Is the US fascist? Are all bourgeois states fascistic? If not then why are some fascist and others not? Is post-Stalin USSR fascist? Was FDR fascist? Is Putin fascist?
Is the US fascist? Are all bourgeois states fascistic? If not then why are some fascist and others not? Is post-Stalin USSR fascist? Was FDR fascist? Is Putin fascist?
The doco uses Nazi Germany as an in-depth case-study and doesn't survey other examples of fascism. But I asked the creators a similar question in a Q&A after the premiere and they said that yes, the same definition works for fascist Italy, but that there examples often called fascist for which it might not exactly fit, such as Franco's Spain, a much less industrialised country.
However, this analysis provides a clear materialist understanding of how fascism is formed out of the decay of capitalism, the particular material nature of fascism, and allows us to draw clear relationships and distinctions with liberalism, bourgeois democracy, other forms of dictatorship. And if there are some things we've thought of as fascist that don't fit the definition exactly, then this definition allows us to study those differences and particularities, and to study the transfer of ideological features from the original classical fascism to other political formations.
I haven't watched that video in a while, but what I didn't like about their definition of fascism is that it automatically excludes neocolonies from being fascist since their principle criterion is domination of financial capitalism with the understanding that the domination is through the country's own financial capitalists, not foreign capitalists. So, South Korea under Syngman Rhee wasn't fascist because South Korea is a US proxy state ultimately controlled by US financial capitalists.
In general, I don't get the purpose of their video. They're hyper-specific about what is and isn't fascist and are scornful of people with looser definitions, but it goes back to my question, what's the point? At the end of the day, it's just capitalist barbarism. Capitalism under decay descents into barbarism. To me, their entire video is just them going over a particular form of capitalist barbarism and being mad that people are using the word "fascism" as a synonym of the word "barbarism." "No, the US isn't fascist, it's settler-colonialist, another form of capitalist barbarism that's nevertheless distinct from fascism." I could counter this with, "Yep, the US isn't fascist, it's just a police state where the police are all fascist" and we're back at square 1. I think the video would be much more beneficial if it just catalogued multiple capitalist barbarisms, so a section on fascism, a section on settler-colonialism, a section on neocolonialism, and so on, with their historical and material roots, their particular ideological manifestations, and the means of combating these particular forms of reaction.
And finally, there's a particular form of racial tone-deafness, which I suppose is understandable because they're white Anglos. There's a reason why the Black Panthers and most Black and Indigenous radicals including George Jackson, someone who they referenced in the video, consider the US fascist. "Uh acktually, the US is settler-colonialist, not fascist" means absolutely nothing to people who are Black or Indigenous. From the perspective of someone who's Indigenous, what's the material difference between a settler-colonial US and a fascist US? Settler-colonial US already steals land, commits acts of genocides, and shoves them into camps. What would a fascist US possibly do to them that a settler-colonial US hasn't already done? Ditto for Black people. Settler-colonial US already enslaved them and continues to enslave them through penal labor. What would a fascist US do? Re-enslave them? Re-enact Jim Crow? Re-enforce miscegenation laws? Re-enact segregation? Re-establish inner city ghettos to concentrate the Black population? Unless they're envisioning a fascist US just straight up dropping tactical nukes on Black majority regions of the country (as we know, settler-colonial US has already dropped conventional bombs on Black communities), they're absolutely nothing a fascist US could do that a settler-colonial US hasn't already done.
I think we should not lose sight on the bigger picture, and instead of being overly academic we should, as George Jackson said:
American bourgeois democracy definitely looks and operates differently from Italian and German Fascism, but also distinctly from, AFAIK, every other bourgeois democracy. The various factions of the bourgeoisie do battle over their competing interests in Congress, but the degree to which covert and overt committees of intelligence and business people decide the actual critical components of domestic and foreign policy can't be overstated and, in my opinion, puts it at least adjacent to the dictatorship of Fascism (though much more effective due to the ability to maintain the facade of liberal democracy).