What is fascism?
For over a century, scholars have debated the meaning of the term; nonetheless, there is no widely accepted definition of fascism today.1 People have misused the term since its inception – recently, we remember Donald Trump’s oxymoronic despair over ‘far-left fascists.’ So-called ‘fascist’ movements also lack shared ideologies; they often contradict each other.2 Some use the term too widely and paint all forms of right-wing authoritarianism or despotism as fascism. Others, arguing for the historical specificity of the notion, insist that Mussolini’s Italy is the only fascist regime. Neither Hitler’s Germany nor today’s self-proclaimed neo-Nazis are fascist; for them, fascism was the singular project of one nation at one moment.
Fascism is notoriously hard to define. For this reason, Umberto Eco believed the word ‘fascism’ describes political movements with any combination of fourteen qualities. A man born in Mussolini’s Italy, Eco said these ‘features cannot be organised into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism.’ Nonetheless ‘it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.’ His list is extensive. But among other qualities,3 Eco said fascists have a predilection for tradition, populism and nationalism. They despise modernism and analytic criticism; they fear diversity and difference, too. Machismo and warfare arouse them; homosexuality, femininity and weakness move them to disgust; and in education and culture, they lust after heroism and valorise action for action’s sake. Ideologies that contain these elements, then, hold the seeds of a fascist regime.
Writing after Eco, Robert O. Paxton instead identified nine ‘mobilising passions’ of fascism. Fascism, Paxton says, begins in the individual’s ‘visceral feelings.’4 The sense of an ‘overwhelming crisis’ traditional means cannot resolve and the belief in one’s victimhood mobilise fascism. A dread of the decline caused by ‘the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism’ and ‘alien influences’ encourages it, too. Likewise for the desire for a ‘closer integration’ of a ‘purer community’ and a belief in the superiority of the ‘leader’s instincts’ over reason.5 For Paxton, emotion rather than reason guides us to the far-right. Certain fears underwrite our turn to fascism.
Offering a stricter definition, Slavoj Žižek believes that neither Eco nor Paxton’s qualities and feelings alone make an ideology fascist. Instead they must be combined in a counter-revolutionary movement that seeks to preserve capitalism. Ideology, Žižek says, first takes our non-ideological longings for ‘authentic community life,’ wholeness and ‘social solidarity.’ It then articulates them within an ‘explicit ideological text.’ That articulation is fascist when these desires and fears legitimise a wider political project, where the notion of capitalist domination is distorted and redefined to justify a familiar political solution – the purification of capitalist society through the exclusion of the ethnic or racial minority purportedly responsible for its ills.6
In contrast to Žižek, Holocaust survivor and writer Jean Améry insists that capitalism has little to do with fascism. ‘If one wants to grasp the facts of the matter,’ he wrote, ‘it is even less permissible to speak of “Fascism” as the most excessive form of “Late Capitalism.” Versailles and the economic crisis with its hardships that drove the people to Nazism is a childish evasion.’ Améry disdained political-economic explanations of Hitler’s regime: ‘Let no young political scientist, no matter how clever he is, tell me his conceptually untenable stories. To someone who was an eyewitness they appear utterly stupid.’ ‘All attempts at economic explanations,’ Améry continued, ‘all the despairing one-dimensional allusions to the fact that German industrial capital, concerned about its privileges, financed Hitler, tell the eyewitness nothing, tell him just as little as the sophisticated speculations about the dialectics of enlightenment.’7 Améry rejected philosophical explanations presented by people like Žižek due to his experience of torture at the hands of the Gestapo: ‘I am convinced, beyond all personal experiences, that torture was not an accidental quality of this Third Reich, but its essence.’8 That experience led him to conclude that ‘there really is nothing that provides enlightenment on the eruption of radical Evil in Germany… this Evil really is singular and irreducible in its total inner logic and its accursed rationality.’9 For Améry, no theory could articulate why a whole of nation of people were driven to find self-actualisation by wielding absolute power over the body of their victim. In ‘the world of torture man exists only by ruining the other person who stands before him. A slight pressure by the tool-wielding hand is enough to turn the other—along with his head, in which are perhaps stored Kant and Hegel, and all nine symphonies, and the World as Will and Representation—into a shrilly squealing piglet at slaughter.’ The intellect fails in the face of the desire for such absolute domination.
Each of these perspectives has its merits; they are all insufficient, though. Améry’s writings refuse the intellectual’s desire to theorise fascism, an act so often trivialises its object. As such they do not explain how the drive to torture and dominate engulfs a whole nation of people. Nor do they explain how that desire emerges amidst liberal capitalist crises, or how it is eventually articulated alongside or within a political-economic framework that preserves capitalism. Meanwhile, Eco and Paxton’s lists illuminate the emotional and political features typical of fascist movements. They also neglect what is most central to fascism for those like Žižek – the crises of capitalism that birthed historic fascist movements. Meanwhile, Žižek defines fascism in precise, structuralist terms; yet such rigour ensures that his definition does not account easily for the process whereby one becomes fascist. In 2016, Trump was a ‘centrist liberal’ for Žižek; in late 2023, Trump now labels his leftist opponents ‘vermin’ and insists that immigrants are ‘poisoning’ America’s blood.10 A theory of fascist politics must account for such shifts in belief. It needs to describe the ideological and emotional terrain that intervenes between these positions – it must explain the space of ante-fascism. To do so, I believe we must synthesise these definitions of fascism, listening for their shared resonances and silences to hear how they resound together.
For us, then, the space of ante-fascism is a psychosocial terrain where a process of becoming takes place. On this land, one moves through—and, strangely, is moved by—the mist of social values, mutual histories, present events, shared futures, individual emotions, private phantasies and personal memories that waft through one another in the space between the mind and the world. Movement through the terrain begins and proceeds in a variety of ways and for reasons both personal and political; it happens en masse, though, when a crisis of liberal capitalism shatters the social and spreads terror, anxiety, shame and rage through a society’s minds. The crisis makes a tempest of this mist, arousing our most startling emotions and reanimating archaic ideas; ferocious dread and burning hope begin to intermingle and soon form an atmosphere where a politics of radical change, total safety, communal perfection and the desire for revenge attains a near-supernatural allure. From the chaos, order emerges as social values—namely, patriarchy and misogyny, racism and xenophobia, nationalism and imperialism, and capitalism—channel our psychic defences, desires and affects toward radical ends; those psychic forces warp and distort those values in turn, driving them toward their logical extremes where the violence and perversion therein become clear. A cruel and incoherent ideology buttressed by dread, hate and pride then takes hold of this society whose people are prepared for atrocity. From the terrain of ante-fascism, the fascists thus emerge; their campaign of racist purification begins; and capitalism, at risk of death before, survives at great human cost. Eventually, the contradictions inherent in this psychosocial movement threaten its survival. Capitalist accumulation, wartime destruction, and murderous domination can only undo one another in the long run. But for a time, they reinforce one another and fascism expands with terrifying success. The psychosocial terrain is then soaked in blood; the mist becomes rank with the stench of death.
This is the process of ante-fascism in brief. Our work here is to investigate this process and examine its return today.
Footnotes
A widely cited definition from p.218 of The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton is a simple ‘snapshot’ of the phenomenon. It goes as follows: ‘Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/04/us-under-siege-from-far-left-fascism-says-trump-in-mount-rushmore-speech
Which are: the appeal to a frustrated middle class; humiliation, inspired by the ostentatious power and wealth of enemies; and the use of newspeak.
The others not listed above are: the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it; the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny; the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success; and the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.
The Anatomy of Fascism, pp.219-220.
The Universal Exception, pp.40-41, 152-154, 165, 355.
‘Preface to the Reissue, 1977’, in At the Mind’s Limits.
‘Torture’, in At the Mind’s Limits.
‘Preface to the Reissue, 1977’, in At the Mind’s Limits.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/28/slavoj-zizek-donald-trump-is-really-a-centrist-liberal and https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/16/trump-immigrants-new-hampshire-rally