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KNOWING FASCISM REQUIRES UNDERSTANDING ECONOMIC FORCES  
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Taylor Dorrell
December 14, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Behind the confusion and debates about fascism lies a simple truth:
it’s a power game driven by economic elites. Communists recognized
that fascism’s form is shaped by class dynamics — an insight we
shouldn’t forget. _

Fascist dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini arrive at
Massenzio Hall in Rome, Italy, on May 5, 1938. , Keystone / Getty
Images)

 

In the Marx Brothers’ 1933 comedy _Duck Soup_, a strongman is named
president of the fictional country of Freedonia. Chaos ensues,
culminating in a war with the neighboring country of Sylvania. The
film satirizes politics and war in the classic Marx Brothers fashion.
The historical context of the story was, of course, the rise of
fascism in Europe — Benito Mussolini had been in power for a decade
and Adolf Hitler had taken office earlier that year. The film depicts
its Mussolini-like leader as clownish, reflecting a distrust of
fascism that was far from the prevailing view in the United States. At
the time, fascism remained ambiguous for many Americans; figures like
Ezra Pound compared Mussolini to Thomas Jefferson while others called
Franklin Delano Roosevelt a fascist.

“There used to be a time when anyone could keep in touch with the
world’s history,” Robert Benchley quipped
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in “A Brief Course in World Politics.” Before World War I, he
argued, history was simple: “Either the king could have some people
beheaded, or some people could have the king beheaded.” However, the
twentieth century ushered in a wave of political complexity. “When
you get twenty-four parties, all beginning with ‘W,’ on each one
of which the future peace of Europe depends, then I am sorry but I
shall have to let Europe figure it out for itself and let me know when
it is going to have another war,” he wrote.

What appears comical in Benchley’s historical assessment and _Duck
Soup_ — that is, a refusal to grapple with what fascism truly is —
persists today in some academic circles. In _Fascism Comes to America:
A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture_, Bruce Kuklick
contends
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that “there is no elemental fascism or much empirical content.”
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins arrives at the same conclusion in his
introduction to _Did it Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and
America_, insisting [[link removed]] that
“the way forward is to put the fascism debate to rest.” Both
analyze the decades-long debates surrounding fascism, its definition,
and its relevance to the present, and both definitively conclude that
the world will simply have to . . . figure it out for itself.

In contrast, the communists approached fascism through a materialist
lens, grounding their analysis in class and economic dynamics. After a
period of playing fast and loose with trigger-happy denunciations of
“social fascism,” by 1935 the Communist International defined
fascism not as a psychological or exclusively cultural phenomenon but
as a repressive form of dictatorship serving the interests of a
segment of reactionary and imperialist economic elites. This framing
linked fascism directly to the forces of economic exploitation and
class power that are essential for understanding and fighting against
fascism today.

Early Debates

In the beginning, claiming ignorance about the nature of fascism was
easy. The word “fascism” derives from the Italian “fascio” and
the Latin “fasces” — a bundle of switches symbolizing strength
through unity, representing the bundle of ideologies that make up
fascism. A fascist dictator was generally understood to wield state
power to create an economy that benefited monopolies while crushing
labor and repressing the racial “other,” but the underlying
dynamics — the forces that support such a dictator — remain far
more contentious and misunderstood. Mussolini himself did not define
fascism until 1932, calling it a “revolution of reaction.” This
definitional ambiguity from one of its leading practitioners further
highlights the question: Is fascism so complex that it can’t be
pinned down? Is there truly no “elemental fascism”?

One can imagine the great minds of the twentieth century, witnessing
the rise of Mussolini, Hitler, and Francisco Franco, grappling with
the sense that these movements were somehow connected — linked by
some shared essence. And so we get, as we see in the books summarizing
these debates, Leon Trotsky’s definition
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emphasizing the reactionary middle class, Umberto Eco’s fourteen
general properties
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fascism, and Theodor Adorno’s _The Authoritarian Personality
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These thinkers seem to say to the confused cynics that there is a
unifying thread; there has to be.

Throughout the collected works in _Did it Happen Here?_, the reader
finds both those twentieth-century debates and contemporary ones.
Beginning with essays from Trotsky, Hannah Arendt, and Eco, we
eventually arrive at articles debating the character of Donald
Trump’s GOP. Jan-Werner Müller argues in “Is it Fascism?” that
nothing today can “plausibly be called fascism” except “the most
recent versions of Putinism.” Ruth Ben-Ghiat counters in “What is
Fascism?” that obscuring fascism’s transformation in places like
today’s Hungary and Italy — both controlled by supposed
“neofascist” parties — dilutes its meaning and aids in its
potential resurgence.

Despite its tangled history and varied interpretations, the persistent
efforts to define fascism reveal a fundamental conviction:
understanding fascism, however complex it may be, remains both urgent
and necessary.

The Communists Were Right

Liberals, conservatives, postmodernists, Trotskyists, Maoists — all
find aspects of their views on fascism echoed in today’s
mediasphere. Talking heads in mainstream media call anyone on the
Right a fascist; both ultraleftists and Trump supporters call liberals
fascist; academics claim nothing is fascist. Painfully missing,
however, is the definition once central to much of the globe —
particularly within the communist-aligned “Second World.” Despite
its erasure from recent literature, this understanding of fascism
remains pivotal, even if unspoken, in contemporary debates. Like the
baker who tries to cheat on doughnuts by enlarging the holes, working
around the communist definition for decades simply takes more dough.

In one of the crucial scenes in David O. Russell’s 2022 film
_Amsterdam_, General Dillenbeck (played by Robert De Niro) is expected
to deliver a speech at a veterans’ gala calling for a march on DC to
overthrow President FDR. Instead, he reads his own speech denouncing
tyranny and fascism, foiling the plot and exposing those behind the
coup attempt: some of America’s biggest industrial capitalists.
Based on the true story of the Business Plot
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the film presents fascism as an elite-driven campaign to take power.
_Amsterdam’s _narrative offers a perspective largely erased from
contemporary discourse — one that shaped the 1930s left and could
help our understanding today.

A month after the Nazis seized power, the Reichstag (parliament)
building was set ablaze. The Nazis used the arson as a pretext for
rounding up communists, who were blamed for the fire. Among the
accused was an indivudal who would become instrumental in defining the
political project of fascism: the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov.
After mounting an impassioned and successful defense at trial,
Dimitrov fled to the USSR, where he became general secretary of the
Communist International.

In 1935, Dimitrov delivered a report to the Seventh World Congress of
the Communist International, articulating a definition of fascism that
resulted from years of debate among communists — including figures
like Clara Zetkin and Antonio Gramsci. Fascism, Dimitrov declared, was
“the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most
chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”

How to Misunderstand Fascism

In the forward to Palmiro Togliatti’s _Lectures on Fascism_, Vijay
Prashad highlights the importance of a clear definition of fascism. He
writes that “the bourgeoisie is split,” referencing the early
stages of fascism, “with the most reactionary section pushing
towards a fascistic solution to the capitalist crisis.” Communists
in Italy and Germany were quick to identify the role of big financiers
and beneficiaries in this shift. In 1926, Gramsci observed that
fascism was not a “pre-democratic regime” which would one day
mature into a liberal democracy but instead was “the expression of
the most advanced stage of development of capitalist society.”

Journalists at the time also tracked this progression. Works like
_Facts and Fascism_
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detailed how industrialists such as Fritz Thyssen and Alfred Krupp
funded and benefited from fascism’s rise. Such figures gradually
aligned with fringe fascist movements, supporting them as a xxxxxx
against communism, which, in the wake of socialist revolutions, struck
fear into the hearts of capitalists. As Daniel Guérin observed in his
1939 book _Fascism and Big Business_, fascist parties were formed out
of coalitions of armed anti-labor militias that brutalized strikes and
socialist meetings. While plenty of industrialists and finance
capitalists supported “bourgeois democracy,” fascism required
funding only from a reactionary segment of that class to deliver its
message to a mass base.

In time, the Comintern’s 1935 definition — i.e., “the terrorist
dictatorship of reactionary finance capital” — sparked both
opposition and distancing by theorists who sought to avoid association
with Joseph Stalin. Contrary to those like Timothy Snyder who claim
that it was the communists who blurred the definition of fascism with
the overuse of “social fascism,” today’s obscuring is directly
birthed out of anti-communist theories about fascism that have
resulted in enduring chaos and confusion.

There’s an old joke about malfunctioning stamps in fascist Italy.
After Mussolini issued a stamp with his face on it, it was quickly
recalled because Italians were spitting on the wrong side. The joke
symbolized hatred for fascism at the time, but today the joke is
reversed: with historians and cultural theorists reluctant or unable
to define fascism, they contribute to very obscurity that fascists
exploit.

Historians in the “postmodern” age, especially the late twentieth
century, have compounded this problem. In the 1997 book _In Defence of
History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda_, Ellen Meiksins Wood
criticized this turn in the 1990s as “a rejection of totalizing
knowledge.” In the same book, John Bellamy Foster described
postmodern history as “signs and signifiers without significance.”
In the preface to _Late Fascism_, Alberto Toscano bluntly omits “the
deliberations of the Communist International” in favor of the 1970s
debates from postmodernists like Michel Foucault. By rejecting
metanarratives, they advance — whether intentionally or not — the
fragmented ideologies that make up fascism. Fascism employs its own
foundational stories, but thinkers like Kuklick and Steinmetz-Jenkins
offer no counter-framework — they simply omit narrative entirely.
How can we understand structural causes of change if we abandon the
very narratives and “elemental” characteristics that make them
intelligible?
The House That Material Analysis Built

Perhaps the solution is to reject the postmodern fragmentation
altogether. To understand the anti-postmodern position, we need to
circle back to the Marx Brothers.

In _Animal Crackers_, the Marx Brothers search for a missing painting.
When they can’t find the thief, they conclude it must be in the
house next door. “That’s great,” Groucho says, but “suppose
there is no house next door?” “Well,” Chico says, “then of
course we gotta build one.”

The lost painting — or, in our case, the lost systemic origins and
unified logic of history — has to be discovered, according to Wood
and Foster, not through unending skepticism that devolves into
cynicism but through material analysis, a Marxist process once called
“historical materialism.” With so much obscuring of an ideology
like fascism, the structural analysis has to be rebuilt to discover
it.

Looking back to _Duck Soup_, we see that the Marx Brothers might have
actually understood the class basis of fascism more keenly than they
are given credit for. The film’s Mussolini-like leader is installed
after a rich widow donates millions to the country in exchange for his
appointment.

Instead of waiting for the next war, as Benchley suggested, we should
look to those who sought to translate truth into meaning and revive
the purged analyses of the old left. As Wood argues in _Democracy
Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism,_ “we should not
confuse respect for the plurality of human experience and social
struggles with a complete dissolution of historical causality.”

Today’s most pressing task is to fight the defeatist tendencies that
reproduce the received wisdom of dominant ideologies and strive to
understand — and ultimately defeat — fascism. The communists
provided invaluable tools for doing so. To understand fascism, we must
use those tools and follow the Marx Brothers’ example to build the
house next door.

Taylor Dorrell is a writer and photographer based in Columbus, Ohio.
He’s a contributing writer at the Cleveland Review of Books, a
reporter for the Columbus Free Press, and a freelance photographer.

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