Fascism: History and Theory

We need to understand the threat of eco-fascism - and therefore fascism. Sam Moore reviews David Renton's latest book, Fascism: History and Theory.

[theecologist.org]

{Fascists think, say and, ultimately, do murderous things. And, where other forms of political movement have started violently before moderating their positions, fascism - in its Italian and Nazi forms - didn’t. It became more and more destructive.}

The Anti-Fascist Wager

All the bone-spur heroes of the American right agree, from Alex Jones to Tucker Carlson, from Andy Ngo to Donald Trump; antifascists must be driven out from public life.

[plutobooks.com]

{And in that way, all of America is being asked to see the world through the eyes of the Proud Boys, the Patriots and the QAnon conspiracy theorists.}

{When fascism began, hardly anyone else in politics agreed with it. The set of people who could have been labelled anti-fascists was very large indeed. It included liberals, conservatives, Christians, anarchists, feminists and countless others.}

{I want to talk about one strand of them in particular, the Marxists. In the twentieth century, they were part of a common approach to politics which was shared by tens of millions of people. Marxism was not a singular thing but a range of politics. It appealed to people who believed in the actuality of revolution and were determined to bring about an immediate popular uprising. The ideology was also employed by others who had no truck with any idea of mass revolt but restricted their desire for change solely to the slow advance of the rights of workers and other subaltern groups, and everything in between.}

{In pamphlets which sold hundreds of thousand of copies, urging the German socialists and communists to unite, Trotsky wrote, ‘In National Socialism everything is as contradictory and chaotic as in a nightmare. Hitler’s party calls itself socialist, yet leads a terroristic struggle against all socialist organisations … It hurls lightning bolts at the heads of the capitalists yet is supported by them’.}

{The interwar Marxists were the first to formulate what can be called the anti-fascist wager. This is the belief, still held today, that fascism is an especially violent and destructive form of right-wing politics, that it has the capacity to grow rapidly in times of social crisis and if ignored will destroy the capacity of the left to organise. If the wager is correct, it follows that it is a priority for its opponents to confront fascism, even at times when other forms of discrimination are endemic, and even when other right-wing politics have more support. This way of thinking assumes a present in which labour is still exploited and discrimination on grounds of race and sex are prevalent. Even in these circumstances, it warns, fascism is an unruly, chaotic agent of negative change. Fascism is capable of extending suffering on an enormous scale. Conversely, where fascism is defeated, the other forms of oppression on which it thrives can also be weakened.}

Hold a great concern, this is essentially what we are facing today. The democratic party has incrementally been moving to the right more noticeably since the Reagan era, building up speed into the Obama era with a rapid leap under the Trump administration. This has been a calculated collaborate agenda of a failing capitalist system with the help of a monopolized ruling class MSCM that controls our information manufactured for them by public relation firms. While this system was already steadily showing signs of nearing a due collapse larger than 2008, this virus expedited our social and economic crisis's. And with the new administration coming in and the apparent potential cabinet names coming in with it in all aspects indicate there's no signs of turning around.