Fascism is a type of political movement. Its precise content will be tailored to the conditions in the country where it develops, but the essential elements of fascism remain unchanged from one iteration to the next. It is a political form with an economic base – a kind of settler-colonial class collaborationism. It has been called the “fighting organization of the bourgeoisie.”
Fascism was first self-consciously synthesized as a political ideology and form by Giovanni Gentile in the early 20th century. It was a semi-coherent, reactionary ideology, making use of pseudo-Marxist analysis to construct a mythic “return” to “heroic” or “dynamic” capitalism. Rather than looking to the self-professed ideological “content” (as, for instance, Umberto Eco does in his essay “Ur-Fascism”) or the political content (as Dmitrov does), we would be better served to identify the economic elements of fascism.
As a self-conscious political movement, fascism was only developed in the 20th century in response to the inherent contradictions of capitalism, as a defense against the advance of Communism. However, the elements that Gentile and fascism’s other adherents drew upon to articulate their position were merely already-existing economic forms with a long history in Europe. The elements of fascism had been deployed by the ruling classes of Europe during a prior period of crisis: that which followed the intensification of the enclosure movement and the initial displacement that created capitalism, beginning in ~1450.
Those elements, which Gentile and others adopted, were settler-colonial relations. The European ruling classes attempted to avert the growing danger of class warfare in the 15th and 16th centuries, shifting the excess beggars, outlaws, and peasants that were thrown off their land during the “primitive accumulation” of the 15th and 16th centuries in which the European nobility directly expropriated the property of the peasantry and formed the large blocs of capital that would jump-start mercantilist capitalism. They did this by transporting the dangerous elements of the population (the landless, the religiously oppressed, etc.) to their colonial possessions: that is, to North America.
During this period, the ruling classes of Europe shifted their criteria of expropriation from religion (that is, it was previously “permissible” to steal the land, property, and labor of religious enemies) to “race” as a result of the growing Trans-Atlantic slave trade. This laid the foundation for a crude class collaborationism between the ruling classes of Europe and their settler shock-troops in North and Central America and the Caribbean.
None of this, of course, was fascism, per se, but it was fascistic; it lay the groundwork for fascism.
Economically, fascism attempts to re-deploy these same strategies that were used in the settlement of North America (and in the semi-fascistic expansion of the United States and the other European settler-colonies) to suppress class warfare. The central element of fascism is a herrenvolk class-collaboration; this is achieved through settler-colonial relations in which the national majority of a given country are promised land and resources. These must be taken from somewhere. As they were during the early genocides of the Europeans in North America, fascism identifies national minorities to exterminate so their land, etc., can be taken. These stolen resources are then offered to the laboring classes of that country as an offering to seal a class-collaborationist deal.
Thus, we can identify the following basic features of all fascisms:
- class collaboration;
- settler-colonial relations; and,
- eugenics.
Fascism can be divided into three stages according to George Jackson:
- Rising,
- Ascendent, and
- Crisis.
Rising fascism is weak and must secure a broad base of power. To this end, although it is a tool of the bourgeois class, rising fascism seeks class-collaborationist allies. It often comes cloaked in a guise of nationalism.
Ascendant fascism is politically secure. It need not exhibit itself as a fascist dictatorship but may very well be dressed up in the trappings of a very secure bourgeois democracy so long as it maintains its collaborationist policies.
Crisis fascism, which is in danger, may rapidly decay into a fascist dictatorship.
By these criterion we can see that the United States, for instance, began its existence as a semi-fascist or fascistic settler-republic that, by the time of the ascension of the regime of FDR in the 1930s, had developed into a fully-formed fascism, complete with class collaborationism that has successfully restrained the development of class consciousness in the working class of the national majority for nearly one-hundred years.