I realize that it sounds elementary to most of us, but given the presence of some who are still willing to miscategorize the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and other people’s republics as ‘fascist’, I think that this point needs to be restated, this time more emphatically.

Quoting Daniel Guerin’s excellent Fascism and Big Business, page 63:

The idea of the class struggle, the basis of proletarian socialism, is at first not understood by the petty bourgeois. For him, unlike the worker, the capitalist exploiter “remains anonymous, unperceived, hidden behind the curtain of free transactions.”²¹ When he defends his threatened interests, he does it with the same mentality as the capitalist [whom] he opposes: one individual struggling against another individual. There is a conflict of interests; there is no class struggle.

The petty bourgeoisie struggles against some individual haut bourgeois, but never the haute bourgeoisie as such.

While many petty bourgeois may be critical of the haute bourgeoisie, they are never against it in any meaningful way. For them, the haute bourgeoisie simply needs some tuning: for example, a more fascist mindset, which entails more respect for small businesses (at least the small businesses of the most preferred racial group, anyway).

Since most (if not all) of the petty bourgeoisie dreams of furthering its opulence, which necessitates eventually graduating to the haute bourgeoisie, it would be nonsensical for the petty bourgeoisie to seriously and meaningfully oppose its richer counterpart. (Microbusinesses consisting entirely of one person are an arguable exception.)

Guerin continued:

The position of the middle classes between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat explains why they tend to condemn all class struggle—that waged by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat as well as that waged by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

They are persuaded that class collaboration is possible, that there is a general interest above all antagonistic interests. And by general interests they mean their own interests, intermediate between those of the [haute] bourgeoisie and those of the proletariat.

They dream of a “state above classes,” which will not be in the service of either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, and consequently will be in their own service. But while the proletariat proclaims the reality of the class struggle between capital and labor, the [haute] bourgeoisie carries on the class struggle behind the mask of “class collaboration,” and often succeeds in turning the middle classes away from socialism.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Somebody might claim that the People’s Republic of China follows a similar pattern with its tolerance for billionaires, but this is a superficial analysis. The haute bourgeoisie in Italy and Germany institutionalized fascism to preserve its class and reinforce its political power, which was why capitalists such as Alfried Krupp received no punishment until Allied occupation (and even then only trivially).

The PRC’s bourgeoisie, which has less political power, is only shrinking despite whatever highly conditional tolerance that it receives. Class warfare against the bourgeoisie never came anywhere close to an official policy in the Fascist empires, but it did in the people’s republics. This is only one of the many reasons why we cannot categorize the PRC or the other people’s republics as ‘(neo)fascist’.

Events that happened today (August 9):

1936: Jesse Owens won his fourth gold medal at Berlin’s Summer Olympics.
1940: The Axis‐aligned Kingdom of Romania introduced new antisemitic laws, based on the Nuremberg Laws, using a ‘biological conception of the nation’ to define who was a Jew and forbidding intermarriage between Jews and Christians.
1942: An Imperial Japanese Navy cruiser force surprised and defeated the Allied naval forces that were protecting Allied amphibious forces during the Battle of Guadalcanal’s initial stages.
1944: The Vyborg–Petrozavodsk Offensive, the largest offensive launched by Soviet Union against Finland, ended to a strategic stalemate: both Finnish and Soviet troops at the Finnish front dug to defensive positions, and the front remained stable until the war’s end.
1945: As the Red Army invaded Axis‐occupied Manchuria, the United States B-29 Bockscar launched the atomic bomb, Fat Man, on Nagasaki, massacring 35,000 people simultaneously (including 23,200–28,200 Japanese war workers, 2,000 Korean forced workers, and 150 Axis soldiers).
1948: Hugo Boss, Axis businessman, perished.
1957: Carl Clauberg, Axis physician who sterilized women for a living, died.