Fascism—if it is ideologically characterized by anything—is characterized by a virulent anti-communist stance. Would-be fascists usually begin with a rejection of the idea that people can or should owe anything to anyone, and believe that people should only act in their own interests (and possibly also the interests of their immediate family and close friends).
Other than simple immaturity, fascism is an ideology that stems from pain, spite, and fear—they have developed a deep distrust in relying on others, which has driven them to reactionary individualism. The would-be fascist wants to be able to dominate anyone who might be able to influence their lives, because they don't believe a world is possible in which people freely choose to positively act together to build society and inclusively support one another.
Such a positive world is the goal of communists, and thus the fascist ideology is inherently incompatible with communism.
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But to exert political power, would-be fascists require collective action—which is in contradiction with fascism’s deeply individualistic roots. Would-be fascists therefore invent and mythologize social groups/categories out of superficial nonsense, and root their collective action in that whole-cloth of fascist cultural mythos. To give examples of the fascist mythos, fascists talk of nonsense like an “Aryan race that is opposed to an inferior black culture and LGBTQ degeneracy; and Patriots who are opposed to Jewish, liberal, and communist plots to destroy society.”
Fascist mythologizing is a desperate and fearful act, emerging out of people grasping for anything that might give them a feeling of security, in this case, the potential for dominating political power which they identify with. Such political power would allow them to feel in control, and not feel like they have to rely on potentially harmful or misguided others.
They feel some sense of security and trust within their fascist party—not because they necessarily believe that their fellow fascists particularly care about them—but because they feel confident that their fellow fascists will act with the intention to promote their shared social group. This is the functional purpose of the fascist mythology: to be the basis of fascist collective action around a “race”, religion, nation, and/or social beliefs. Many diehard individualists who want effective political power will land on some kind of fascist mythology as their guiding analysis of the world.
The fascist Us-vs-Them mentality is rooted in the fear of vulnerability, particularly the kind of vulnerability which is required to live in concert with others. Fascism rejects the all-encompassing, inclusive form of collective action, and all the effective communication, interdependence, and decision-making equality which is needed to make such a communist world work. Instead, fascism embraces the mass coordinated action of individuals acting with a shared loyalty to their exclusive social group—acting together so that their social group can dominate over any other social group that they come to distrust.
Fascists love a historical project because it gives their fascist party a goal to unite around, which makes them feel safe and empowered. Fascists don't even need to believe their project is a good goal for the whole of humanity, although they might convince themselves that is the case through faulty beliefs in (1) Social Darwinism and (2) of the inferiority, unnaturalness, and conniving antagonism of the fascists’ perceived outgroups.
To summarize, fascists are caught in a fearful individualist mindset, in a world which materially requires people to rely on each other to produce decent standards of living. The fascist project of coordinating around Us-vs-Them politics is an unfortunately common result of fearful individualists trying to square this circle.
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Fascism is grounded in social myths meant to justify coordinated political action amongst otherwise deeply fearful individualists; it is not grounded in a material analysis of reality. This has significant downstream effects for the fascist political movement.
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First, fascism’s material ungroundedness results in a deep flexibility and fluidity in how fascism defines its political targets. The fascist ingroup and enemy outgroups change primarily to feed the fascists’ insatiable fear, not to achieve material goals beyond “Fascists should be in power.” There’s nothing material that intentionally underlies fascism’s political project, only the fear of others and the fascist desire that can emerge from that to “dominate others” before “they” dominate “us”. The fascist mythology warps, adapts, and retcons to become whatever social justification is necessary at the time to justify and promote fascist coordinated action.
So, when cops were cracking down on the George Floyd protest, then, it was “Back the Blue.” When they’re raiding Mar-a-Lago, it’s like, “defund the FBI.” It’s very simple. It’s like when you’re going after the guys I dislike, you’re great, and when you’re going after the guys I like, fuck you.
— Tal Levin, 2022 interview with Movement Memos hosted by Kelly Hayes with Truthout
Fascists love the police when the police do what's in the perceived interests of fascist unity, and hate police when fascists are the ones being policed. The same fickleness applies to the actions of capitalists.
Fascism’s targets coalesce around the most socially vulnerable—such as trans people, racial minorities, and Jews. Fascists, pulling from their mythology, will lie and propagandize against these groups (who they have learned are easier targets to lie about) to try to stir up anger and division. They hope for and intentionally strategize their superficial culture wars to bring more people into viewing the world like them: through a lens of division and distrust, as if the world is necessarily composed of antagonistic teams.
Simultaneously, fascists will also lie about and attack those who would defend (or simply accurately represent) these minorities on principled grounds—that is, communists, socialists, anarchists, feminists, most liberals, and fact-based media.
Unlike their fickle relationships with police and capitalists, fascists see their targeted social groups (Jews, racial minorities, LGBTQ people, communists, feminists, liberals, fact-based media) as inherently impure and/or antagonistic.
And, to be fair, communists are inherently antagonistic to fascists, insofar as they can be said to fall in the category of communist. With communism, fascists are correct in seeing an unbridgeable political difference (broken clocks are correct twice a day as the saying goes).
But with most of their targets, fascists see an incompatibility in qualities that have no inherent political relevance, like “race”, sexuality, or gender. When those qualities are linked to politics, it's because oppressors have decided to use those qualities as justifications for oppression, which generates the ensuing political battle for liberation. In a just world, qualities like physical phenotypes, sexuality, gender, and so on would be simple human qualities—in that sense, those aspects of identity are not directly political like the communist political stance.
In any case, these targeted groups are cast in the fascist mythos as potential sources of weakness and danger for the fascist political project. Where fascists don't yet have political power, they seek to demonize and delegitimize these targeted groups. Where fascists have political power, they turn genocidal.
The fascist ideology is rooted in an unassuageable fear of others potentially imposing their will on them. By extension, they have a fear that people will cause disunity which would threaten fascist political power. They therefore try to create internal unity by riling up the populous to mobilize around massive exclusionary political projects rooted in the fascist Us-vs-Them mythology.
Thus, with regards to other nations, a fascist nation becomes expansionist to conquer over others who they believe they can conquer. For those they don't believe they can conquer, fascism takes on a stance of isolationism and protectionism. Fascists might nevertheless engage with an enemy if they are fearful enough of them—particularly, this applies to economically influential communist societies (such as the USSR or China).
Internally, a fascist nation becomes genocidal, to destroy or remove any people who are seen as impure or threatening. Fear is the guiding principle here, and their fascist “science” and mythology changes according to their fear. Fear of declining living conditions is transformed into anger and apathy at the scapegoats. Fascists further transform this anger and apathy into an eliminativist historical project that unites fascists into a coordinated political movement against their targets.
Fear is at the root of fascist motivations, and their fear is interpreted into action in a deeply individualistic way. It's individualistic to the point of distrusting any interdependence and need for collective action. Fascist mythologies break down even the “traditional” family structures which fascists claim they want to protect; turning family members against each other in the name of upholding the demands of the fascist ethnostate. Fascism will be forced to continually create new scapegoats to explain why fascist society isn't the perfect utopia, new rules for internal social control, and consequently, new dissenters against fascism. Fascism will eat itself alive unless it lands on a social ideology which is internally stable and can constrain and regulate fascism's individualistic fears. [1]
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Second, fascism's material ungroundedness makes it particularly susceptible to cults of personality. Without the objective measure of material reality, fascism becomes subjectively guided in crucial points by people who focus the conversation within fascist circles to specific scapegoats and historical projects.
LGBTQ folks, racial minorities, Jews, the media, and communists tend to become scapegoats. Conquest and protectionism tend to become historical projects.
In the USA today, the fascists’ historical project is to defeat an imaginary “liberal plot to carry out mass voter fraud”—this is a false, completely ungrounded fascist conspiracy which is taking center stage in USA’s contemporary fascist mythology. The myth is cynically disseminated by fascists in Trump’s circle, and believed by masses of fearful individualists who have been previously moved by other parts of the fascist culture war.
The common scapegoats and projects have the most broad appeal among fascists for reasons regarding the fascist mythology of nature and history. But even when the fascist movement needs to make more precise decisions about targets and projects, there's still no material reality that can guide these more particular decisions.
Fascist mythology is therefore invented on the spot, to provide justification for the precise decisions within the fascist regime. For a mass of fascist individuals to coordinate according to a constantly updating mythology, it helps them to follow one shared source of ideology. While the fascist mythology might be developed in anonymous chatrooms, over time through conversations on conservative media, or in political boardrooms—there's usually ultimately a few people who charismatically summarize and finalize the message to the broader fascist movement.
Mussolini, Hitler, and Trump developed cults of personality around them for their roles as the coordinating spokesmen for their respective fascist movements. They then used their position to institutionalize their more personal whims and fears into the movement.
Fascists initially look to these kinds of spokespeople to coordinate, because they summarized and “charismatically” conveyed the general fascist ideology. But later, fascists follow them and their individual whims because doing so is the primary way for them to coordinate at mass scale. The fascist movement transforms into a cult of personality—fascists learn to identify with the goals of the leader/spokesperson because it's the only way they know that the fascist movement can coordinate politically, and they're terrified of what would happen if the fascist movement were to fail.
Other forms of mass coordination would depend much more on some kind of democratic deliberation—but fascists are too individualist for this to be a sustainable solution for them. Additionally, there's no material analysis to objectively coordinate around, so social disagreements among fascists can quickly spiral out of control. Significant internal disagreements threaten to cause too much disunity in the fascist movement, so fascists will tend to avoid too much deliberative conflict in favor of “decentralized conversations among fascists which get summarized by charismatic spokespeople”. An undemocratic cult of personality is the main political form of fascism.
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There may be a few lessons to take from this analysis of fascism. Fascism is based in a fearful individualism and an Us-vs-Them mythos which mobilizes these fearful individualists into fascist collective action. Fascist fears are irrational and ungrounded, and therefore the fascist ideology is irrational and ungrounded, even if its mythology appears complex and internally consistent. Fascism’s mythological justifications are ‘nonsense’ in the philosophical sense of the word—they lack any justificatory basis in the rest of the world.
To defeat fascist ideology, we need to overcome the fearful individualism that fuels it, and preventatively provide otherwise-would-be fascists with a meaningful alternative through the viable political project of inclusive, safe, interdependent, social care and community. Materially, we need to protect the people who are targeted by fascism, including through our own use of force, as is often necessary against fascism's genocidal desires.
We should not get lost in arguments regarding fascist ideological nonsense. The fascist movement is utterly inconsistent with reality, and its most stable quality is its desperate, spiteful, and distrustful desire for power and domination over others. We should build an explicit opposition to fascism on that point. It is where fascism cannot shift and slip away as easily.
The fight against fascism is a difficult one because, in many ways, it's also a fight against capitalism.
Capitalism promotes a rugged individualism but can only give success to a few people. For the rest—the vast majority of believers in capitalism—it breeds a desperate, spiteful, and distrustful form of individualism. This is the exact thing that fascism preys on. If these people cannot succeed as individuals, but they still believe in individualism, then they are more likely to buy into fascist ideologies and identify with fascist leaders to meet their desires for safety, self-worth, and community.
Capitalism also divides the working class along social lines to prevent the working class from engaging in collective action. It alienates people from each other by putting people in economic competition with one another to survive. Capitalism wants to extract every last bit of work from people—and this promotes a world in which people begin to lack the energy and time of day to meaningfully bond with one another, let alone form bonds across capitalism’s invented social divides.
Capitalism encourages people to believe that all this disconnected, competitive, socially-divided individualism is natural, and not the fault of capitalism. Many people therefore begin to believe that it's impossible for a society to exist that is based on people freely choosing (as individuals) to inclusively help one another. These social divisions, which capitalism encourages and presents as natural, are ready-made to be co-opted into the fascist mythology.
The need in this case is to develop strong working class bonds in the face of capitalism and fascism. We must build bonds which are immune to the social divisions of capitalist and fascist propagandists—that is, bonds which are grounded in humanity’s material interests in the inclusive historical project of communism.
Unions, worker cooperatives, and other deliberative and participatory democratic institutions of the working class help develop these anti-fascist bonds. Through practice, these institutions of working class solidarity disprove the fascist’s core belief that “people cannot work together across fascism's mythological social divisions, to effectively care for one another inclusively in meaningful material ways.” To stem fascism, we must do that solidarity-building work and shout from the rooftops our joyous achievements and the practical lessons we’ve learned.
Footnotes
[1] A foundation in religion may be what fascism requires to prevent itself from eating itself alive. While ungrounded in material reality, religions are nevertheless rather stable social structures because they have been honed for centuries. Indian fascism may have landed on this already: they are Hindu-Nationalist. But even their stability might depend on the lack of significant internal divisions within Hinduism, as Hindus regard the fascist political form.