Fascisms: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, October 2022

Jeremy was a dandy. At a time when young men were going hippie—growing their hair long, wearing faded, ripped blue jeans with western or tie-dyed shirts, buckskin or Edwardian vests and sandals or cowboy boots—Jeremy wore sharply pressed pleated dark slacks, pastel dress shirts with smart cardigan sweaters highlighted by the occasional ascot, and black or brown wingtips. This was 1970 and I was just such a wannabe hippie when I boarded the local Ventura city bus to sit down next to Jeremy. He sniffed in disdain at my unruly appearance and went back to writing in his notebook.

“I’m on the Prom Committee,” he said, holding his pen in the air between thumb and forefinger. “We’re developing the theme for this year’s Prom. What do you think about ‘a taste of bittersweet’?”

I had no school spirit nor had I plans to attend my high school prom so I simply shrugged. Jeremy was a walking contradiction. Everybody knew he was gay even though he was not out. He was overtly Catholic however and always wore a silver crucifix with a finely tooled image of the bloodied Jesus around his neck. Michael boarded the bus the next stop and sauntered back to where we sat. Michael was a year older and now a freshman at UC Santa Barbara where he had participated in the Isla Vista student riots that burned down the Bank of America. He wasn’t just a shaggy hippie but also a burgeoning New Leftist like myself. Michael and Jeremy despised each other. So while Michael and I chatted, Jeremy and Michael ignored each other. Then Michael happened to mention he “planned to hitchhike around Europe in the summer.”

“Spain is quite lovely, although a tad hot in the summertime,” Jeremy feigned a casual air. “I visited Spain last summer for an Opus Dei retreat and I had such a wonderful time.”

Potentia Habet Terminos Non: “What’s Left?” November 2016, MRR #402

I don’t recollect the TV commercial in question, but everything is available via YouTube nowadays. I do remember the controversy surrounding it. A cute, freckled, blonde-haired little girl is in a field of flowers picking the petals off a daisy, counting them out as she goes. When she picks the last petal, a countdown begins, she looks up, and the camera dives deep into her eye. A thermonuclear explosion goes off against the black background as a snippet of Barry Goldwater’s speech plays laying out his perceived choice before god between love and annihilation. Then the final verbal message, the stakes are too high, plays over a title card plea to elect Lyndon Johnson president in 1964. It was the first time I was aware of someone warning against potential Republican fascism, and that only obliquely in a vague, entirely faux “liberty or death” sort of way.

The whole world was exploding in 1968, or so it seemed. Paris, France and Prague, Czechoslovakia experienced a short-lived revolutionary spring; the guerrilla Tet Offensive raged throughout South Vietnam; the Mexican army brutally massacred students in Mexico City; Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated and riots erupted across the US; Robert Kennedy was also gunned down; a police riot at the Democratic National Convention brought Richard Nixon to power—these were but a few of the events that politicized me. I became an anarchist and went from a pious pacifism to wanting to join a rapidly radicalizing SDS, which by that time was tearing itself apart thanks to New Left sectarianism. My precipitous political development had me believing that Nixon—the law-and-order candidate—would round up all the hippies into labor camps, shoot black people on sight, and usher in a red-white-and-blue fascism. With the ratification of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18, I immediately registered to vote Peace and Freedom Party. In 1972, I voted for the People’s Party’s presidential candidate Benjamin Spock in the primaries and George McGovern in the national election.

Living in San Diego by 1980, I was a full-on lefty anarcho making a transition to commie ultraleftism. Ronald Reagan was running for president. As California’s governor, Reagan had said in reference to quelling riotous student protesters: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” No wonder me and my fellow lefties, and many liberals to boot, thought that Reagan would call “action” on a Hollywood version of fascism for the country when he got elected. Reagan liked to start and finish his various political campaigns in San Diego for superstitious good luck, so I was part of the protest at the Chargers/Padres sports stadium that hoped to “welcome” the newly elected President Reagan into office. My girlfriend got into a scuffle with a cop and I spent the rest of the evening bailing her out of jail. In hindsight, Hinkley did a far better job in welcoming Reagan to the presidency, but the left of the Left was fully prepared for some Weimar-style street fighting. It was bullets, not ballots, or so we thought.

These Republican campaigns helped move American politics inexorably to the right, but they did not bring about a homegrown fascism. Indeed, the Democratic campaigns of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and even Barack Obama also contributed in their own ways to the rightwing drift of US politics without actually inaugurating fascism proper. So now we’re being told by various liberals and progressives that Donald Trump represents more than your ordinary everyday run-of-the-mill rightwing, authoritarian, racist, nationalist politics; that he actually steps over the line into fascism proper, capital “F” Fascism if you will; and that we have no choice but to do everything in our power to elect Hillary Clinton, up to and including what Bill Maher recently suggested by warning: “Every cause has to take a back seat to defeating Trump. He’s like an infection, you don’t fool around with it. […] There’s no room for boutique issues in an armageddon election.”

Bullshit!

An article in The Economist entitled “Past and future Trumps” (7-16-16) argues that Republican Trump fits the strongman type, much like the dictatorial caudillos of Latin America, but with an Anglo American emphasis on nativism, isolationism, and populism. This election pits him against Democrat Clinton who is a corporatist, globalist, and multiculturalist, and it behooves us to remember that the Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin. Or as Gore Vidal once quipped: “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.” There actually might be more than a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrats and Republicans this election, to paraphrase George Wallace, but both are rightwing parties bent on taking the US further to the right, one in a free-trade globalist direction and the other in a protectionist nationalist way.

So, which is it? Are the Democrats and Republicans fundamentally the same? Or are there differences that make a difference between the two parties? Is Trump your usual rightwing Republican asshole? Or is he a fascist-in-the-making, a crypto-fascist, an ordinary fascist, or a formal Fascist? Perhaps I should make up my mind.

In keeping with the Wayback Machine theme this column started with, we of the 60s persuasion tended to call anything even remotely rightwing, authoritarian, racist, or nationalist “fascist” all the time. Our rather indiscriminate use of the epithet to broadly tar our political opponents tended to degrade the English language, not to mention any political discourse so that the term eventually became meaningless. It also obscured some real important political distinctions. Take black men for instance. Compared to white men, their unemployment rates are over twice as high, their incomes are less than one sixth, and their incarceration rates are nearly six and a half times as much. Could they justifiably claim they already live under some form of fascism, whether capital “F” or not, especially when compared to their white counterparts?

Some differentiation is thus in order, and we’ll start by defining fascism. Fascism began coalescing as a distinct rightwing politics during the first World War, gained ground in various European political movements in the interwar years before taking power in Italy and Germany, cohered like-minded regimes and political movements around a political/military alliance, finally to fight and lose the second World War. Not only do I consider fascism as encompassing both Italian Fascism and German Nazism, I think its military defeat in 1945 means that what we’re dealing with today is a neo-Fascist/neo-Nazi movement substantially changed by that defeat and by fascism’s propensity for political synchronicity, yet one still committed to a fascist minimum, a generic fascist core ideology. In the bewildering academic tangle that is Fascist Studies, I side with Roger Griffin who argues that:
[F]ascism is best defined as a revolutionary form of nationalism, one that sets out to be a political, social and ethical revolution, welding the ‘people’ into a dynamic national community under new elites infused with heroic values. The core myth that inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement of purifying, cathartic national rebirth (palingenesis) can stem the tide of decadence.

So while Trump’s alt.right fanboys definitely are fascists, as are many of his good-ol-boy back slapping paleoconservative followers, Trump himself is not a fascist. And no quantity of “Make America Great” made-in-China red baseball caps can make his clownish, blowhard politics into some kind of revolutionary palingenetic nationalism. He’s a demagogic schoolyard bully along the lines of Huey Long, but a more up-to-date comparison might be to Silvio Berlusconi. That’s not to say his campaign does not give aid-and-comfort to American fascists, or reinforce some of the more reactionary aspects of US politics, and therefore should be defeated. Yet the liberal/progressive scare mongering that we are on the eve of goose stepping into a Donald Trump presidency is way overblown.

Ah, but wasn’t Juan Perón one of those Latin American caudillos who promulgated a variation of fascism and aligned himself with the Axis powers during the second World War? And didn’t Gilles Dauvé argue, writing as Jean Barrot in “Fascism/Anti-Fascism,” that “Fascism was a particular episode in the evolution of Capital towards totalitarianism, an evolution in which democracy has played and still plays a role as counter-revolutionary as that of fascism,” and thus that fascism and democracy are but two faces of the capitalist state? Couldn’t US democracy turn on a dime and become fascism?

Yes, and no. Dauvé’s overly simplistic and somewhat dogmatic analysis posits a unitary capitalist state run by a unified capitalist ruling class where fascism is one of that state’s and class’s unified responses to a capitalism in crisis when democracy no longer works. (Another implication of Dauvé’s opposition to antifascism—that we don’t need to combat fascism—is belied by a like-minded ultraleft that never held back from fighting fascists.) This vulgar, mechanistic, ultraleft interpretation of Marx’s famous quote that “[t]he executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” does Marxism no favors.

We can agree that fascism is a special case of generic rightwing politics, and that American politics are of a piece left and right, without clearly grasping the relationship of one to the other. I suggest a little less Hegelian dialectics and a little more Heisenbergian simultaneity, in particular the latter’s uncertainty principle in which light is defined as simultaneously a wave and a particle. The idea that two contradictory things can also constitute a kind of unity doesn’t sit well with the more linearly-minded among us. Light is both particle and wave. A singular American party politics is both rightwing and leftwing, Republican and Democratic. Fascism is both a part of generic rightwing politics and sui generis. This duality also applies to behavior, in that we can simultaneously hold that US electoral politics are irredeemably corrupt while voting for the lesser of two evils, or realize that the capitalist ruling class has democratic and fascist faces in power while fighting that fascism in the streets. Two things can be fundamentally the same and yet crucially different.

Personally, I square this circle by not investing too much in the analysis or the actions in any particular case. Yes, US winner-take-all, ideologically narrow party politics are shit, but I don’t endorse third party nonsense or pie-in-the-sky calls for world revolution. Nor do I make a big deal of voting for the lesser of two evils, whether that’s Clinton over Trump or Sanders over Clinton. And make no mistake, Bernie is still the lesser of two evils. Yes, the bourgeoisie has democratic and fascist options when dealing with a capitalism in crisis, but I don’t deny that black people face a more fascistic existence in this country than do white people. Nor do I denigrate those who would fight fascists in the streets even though I don’t agree that the fight against fascism must be the be-all-and-end-all to our politics.

This is part of the centuries-old debate on the Left pitting reform against revolution. I never subscribed to the notion, popular in the 60s, that “the revolution” will happen sooner if we eschew liberal reforms or if reactionary politicians are elected. Nor do I buy into the myth that winning a string of incremental reforms brings us any closer to social revolution, let alone socialism, even while I acknowledge that incremental reforms do make a difference in the lives of ordinary people. The point is to be engaged in social change—whether incremental or revolutionary—without attachment, in the spirit of “When you are hungry, eat; when you are tired, sleep.” More on that next column.

FOOTNOTE:

[Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led “armed party” which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence. (Roger Griffin, “The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology”)

Anarchism for Fools: “What’s Left?” April 2014, MRR #371

Part Three: Anarchism of-by-for Fools

What has to be stressed here, regardless of the philosophical foundations of Anarchism, is that National-Anarchism is Anarchism sui generis. An Anarchism of its own kind. We are not answerable to or responsible for the actions of those who also happen to call themselves ‘Anarchists,’ be they contemporary or in the past.

Troy Southgate

When I hear the term sui generis, I reach for my gun. Also, the term “beyond left and right.” Both are attempts to provide a patina of philosophical respectability to the idiocy that is National Anarchism (NA), an oxymoron if there ever was one.

Two columns ago, I discussed the relationship of capitalist libertarianism to historical libertarianism, that is, to old school anarchism. I didn’t require more than a sentence to position anarchism, which referred to itself as social anarchism, within the context of socialism or the Left as a whole. Individualist anarchism, up to and including its current capitalist iteration, is categorical in identifying the various schools of social anarchism as leftist. And that tiny yet shrill tendency calling itself post-left anarchism, first promulgated by Anarchy, A Journal of Desire Armed, acknowledges the leftism of much previous anarchism by defining itself as “post.” That NA describes itself as a unique “category in itself” suits most anarchists just fine, as they would be happy to be completely rid of these poseurs. NA is far from Fascism sui generis, however. In point of fact, NA is Fascism, simple and unadorned and quite generic.

Which brings up the tricky task of defining Fascism proper. The thumbnail description associated with Fascism is that it’s an “anti-liberal, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist revolutionary ultra-nationalist ideology, social movement and regime.” This tweet-length one-liner is woefully insufficient for most academics interested in researching the nature of Fascism and coming up with a paradigmatic “Fascist Minimum” that can encompass as many types of ultra-right ideological/social phenomenon as possible. But for those on the ultra-right, the above sound bite of a description is too definitive because it tries to nail down what seeks to remain intentionally vague, flexible, and sui generis.

I noted the explosion of political ideas, associations and actions, left and right, that occurred from the fin de siècle to the beginning of the second World War. With respect to the European ultra-right in the decades inclusive of and following La Belle Époque, and aside from Mussolini’s Fascism and Hitler’s National Socialism, there was political futurism, Traditionalism (Evola), völkisch nationalism (Dickel), Novecentismo (Bontempelli), Maurras’s Action Française, young conservatism (Jung), conservative revolutionism (van den Bruck), Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal, national revolutionism (Jünger), the German Freikorps, the Croatian Ustasha, National Bolshevism (Niekisch), leftist “universal fascism” (Strasser), Codreanu’s Iron Guard, Perón’s Justicialismo, ad nauseum. This is by no means an exhaustive list of fascist, quasi-fascist, para-fascist, and crypto-fascist tendencies, movements and regimes in this era, and in a European context.

Despite the short-lived attempt to found a Fascist International Congress at Montreux, Switzerland in 1934-35, the relationships between these highly fractious tendencies, movements and regimes were often less than cordial, and sometimes quite brittle. To briefly illustrate: when National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy formed their Rome-Berlin Axis in 1936 it became clear that Mussolini’s Italy was to play “second fiddle” to Hitler’s Germany in military expansion, empire building, and war against the allies. The Allied invasion of Italy led to German intervention and invasion to shore up Mussolini’s Fascist regime, resulting in the consolidation of the rump Italian Social Republic in northern Italy in 1943. The pseudo-leftist Salo Republic proved a “shrinking puppet-state of the Nazis in economic and agricultural production, in foreign affairs, and in the military campaign against the Allies.” (Roger Griffin) Both Germany and Italy came to the aid of Franco’s Nationalist rebels in Spain with military and financial assistance between 1936 and 1939. After Nationalist victory, Franco joined with Mussolini and Hitler to clamp down on liberal, democratic, secular social elements generally, and specifically to smash the international socialist working class, from anarchist to Bolshevik. But, given that Francoismo was above all traditionalist in orientation, Franco also dissolved the overtly fascist Falange as a party, declared Spanish neutrality, refused to enter the war as an ally of Germany, nixed a plan to seize Gibraltar and close the Mediterranean to the British fleet, and even allowed Jewish refugees escaping the Nazi Final Solution to transit Spanish territory. Italian Fascism made easy accord with the monarchy and the Vatican. Rightwing Italian critics of Mussolini and his Fascist regime were rarely imprisoned, but were occasionally placed under house arrest. Julius Evola was kept at arms length, never embraced but never renounced. Hitler’s National Socialist Germany was far more brutal in dealing with right wing critics and competitors. During the Night of the Long Knives (Operation Hummingbird) in 1934, Hitler ordered the murder of aristocratic and Catholic conservative opposition figures (von Bose, von Schleicher, von Kahr, Klausener, and Edgar Jung), as well as the purge of National Socialism’s left wing. Ernst Röhm, leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA), was first imprisoned and then killed, while Nazi leader Gregor Strasser was assassinated. His brother, Otto Strasser, was driven into exile. The literary figure, war veteran and national revolutionary Ernst Jünger was kept under constant surveillance by the regime.

(Röhm and the Strasser brothers considered themselves “second revolutionaries.” Yet it would be a “historical mondegreen,” referencing Death in June, to believe that the actual history of the Third Reich would have been much different had either of these three been führer instead of Hitler.)

Fascism guilefully thinks of itself as sui generis, beyond left and right. The various groupings within and surrounding Fascism, as well as its National Socialist “blood brother,” each insist on their status as sui generis. In attempting to synthesize a violent opposition to Enlightenment liberalism, Marxism, and capitalism with an embrace of populism, revolutionism, and ultra-nationalism, these ultra-right ideologies, movements and regimes exemplify not fusion and unification but splitting and division. Their sense of distinctiveness and uniqueness might be laid at the feet of Nietzsche and his philosophy of aristocratic individualism, what Jünger called the sovereign individualism of the Anarch. Yet more fundamental socio-political causes must be cited. Unlike Marxism’s highly programmatic politics, the Fascist ultra-right was decidedly less programmatic, and what platforms it did generate were intensely idiosyncratic. Leninism posited a scientific, universalist, international socialism that, when corrupted by nationalism, devolved into particular socialist types, say, a socialism with Chinese or Vietnamese or Cuban characteristics. By contrast, the particular cultural, social and national characteristics of the countries out of which Fascism arose, combined with Fascism’s innate syncretic tendencies, has produced a plethora of Fascist types. Consider the problem of nationalism. In opposition to the secular nationalism born of the Enlightenment, there is Evola’s Traditionalist pan-European Imperium on the one hand and on the other hand de Benoist’s Europe of a thousand flags comprised of separate tribal ethnies. Way stations along this spectrum are völkisch pan-Germanic Aryanism and the Romantic organic nationalism that was a fusion of local ethnic groups within a given nation-state. Then there is the issue of racism. National Socialism’s biological racism and virulent anti-Semitism stands in stark contrast to Italian Fascism which was relatively free of anti-Semitic and eugenic strains until influenced and then subsumed by Nazi Germany.

Academics and intellectuals, whose job it is to formulate unifying theories and overarching explanations of phenomenon, have been stymied by the variegated nature of Fascism. Attempts to define a “Fascist Minimum” have been as diverse as Fascism itself. Marxist approaches have predominated, and at times have been augmented by post-Marxist modernization, structural and psycho-historical theories. Liberal reactions to Fascism have remained thoroughly splintered, ranging from Nolte’s theme of resisting modernization to Payne’s understanding of a new kind of nationalist authoritarian state. A related conceptual constellation offered by Mosse’s “third way,” Sternhell’s “new civilization” and Eatwell’s “new synthesis” hints at a way forward. Personally, I find Roger Griffin’s summation that “Fascism is a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” the most convincing.*

Which brings us back to National Anarchism. Troy Southgate has been engaged in “serial Fascism” based on a “palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” for most of his political career, pursuing the next big Fascist thing from the National Front, through the International Third Position, the English Nationalist Movement, the National Revolutionary Faction, Synthesis and the journal Alternative Green, to his current New Right and National Anarchist affiliation. “As a prelude to an anticipated racial civil war and a collapse of the capitalist system,” NA seeks to “[E]stablish autonomous villages for völkisch communities, which have seceded from the state’s economy and are no-go areas for unwelcomed ethnic groups and state authorities.” Setting aside the ersatz weekend hipster tribalism of your typical Burning Man participant as an outright insult to aboriginal realities, NA’s anti-statist ethnic tribalism is, in actuality, well within the range of Fascist nationalism demarcated by Evola and de Benoist. NA’s racism falls within the spectrum defined by German Nazism and Italian Fascism as well. (“My race is my nation,” or so goes the White Nationalist slogan.) Whether NA prefers mutualism or autarky to national socialism or corporatism for its so-called anti-capitalist economics is also not unusual. Presenting itself as a resynthesis of “classic fascism, Third Positionism, neo-anarchism and new types of anti-systemic politics born of the anti-globalization movement” simply reveals the syncretic character inherent in Fascism as a phenomenon. That this segment of the “groupuscular right” champions a “a stateless palingenetic ultranationalism” amounts to subtle nuance, not radical difference. Nothing distinguishes NA from Fascism proper. Nothing sui generis here. Absolutely nothing.

So, let’s forego all the academic abstractions and get down to brass tacks. Individuals who claim NA talk to, hang out with, organize among, and act alongside fellow ultra-right Fascists. They claim to “go beyond left and right,” but they fully identify themselves as New Right. If NAs rear their ugly pinheads on internet forums like anarchist LibCom or leftist RevLeft, they are immediately identified, isolated, and purged. And if they openly show their faces at explicitly anarchist and leftist events, they risk a serious beat down. In contrast, NAs can and do freely join, discuss, argue and debate on white nationalist/white supremacist forums like Stormfront. They’re also welcome on disgruntled anarcho-individualist and self-styled pan-secessionist Keith Preston’s greatly attenuated Attack The System forum. His American Revolutionary Vanguard argues that “the mainstream of the anarchist movement has become unduly focused on left-wing cultural politics, countercultural lifestyle matters, and liberal pet causes.” His stated goal is to go beyond the Left/Right political spectrum to: “work towards a synthesis of the currently scattered anarchist tendencies. These include anarcho-collectivism, syndicalism, mutualism, post-structuralism, Green anarchism, primitivism and neo-tribalism from the Left, and anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-monarchism, anarcho-feudalism, national-anarchism, tribal-anarchism, paleo-anarchism and Christian anarchism from the Right.”

Fuck this fascist noise!
—
*[F]ascism is best defined as a revolutionary form of nationalism, one that sets out to be a political, social and ethical revolution, welding the ‘people’ into a dynamic national community under new elites infused with heroic values. The core myth that inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement of purifying, cathartic national rebirth (palingenesis) can stem the tide of decadence.
Roger Griffin, Nature of Fascism
[Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led “armed party” which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence.
Roger Griffin, The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology