The F-word

The F-word

Many theories of fascism were developed in the 20th century – they couldn't prevent it, but they may still be able to help us today.

By Morten Paul

[This article posted on 3/18/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, http://www.linksnet.de.]

What is, or more precisely, is fascism? This question is on everyone's lips. Whatever the answer, it is often substantiated with references to authorities on left-wing interpretations of fascism. The early theorists of fascism did not have to discuss whether what emerged as a combat league after the First World War was fascism. After all, it called itself that: Fasci di Combattimento. But even then, there was fierce debate about how fascism should be understood.

A few days after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the philosopher Max Horkheimer coined a motto that is still popular in left-wing discussions of fascism: “But those who do not want to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism.” The sentence was directed at intellectuals in exile who, driven from their homeland by fascism, had discovered a love of liberalism. Horkheimer, on the other hand, insisted on the connection between liberalism and fascism: the crisis-ridden nature of capitalism did not alone create the conditions under which fascism could flourish. It also distorted an aspect of capitalism that had been obscured by talk of freedom and equality: its domineering character.

Crisis response and capital domination
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All Marxist theories of fascism agree that fascism is a reaction to the crisis tendencies of capitalism. But opinions on how this crisis should be understood varied widely. Initially, the prevailing view was that fascism was bourgeois terror against the proletarian threat. The role model was Admiral Miklós Horthy, who brutally crushed the Hungarian Council Republic established after the defeat of the Habsburg Monarchy in the war. However, as early as 1923, KPD politician Clara Zetkin contradicted this view. In Italy, the first country where fascism came to power, it was not a response to a victorious revolution, but rather revenge for its failure. The disappointed masses then turned to the pseudo-revolutionary promise of the fascist leaders: the nation.

Other socialist theorists attempted to explain the puzzling composition of fascism's mass base by drawing on Karl Marx's analysis of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's coup d'état. Marx had shown how Bonaparte was able to establish a dictatorship in 1851 with the support of various social groups. The Bonapartism approach succeeded in focusing attention on the cross-class appeal of fascism on the one hand and the independence of the state from social class relations on the other.

However, the social fascism thesis developed a year after Zetkin's warning initially prevailed within the Communist International (Comintern). It assumed that social democracy, as the moderate wing of fascism, was the most important pillar of capitalism. In the years when Mussolini's rule consolidated and the NSDAP achieved electoral success, this led to social democracy being fought as the main opponent. When Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor, the Comintern formulated considerations on fascism in power: the thesis named after its General Secretary Georgi Dimitroff referred to fascism as a “terrorist dictatorship” of the most reactionary imperialist finance capital, indicating that it was still understood as a form of capitalist rule and not as a break with it, just like bourgeois democracy. However, its dangerous nature was now recognized. At the same time, this suggested an image of fascist leaders as compliant puppets, which has survived to this day in the slogan “Behind fascism stands capital.”

Dual state, non-state, or total state?
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With fascism in power, the state became the defining issue. The lawyer Ernst Fraenkel emphasized that a repressive state had been established, but that formal legal structures such as laws and courts continued to exist alongside it. For him, it was precisely this duality that characterized the fascist state. The political scientist Franz Neumann, on the other hand, emphasized anarchic arbitrariness and described a non-state determined by competing centers of power. Others subsequently compared fascist regimes to criminal gangs that divide the state among themselves as spoils. Both approaches provide a fairly good description of the hectic activity of the current US administration, with its plethora of executive orders and the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, euphemistically referred to as “bureaucracy reduction.”

The blurring of the boundaries of the fascism debate in the 1970s is linked to the accusation that it has been gradually emptied of meaning: if everything and everyone is “fascist” from some perspective, what is the term still good for?

In a study published shortly after the end of the World War, the liberal philosopher Hannah Arendt emphasized the ideology of fascism in addition to its characteristic of terror. It sought to radically transform society and individuals. With regard to this “total domination,” she and others noted structural similarities between National Socialism and Stalinism. This established a pattern of interpretation that, as the theory of totalitarianism—regardless of intention and content—was to make a career for itself during the Cold War. To this day, it serves arts editors and talk show hosts as a means of fending off left-wing positions, while on the extreme right, the fervor for change has long since been replaced by the defense of “threatened normality.” This is now rarely associated with an openly anti-democratic agenda. But even in historical fascism, contempt for parliamentary procedures and republican institutions was perfectly compatible with the plebeian rhetoric of embodying the true will of the people in a leader, party, or movement.

With ideology, Arendt returns to something whose significance Zetkin had already recognized 30 years earlier: even though the left agreed that there was a connection between capitalism and fascism, this alone did not seem to explain its broad appeal. Around 1930, irritation at this appeal united the thinking of philosophers Ernst Bloch and Georges Bataille, as well as psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich: although committed to communism, they believed that its focus on the economy did not pay enough attention to so-called superstructure phenomena, especially culture. They had in mind the symbolic effort that fascists put into their fantasy uniforms and flags, torchlight processions, and pseudo-myths. As ridiculous as they found the masquerade, they recognized that it tapped into needs that could become significant in circumstances such as mass unemployment and social decline. Studies on the development of authoritarian personality structures in the nuclear family or in working relationships revealed the influence of mentalities and milieus on political processes.

Based on the spread of new media such as radio and cinema, cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer and sociologist Leo Löwenthal in particular linked attention to psychological mechanisms with the study of propaganda techniques. Their descriptions of agitation and fanaticism still astonishingly accurately capture the dynamics of the manosphere, digital shitstorms, or the vitriolic speeches of Jair Bolsonaro or Björn Höcke. Instead of explaining social ills, they identify an enemy: the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy perfectly fulfilled this projective function. Following on from critical theory, Moishe Postone therefore characterized modern anti-Semitism as romantic anti-capitalism. National Socialism cannot be explained without taking into account the anti-Semitism of redemption that culminated in industrial mass extermination.

Gender, Race, Violence
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With the left-wing upheaval around 1968, other global conditions entered the discussion on fascism. In the 1970s, literary scholar Klaus Theweleit described the experience of World War I and participation in the paramilitary Freikorps of the Weimar postwar period as the prehistory of fascist masculinity. Around the same time, PCI politician Maria Antonietta Macciocchi turned her attention to women. She identified their portrayal as virgins and mothers of the nation as a decisive factor in their support for the regime. Subsequent controversies about the active role and perpetration of women in fascism not only challenged the image of women in postwar societies, but also had a productive effect on feminism and gender studies.

Today, gender is once again at the center of reactionary formations: references to traditional gender roles and family images, but even more so the imagination of a threat to this order by queer and trans people, form a binding agent from the far right to far into society. Gender panic allows the threat scenario to be scaled up from the family and immediate environment to the nation, the people, or the world.

The blurring of boundaries in the fascism debate of the 1970s is accompanied by accusations that it has been emptied of meaning: if everything and everyone is “fascist” from some perspective, what use is the term anymore? This objection was also raised against its use in anti-colonial liberation struggles or in the US civil rights movement. What is often overlooked is the early participation of anti-colonial and Black activists in anti-fascist struggles. They naturally made references to their own experiences of oppression. As early as 1937, the poet Langston Hughes pointed out at an anti-fascist congress in Paris that there was no need to explain fascism to Black North Americans, as they were familiar with its pogroms in the form of lynchings, its anti-Semitic race laws in the segregation of the Jim Crow South, and its ideology of Nordic superiority in the Ku Klux Klan. Hughes concluded that the struggles must be united.

The thesis of the writer and politician Aimé Césaire, on the other hand, still provokes controversy: that fascism is the reimportation of techniques of power and means of violence that had been tested in the colonies. However, he wrote bitterly in 1950, this violence only frightened European intellectuals when it was used against them. Even though the specifics of anti-Semitism and the extermination program are not mentioned in this text, Césaire did not deny the horrors of fascist violence. However, the long line he drew from fascism back to colonialism served him to develop a fundamental critique of European “pseudo-humanism.”

Fascism theory as social criticism
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From the 1980s onwards, historians increasingly conducted comparative studies and important detailed research. From the 1990s onwards, a new wave of research then devoted itself to the historical roots of ideas in order to describe fascism as an independent political formation. Roger Griffin coined the influential term “palingenetic” ultranationalism, meaning aimed at rebirth. Stage models were discussed to describe the development from a political movement to a regime in power to war and genocide, and researchers finally began to consider the global interconnection of fascism throughout history.

Left-wing theories of fascism, however, were never solely concerned with whether they accurately described historical fascism, but also with how this description could have an anti-fascist effect. This was obvious given the immediate danger that fascist violence posed and still poses to left-wingers. These theories therefore also differ in how they model the connection between knowledge and practice, enlightenment and change. In this respect, however, they themselves are part of the debates of their time and need to be historicized. The challenge for a socially critical examination of fascism continues to be that of neither viewing it as a mere extension of existing conditions and thereby missing its distinctive features, nor viewing it as a complete break and thereby ignoring the conditions under which it arose and could arise again. In the best case scenario, social theory challenged in this way will also learn something about societies that are not yet, no longer, or soon to be fascist—and about its own place in the struggle for emancipation.

### Morten Paul

is a literary and cultural scholar and works at the Institute for Cultural Studies in Essen.