I’m a fan of Marxist poster C_Plot on Reddit. I’ve gained a lot of good insights from them. Here, they talk about what fascism is/isn’t, but not in a way that excludes other angles on it imo. Link to Reddit in the post but I’m copying & pasting the whole comment here so you don’t have to go there to see it. Overall I agree but would love to hear your takes.
Fascism is not at all an ideology. Fascism is a tactic to maintain tyrannical class-rule. So fascism is not extreme capitalism. However, fascism is a tactic to maintain tyrannical capitalist class rule with a rise in the conscious of the oppressed classes. In feudalism, the ruling class rule by divine right. The bourgeois revolutions shattered that and promoted the view that “all are created equal”.
Republicanism (even in a stunted constitutional monarchy form), along with legislative supremacy, threatens the reign of the capitalist ruling class unless either the working class submits obsequiously to capitalist tyranny OR the franchise of the working class can be diverted into basal hatreds and bigotries through the tactic of fascism. If the working class remains steeped in obsequiousness, the capitalist tyrants can maintain the myth of rule of the People and republicanism. However as consciousness rises, even slightly, and the working class becomes conscious of themselves as an oppressed class, the ruling class panics and promotes hatreds and bigotries toward a cultivated out-group set and promises to smite the members of that out-group.
Those anti-Agápē hatreds and bigotries come to dominate what passes for civic discourse. Instead of government administering our common resources and addressing our common concerns, as civic discourse, the hatreds and bigotries of the out-group members and the hyper oppression of the out-group eclipses all genuine civic discourse. The fascist tactic allows the capitalist ruling class tyrants to maintain their rule while maintaining the semblance of a republic (though recently a return to divine right for tyrants is being promoted too).
Therefore capitalism cannot sustain itself without the docility of oppressed classes or instead the panic and pervasive deployment of the fascist tactic. That is not about societal decay but the decay of the tyrannical reign of the capitalist ruling class itself. So fascism is entirely about the capitalist counterrevolution reaction to the socialist call for advancing the bourgeois revolutions beyond capitalist tyranny.
We have been conditioned, like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water, to accept fascism as the very water in which we swim. Fascism was the result of the Great Depression, not because of the downturn in the economy itself but because of meager advances in working class consciousness. It’s just that the fascist tyrants demanded we never use the proper moniker to delineate what they had imposed upon us (rampant ridicule of those using the term “fascist” as if it is absurd to use the term when instead it is entirely appropriate).
Capitalism as it is usually defined is not an ideology either, it’s a system of economic relations. The ideology most associated with it is liberalism.
I think the idea of fascism not being substantially ideological is undermined by the obvious point that it’s closely conjoined with capitalism. Also, even what they are describing, the lionizing of ingroup preference, is ideological, and you can easily point to other features that are more characteristic of fascism than their explanation (which I think is overly tainted by Hitlerian Nazism rather than a broad view of fascist ideologies), most particularly the fantasy that class collaborationism can be perpetuated forever if we just subordinate all classes to the state, which is somehow not a bureaucratic or military class of its own, on the basis of some sort of egoistic nationalism.
I can’t say I follow or agree on this point. I think this just the method of practical carrot-and-stick behavior modification. The promises of in-group rewards means even a Jewish person will become a a Nazi, or Candace Owens will become MAGA. Then fear of losing in-group status is what keeps people in line: Carlie Kirk back to toeing the party line over his audience after one phone call.
It’s a brutally effective way to prey on people where they’re vulnerable: primal fears and desires.
You can phrase things mechanistically if you like and then nothing is ideological except for a purely aesthetic, Nietzschean sort of ideology, but I said the word “lionizing” for a reason. I don’t mean just the strategy of favoring your ingroup, I mean the set of social values in which you should do such a thing even if it was hypothetically to your detriment (a hypothetical that the Nazis and notoriously Imperial Japan had people frequently realize) because it is good and it is just to do so.
I think ideals do exist, I think “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” can only be explained as an ideology because it places an intrinsic value on people, not a practical value. It exists regardless of who the ruling party is.
I never got the sense it was about a sense of universal goodness that exists independently of the ruling party, but because earning approval of the ruling in-group could help you earn carrots and escape sticks.
Remember that the inherent virtue of serving and sacrificing for your country that has long been a central element of America’s civic religion.
See also JD Vance:
Of course, this is closer to Confucianism than anything you’ll find in the New Testament, and actual Confucianism is another great example of ingroup preference as a set of values as well as a supposedly pragmatic approach to social organization.
Lol, JD Vance lying out his mouth. Do you think JD Vance believes in self sacrifice for himself? Do you think JD Vance loves Hispanic Americans? Or immigrants? Or Palestinians?
No, what JD Vance loves is encouraging other people to self sacrifice, to perpetuate genocides at home and abroad, to make himself and his billionaire donors richer and more powerful.
Like how Christo-fascists have nothing to do with Christian values, they appropriate the aesthetics and rhetoric only to the extent that it gets them what they want.
Obviously he doesn’t have any interest in self-sacrifice, and Trump has opened a Bible maybe three times in his life, but it would be absurd to think there isn’t a major element of their evangelical support who don’t hold the values promulgated by these lying careerists, whether because the careerists are advocating for them or because the careerists knew these were already popular values. Vance was just an example, I could have just as easily cited Benjamin Franklin talking about how natural it is to want to see one’s own race proliferate.
Yes, but holding those values doesn’t make them fascists, it does make them vulnerable to fascists who appropriate the aesthetics of their values.
Fascism is not arising out of their values, it is exploiting their values.
I’m sorry but this is a silly argument that amounts to playing with words. If you’re trying to do literally anything but defend the conclusion of the post, what sort of descriptive value are you adding here? Holding one specific element of belief that is characteristic of fascists does not itself make them fascists, therefore the belief has no bearing on them being fascists?
All that argument is is the confusion of a necessary condition with a sufficient condition. Based on what we’ve seen historically, the value of some kind of ingroup preference is a necessary element of fascist ideology, it’s the bundle that is the fasces. It also seems plain that fascism is the logical end point of these beliefs, not an “exploitation” of them. If you think that your race should come before other races, why wouldn’t you seek to exterminate all those untermenschen? If you think your nation’s benefit should come before those of any other nation’s (or, you know, that of the people in other nations), the only reason you have to hold off on conquering them is pragmatic (which indeed was what held off the Nazis on starting WWII until they thought they were ready to). Most of all, if you believe that ethno-national heritage is the most fundamental dividing line between yourself and others (with the people on your side being the ones you should care about), doesn’t it make the most sense to side with your ethnicity’s/nation’s bourgeoisie against the workers (and bourgeoisie) of other nations and ethnicities?
Vance is basically summarizing the Confucian argument against Mohism’s universal love, which more or less maps one-to-one with agape. In general, it’s fascinating how Mohists and early Christians were so similar.