I just read this piece by J Sakai of Settlers fame (or infamy if you’re a kkkrakkker). It’s an analysis of fascism that rejects many of the common positions on fascism, including the view that fascists are simply puppets of the haute bourgeoisie. Instead, Sakai contends that fascism is a mass revolutionary movement that tries to appeal to many of the anticapitalist attitudes that left wing movements do.

Some clarification to avoid misunderstanding: regarding fascism being revolutionary, Sakai is careful to point out that this is meant only in the simple meaning of the term referring to the overthrow of the existing state and restructuring of society, not that fascists intend to build socialism. Regarding fascism being a mass movement, it isn’t one that has the working classes as its base. Rather, the class interests of fascism are those of the lower end petite bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy as well as those who are declassed.

Here are some quotes from the text to givev people an idea of what Sakai is getting at:

Fascism is a revolutionary movement of the right against both the bourgeoisie and the left, of middle class and declassed men, that arises in zones of protracted crisis. Fascism grows out of the masses of men from classes that are abandoned on the sidelines of history. By transforming men from these classes and criminal elements into a distorted type of radical force, fascism changes the balance of power. It intervenes to try and seize capitalist State power – not to save the old bourgeois order or even the generals, but to gut and violently reorganize society for itself asnew parasitic State classes. Capitalism is restabilized but the bourgeoisie pays the price of temporarily no longer ruling the capitalist State. That is, there is a capitalist state but bourgeois rule is interrupted. As Hamerquist understands, the old left theory that fascism is only a “tool of the bourgeoisie” led to disasters because it way underestimated the radical power of fascism as a mass force. Fascism not only has a distinctive class base but it has a class agenda. That is, its revolution does not leave society or the class relations of production unchanged.

The truth here is startling and it isn’t in the least bit vague. The new fascism is, in effect, “anti-imperialist” right now. It is opposed to the big imperialist bourgeoisie (unlike Mussolini and Hitler earlier, who wanted even stronger, bigger Western imperialism), to the transnational corporations and banks, and their world-spanning “multicultural” bourgeois culture. Fascism really wants to bring down the World Bank, WTO and NATO, and even America the Superpower. As in destroy. That is, it is anti-bourgeois but not anti-capitalist. Because it is based on fundamentally pro-capitalist classes.

All during the rise of euro-fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, the left dissed & dismissed them as pawns of the capitalist class. Whether in the brilliant German Communist photomontage posters of the artist Heartfield or the pronouncement from Moscow that “fascism is the terroristic dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie”, there was a constant message that Italian fascism and German Nazism were only puppets for the big capitalist class. This has some parts of the truth, but is fatally off-center and produces an actually disarming picture. Not that no leftists saw the problem, of course. In 1922 one German communist writer warned of a “Fascist Danger in South Germany”, and even analyzed the Nazi Party as a highly militarized anti-semitic sect that was based in the petty bourgeoisie but was agitating against big business. These assessments on the ground were soon swept away by dismissive theories from the big left uberheadquarters in Berlin and Moscow.

Much of the standard old left analysis of the Hitler regime as essentially acting for big business is based on a vulgar Marxism, and is a fundamental misreading of fascism’s character. This pseudo-materialist line of thinking says: the biggest German corporations got bigger and richer, so the big capitalists must have been running the show. How simple politics is to those bound and determined to be simple-minded. While Nazism could be thought a “tool” of the bourgeoisie in the sense that big business took advantage of it and supported it, it was out of their control – in other words, not a “tool” in the usual meaning of the word. Picture a type of power saw that you hoped would cut down the tree stump in your backyard, but that not only did that but also went off in its own directions and escaped your control.

I’m curious about others’ thoughts on this. For anyone interested, its a short read at only 40 pages.