Notes on the US Form of Fascism

The US Form of Fascism

These are notes from a seminar now in progress at the Bay Area Public School, a free university located in the Omni, at 48 St. and Shattuck, in Oakland. These notes are from the first session of the seminar.
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The concept of fascism is ambiguous. It emerges in Europe, in Italy in particular, when Mussolini’s movement uses the fascia, a bundle of sticks tied together, as a Roman symbol of power. Different countries were subject to fascist regimes in different ways, with different structures, meaning that there is no single form of fascism. Police rule and state violence seem to be constant elements, but even that is culturally varied.

The US has a different history and tradition from Europe. So we must expect the form fascism would take to be different from that of Europe. And the problem that raises for us is that we might not see it if we look for it using a European lens.

But there is a third level of fascist regime that has arisen since World War II, and that is the regime examplified by the client states the US has established in many third world countries, particularly in Latin America. We know the histories of the regimes of Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, Banzer, and the colonels in Argentina. They were all similarly militarized police states designed to suppress any movement toward national sovereignty, or independence from the US. The latest is the Calderon regime in Mexico.

So we have three forms of fascism, the European, the US (insofar as we can discern its underlying structure), and those constructed by the US in third world countries. The discussion in this class will focus on the second one, the form fascism takes in the US – not exclusively, but primarily.
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Many people have analysed the European experience, and attempted to generalize it with some kind of criteriology. (A few examples were handed out.) But for each of these schemas, with respect to the US, there always seems to be something missing. For instance, the Marxists focus on the fact that there is a right-wing demogogue who seizes power and establishes autocratic rule in the interest of the capitalist class. That had been the case in Europe. But since that has not happened in the US, one must conclude that the US is not fascist.

There is a different situation here, however. For instance, we learn from the Obama administration that he had the same policy makers as Bush. That is the conclusion to be derived from the continuity of policy between them.

In other words, there is an autocratic entity (the “policy-makers”) already in place, implying that the does not need a right-wing seizure of power to establish autocratic rule.

Those policy-makers are not known to us, and we don’t elect them. But the president doesn’t choose them either. They choose the president – which assumes a rigged election, which is generally assumed to be one of the characteristics of a fascist system.
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Another central concept derived from the European experience is the idea that the capitalist class was under attack by the people, the working class, or its own internal economic crisis. And for that reason, it turned to violence against the people, to defend itself and to suppress uprising. Christian Parenti makes that case in “Lockdown America,” analysing the rise of the prison industry as the response to capitalist crisis.

But the capitalist class was not under attack by a working class when it turned to mass incarceration as a strategy. During the 60s and early 70s, there had been large strike waves. And the civil rights movement could itself be considered a class struggle insofar as it was an uprising of the colonized (black, brown, women, etc.) against their socio-economic oppression. But when the Vietnam War ended, militancy cooled off. Thus, the beginning of the period to which Parentiy refers is already one of reduced popular pressure on government.

Indeed, when Reagan expunged PATCO in the early 80s, there was no union uprising in solidarity. This was also the beginning of the mass incarceration policy. And when the federal government subsidized runaway shops, deindustrializing the US, there was not a single organized or institutional act of resistance against this. The only attempt at resistence occurred in Youngstown, where some steel workers started a move to buy out the mills, and failed.

Deindustrialization decimated the industrial unions. The industrial unions were integrated. Most white workers, and union leaderships, knew that the investment that came in to fill the vacuum would hire white workers first. Whether in a conscious or an intuitive sense, they knew that this process would bleach out the working class. So they didn’t organize resistance, the way workers did in France, for instance. And they were right. Mostly white people were hired, and the black communities in major industrial cities, like Pittsburgh or St. Louis went into decline and impoverishment.
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Of course, once the issue of fascism is raised, the fact of elections gets raised as well. Many of the theorization of a US fascism mention “rigged elections” as a criterion. There can be endless discussion over whether they are rigged or not, or how they are rigged, and what that means. But the fact is that we vote on proprietary machines, with proprietary software, which makes the tallies proprietary, and thus out of reach of accountability, cancelling transparency. Nevertheless, people vote, and candidates and measures win. We seem to be stuck with the notion that this is how the USian people feel.

But when we put this together with the idea of rigged elections, it comes out inverted. Elections are not held for people to express their opinion. Rather, insofar as they are fixed, they rigged to produce certain outcomes, which can then be used to make popular opinion. If the power structure can say that, because the vote went a certain way, it means that that is how people think, they have a powerful propaganda weapon in their hands. If the outcome of an election is determined, including percentages, then those facts manufacture opinion because they are by definition a validation of a "real" vote. Thus, the elections are not a reflection of opinion but what makes opinion, like the opinion polls.
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Some people focus on the institutionalization of violence as the hallmark of fascism. But that raises an important issue. Violence is imposed by a power structure against people. It is a relational thing. We can’t understand the power that uses violence routinely or as a norm without understanding the structure of acceptance or acquiescence to it on the part of the people. Power exists only because there is acquiescence to it by the subjected. All subjection requires some violence, and so all political power is based on violence to a certain extent. With the issue of fascism, however, we have to understand what the specifics of that violence are, and why they are different, for instance, from the violence of a representationist republic. Thus, it is also the mode of acquiescence, and the cultural structure to which it points, that specifies the forms of violence acceptable. The forms of violence today are growing and increasing, to the point where civilians are picking them up (Zimmerman, Roof, etc.). To understand what this means, we cannot simply look at violence as incoate or dystopic. We would end up discussing it forever. What we need to understand is what social and cultural structures it represents. Capitalism may be one of them, but again, that seems beside the point in the US since the 80s and the rise of the WTO.
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It is also the case that we have lived under the operation of certain structures so long that their operations, which include violence, seem normal. For instance, when an extractive corporation cuts the top off a mountain to make extraction easier, we can act to defend the mountain, or the planet, but we have to understand why, structurally, corporation policy can see that type of despoliation to be valid. When the US bombs another country, or instigates civil war within it, both of which only destroy a social infrastructure and set up resource extraction, without carrying that militarism to the point of occupation or annexation, an anti-war movement finds itself spinning its wheels.

In other words, rather than look at events, or processes, what we have to look at and analyse are the underlying structures.

The difference between event and structure is exemplified and described in an article by Steve Martinot, “Probing the Epidemic of Police Killings,” in Socialism and Democracy, #61 (March 2013). It is about the structure of police interactions with humans, in which the human is killed by the cop. And they have a comon structure. That means that the police have been normalized to act this way across the country.
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The syllabus lists seven structures that need to be analyzed in this sense. They are:
• The corporate structure.
• The structures of racialization, and of white racialized identity.
• The contemporary structure of policing.
• The structure of representationism, its disconnects and its scorn for people.
• The Two-party system
• The structure of mainstream labor unions.

Steve Martinot