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.
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.
This already seems off-base to me. Fascism in Italy, Japan, and Germany was a union of corporate power, new violent groups outside the government that could enact their will better, *as well as provide more imperialist spoils to its people…
That is, its revolution does not leave society or the class relations of production unchanged.
A change in goverment that didn’t change anything about who controlled production. I don’t think we can call these anything but a change in government, and not even equal to the revolutions in europe that supplanted feudal power with capitalist power.
Sakai is correct tho that the new fascist governments did provide a lot of benefits to its citizens, as a result of new imperial conquests, and he’s right to criticize the left for claiming that fascism had no popular support, or provided no benefits to its citizens.
In a major way, it was an attempt by a few powers who had lost the ‘great game’ of imperial conquest, to re-enter it, and see if they could out-perform the other european powers at their own game.
There are two chapters in Zak Cope divided world divided class that get into fascism in germany, and the spoils of imperialism in the US, that touch on this point: the spoils of imperialism do not only go the its bourgeiosie.
I think Sakai is making a good point here, but it’s wrong to call fascism anti-imperialist or anti-bourgeios: you would have to ignore the extremely tight links between the industrialists in germany, japan, and italy, and the new groups to do that. His timeline of when they supported fascist groups, even if correct(and according to most, including cope, it doesn’t seem to be), doesn’t get around the fact that industrialists did come to support the new groups, and the new groups fully supported them.
I think Sakai is making a good point here, but it’s wrong to call fascism anti-imperialist or anti-bourgeios: you would have to ignore the extremely tight links between the industrialists in germany, japan, and italy, and the new groups to do that.
I think there are some subtleties here. When you look at Proud Boys and MAGA in the modern era and Nazis in the 30s there is populist rhetoric that is anti (imperialist, bourgeoisie) government. It appeals to people who are suffering under the system, and in that sense it appeals to anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeois sentiment. But it proposes that the problem is that the imperialism is being done wrong, and that done correctly the demographics it’s appealing to eould be benefitting instead of suffering.
I think that’s consistent with what Lenin said about fascism as retrograde imperialism. When an Imperial core no longer has a periphery to exploit, it forms a more exclusive, smaller core by cutting demographics out (jews, LGBTQ, blacks, etc), so it can exploit those groups. The mechanism by which it did (is doing) that is by proselytizing against the larger inclusive imperial core (Democrats 🫏) with anti-imperialist rhetoric.
It’s the reverse of what happened when the US was rising as a white supremacist power, where it expanded the core by changing the definition of ‘white’ to include groups like Irish immigrants as its empire grew.
The imperial ambitions of those three fascist governments shouldn’t be overlooked. There is a qualitative difference between the US-Israel compared Italy-Japan, that being Settler Colonialism. German Fascism modeled itself after American Settlerism which is why it performed extensive pogroms on many peoples and Communists. The mass support for anti-Communism and anti-Semitism was realized not only in Germany, but also the occupied territories, where the middle classes of Eastern and Central Europe excitedly participated in the Holocaust (often taking initiative as in Estonia and Ukraine!) and would have gleefully accepted a homestead on the Volga if the Nazis had won (granted they assimilate into German speakers).
Italy and Japan’s middle classes seemed to mostly have Colonial ambitions, like that of Britain (which had a settler empire itself) and France. The base for desiring empire was in the middle classes (because they stand to benefit), but in all three cases, the Big Bourgeoisie saw salvation in accelerating these desires because who else is going to fight the wars required to obtain empire?
Personally I don’t think Fascism is a good term, it’s self described, like Neoliberalism, or Trotskyism. The bases for these ideologies existed before they developed a name, which is contextual to a specific historical moment. It’s better to describe these ideologies as Colonialist and Settler-Colonialist, as their behavior isn’t new and their excuses resonate through time.
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I intend to read further into this, thank you for bringing it to attention. I am reminded by these excerpts of something Parenti noted.
Parenti moment
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"In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance.
But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.
During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown-shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had con-cluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class.
They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with gener-ous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July RATIONAL FASCISM 5 1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.
In that same campaign the Nazis received 37.3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bour-geoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end."
-Blackshirts and Reds, p5
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I was surprised to find that Parenti implicated “many lumpenproletarians” here, when I first read it at 19. I do not know what entirely to make of it all without more research, but it is interesting. I agree that the Nazi image of the revitalized Aryan Man could not have been effective propaganda without masses of alienated and devalued people who sought to improve their means by any means necessary.
It would be ridiculous I think to believe that the Nazi or Italian fascist takeovers were managed, performed and dictated entirely by small land/businessowners and corporate giants without, historically, enraged poor white people who were sold on the idea that imperialism and subjugation would increase their standard of living… this is reflective of a major contradiction working against even the kindest settler or beneficiary of an imperialist state, systematic ideological reconditioning from birth to death towards an understanding of other peoples as inherently inferior and thusly that those peoples must be the primary catalyst for all of our societal ills.
The bourgeoisie may not directly control the reins, but they’ve certainly got strings it is wise to be aware of, I think, and this should serve to make us more cognizant of how we talk to people who are conditioned into inhumane ideologies - what can be done or said to effectively combat this conditioning? (Tangentially, much respect to our comrades at MintPress, Breakthrough News and First Thought for managing to amass respectable audiences with explicitly anti-imperialist education).
I submit that as a settler subjected to that same conditioning, I don’t know what the fuck to do about it, at least on a personal level, other than furthering my education and not allowing liars to manipulate me into distrust and disdain towards people of other phenotypes and cultures and ensuring that I properly accept the leadership of my black and colonized comrades on these issues. (How heroic of me, I believe I deserve a medal now 🏅 😎 )
It would be ridiculous I think to believe that the Nazi or Italian fascist takeovers were managed, performed and dictated entirely by small land/businessowners and corporate giants without, historically, enraged poor white people who were sold on the idea that imperialism and subjugation would increase their standard of living… this is reflective of a major contradiction working against even the kindest settler or beneficiary of an imperialist state, systematic ideological reconditioning from birth to death towards an understanding of other peoples as inherently inferior and thusly that those peoples must be the primary catalyst for all of our societal ills.
Sakai touches on this point. Regarding Nazi ties to big business:
The major German capitalists didn’t support the excessively unstable, fractious, violent, antibourgeois Nazi Party until after its 1930 electoral breakout into being the dynamic major party of the Right. That is, after a long decade of difficult fighting and building from tiny, obscure beginnings. The Nazis were a poor party by bourgeois standards, financed primarily from their own members and followers. Big capitalism in Germany had instead backed a rival party with big cash – the right wing but respectably bourgeois German Nationalist Party, headed by Alfred Hugenberg. ( A director of the giant Krupp armaments firm, Hugenberg owned the major UFA film studios, the leading German advertising firm, and a nationwide chain of newspapers. He was supported by Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank and Albert Voegler of United Steel ). This is another way of saying that the major German capitalists themselves long misjudged how to handle the crisis that was destroying Depression-era Germany. This is no surprise, since their misruling class ineptitude was one reason things were in such crisis. The failures and misjudgement of the capitalist class leadership play a larger role in things than we sometimes recognize.
For the Italian fascists:
While there are rogue operations and unofficially approved assistance to fascists, there are also cases where the State on all levels gets involved. Italy was one such case, where the newborn fascist movement in 1919-22 got informal local help from police and army officers as well as official assistance from the highest levels of the State. Arrested with a hundred other fascists after the 1919 elections on charges of flashing guns ( Mussolini lost to a socialist candidates by 40 to 1), Mussolini was freed on government orders. In 1920, the defense minister ordered that demobilized officers who joined the fascist action squads to give leadership to the mix of inexperienced middle class students and street criminals in them would continue to get 4/5ths of their army pay. But it wasn’t the Italian big bourgeoisie who were so enthusiastic about supporting fascism but police officials, army officers, local capitalists and the rural middle class landowners and intellectuals. It wasn’t until the eve of the fascist march on Rome in 1922, when Mussolini was being supported by the heads of the military for the next chief of state, that the major industrial capitalists swung into line.
While they did get supported by the big bourgeoisie, the fascists weren’t their first choice. However, as suggested in the second quote, there were still those within the state willing to help the fascists come to power.
It makes me think of the efforts by the right to control finance in the US. These are mostly Republican state legislatures and treasuries that are divesting from BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity etc. By doing this they appeal to the general public by saying ‘green’ finance is harmful for Texans (or whomever), that finance should be supporting what America needs (more oil production apparently), and of course it is quite easy to rationalize any kind of campaign against capital, but especially when it is painted as ‘woke.’
I can definitely see this kind of situation as a ‘right wing’ reaction against monopoly finance capital. Finance is ostensibly the present mode of governance so it makes sense that if fascists struggle to control the heights of the bourgeois government, they will use the back door through finance. If they gain more control of the government, it will probably intensify their efforts to reign in ‘woke’ ‘green’ finance.
But where the current situation may differ from Sakai’s thoughts here is that, for one, these efforts are almost certainly driven by sections of industry! It may be easy to rile up the rabble with cynical anti-capitalism but it is hardly grassroots.
Secondly, (and this is just an observation on this specific issue) they have not yet been successful even though they are fairly organized. I have seen more finance led divestments from fossil fuels in the news over the last week and I’m curious to see if reaction intensifies globally or if this is a uniquely American sort of fascism. Anyway, its deeply strange to imagine climate change could be holding fascism back…
Part of what I think he is getting at is the right-wing resentment of cosmopolitanism and how it can, through propaganda and through class ontologies, get married to the capitalist system as a whole. I think of this dynamic among the classic contradictions of colonialism that drove many of the political debates of the 18th, 19th, 20th centuries. Ultimately these are existential questions for the empire that are answered differently by the different poles of the discourse. Clinton and Obama prize globalization (cosmopolitanism), while Bush and Trump prioritize American fascism.
