Of course, there will be many interpretations, but what are the defining Marxist ideas on the definition?
I ask, because you see a lot of libs and liblefts calling America fascist, but then being asked how, and not being able to respond. It makes them (and us, because we always get lumped in with them) look bad. I’d like to be able to step in if I ever witness such a thing.
I have nothing to add to the definitions others are giving, but I do wanna say it really annoys me how radlibs and some socialists who are non-Marxist will define fascism mostly as “strong man who appeals to populism”. Like I enjoyed most of the Dollop episode on Huey Long, but Dave at the end describing the basic concept of a demagogue and saying “that is what fascism is” was frustrating. I mean Dave is smart and understands Trump is not really cognizant enough to be a fascist himself, he still defines fascism in a really weak way. It is the same trick people fall into when calling Peron a fascist, even though Peron was at least a fan of Mussolini in the early 30s though for very stupid reasons of buying his propaganda when visiting Italy.
Something similar happened with Quinton Reviews when talking about the History Channel, he sorta goes to far in mocking Nazi inefficiency and ends up saying fascism is internally incoherent and is more or less just a vibe. I think a lot of breadtube and breadtube adjacent folks do this, heck WTYP have done this iirc. People ignore that the ideology and political structure of fascism is a thing, weird and unreasonable as it is, it has theories and shit like the hollow earth that are super goofy stem FROM those reactionary real material forces.
Esoteric fascism is not just the realm of history channel, shit like Sofindus and Executive Outcomes, these orgs literally run by former Nazis who said they communed with Hitler’s spirit, actively did horrifying shit. And fascist ideology was not just left in the dustbin of history, not just reactionaries, but true believers in Hitler personally, got to structure and design our world. The bureaucratic fascists who remained in control of West Germany and the Von Braun types are not so easily divorced from the wacky guys, and said wacky guys had serious sway in the CIA, blew up shit in Italy, ran torture camps in Chile, and formed the basis for modern private military contractors and current torture techniques. Both parts of that equation are relevant.
I HATE when libs say “oh well bigotry is illogical, it doesn’t make sense so there is no structure or path that led to these people” even if they accept that material conditions led to these ideologies. Because they more or less let fascism become the masses going crazy and their irrationalities and anxieties being the driving force hence the scattershot beliefs. This shit ignores that we can track how this shit develops socially, we can trace the esoteric shit and it doesn’t come from the backwards hicks of saxony, it is the fucking Thule society and elite dinner parties.
I think Trueanon’s spider-network series genuinely covers this shit so well
Yeah, there are a million lib essays on fascism that don’t understand that there is a material root to fascism and it’s contradictions. They get so caught up on ‘authoritarianism’ usually though, and get into comparing Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler, which gets them way off course.
The real key as well, imo, is to study the rise of Japanese fascism, because it mirrors the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, but it does it without having a singular massive ‘authoritarian’ leader (because that is not how the histories of Asian people are written in the West). It’s a little different because it was a continuation of the Imperial system, but you will notice that, for the most part, the Emperor himself was not a singular driving force, but that it was a collective emerging capitalist/noble class decision. It really drives home the idea that fascism is just when you are on the pointy end of capitalism.