now of course when people think of the National Socialist
German Workers Party nowadays, they don’t think of government regulation of
industry and free vacations for factory workers, even though those were
significant factors in German public life after 1933. They think of such other habits of Hitler’s
regime as declaring war on most of the world, slaughtering political opponents
en masse, and exterminating whole ethnic groups. Those are realities, and they
need to be recalled. It’s crucial,
though, to remember that when Germany’s National Socialists were out there canvassing
for votes in the years before 1933, they weren’t marching proudly behind
banners saying VOTE FOR HITLER SO FIFTY MILLION WILL DIE! When those same National Socialists trotted
out their antisemitic rhetoric, for that matter, they weren’t saying anything
the average German found offensive or even unusual; to borrow a highly useful
German word, antisemitism in those days was salonfähig, “the kind of thing
you can bring into the living room.” (To be fair, it was just as socially
acceptable in England, the United States, and the rest of the western world at
that same time.)
For that matter, when people talked about fascism in the
1920s and 1930s, unless they were doctrinaire Marxists, they didn’t use it as a snarl word. It was the official title of Italy’s ruling
party, and a great many people—including people of good will—were impressed by
some of the programs enacted by Mussolini’s regime, and hoped to see similar
policies put in place in their own countries. Fascism was salonfähig in most industrial
countries. It didn’t lose that status
until the Second World War and the Cold War reshaped the political landscape of
the western world—and when that happened, the complex reality of early 20th
century authoritarian politics vanished behind a vast and distorted shadow that
could be, and was, cast subsequently onto anything you care to name.
