often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
Replace the word race with party and you've got an incomplete yes, but not necessarily inaccurate description of Stalins USSR.
Seriously not trying to just be a troll or shill here, so if you feel I'm wrong please let me know how and why. I am legitimately, in good faith, curious about the perspectives of some communist here. It is an ideology I am somewhat interested in.
That's a pretty significant difference, don't you think? Exalting racism and exalting a political organization that opposes racism are diametrically opposed things, not equivalent.
Not saying it is a fair exchange, you are correct. But do keep in mind the wording in the definition is "often". My suggestion of replacement was to emphasize that race is not a requirement to the definition, it's just pointing out that it is usually the characteristic used to define who is the most loyal or desired type of citizen. From what I understand party loyalty could be definitely be applied there.
There's a reason that race is included though, and that reason is that fascism aims to strengthen and reinforce existing hierarchies. That generally includes race, gender, sexual orientation, class, disabilities, etc. Theoretically it's conceivable that you could have a political project that includes all of that except for race, but in practice it's extremely unlikely that a fascist project would exclude it, which is why it's mentioned in the definition.
Communists (esp. Marxist-Leninists) believe in using political power to reduce or remove these hierarchies, even if it requires the use of force. For instance, I think it's good that slave owners in the US were forcibly suppressed and the people they enslaved were liberated. Does that "willingness to forcibly suppress the opposition" make me (and Lincoln) a fascist, even though my goals and values are completely opposite to those of fascists?
If "the opposition" in your definition is taken to include groups that would also forcibly suppress their opposition given the opportunity, then it seems that Webster's has unintentionally baked in assumptions from which the only conclusion is something like anarcho-pacifism, while labelling all states as inherently fascist. This is either a bad definition, or a bad interpretation of the definition.
That is a good point. It's a really interesting application of the tolerance paradox. This is some good perspective I'm getting, glad I made this comment thread.
You can't just swap words out and assume the framework is the same. It literally makes no sense. Changing one word can, and does, have a huge effect on overall meaning of a sentence.
I don't want to dogpile and axont already pointed out a pretty good scholar who talks about the subject, but I did want to add for clarity the reason that it's important to have a precise definition: We could look at, say, Victorian Britain, Ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire and Suleiman the Magnificent and argue that they were all unquestionably ruled by either a single or a small handful of rulers with no real checks on their power, that they oriented the economy and society around themselves, that they suppressed dissent etc. and conclude, from Webster there, that basically every government except modern American government is fascism. Simply in historical terms that would be an enormous problem, because it collapses all the nuance and distinctions that exist, obviously, between these extremely diverse forms of government.
When people talk about fascism, there's a reason they think of Hitler and Mussolini (who self-described, which makes that a bit easier I guess) even if it's hard to put a finger on exactly what the unifying factors are. Very clearly, Mussolini and Hitler thought their projects were incompatible with communism/socialism, it's why their first steps upon achieving power in their countries were to purge the left and ensure that left resistance couldn't be organized against them. Even if you have critiques of Stalin (I certainly do) I think there are pretty obvious differences between the USSR and the fascist axis that it ended up fighting against, reasons that were ultimately persuasive to Roosevelt and Churchill despite their own misgivings about communism. Everyone at the time understood there was a difference, and we need to be able to distinguish if we're going to talk intelligently about forms of government that western countries don't themselves use.
So in short, I'd say that definition from Webster is too vague to be useful, I'd say there are factors like palingenetic ultranationalism and hostility to the left that seem to be constant in any real fascist regime that should really be a part of a definition of the term. Otherwise 'fascist' just means 'mean' or 'bad' because all of its distinctives are gone.
Mussolini and Hitler thought their projects were incompatible with communism/socialism, it's why their first steps upon achieving power in their countries were to purge the left and ensure that left resistance couldn't be organized against them
I think something liberals trip on is that Hitler and Mussolini didn't just attempt to suppress leftists. They did that after gaining power. Before gaining power they did any number of weasel-like things to convince the average person that fascists were in fact better socialists than the socialists. They appealed hard to working class interests, especially the ones with national chauvinist tendencies. They appealed to racism and scorned international cooperation. It didn't help that the average person in this was often confused, coming out of the problems of post WW1 Europe, and mainly wanted a party that would put food on the table. The so called "beefsteak nazi" was a type of person who'd join the Nazis believing they'd put forward more genuine socialist policies. Beefsteak, red on the inside, brown on the outside. Then you had people like Ernst Röhm and Strasser, who identified publicly as socialist. Then once gaining power in 1934, they were killed.
Fascists don't really have beliefs so much as they're an emergency tool for capital to rid itself of its primary internal enemies.
Personally I like the definition that the historian Robert O. Paxton uses. Now, he's a liberal, but he does have good insight into fascism and he doesn't fall into that trap of deciding that communists and fascists must be the same thing. His definition isn't materialist, but it's a good start.
To paraphrase, his definition is "a suppression of the left among popular sentiment." By left he means things like socialists, labor organizations, communists, etc. Fascism is a situation where a country has found its theater of democracy has failed and the capitalists need anything at all to keep themselves in power, even if it means cannibalizing another sector of capitalists. The fascists are the ideological contingent of this, who put forward a policy of class collaboration between working class and capitalist, instead of what socialists propose, which is working class dominance in the economy. Fascists exalt nationality or race because that extends through class sentiments. It brushes aside concerns like internal economic contradictions. I once had a comrade say something like "Fascism is capitalists hitting the emergency button until their hand starts bleeding."
Communists using a vanguard party is to defend their own interests against capitalists or outside invaders. The praise of the CPSU in Stalin's era was precisely because it acted as a development and protection tool for the working class. It did its job and people were wary of any return to the previous Tsarist or liberal governments. Women began going to school, women were given the vote for the first time. Pogroms ceased. In less than one lifetime of the CPSU administrating the country, people went from poor farmers to living in apartments with plumbing, heating, and clean medical care. That's why there was such praise of the party, because they actually did things people liked, and they didn't want anything to threaten them.
Also, what does it matter if there's one party or two? The working class have a singular, uniting interest to overthrow capitalism. Why are multiple parties needed? Anything the working class needs to negotiate for can be handled within a socialist, democratic structure, not two or three competing structures against one another. Take a look at Cuba, which has one party, but doesn't use their party to endorse candidates. Everyone's officially an independent in the National Assembly.
This was an enlightening comment and I appreciate it. I may not agree with all of it but it definitely shows there are some perspectives I haven't considered. A parliamentary or council type system could definitely provide enough representation of different working class communities within a single party. I wonder if they had term limits, or if their representatives would fall into the same hole as the US Congress.
You might be interested in Cuba's representative system then. Politicians there aren't allowed to propose policy or platforms, instead they act purely as representatives from community interests. Cubans can initiate votes of non-confidence in their politicians as well, at any point to have them removed from office. They don't make great salaries either, and if they're party members they're required to pay regular dues. There aren't term limits. I remember there was some kind of referendum a while ago about Cuban term limits and they were declared undemocratic, plus they didn't make sense in regards to Cuba's long term economic plans.
Cuba has one of the most robust democracies in the world. Their constitution was rewritten in 2019 and it was a countrywide effort, starting at things like local union halls and referendums sent to people's homes.
See that's how you fuckin do it. I've always been angry with the US for holding Cuba back. I would love to see where they would be now without the sanctions.
Not sure how Cuban party dues work, but I do know there's an application process and not everyone gets membership. Not sure how it works in regards to income level either
The common socialist position is that term limits are anti-democratic not just because they keep people from voting for who they want to but, more significantly, it tilts the scales in favor of structures that do not have term limits. In the US, for example, elections are essentially completely controlled by private companies from the media to the National Conventions, and term limits check the power of popular candidates (and therefore popular sentiment) versus capital, which does not expire in 8 years.
He was a professor at Harvard most of his career, if that explains anything. He's also on record calling the January 6th capitol thing a fascist coup attempt.
I do think it was an attempt. They just didn’t even know that a coup attempt involved more than walking in the door and demanding Trump be president. The next one in America will involve mass killing, and it will be from a similar demographic.
Yeah we're still in a position where American fascism doesn't even recognize itself in the mirror. It doesn't realize it's a movement that needs coherent aims. It's still stuck in the American paradigm of politics as consumerism. A comrade the other day here said the explicit kind of American fascism is having a hard time getting off the ground because they refuse to adopt socialist rhetoric, like European fascist movements in the past.
Yea that’s well said, also American fascists luckily have no history to look back to that’s before the US state formation. So instead of wanting a new system, they just want their guy to play President as they sit on the couch.
If i remember his book correctly, at start he explicitly denies marxist definition of fascism, and then in course of the book his research lead straight to it being correct on at least two separate occasions, them makes full stop and end the topic when he realise what would he have to write next.
I don't know if thats merely ritually exorcising communism in order to have his book accepted by liberal academia (like in case of Geza Alfoldy for example) or he really is this intellectually dishonest, because he clearly did realised. Anyway it was funny as hell and the book isn't even bad.
Possibly because of the way he's found his career. Paxton is very popular in France and was very instrumental in introducing liberal historiography into French WW2 history. For him to throw a bone to Marxists would be undermining how he earned a name for himself in the first place.
Yeah i see that in polish social sciences too, especially by older authors, it's hard here to keep position in the academia without paying at least lip service to anticommunist witchhunt. Unfortunately even those people are already dead and the new ones are not even shy about being opportunists, most books publish nowadays are almost worthless since it's either anticommunist propaganda, pophistory or bland compilations from older ones.
A different response, which comes from a different angle to those pointing out that Marxism-Leninism is not fascist:
The word 'fascism' is used so fast and loosely outside of a technical context that I wouldn't say one interpretation is necessarily right or wrong. It depends on context. (Incidentally, same for 'socialism', even principled well-read communists can't agree on a definition.)
For example, if we're talking about the actual Fascist ideology (think of Mussolini and associates) then I would even hesitate to include Nazism due to the very different roots: they're both nationalist anti-liberal anti-democratic, anti-socialist 'third way' ideologies and they did ally in the war, sure, but to group them both as 'fascism' trivializes core differences in how they formed, why they successfully formed, how they appealed to their followers (fascism actually recruited many self-identifying socialists in Italy and its important to recognise why to prevent it), and why they were ultimately antisocial and unsuccessful in their goals.
This isn't just some academic masturbation nitpicking or anything: I believe that the ignorance of Classical Fascism by lumping it in with the far more obvious and baseless idiocy of Nazism makes it harder to recognize and counter, especially when neo-Nazis are such ridiculous cartoonish farces. Fascism stemmed from National Syndicalism and has core economic ideas like corporatism (from 'corpus') that could fool people, and sounds much less stupid that Hitler's bizzare esoteric fantasies about Aryan racial supremacy: even Mussolini considered Hitler crazy.
The point of me making this distinction is that the dictionary definition you gave isn't even wrong in describing fascist ideologies, but, I don't think that list of common traits should be mistaken for a definition. Those traits are the results, not the foundation of the ideology, and a neo-liberal state like the USA can easily match many of those traits despite being a very distinct ideology. Any you will absolutely see people saying 'USA is fascist' as a shorthand for nationalist, racist, imperialist, oppressive, blah blah blah, but it's definitely not post-National-Syndicalist faux-socialist corporatist collectivism. We should obviously fight both but they are not the same and manifest differently.
I'm confused, are you saying he's using it wrong?
Here's a copy paste from Webster.
often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
Replace the word race with party and you've got an incomplete yes, but not necessarily inaccurate description of Stalins USSR.
Seriously not trying to just be a troll or shill here, so if you feel I'm wrong please let me know how and why. I am legitimately, in good faith, curious about the perspectives of some communist here. It is an ideology I am somewhat interested in.
That's a pretty significant difference, don't you think? Exalting racism and exalting a political organization that opposes racism are diametrically opposed things, not equivalent.
Replace (good thing) with (bad thing). You looking pretty fucking bad now don't you tankie?
Not saying it is a fair exchange, you are correct. But do keep in mind the wording in the definition is "often". My suggestion of replacement was to emphasize that race is not a requirement to the definition, it's just pointing out that it is usually the characteristic used to define who is the most loyal or desired type of citizen. From what I understand party loyalty could be definitely be applied there.
There's a reason that race is included though, and that reason is that fascism aims to strengthen and reinforce existing hierarchies. That generally includes race, gender, sexual orientation, class, disabilities, etc. Theoretically it's conceivable that you could have a political project that includes all of that except for race, but in practice it's extremely unlikely that a fascist project would exclude it, which is why it's mentioned in the definition.
Communists (esp. Marxist-Leninists) believe in using political power to reduce or remove these hierarchies, even if it requires the use of force. For instance, I think it's good that slave owners in the US were forcibly suppressed and the people they enslaved were liberated. Does that "willingness to forcibly suppress the opposition" make me (and Lincoln) a fascist, even though my goals and values are completely opposite to those of fascists?
If "the opposition" in your definition is taken to include groups that would also forcibly suppress their opposition given the opportunity, then it seems that Webster's has unintentionally baked in assumptions from which the only conclusion is something like anarcho-pacifism, while labelling all states as inherently fascist. This is either a bad definition, or a bad interpretation of the definition.
That is a good point. It's a really interesting application of the tolerance paradox. This is some good perspective I'm getting, glad I made this comment thread.
oh god someone in good faith
Replace the Sodium in Sodium Chloride with Hydrogen and OH GOD IT BURNS IT BURNS OW OW OW OW!
You can't just swap words out and assume the framework is the same. It literally makes no sense. Changing one word can, and does, have a huge effect on overall meaning of a sentence.
I don't want to dogpile and axont already pointed out a pretty good scholar who talks about the subject, but I did want to add for clarity the reason that it's important to have a precise definition: We could look at, say, Victorian Britain, Ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire and Suleiman the Magnificent and argue that they were all unquestionably ruled by either a single or a small handful of rulers with no real checks on their power, that they oriented the economy and society around themselves, that they suppressed dissent etc. and conclude, from Webster there, that basically every government except modern American government is fascism. Simply in historical terms that would be an enormous problem, because it collapses all the nuance and distinctions that exist, obviously, between these extremely diverse forms of government.
When people talk about fascism, there's a reason they think of Hitler and Mussolini (who self-described, which makes that a bit easier I guess) even if it's hard to put a finger on exactly what the unifying factors are. Very clearly, Mussolini and Hitler thought their projects were incompatible with communism/socialism, it's why their first steps upon achieving power in their countries were to purge the left and ensure that left resistance couldn't be organized against them. Even if you have critiques of Stalin (I certainly do) I think there are pretty obvious differences between the USSR and the fascist axis that it ended up fighting against, reasons that were ultimately persuasive to Roosevelt and Churchill despite their own misgivings about communism. Everyone at the time understood there was a difference, and we need to be able to distinguish if we're going to talk intelligently about forms of government that western countries don't themselves use.
So in short, I'd say that definition from Webster is too vague to be useful, I'd say there are factors like palingenetic ultranationalism and hostility to the left that seem to be constant in any real fascist regime that should really be a part of a definition of the term. Otherwise 'fascist' just means 'mean' or 'bad' because all of its distinctives are gone.
I think something liberals trip on is that Hitler and Mussolini didn't just attempt to suppress leftists. They did that after gaining power. Before gaining power they did any number of weasel-like things to convince the average person that fascists were in fact better socialists than the socialists. They appealed hard to working class interests, especially the ones with national chauvinist tendencies. They appealed to racism and scorned international cooperation. It didn't help that the average person in this was often confused, coming out of the problems of post WW1 Europe, and mainly wanted a party that would put food on the table. The so called "beefsteak nazi" was a type of person who'd join the Nazis believing they'd put forward more genuine socialist policies. Beefsteak, red on the inside, brown on the outside. Then you had people like Ernst Röhm and Strasser, who identified publicly as socialist. Then once gaining power in 1934, they were killed.
Fascists don't really have beliefs so much as they're an emergency tool for capital to rid itself of its primary internal enemies.
Personally I like the definition that the historian Robert O. Paxton uses. Now, he's a liberal, but he does have good insight into fascism and he doesn't fall into that trap of deciding that communists and fascists must be the same thing. His definition isn't materialist, but it's a good start.
To paraphrase, his definition is "a suppression of the left among popular sentiment." By left he means things like socialists, labor organizations, communists, etc. Fascism is a situation where a country has found its theater of democracy has failed and the capitalists need anything at all to keep themselves in power, even if it means cannibalizing another sector of capitalists. The fascists are the ideological contingent of this, who put forward a policy of class collaboration between working class and capitalist, instead of what socialists propose, which is working class dominance in the economy. Fascists exalt nationality or race because that extends through class sentiments. It brushes aside concerns like internal economic contradictions. I once had a comrade say something like "Fascism is capitalists hitting the emergency button until their hand starts bleeding."
Communists using a vanguard party is to defend their own interests against capitalists or outside invaders. The praise of the CPSU in Stalin's era was precisely because it acted as a development and protection tool for the working class. It did its job and people were wary of any return to the previous Tsarist or liberal governments. Women began going to school, women were given the vote for the first time. Pogroms ceased. In less than one lifetime of the CPSU administrating the country, people went from poor farmers to living in apartments with plumbing, heating, and clean medical care. That's why there was such praise of the party, because they actually did things people liked, and they didn't want anything to threaten them.
Also, what does it matter if there's one party or two? The working class have a singular, uniting interest to overthrow capitalism. Why are multiple parties needed? Anything the working class needs to negotiate for can be handled within a socialist, democratic structure, not two or three competing structures against one another. Take a look at Cuba, which has one party, but doesn't use their party to endorse candidates. Everyone's officially an independent in the National Assembly.
This was an enlightening comment and I appreciate it. I may not agree with all of it but it definitely shows there are some perspectives I haven't considered. A parliamentary or council type system could definitely provide enough representation of different working class communities within a single party. I wonder if they had term limits, or if their representatives would fall into the same hole as the US Congress.
You might be interested in Cuba's representative system then. Politicians there aren't allowed to propose policy or platforms, instead they act purely as representatives from community interests. Cubans can initiate votes of non-confidence in their politicians as well, at any point to have them removed from office. They don't make great salaries either, and if they're party members they're required to pay regular dues. There aren't term limits. I remember there was some kind of referendum a while ago about Cuban term limits and they were declared undemocratic, plus they didn't make sense in regards to Cuba's long term economic plans.
Cuba has one of the most robust democracies in the world. Their constitution was rewritten in 2019 and it was a countrywide effort, starting at things like local union halls and referendums sent to people's homes.
See that's how you fuckin do it. I've always been angry with the US for holding Cuba back. I would love to see where they would be now without the sanctions.
Hell yeah!
Wouldn't party dues be a bad thing here because they gate poorer members?
Not sure how Cuban party dues work, but I do know there's an application process and not everyone gets membership. Not sure how it works in regards to income level either
Requiring application is good, I just don't like it costing money
I think it could come out of the salary they give you
Isn't that just them paying you less, then? And are all party members salaried to start with?
The common socialist position is that term limits are anti-democratic not just because they keep people from voting for who they want to but, more significantly, it tilts the scales in favor of structures that do not have term limits. In the US, for example, elections are essentially completely controlled by private companies from the media to the National Conventions, and term limits check the power of popular candidates (and therefore popular sentiment) versus capital, which does not expire in 8 years.
I'm confused how he could make these observations and remain a lib, what happened?
He was a professor at Harvard most of his career, if that explains anything. He's also on record calling the January 6th capitol thing a fascist coup attempt.
Harvard, say no more fam
I do think it was an attempt. They just didn’t even know that a coup attempt involved more than walking in the door and demanding Trump be president. The next one in America will involve mass killing, and it will be from a similar demographic.
Yeah we're still in a position where American fascism doesn't even recognize itself in the mirror. It doesn't realize it's a movement that needs coherent aims. It's still stuck in the American paradigm of politics as consumerism. A comrade the other day here said the explicit kind of American fascism is having a hard time getting off the ground because they refuse to adopt socialist rhetoric, like European fascist movements in the past.
Yea that’s well said, also American fascists luckily have no history to look back to that’s before the US state formation. So instead of wanting a new system, they just want their guy to play President as they sit on the couch.
If i remember his book correctly, at start he explicitly denies marxist definition of fascism, and then in course of the book his research lead straight to it being correct on at least two separate occasions, them makes full stop and end the topic when he realise what would he have to write next.
I don't know if thats merely ritually exorcising communism in order to have his book accepted by liberal academia (like in case of Geza Alfoldy for example) or he really is this intellectually dishonest, because he clearly did realised. Anyway it was funny as hell and the book isn't even bad.
Possibly because of the way he's found his career. Paxton is very popular in France and was very instrumental in introducing liberal historiography into French WW2 history. For him to throw a bone to Marxists would be undermining how he earned a name for himself in the first place.
Yeah i see that in polish social sciences too, especially by older authors, it's hard here to keep position in the academia without paying at least lip service to anticommunist witchhunt. Unfortunately even those people are already dead and the new ones are not even shy about being opportunists, most books publish nowadays are almost worthless since it's either anticommunist propaganda, pophistory or bland compilations from older ones.
"Replace the word 'pollution' with the word 'jews' and captain planet looks pretty fascist!"
I'm sure a lot of people will chime in, I just want to add this short vid with Domenico Losurdo.Here.
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in that one episode
A different response, which comes from a different angle to those pointing out that Marxism-Leninism is not fascist:
The word 'fascism' is used so fast and loosely outside of a technical context that I wouldn't say one interpretation is necessarily right or wrong. It depends on context. (Incidentally, same for 'socialism', even principled well-read communists can't agree on a definition.)
For example, if we're talking about the actual Fascist ideology (think of Mussolini and associates) then I would even hesitate to include Nazism due to the very different roots: they're both nationalist anti-liberal anti-democratic, anti-socialist 'third way' ideologies and they did ally in the war, sure, but to group them both as 'fascism' trivializes core differences in how they formed, why they successfully formed, how they appealed to their followers (fascism actually recruited many self-identifying socialists in Italy and its important to recognise why to prevent it), and why they were ultimately antisocial and unsuccessful in their goals.
This isn't just some academic masturbation nitpicking or anything: I believe that the ignorance of Classical Fascism by lumping it in with the far more obvious and baseless idiocy of Nazism makes it harder to recognize and counter, especially when neo-Nazis are such ridiculous cartoonish farces. Fascism stemmed from National Syndicalism and has core economic ideas like corporatism (from 'corpus') that could fool people, and sounds much less stupid that Hitler's bizzare esoteric fantasies about Aryan racial supremacy: even Mussolini considered Hitler crazy.
The point of me making this distinction is that the dictionary definition you gave isn't even wrong in describing fascist ideologies, but, I don't think that list of common traits should be mistaken for a definition. Those traits are the results, not the foundation of the ideology, and a neo-liberal state like the USA can easily match many of those traits despite being a very distinct ideology. Any you will absolutely see people saying 'USA is fascist' as a shorthand for nationalist, racist, imperialist, oppressive, blah blah blah, but it's definitely not post-National-Syndicalist faux-socialist corporatist collectivism. We should obviously fight both but they are not the same and manifest differently.
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