Fascism and the three-way fight

48 min readFeb 4, 2022

International Monument at Dachau concentration camp, sculpture by Nandor Glid — Dachau Memorial sculpture photo by Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47645909

“Creeping fascism” and other liberal delusions

Fascism never creeps, it marches. In boots. Not sandals, not trainers, not brogues, flip-flops or hush puppies, definitely not high heels, but boots. Boots capable of “stamping on a human face — forever” in Orwell’s nightmare vision. In World War II Britain, the jackboot became a signifier for Nazi fascism. Of course the boot has many positive associations in work and leisure, but in relation to fascism it represents its intimate relationship to violence.

But therein lies the rub, because the existence of an inherent link to violence is about the only thing universally accepted when talking about fascism and how to define it. To such an extent that in some cases people directly equate fascism and violence (by non-state actors), even to the perverse degree as to equate the violence of anti-fascists with that of their fascist opponents, as we discussed in the chapter on centrism and liberalism earlier.

Standing apart from such anti-intellectual centrist reactions, academic and other branches of research in diverse fields such as modern history, political science and so on, have naturally invested more effort in trying to nail down the essential characteristics and traits of fascism. Consensus is however still elusive and a broad range of often mutually-incompatible definitions exist¹.

The first question that arises is whether it is even possible to create a definition of fascism that is in some way “generic” enough to be relevant to contemporary political movements. The opposing view is that fascism, as an analytical category, was really only valid for the specific historical cases of early 20th century European movements of Italian Fascism and German Nazism.

Without getting bogged down in the historiographical weeds, the working assumption here is (maybe self-evidently given our title) that such a “portable definition”² of fascism is both possible and useful. Both in temporal terms of being able to talk of fascism in the present and future, and also in spatial terms, of a political phenomena not confined to European or historically white supremacist regions.

But before we get to looking for a positive definition of fascism, we need to dispense with tedious but prevalent centrist notions that conflate fascism with authoritarianism or state repression in any form. Centrist and libertarian-leaning commentators greet every news item announcing any new measure or statute by the state, perceived as being illiberal or repressive, as another instance of “creeping fascism”.

The image of creeping fascism, which arrives little by little with each new official ordinance, like the mythical boiling of a frog by degrees or salami-slicing an elephant, reduces fascism to a form or style of state rule or policy. This is a product of the protagonistic³ view that state action is the only real social agency and the relation between the (atomised) individual and the state, defined in legal terms of rights and negative freedoms, is the whole of the political, constitutional order.

Clearly following the argument of this overall text, we are going to reject such a narrowly state-regime focused definition of fascism.

But before we go on, it’s vitally necessary, for basic ethical and humanitarian reasons, to re-affirm the right of survivors of violently repressive dictatorships, from Francoist Spain, to Pinochet’s Chile, the Colonel’s Greece or the multiple Turkish military dictatorships, to characterise the regimes they survived as “fascist”. Even though those regimes were imposed “vertically”, by military coup, rather than the seizure of state power by fascist mass movement, and so do not “fit” the definition we are going to outline below. Simultaneously holding both these positions presents the unavoidable appearance of a contradiction, but hopefully one which we will be able to resolve, or at least allay, before closing.

Fascism in the era of ecological crisis and demographic paranoia

June 7, 2014 — Mediterranean Sea / Italy: Italian navy rescues asylum seekers traveling by boat off the coast of Africa (Massimo Sestini/Polaris) (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Militant anti-fascism has always held that the basic relations of capitalist society itself create the conditions that make the re-appearance of fascism an ever-present danger. Regardless of whether this position appears intuitively plausible or not — a question which depends the outlook of the reader — it is undeniably a position that abstracts away from the concrete reality of specific historical conjunctures. It is clear that the specific conjuncture of post WW1 Europe, with its masses of demobilised soldiers, unemployed thanks to the Great Depression, the depression itself, the apparent threat of the recent Russian revolution, the insurgent force of workers movements with deep autonomous roots in self-organised civil society institutions, and so on, is very different from the situation today.

So even though, we’ve just said above that we weren’t going to get into the historiographical weeds on justifying a portable definition, we need to at least give some illustration of how a concrete justification might be framed.

This argument has been made better elsewhere, but our current situation in the early 21st century confronts us with a number of serious problems that not only present the possibility of existential crises for the global capitalist economy, but also the political threat of resurgent far right and fascist movements. First and foremost the environmental crisis of global warming threatens the lives of 100s of millions. But the distribution of those most at risk is not evenly spread around the inhabited globe, but concentrated in the ex-colonial regions of the Global South. As temperatures rise, droughts, floods, increasingly extreme weather events cause crops to fail, in regions already blighted by economic precarity and war, increasing numbers of people are likely to be driven off the land of their birth and forced to seek survival and a better life through migration to the environmentally more temperate and greater economic opportunities of the Global North. At the same time, most of the countries and regions of the Global North are experiencing falling rates of fertility, below reproduction levels, facing the prospect of absolute declines in population numbers and the increasing aging of a top-heavy demographic pyramid. Far from these two conditions being seen as complementary and the opportunity for mutually beneficial solutions, the situation has given fuel to the most reactionary, xenophobic and racist reactions in the ideological and political spheres in the Global North. The still unresolved fallout of the colonial era of the 19th and early 20th centuries and the settler-colonial origins of the Americas and elsewhere, present an underlying structurally white supremacist legacy these reactions can revive and exploit. In this conjunction, it’s not difficult to argue that, yes, fascism remains a clear and present danger in the early 21st century, not merely a “historical detail” from nearly a century ago.

A necessary caveat — if there’s no room for complacency about the threat of fascism in the present, neither should we become fixated upon it to the extent of thinking that it — and only it — encompasses the entire threat of the current historical conjuncture. To put it bluntly, the victory of fascism in the Global North is not necessarily needed for the current situation to be mishandled in a way that leads to mass casualties and epochal crimes against humanity. Ordinary, mundane “politics as usual” could well suffice on its own to lead us down the path to catastrophe. The current covid19 pandemic has already shown that the political instincts of the Global North is to vaccinate its own populations first, piling third and fourth vaccinations on top of the initial life-saving courses, in the pursuit of defending corporate profits and business as usual. At the expense of leaving the vast majority of the population of the Global South as yet unprotected, a calamitous situation that the current head of the WHO has denounced as “global vaccine apartheid”.

We must heed the lesson not to become too narrowly fixated on fascism at the expense of a wider awareness of the threats of other strands of far-right, populist or even just narrowly parochial centrist ideological tendencies.

Militant theory — the Three Way Fight tendency

Steampunk convention goers pose armed 3-way standoff — by Martin Soulstealer CC BY 2.0

The task of theorising fascism has been divided between academic and militant approaches. Our analysis here puts militant theory before academic theory, not out of some chest-beating Antifa machismo, but following the logic of how we understand the relation between ideology and practice. That is, that theory only pragmatically grasps reality through the process of becoming the living doctrine of bodies engaged in collective practice. So while the original sources of particular theories, whether in an academic or militant environment, are not important, they can only be actualised and tested through the practice of anti-fascist struggle. Because theoretical work from the academic sphere cannot be directly related to practice, except by the route of being absorbed and adopted by the practice of the militant environment, it is logical that we take the theory and doctrines of the militant sphere as the primary point of reference.

It is not in the scope of this section to make a comprehensive review of militant anti-fascist theories of fascism, across all languages and periods. Even limiting ourselves to recent work in English, a full review of what has been produced in the last 20 years is beyond our capacity. We have decided to select the theoretical work associated with the Three Way Fight blog in the US as representative of some of the more advanced theoretical work of the anglophone militant antifascist milieu. Even more narrowly, a subset of only three of the writers associated with it. The selection may appear arbitrary, but ultimately the purpose of the exercise here is preparatory, i.e. to explore and illustrate some of the problems and questions that the model we are going to propose, will attempt to address.

The three-way fight concept

The best way to introduce the concept of the three-way fight in militant anti-fascism is the opening of the eponymous blog’s “About” section:

Three Way Fight is a blog that promotes revolutionary anti-fascist analysis, strategy, and activism. Unlike liberal anti-fascists, we believe that “defending democracy” is an illusion, as long as that “democracy” is based on a socio-economic order that exploits and oppresses human beings. Global capitalism and the related structures of patriarchy, heterosexism, racial and national oppression represent the main source of violence and human suffering in the world today. Far right supremacism and terrorism grow out of this system and cannot be eradicated as long as it remains in place.
At the same time, unlike many on the revolutionary left, we believe that fascists and other far rightists aren’t simply tools of the ruling class. They can also form an autonomous political force that clashes with the established order in real ways, or even seeks to overthrow global capitalism and replace it with a radically different oppressive system. We believe the greatest threat from fascism in this period is its ability to exploit popular grievances and its potential to rally mass support away from any liberatory anti-capitalist vision.
Leftists need to confront both the established capitalist order and an insurgent or even revolutionary right, while recognizing that these opponents are also in conflict with each other. The phrase “three way fight” is short hand for this idea (although in concrete terms there are more than three contending forces).

The key to the concept is that the struggle between anti-fascists and fascists and the state, cannot be conceived as a two-way fight, on a political (as opposed to ideological) level. This needs a little unpacking.

Schematically-speaking, liberal anti-fascism sees the struggle against fascism as a two-way fight between the defenders of liberal democracy and the fascists and far-right forces that would overthrow it. The reluctance of the police and other state forces to properly repress the enemies of democracy may be seen as a problem, but essentially the struggle is seen as between the partisans of liberal, anti-racist, egalitarian democracy, against the forces ranged against it. In other words, the struggle is seem primarily as an ideologically-driven one, in which class conflict and capitalist crisis play no central agential role. This is the liberal two-way fight perspective.

So far, so orthodox, from a leftist perspective. The second paragraph here really spells out the heterodoxy of the three-way fight concept compared to earlier orthodox Marxist perspectives. Back in Section 3 we told the story of the disastrous Third Period where the consensus of the Communist parties following the Comintern line was that fascism was simply a violent adjunct or auxiliary to the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. That is, the problem of challenge of fascism was subsumed under the two-way fight of the class struggle, as seen through the orthodox lens. If the Third Period was on the threshold of a new revolutionary period, then all defenders of capitalism — i.e. non-Communists — were equally “fascist”, and those claiming to do so in the name of the workers, i.e. the hated Sozialdemokraten, were the biggest threat of all, before even the the Nazis.

After the Nazis came to power and liquidated the German Marxist movement, the Comintern belatedly realised the need to make a drastic U-turn and drop all the “social fascist” BS. The new line, in preparation for coming Popular Front policy, was expressed by the then Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov in the following formulation that ”Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of finance capital”. Which is often since referred to as the “Dimitrov line”. However, the new line, albeit a U-turn from the disastrous Third Period ideology, still persists in framing fascists as a simple tool or instrument of the bourgeoisie, with no autonomy of their own. In other words, this was also a two-way fight perspective. Significantly, although dressed up in economistic language — the necessity of siding with the “good capitalists” of the manufacturing and “progressive” national bourgeoisie, and their liberal middle class supporters, against the “bad” finance capitalists — effectively aligned Popular Front anti-fascism along the same line as liberal anti-fascism. In the post-war period, this aspect of “popular frontism” has been criticised at times by the radical left as reformist and opportunist. But these are functionalist or even ad hominem arguments, compared to recognising the structural effect of viewing a three-way fight through two-way fight blinkers. A perspective that constrains you to choosing one side as the “main enemy” and allying with the other as the “lesser evil”.

The failure of the economistic dogmas of official Marxism in 1930s Germany led some thinkers, particularly individuals associated with the Frankfurt School, like Wilhelm Reich or Erich Fromm, to retry an analysis of Nazism and fascism by switching to a psychoanalytic framework instead. But in many ways this was a case of jumping from the frying pan into the fire, metaphorically speaking, as psychoanalysis was no less of a “totalising discourse” (we’ll come back to this in a minute) than the economic determinism of Comintern doctrine. Wilhelm Reich’s “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” is recognised as a classic of the genre. But it has to be said that despite its seminal role in forming the problematic of “how did the masses come to turn to their own repression”, his proposed answer boils down to “sexual repression”, which is frankly absurd. Admittedly not as dementedly self-annihilating as the KPD’s “Nach Hitler, uns!” perspective. But that’s a very low bar. Fromm’s more existential “Escape from Freedom” has stood the test of time better, but is ultimately no more convincing as an analysis of the causes of the rise to power of Nazism in Germany than Reich’s sexual repression thesis.

Returning to the three-way fight concept, the historical genesis of this lies in 1980’s USA within the small but energetic militant anti-fascist movement, specifically around Anti-Racist Action and similar groups, taking the fight to the neo-nazi movement of that era. Within that milieu, veterans of the US’s predominantly Maoist New Left from the late 60s and 70s mixed with anarchist-leaning youth from punk, skinhead and gang subcultures. Despite the ideological diversity of the resulting mix, the pragmatic imperatives of direct action anti-fascism⁴ welded a common starting point. The three-way fight concept came out of this, not as an ideological stance, but a kind of political⁵ “action consensus” that opened, rather than concluded, the question of what kind of analysis would be adequate to it. It should be noted also, that even today, a majority of the groups and movements of the radical left, at least in the anglophone world, have yet to fully incorporate the three-way fight perspective as a rupture with the erroneous two-way fight perspective of the 1930s. The explanation for this theoretical sluggishness is most likely found in the pragmatic reality that up until very recently, the majority of the anglophone radical left, at least since the 1970s, did not seriously engage in militant anti-fascist practice. As ever, theory lags behind practice.

If we can now appreciate the relative novelty of the three-way fight perspective, that doesn’t mean that the concept in itself presents a finished analysis. It is a political starting point that demands the elaboration of a worked out strategic, ideological and theoretical analysis. So let’s look at how some of the writers in this tradition have attempted to do just that.

Exploratory post-economism — the Don Hamerquist & J. Sakai dialogue

In 2002 a book called “Confronting Fascism — Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement” was published by Anti-Racist Action Chicago, Arsenal Magazine (also Chicago) and Kersplebedeb Press (Canada). Apart from a short introduction by Chicago ARA, the book consists essentially of two discussion documents written in the aftermath of the momentous events of the preceding two years — 1999's Seattle WTO protests and 2001’s 9/11 Al Qa’ida attacks. But, also for context, before the anti-war movement that swept across the US in 2003 in reaction to the invasion of Iraq.

The first document — Fascism and Anti-Fascism — is written by Don Hamerquist, a veteran of the American New Left, specifically the innovative and somewhat heterodox Sojourner Truth Organisation. The second document — The Shock of Recognition — is written in dialogue with, and as a constructively critical response to the first, by another veteran of the 1960s American radical left, who writes under the pen name J. Sakai, well-known in the milieu for his book “Settlers”, amongst other works. Despite being from a similar era, Sakai’s political background would be more classically Maoist than the STO. Although neither author was a member of ARA, Hamerquist was actively engaged in collaborative work with parts of the network, in both theoretical discussion and political action, being a driving force behind the ARA Research Bulletin, a kind of precursor to “Confronting Fascism”. Sakai’s engagement was more by way of external political commentary, in a comradely and supportive vein. The dialogue between the two writers was informed by the experiences and problems of the militant anti-fascist movement of the immediately previous period, and the exchange of views in this book eventually contributed to the founding of the Three-Way Fight blog a few years later, to continue the discussion.

It may seem odd to pick on an exchange that is now over 20 years old and both authors characterised at the time as provisional and opening perhaps as many questions as were answered. But on the one hand, as mentioned above, the perspective of the shared three-way fight concept that framed the discussion, is far from hegemonic, even amongst the radical and anti-fascist left. And, more prosaically, it suits our purposes for teasing out the issues and problems in trying to frame an analysis adequate to the concept.

Hamerquist opens with a review of the history of the Third Period and the U-turn to the Popular Front and the Dimitrov line we’ve already covered above. He concludes his historical summary of those two approaches with the following observation.

…for purposes of my argument there are two central points. Fascism was capitalism, but of a “bad”, gorilla variant. Anti-fascism was either confined to the terrain of reformism or collapsed into the general struggle against capital. In the rest of this paper I hope to demonstrate what’s wrong with the first point, and to develop an alternative to the second.

Although the actual term “three-way fight” doesn’t appear in either Hamerquist or Sakai’s papers, its clear from the above that the central insight of rejecting both the ultra-leftist and reformist/liberal variants of the “two-way” view of anti-fascism emerges here, within this dialogue, as the common ground of the two writers.

There is much that is value in the Hamerquist piece, although some of the positions are dated in the light of subsequent events, the anti-war movement, the rise of the alt-right and Trumpism, that have redrawn the lines of contemporary American fascism back away from the apparent lines of development of Third Positionist, “Strasserite” or “revolutionary anti-capitalist” fascisms, that were visible in the particular post-1990s and post-Seattle conjuncture. But aside from that, much remains that are still open questions today, I can only urge readers to take the time to review the full document, because it is of more than merely historical value.

Hamerquist’s central concern is that in a period of unprecedented weakness of the left in post-Reagan America, that fascists might conceivably out-compete the left in gaining a mass following within the economic mass base of society.

The real danger presented by the emerging fascist movements and organizations is that they might gain a mass following among potentially insurgent workers and declassed strata through an historic default of the left. This default is more than a possibility, it is a probability, and if it happens it will cause massive damage to the potential for a liberatory anti-capitalist insurgency

This is clearly a radical break from the previous dogmatic economism that only marginal or strategically insignificant numbers of the working class could be won to fascism. And in fact this position and language is reflected in the second paragraph of the above quote from the blog’s “About” section. But Hamerquist goes further, in seeing the attacks of the then “national revolutionary” fascists on William Pierce’s National Alliance for being insufficiently anti-capitalist, the emergence of a new, genuinely anti-capitalist fascism.

Capitalist development creates an anti-capitalist fascism that will neither retreat nor evaporate when confronted by what it sees as pro-capitalist fascism. Long before Pierce’s strategy succeeds, it has created its own fascist challenge, a challenge that it will have great difficulty defeating or absorbing.
Which variant of fascism will prevail? Will they cancel each other out? I have my opinions but I could be wrong. What I do know is that, on this point as on all others, the most dangerous left assumption is that the easier road is the one that we will be traveling. The worst error the left could commit in this situation is to assume that Pierce’s [pro-capitalist] variant of fascism will ultimately prevail because it looks most like the best recognized historical model, German National Socialism. This assumption might ultimately prove to be true, but acting on it now only means that fascism will be effectively discounted as an ideological challenge, whatever significance it is assigned in other respects.

In summary Hamerquist posits that not only could fascism potentially win over more of the working class than the left, but it could do so by not only pretending, but actually being a revolutionary anti-capitalist political movement.

Even from the most heterodox of Marxisms, Hamerquist’s challenge is strong stuff. Indeed Sakai opens his response to Hamerquist by challenging him over a perceived lapse in rigour in applying class analysis properly in his paper. Above all he pushes back on the idea that fascism could be not only revolutionary (which he also accepts, but qualifies as not new) but also even anti-capitalist.

…when Hamerquist says that this wave of fascism is both seriously anti-capitalist and revolutionary, i would have to qualify that. His insight is deep, but his exact breakdown is not and i think that serious misunderstandings could arise. Reading Fascism & Anti-Fascism too literally could get one disoriented, wondering if fascists are really “revolutionary” and “anti-capitalist” like socialists or anarchists are, then maybe anything can be anything and right could be left and oppressors could be oppressed?

Here Sakai is throwing up his hands and claiming that Hamerquist has crossed a threshold beyond which all categories of left and right fall apart. He continues by countering that if contemporary fascism cannot be truly anti-capitalist, it is however sincerely anti-imperialist in its opposition to the UN, WTO and so on

The new fascism is, in effect, “anti-imperialist” right now. It is opposed to the big imperialist bourgeoisie (unlike Mussolini and Hitler earlier, who wanted even stronger, bigger Western imperialism), to the transnational corporations and banks, and their world-spanning “multicultural” bourgeois culture. Fascism really wants to bring down the World Bank, WTO and NATO, and even America the Superpower. As in destroy. That is, it is anti-bourgeois but not anti-capitalist. Because it is based on fundamentally pro-capitalist classes.

He goes on to outline these allegedly fundamentally pro-capitalist classes

Enemy of emigrant Third World labor and the modern supra-imperialist State alike, fascism draws on the old weakening national classes of the lower-middle strata, local capitalists and the layers of declassed men. To the increasing mass of rootless men fallen or ripped out of productive classes — whether it be the peasantry or the salariat — it offers not mere working class jobs but the vision of payback. Of a land for real men, where they and not the bourgeois will be the one’s giving orders at gunpoint and living off of others.
Against the ocean-spanning bourgeois culture of sovereign trade authorities, Armani and the multilingual metropolis, it champions the populist sovereignty of ethnic men. The supposed right of men to be the masters of their own little native capitalism. In the post-modern chaos, this part of the fascist vision has class appeal beyond just simple race hatred alone.

There isn’t really the space and the time here to go into a full deconstruction of Sakai’s class categories. That would in any case require a critical review of both his Settlers and Lumpen/Proletariat books, which is outside of our scope. Suffice it to say, that despite the originality of his contributions in this paper (and elsewhere) relative to the economism of the 1930s, there is still something of a “return of the repressed” here in that the possibility of fascist ideology recruiting amongst the proletariat proper is averted by a complex re-articulation and stratification of wage labour. Such that to each putative class fraction, there is a corresponding ideology. In my opinion this is a form of neo-economism, by the back door. If by economism we understand a particular, ultimately determinative relation between class and ideology. The problem with such a view is that it is a form of totalising discourse in which class structures and struggles form the explanatory core, relative to which all other “variables”, ideology included, are dependent variables.

Towards an Ideological/Economistic synthesis — Matthew Lyons’s response

Cover of Socialism and Democracy journal July 2008

Matthew Lyons, another long-term contributor to the three-way fight blog, responded to the Hamerquist/Sakai dialogue in a 2008 essay “Two Ways of Looking at Fascism”. Again, as with both previous writers, Lyons has written many further, later texts, including a number of books. But this 2008 essay is most directly engaged with the previous dialogue, so at the risk of misrepresenting the author’s current positions, it suits our purposes here to concentrate on this older text.

Lyons opens by giving examples of the extent to which the old classical Marxist “instrument of the bourgeoisie” two-way perspective remains much the dominant theoretical perspective on fascism. He then goes on to cover the Hamerquist/Sakai dialogue and then explores the possibility of using the analytical framework of Roger Griffin to complement the class-centric approaches of the former pair (without falling into the problem of circularity noted above in the class/ideology relation).

Lyons leads into the discussion on Hamerquist/Sakai with a brief recap of the historical context of the orthodox Marxist “two-way” position on fascism, from Third Period to Dimitrov line, and then looks at some dissenting heterodox voices, August Thalheimer in the 20s & 30s and in the post-war period, Tim Mason and Mihaly Vadja in the 60s. Lyons then reviews the Hamerquist/Sakai dialogue above. While Lyons, writing in 2008 in the wake of the post anti-war movement, accepts that Hamerquist’s vision of the near-term threat of a radically anti-capitalist fascism has not appeared, he doesn’t conclude that the more general question has been ruled out. The more general question being, that if we accept Thalheimer et al’s position that the economic conflict between the Nazi war state and the bourgeoisie is unstable, other than systemic collapse or reversion to a more conventional reactionary capitalism, is there a third option where fascism goes onto a revolutionary overthrow of capitalist power to some other non-bourgeois class state?

Lyons also expresses scepticism towards Sakai’s position against fascism ever potentially having a working class base, including some historical counter-examples. He goes on to cover some of the other areas of agreement between Hamerquist and Sakai (against Eurocentric assumptions of fascism being a necessarily white phenomenon for e.g.) and concludes that their common ground of fascism’s radicality poses a better explanation for its mass appeal than traditional Bonapartist frameworks, but their analyses are ultimately fragmentary and lacking in a number of areas, specifically a closer look at the ideological determinants and dynamics.

To get beyond the liquidation of the ideological dimension that the totalising economistic discourse effects, Lyons turns to Griffin’s work which is very much ideology-centred. Indeed Griffin is generally recognised as one of the leading academic theorisers of fascism as an ideological movement. His one-sentence condensation of his definition is “Fascism is a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.” The unfamiliar word “palingenetic” is from the Greek “palin”=again and “genesis”=birth, i.e. rebirth (for e.g. like the Phoenix rising from the ashes, a traditional Irish republican symbol for national rebirth).

However, even if we haven’t quite leaped from the economistic frying pan into the psychoanalytic fire in the manner of Reich and Fromm, Griffin’s approach, for all its value, is openly one-sided in its prioritising of ideology as the principle lens for analysing fascism. Not to the exclusion of any dimension outside of ideology, Griffin recognises the role of structural, economic and other social dimensions, so his model is not a totalising discourse, by any means.

Still, as hinted at in his one sentence summary of fascism as a “political ideology” and made more explicit in later works⁶, Griffin conflates ideology and politics. This is of course common practice and appears natural from the “states-eye-view” of the dominant superstructural (or “protagonistic” in this text) ideological view of things. Such a perspective does not have to answer questions from the antagonistic perspective of militant anti-fascism which is always confronted with the question when is the use of force legitimate, for example. From the perspective of the dominant ideology this is a non-question because it is axiomatic that only the police and armed forces of the state can ever legitimately use violence. Similarly, the perspective of militant anti-fascism is focused on the concrete task of disrupting the enemy by any means, including fomenting internal division and internecine strife in their ranks. From that perspective all internal contradictions, including contradictions between fascist ideology and politics are matters of vital interest. Militant anti-fascism has never had the luxury of being able to ignore contradictions between ideology and politics and conflate the two in the disengaged manner of conventional centrist or liberal views.

In reviewing the confused state of both Marxist and liberal attempts to analyse fascism in the post-war period, Griffin identifies the work of George Mosse as an early precursor of what he calls the “empathetic” approach to fascist ideology. This is not “empathetic” in the sense of sympathising with, but in breaking with the “antipathetic” views of prior writers who allowed their sincere hostility to the object of study to lead them to dismiss fascist ideology as simple lies and propaganda (in the most negative sense). That is, ultimately, devoid of any significant meaning and not worth further consideration. Some of this attitude can also been seen in the common prejudice that fascism was therefore “non-ideological”. Mosse’s position was that fascist ideology must have been functional for fascists at some level, and that we should therefore read it “hermeneutically” to try and see what it was doing for them. Griffin quotes Mosse approvingly:

First, though Nazism is to be conceived as unquestionably a manifestation of generic fascism, it is no longer to be seen as paradigmatic or its quintessential manifestation. Second, at bottom fascism is neither a regime, nor a movement, but first and foremost an ideology, a critique of the present state of society and a vision of what is to replace it. Third, when this vision is dissected it reveals fascism to be a revolutionary form of nationalism…Fourth, its ideology expresses itself primarily not through theory and doctrines, but through a bizarre synthesis of ideas whose precise content will vary significantly from nation to nation but whose appeal will always be essentially mythic rather than rational. Equally importantly, it is an ideology which expresses itself through a liturgical, ritualized form of mass political spectacle.

We can see that Griffin indeed aligns with Hamerquist & Sakai in seeing fascism as a revolutionary movement. However, he is not a Marxist and follows the default liberal “two-way” position of liquidating or ignoring class as an analytical framework. A position Lyons recognises as problematic, which why he proposes to take the best from Hamerquist & Sakai, re class, and combine it with Griffin, re ideology. Which is the literal meaning of an eclectic approach, i.e. picking the best elements from a range of diverse doctrines or frameworks.

Now eclecticism gets bad press from certain quarters, particularly those enamoured with a certain type of intellectual snobbery or haughtiness. It’s worth countering that with a healthy does of pragmatism. To purloin Deng Xiaping’s famous cat quote “No matter if it is a white cat or a black cat; as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat”. Or as Donald “Duck” Dunn said in the Blues Brothers “If the shit fits, wear it”. The value of theoretical frameworks lie in their utility, not the immaculacy of their conception.

That said, obviously Griffin is not going to help us with the problems of circularity in the class vs ideology relationship already noted. So rather than continuing further with Lyons’ essay, other than encouraging the reader to take the time to read it in full, I’m going to move on to proposing an alternative approach to a definition either trapped within the “class-as-totalising-discourse” schema or Griffin’s one-dimensional-but-not-quite approach.

Towards a multi-dimensional analysis of fascism

OLAP cubes — OLAP Cubes by Mquantin — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62563102

In Jorge Luis Borges’s 1942 essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” the following, now famous passage appears:

These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies [of Wilkins’ proposed categories] recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into:
(a) Those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c ) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that, at a distance, resemble flies.

The passage is famous, not just because it was later quoted by Foucault and many others besides, but because it so humorously and charmingly satirises the problem of a certain strategy of categorisation. Namely the “laundry list” or checklist attempt to capture a definition in a series, with or without a minimum number of ticks to be accumulated to pass the definitional threshold, rather like on a psychologist’s pathology scoring questionnaire.

The list of writers and scholars who have used this “Celestial Emporium” strategy is a long and illustrious one, including such names as Umberto Eco (14 points), Emilio Gentile (10), Ian Kershaw (4 non-optional + 4 optional), Robert Paxton (9), and many more besides. All of whom, we should add, are far more serious scholars, and/or have lived experience of historical fascist regimes, far beyond the current writer.

The other most common approach is the proposal of a more integrated single definition, often condensed to a single sentence or paragraph, like the one from Roger Griffin, quoted above. While these are generally not the frameworks of totalising discourses like the economistic version of orthodox Marxist class analysis, or the psychoanalytic frameworks of Reich or Fromm, they do tend to be what Marx called “one-sided”. That is, trying to find a single viewpoint from which the essence of the phenomena can be grasped.

Without trying to justify it, at this stage, I’m just going to baldly make the proposal that any one-dimensional or one-sided approach will ultimately fall back into the binary thinking of the various competing and mutually-incompatible two-way fight perspectives. That is, that any analytical framework adequate to the three-way fight concept will of necessity have to be a multi-dimensional one.

Dimension 1 — Ideological

Let’s start with the big one. Griffin and liberal anti-fascism may be erring in making this the only dimension, but there should be no denying that it’s a major one. I say “should” because even though its less common these days, the old “fascism isn’t ideological” saw from the 1920s and 30s still makes periodic appearances in the most surprising of places.

Far right/anti-centrist/anti-populist/anti-bourgeois

Despite occasional bad faith attempts to pose as being “neither left or right” (under the aegis of de Benoist’s “metapolitical offensive”), fascism is both determinedly outside and against the political centre ground and very much to the right — they are violently opposed not only to socialism, but also to liberalism and democracy. To recall our little sketch of the left/right distinction — the bourgeois political centre legitimises the marriage of political equality and economic inequality, the left reacts against the inequality aspect, the right the egalitarian. While a belief in the natural inequality of humans (and genders) is widespread amongst the right and far right, and not exclusive to fascists. Nonetheless, despite occasional forays into third positionist drag, fascists are clearly fundamentally in the far right camp on human inequality.

But if all fascists are far right, it doesn’t necessarily mean that all devotees to far right ideologies are fascists. Far right is a relative position defined against the centre-ground which can vary across different polities in different periods. If the centre-ground in Holland is liberally non-racist, then a politician like Pym Fortyn was far right — in the sense of being to the right of the then Dutch centre-right — in his attempt to drag the Overton window towards a more overtly racist and openly islamophobic position. But his methods of using conventional electoralist and mainstream media methods, marked him out from the anti-reformist revolutionary violence of the fascist far right. Fascists don’t want reforms within the existing system — even ones towards a racially exclusive democracy — but race war, dictatorship and the revolutionary overthrow of the existing bourgeois electoral system.

For similar reasons, even though fascists often try to pass themselves off as right-populists at times, for tactical reasons, they distrust and despise “mere populists” as simple opportunists and tail-enders without any real beliefs. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, given the often cobbled-together, contingent and contradictory mess that are fascist ideologies, they genuinely believe in the necessity of people having beliefs strong enough to kill and die for. That is they care more that people have strong (fascist-compatible) beliefs, than what the actual detailed content of any individual’s particular beliefs may be.

Redemptive ultranationalism

Fascists believe in the nation, but that the nation is currently “fallen” and corrupt and needs a violent, revolutionary rebirth, to remake the social. This is Griffin’s palingenesis. The difference between mere patriotism (much as fascists often attempt to appropriate this word) and “ordinary” nationalism, and ultra-nationalism is qualitative as well as quantitative. Regular nationalism supports the nation as it is in the here and now (“my country, right or wrong”). Ultra-nationalism believes that the nation of today is in a fallen state and needs to be redeemed, it is the future utopia their passion is focused on, not the mundane present. It is the fervent belief in the utopian possibilities for a reborn nation as an ideal society.

This ideological aspect has obvious collectivist leanings, and so today, in late neoliberalism, is more in tension with macho individualism than it was a century ago. It is also in direct conflict with “bourgeois libertarian” views on the rights of capitalists to pursue profit without heed to the needs of the “national community”. Although the envisioned fascist ultranationalist utopia may be vague and unfocused, it is clearly in conflict with leaving “globalist” capitalists and big finance the freedom of action they currently enjoy under neoliberalism. Which is not to say that fascism cannot appeal to layers of local or regional capitalists, less reliant on the world market.

The need for violent redemption is tied intimately to a narrative of national humiliation (which may have roots in real historical reverses, or be purely subjective). “Death to the traitors!” is the rallying cry. There is a psychological relation between the feeling of humiliation and the rage for revenge, directed not only at the chosen human targets for hate, but for the existing social order as a whole. The the gulf between the revolutionary revenge fantasies of the fascist and the conservative’s fear of change has to be registered here. The conservative believes that the traditional order is under threat from subversion and “society must be defended”. The fascist believes that the conservative does not have the courage to face the hideous truth that that battle has already been lost and in reality “the world is upside down” and can only be righted by violent insurrection.

(Review question) Why nationalism?

In fact other collective identities are available, some minoritarian fascist tendencies make nods towards “white” internationalism. Male supremacism as fascist identity on its own, is toyed with online, without finding much organisational expression or real-world impact, other than the occasional lone wolf terror outrages of incels. The dream of a reborn totalitarian Islamic caliphate, is also a strong contender in the ISIS model. But even most radical Islamic groups of the salafist-jihadist type, tend to be nationalistic in practice. This was a factor in the split between ISIS and Al Nusra (Al Qa’ida) in Syria, for example. Similarly ISIS in Afghanistan attacks and denounces the Taliban for its Pashtun national chauvinism (in their eyes). The nation state remains the practical archetype of the instrument for remaking the social within the modernist worldview. And fascism, for the most part, whether white supremacist or salafist-jihadist, remains within the extremist end of the modernist spectrum (another point of agreement with Griffin here).

“This is what they took from you” — Mourning a lost solidarity that never was

The idea of a lost golden age of past social solidarity (whether “white” or “national” or other exclusionary far right identitarian category) haunts the present day resentment of the far right. The real relative absence of social solidarity in existing capitalist society is projected backwards into nostalgia for a lost age of cross-class “white” (or other) solidarity. A Kubler-Ross style “stages of grief” of denial, anger, bargaining, despair is the simultaneously experienced turmoil of fascism’s emotional monologue. The grand irony being, of course, that this mythical age of cross-class solidarity between bosses and workers on the grounds of shared “whiteness”, never really existed. As any knowledge of actual class history will show. As a mneumonic for this facet, I call it “Kubler-Ross for imagined loss”.

There is a particular danger here from radical liberal responses to this fascist mourning for a past white solidarity that never was, which is to reinforce that fantasy by, effectively, saying that that imagined past did in fact really exist. Here, strategically, the line must be drawn between militant, class-conscious anti-fascism and the liberal and radical liberal deformations. Reinforcing alienation by telling the losers in the capitalist labour market lottery, that they are morally corrupt (or, god forbid “stupid and ignorant”) and thus reponsible for their own degradation, is strategically a gift to the enemy. We should certainly never pander to racism or bigotry, but neither should we victim-blame genuine casualties of capitalism’s meat-grinder. Taking care, of course, to distinguish between them and the middle class and small capitalist partisans of fascism (who are always there also).

The only sustainable counter to the fantasy of a lost racial or national solidarity that never was, is to build a real class solidarity in the present. Even militant anti-fascism can never be the whole answer to the threat of fascism. Ultimately the positive side of anti-fascist counterpower is to build effective models of functioning class solidarity here in the real world. This is why in militant anti-fascist movements you will always find activists who are also involved in union and community organising. Because long-term we can not win by being merely against something, we have to be for something else as well.

Conspiratorial by instinct and ideological necessity

If both liberals and the left mainly persist in seeing the fascist vs anti-fascist struggle as a two-way fight, fascists show a fanatical attachment to the two-way fight perspective. To the extent that they inescapably rely on conspiratorial narratives of how all the apparently mutually-hostile forces ranged against them, from liberals, the left, the state, the oligarchs, the migrant poor, etc, are all secretly engaged in a united conspiracy against them, the “true people”. These conspiracies don’t have to make any logical sense, they just need to support the main narrative of a two way fight in which they, the fascists, are the forces of good, and all the others are pawns of the darkness. Similarly social conflicts do not arise from “structural” causes (like class conflict) because “structural” doctrines are part of the conspiracy. As previously mentioned, on the AfPak border the local ISIS franchise the IS-K (Islamic State — Khorasan) are sending suicide bombers to attack the new Taliban regime because they blame them of being in league with an imagined Pakistan, USA and Israeli united enemy. It doesn’t have to make any logical sense, it just needs to serve the narrative of good vs evil. Hard luck on the Taliban being unable to prove that they’re not in fact pawns of the US, but there you have it.

Biopolitical

The demographic paranoia of the current conjuncture mentioned above is in fact not new. Even back in the 1920s and 30s fascists were obsessing with falling national (white) birth rates and fertility. Mussolini instituted pretty much the same monetary bribes to encourage Italian families to have more children that Orbán is trying in Hungary today. With pretty much the same effects (i.e. none). These biopolitical obsessions with fertility and demographics are not just 21st century anxiety about the future sustainability of white supremacism as a globally dominating force, but have more long-term roots in macho misogynist sexual paranoias about control over women’s fertility.

Dimension 2 — Political

Politically insurgent

In our model (and that of the three-way fight writers) this political character of fascism as a “revolutionary” force or following the strategy of counterpower — or political “antagonism” in our parlance here — is the real differentia specifica that separates fascists proper from mere adherents of far right ideological beliefs. It doesn’t just need to dream like a duck, it needs to quack like a duck, walk like a duck, swim like a duck and generally indulge in aggressively duck-like praxis to be a duck. Fascist is, as fascist does. “By their deeds shall you know them”. In a collapsing social order (whether that collapse is institutionally real, or ideologically subjective), the fascist ability to project force where the state is no longer able to (or willing to, from a fascist perspective) is the power to transform a “corrupt” society into a new fascist utopia. At the risk of sounding arch or wantonly Deleuzian, it is the strategy of violent reterritorialisation of the terrain of reproduction and civil society, that marks out fascism from the far right or populism. Within the framework we gave in the last chapter (Ideology and Politics) fascism is an outsider politics with a necessarily strong element of prefiguration (appeal to the shared vision of the future), even though of course fascists are also prone to the instrumentalist politics of fighting like rats in a sack for personal power and advantage.

Fuhrerprinzip (ultra-factionalism)

Again following the political typology developed in the last chapter, fascist politics compensates for the contradictory and tendentially incoherent character of their conspiracy-addled ideologies by ultra factional political practices. Leadership and loyalty to leaders is a necessity for fascist group-formation at all levels from smallest to highest. US fascist Louis Beam may have popularised the concept of “leaderless resistance” amongst the American far right in his essay of the same name. But in our definition, politics is the process of forming collective bodies capable of exercising collective agency, and from that specific perspective, isolated cells and lone wolf terror attacks, while ideologically-inspired, are functionally apolitical. We’ll come back to this in the discussion on incels below.

At a movement level, the leadership principle produces the elevation of a maximum leader, demanding ultimate personal loyalty from every member and cast in the role of messianic saviour of the nation.

Two things must be specified about this characteristic. First, it is not necessarily specific to fascists alone. Most right-wing populists movements also rely on a charismatic saviour/leader figure. Bolsonaro, Trump, Orbán (Modi, not so much) are all charismatic leaders in the right-populist mode, without so far really empowering the fascist fraction of their fanbase. Second within fascism proper, the leadership principle is often in tension or even conflict with the lust for revolutionary counterpower amongst the acolytes. In the late 80s I once had a member of the “Political Soldier” wing of the NF, a self-declared “Strasserite”⁷ declare to us, in all seriousness, that we couldn’t accuse him of being a Hitler fanboy, “…because Hitler was a reactionary who sold out the movement”. Which, within his ideological framework actually made sense (didn’t stop us laughing at him, though).

The leadership principle is a pragmatic necessity for a fascist mass movement, but that doesn’t mean that fascists are always happy with their current incumbent Fuhrer, to say the least. And it doesn’t mean that the leadership will not sell out the followers whose muscle brought them to the negotiating table when it’s time to cut a deal with the captains of industry and the armed forces of the permanent state, as the Brownshirts found out to their peril.

Dimension 3 — Cultural

Cultural machismo and misogyny

Machismo is the cultural glue that binds all the elements of the other dimensions of fascism together. It’s the cultural chauvinist part of ultranationalism. The willingness to kill, indifference to mass death of non-nationals, is not just an ideological value but also a matter of pride and emotional pleasure. The “death cult” aspect lurks within the cultural-hedonic darkness of fascism. The anti-cosmopolitan populist aspect is framed in disgust at the effeminacy and perversity of the elites. The emotional and libidinal elements of fascist culture are always near the surface and the ideology is never separate from them. Speaking metaphorically, if the toxins in toxic masculinity could be extracted as an essential oil, it would be the engine fuel of the fascist war machine. It goes without saying that this all presupposes the general rightist view of masculine and feminine roles as natural, biologically-rooted and essentially unequal.

However, if cultural machismo was as much part and parcel of fascism a century ago as it is today, there have been substantial changes in the wider culture in the past hundred years that have also changed the character of fascist macho culture. The neo-nazi skinheads of the 1980s, with their pub and football terrace hooligan culture, would rather have died than admit to not being able to get a girlfriend or confess any of the resentments and insecurities routinely exchanged on the online masculinist safe spaces of the manosphere. With the society-wide cultural revolution brought about by the advent of the internet, old-school macho sexism has started to dissolve its repressive bundling together of disparate elements. In the new deterritorialised virtual space of anonymous online encounters we are witnessing an analogous effect to the derivatives revolution in finance, disaggregating the different aspects of real-space assets into their separate facets. The proliferation of anonymous online spaces allows the individual to diversify into multiple “dividuals”, expressing and growing different facets of their desires, obsessions and neuroses in separate disconnected virtual “communities of obsession”. The loss of the territorialised dimension of “meat space” politics leads to a process of ideological disaggregation, diversification and intensification.

Sexism and misogyny used to be combined within the unitary body, behaviour and speech of a territorialised and identified individual in the company of their in-group peers. Now the disaggregating and diversifying effect of online virtual spaces have allowed misogyny to strike out on its own, find its own line of flight and end up dispensing with many of the macho stances that real-world performative masculinity imposed. Now the misanthropic aspect (“sympathy is for the weak”) of machismo is separated from the misogynistic (“sympathy is for pussies”). Incel beta male culture is emblematic of the cultural forms that could not have existed prior to the new virtual terrains opened by the internet. To concretise the distinction between the mere fact of (pre-internet trad) fascists connecting online and specifically “extremely online” fascism, we can say that Stormfront epitomises the former and Iron Front the latter.

The aestheticization of politics

Ever since Walter Benjamin declared, in the epilogue of his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, that “The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life”, the concept of fascism as somehow the “aestheticization of politics” has entered the discourse and usually makes an entry in the checklists of the diverse Celestial Emporiums of fascism. The first paragraph of Benjamin’s epilogue is worth quoting in full

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.⁸

In the rest of the (brief) text of the epilogue, Benjamin goes on to quote Marinetti’s manifesto enthusing over the aesthetics of war and concludes that war and destruction is the inevitable perverse result of the aestheticization in the vein of Luxemburg’s “socialism or barbarism” or Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms” of the interregnum between an “overripe” capitalism fated to descend into the apocalypse of inter-imperialist war that WW1 had already unveiled. This was a very common perspective in the 1930s for fairly obvious reasons. In today’s world of fascism in the era of demographic paranoia, the intimate association of fascist ultra-nationalism with imperialist or colonial expansion is broken. The US invasion of Iraq was a neoconservative project, not the paleoconservative-aligned isolationist xenophobia of the 21st century US evangelical and far right. US fascists today not only do not, in the main, fantasise about invading and conquering China, but dream of forming a “white ethnostate” in a subset of the USA’s existing territory — a strategy of retreat rather than expansion.

If the original context of Benjamin’s concept no longer plays, it’s evocative resonances are still with us. Fascism does have a culture of victimisation, that narrative of national humiliation mentioned above under the heading of redemptive ultranationalism, is founded in a specifically identitarian take on “We are nothing and yet we should be everything”. We need to pare Benjamin’s aesthetic dimension from the “high culture” notions of art that haunt the intellectual milieu of his time and the later Frankfurt School, and relocate it solidly in popular shared pleasures (hedonics), like music.

Fascism loves music. Not in the literal sense of specific musical genres, be it Wagner, Skrewdriver, Neofolk, Scandi-death metal or whatever. Because these vary ceaselessly and the particular musical forms subject to fascist infiltration in any particular time or region are entirely contingent. Rather that music represents the special power of aesthetics of being able to invoke emotions directly, not only in a solitary listener, but also amongst a collective audience. And fascist culture can use this to inspire and communicate the emotions of fascist desires, hatreds, rages and ecstatic visions directly. Directly, that is, in a way that is obviously influenced by and channelling ideological values, but not intermediated by them.

Again, this is strongly beneficial if your amalgam of cobbled-together ideological doctrines, self-pitying narratives and conspiracies is not nearly as strong on the rational coherence side, as it is on the power of the emotional responses it evokes. The aestheticization of politics doesn’t necessarily lead, always and in every case, to a turn towards military expansionism. But it is a vital accompaniment to cultural machismo in binding the fascist revolutionary vision and enthusiasm together in a way alien to the bureaucratic rationalism of a Weberian liberal reformer or a Prussian conservative like Bismarck.

Cultural transgression and political nihilism — O9A, Accelerationism and Stochastic terrorism

Another specifically fascist beneficiary of this virtualised cultural revolution is the nazi-satanist project concocted and promoted by British nazi David Myatt since the 1970s, long before the internet was known outside of university CompSci labs. There is a danger when talking about Myatt and his “Order of the Nine Angles” (O9A) of boosting or amplifying what remains a relatively tiny fringe fascist phenomenon beyond its real-world significance. Nonetheless the noxious specific ideology of the O9A has been behind a not insignificant number of murders and terror attacks from the 1990s to the present day, and Myatt was involved with the formation of Combat 18 in the UK, amongst other things in his lengthy and sinister CV. But the specific nazi-satanist ideology of the O9A, which encourages all forms of depraved behaviour, including child abuse, is far beyond the limits of what the main bulk of the fascist movement considers tolerable. “Pedos” are a hate target for much of the fascist and far right milieu, yet by contrast O9A promotes it, and anything else people outside its specific sado-nihilist ideology might find unspeakable. Before the internet allowed safe ways for rare individuals with pathological hedonic desires to get in touch with each other without risking exposure to a hostile outside world, Myatt’s decades-long project for building a movement founded on an ideology specifically tailored to “sickos” had almost insurmountable barriers to getting any traction. Now the same internet cultural revolution that has allowed incel culture to flourish has enabled O9A ideology to gain traction on the influential Iron March and Atomwaffen fascist discussion boards (both since shut down). Forums in which Myatt’s twisted visions cross-pollinated with the equally malevolent “Siege-pilled” accelerationist ideology of James Mason, an American neo-nazi Charles Manson fan and advocate of stochastic terrorism. While Mason is not a satanist, his Manson obsession contributed to him being a relatively marginal figure in the 1980s (when most of the material for Siege was originally produced) but. like Myatt, has now found an audience amongst the “extremely online” millennial fascists of the Iron March generation.

“Sicko” above is, believe it or not, a term of art in parts the UK antifa intel community. It’s one of the “3 Esses”, being “saddo”, “(p)sycho” and “sicko”. These crudely mocking labels are a heuristic device for categorising individual fascists into types, based on their individual motivations and psychologies. Briefly the “saddos” are the people who actually believe in the ideology. The “psychos” don’t particular believe in anything, but they enjoy risk, power and “the game”. And finally the “sickos” are the sexual sadists who are turned on by the thought of doing unspeakable things to victims that the movement will hopefully allow them to access. Up until the internet the “sickos”, of necessity, used to have to keep a discreetly low profile lest the “saddos” suss them out and hospitalise them. Myatt’s O9A nazi-satanist ideology, with its commandments to seek out and groom “opfers” (potential victims for sexual abuse and murder) is effectively tailor-made for that, up until now relatively hidden, fraction of the fascist demographic. It’s emergence out into the open (virtually speaking), thanks to the internet, is an extremely unwelcome development. But it is emblematic of how extreme a role of the dimension of hedonics/desires — what we label culture — can play in the fascist sphere, understood in all its facets.

In relation to these online-spawned networks of “sicko” fascists, bound together by their inadmissible desires, the question of lone wolf or stochastic terrorism, touched on briefly above, has to be covered.

Stochastic terrorism is thus at once both hyper-ideological and simultaneously anti-political. I appreciate this statement makes little sense in the conventional use of political as being virtually synonymous with the ideological, but I can only lay out that this is a problem stemming from the idiosyncratic redefinitions given in this theoretical framework, that separates ideology and politics as distinct quasi-orthogonal dimensions of human interaction. (It is also, by the same token, the very motive for such an idiosyncratic redefinition). The basic idea that separating the dimensions of i) values/norms, ii) trust/loyalty and iii) desires/disgusts is a productive exercise in increasing our understanding of our object of study, is the basic gambit of this framework.

Here we are working with a definition of politics as the contestational becoming-collective dynamics of human social groupings which, we contend, can only occur through face-to-face reterritorialisation based on building interpersonal links of trust. The very characteristics of the deterritorialised virtual spaces of the online world — the lack of face to face contact, the anonymity of the interactions, the bodily isolation and physical loneliness of the participants — that have created the revolutionary conditions for a new form of alienated sociality, are also fundamental barriers to political bonding as we define it here. The participants of this alienated “siege-pilled” accelerationist milieu both revel and despair in the political impasse of their situation. On the one hand periodic attempts are made to log off and try and form actual political associations in the real world. National Action, in the UK, was the nearest this O9A and Siege-pilled milieu came to having a political existence. But the experiment was short-lived and effectively crushed by a two-pronged failure to hold their own against the physical challenge of militant antifa (they were run off the streets in short order and in a particularly humiliating fashion) and the counter-intelligence challenge of being infiltrated by police intelligence and rolled up in a series of arrests for terror charges and the inevitable child pornography and sexual abuse charges that follow O9A “adepts” everywhere.

So much for our brief tour of what a multidimensional model of “specifically fascist” movements or collective bodies could look like. On that collective bit, one last quick note before we move to wrap up this section.

This third, cultural dimension above sounds a lot like it is encroaching into the realm of the various attempts to analyse fascism through (mass) psychology — from Reich and Fromm, through Frankfurt critical theory and Parisian poststructuralism. As already mentioned the catastrophe of Third Period economic determinism motivated a leap of desperation from Marx to Freud. But the attempt to take the model of individual psychology and psychoanalyse social mass movements like fascism, is the wrong approach in my opinion. It’s seems an obvious category error to take a framework for looking at the psychology of the individual and thinking you can just scale it up to the scope of the collective or the social. I reserve judgement on how possible a solid foundation for a social psychology is, as a separate question. But here we are dealing with what can be passed between individuals, which does not include thoughts, conscious or unconscious, but only what we can communicate in language and collective practices.

So let’s start by first creating a critical sociology of mass politics that is more or less fit for purpose first, and then come back later to re-examine what psychology can then add to the story, rather than overload it with the entire explanatory burden from the outset. Not saying that psychology has no role to play, any more than the economic materialist realities of social production, distribution and reproduction have no role. But modelling the roles of ideology, politics and culture in between is necessary to avoid the dead end of a simple simple flip-flopping between Marxian and Freudian totalising discourses as happened so much from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Rowing back — there is no “correct” definition of fascism

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

At the end of the opening section to this piece, we re-affirmed the moral right of those who have suffered the violence of top-down state repression of civil society and democratic rights of workers and oppressed minorities to organised, to name their experience “fascism”, even if it doesn’t fit the model we have sketched here. We also said that despite the appearance of contradiction in holding both positions to be valid, it isn’t necessarily so. That is because we agree with Matthew Lyon’s statement from a talk on Trump in 2016⁹

The question of ‘what is fascism?’ is a complex, emotionally loaded topic that we could talk about for hours. Even among leftists, there’s no consensus about how to even go about defining fascism. Is it based on certain ideological characteristics, or a particular relationship of class forces? Is it a political process? Is it stage of capitalism? So let’s talk about fascism, but let’s not get too fixated on the word. Because what’s more important is how we analyze the situation, and what we decide to do about it.
As a political category, fascism isn’t an objective thing — it’s a tool for analysis, a tool for making connections and distinctions between different political movements or regimes. Definitions of fascism aren’t objectively true, they’re just more or less useful in helping us understand political developments, and helping us choose a course of action.

It serves no useful purpose for anti-fascists, anti-racists and anti-oppression activists to fight over whose definition of fascism is the “correct” one. We are not constructing a deontological moral framework, nor some metaphysically pure ontology. The theoretical models we create and use have only one criteria for validity — that is their usefulness in guiding our activity and informing our strategic and tactical choices in the struggle against the enemy. At the end of the day, whether a multi-dimensional analysis, eclectic approach or even the old Celestial Emporium categorical checklist works best for people, is up for anti-fascists to decide for themselves. When we formed Leeds Anti-Fascist Action back in 1986, one of our most basic principles of operation was that no-one owns anti-fascism, and especially not theoreticians or academics.

If we have included a discussion of fascism and the three-way fight in this broader text on ideology and practice, it is more by way of an illustration of how a non-totalising, non one-sidedly ideological model can clarify our understanding of the differences (as well as the continuities) between the fascists of yesterday and today, so as to more effectively fight them. Not to produce any final answers on the topic. In fact there can be no final answer until the day when we can at last respond to the question “What is fascism?” with the answer “Finished. Over. History”.

Notes

[1] This is a big topic and a perennial debate. For ease of access the Wikipedia page on ‘Definitions of fascism’ is as good a starting place as any. But a richer discussion of the historiographical issues around whether a general concept of fascism can group historical Italian Fascism and German Nazism together and whether or not it (fascism) can be subsumed under a more general concept of totalitarianism, that conflates Nazism and Stalinism, the first two chapters of Ian Kershaw’s “The Nazi Dictatorship — Problems & perspectives of interpretation” is an invaluable introduction to the debate and the stakes.

[2] I have taken the term “a portable definition of fascism” from an essay by Geoff Eley “What is Fascism and Where does it Come From?”, published in History Workshop Journal, Issue 91, doi:10.1093/hwj/dbab003, and at the time of writing, available online here. Although the term appears earlier in the introductory chapter “Introduction: A Portable Concept of Fascism” by Julia Adeney Thomas, in the 2020 book “Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right”, doi:10.1215/9781478004387, a collection of essays edited by both herself and Eley.

[3] This is a neologism here, an unfortunately necessary evil in this overall text. Section 6: Ideology and Protagonism goes into further detail.

[4] I’m using “direct action anti-fascism” and “militant anti-fascism” as effectively synonymous. To go further, I could even characterise it as “antagonistic anti-fascism” within the protagonism/antagonism duality (see note 3) in the wider text, but we will return to this in the later section on “The Strategy of Counterpower”

[5] “Political” as distinct from “ideology” in the specific sense outlined in the previous section of this text, Section 8: Ideology and Politics

[6] Specifically, Roger Griffin, “”Fascism”, Key Concepts in Political Theory, Polity Press, 2018.

[7] Actually “Strasserism” was not really a genuine historical tendency within the NSDAP in the 1930s. Peter D Stachura’s political biography of the elder brother, Gregor Strasser (“Gregor Strasser and the Rise of Nazism”, 1983), debunks this thoroughly. “Strasserism” is a political fiction later concocted by the younger brother, Otto, during his Swiss exile after the war. Which is not to say that Strasserism as a contemporary fascist ideology doesn’t exist, just that, like most fascist ideologies, it’s based on fake history.

[8] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, 1936, at marxists.org.

[9] Matt Lyons, “Making America Worse”, three-way fight blog, 2016.