quick (?) note on the f word
Since 2016 or so I’ve repeatedly been struck by usages of the term fascism to characterize the Trump administration. This may be me equivocating or being mealy-mouthed but at this point my view is that this isn’t a usage for me but I can also see why other people might want to use the term. A lot of my response is simply to be perplexed for two reasons. One is that I really can’t tell what people mean by the term. As far as I can work out, this is a situation where people nod at the same word but don’t share the same concept in mind. (I once took a philosophy of language class and the professor tried to explain why pointing at a table and going ‘table’ is a limited way to teach people the meaning of the word table, because without context, word could mean, well, the table, or the color of the table, or items on the table, or a command like ‘stand on top of the table.’ In some circumstances people might all get along fine with usages like that and yet not share the same idea when they hear the word ‘table.’ This is kind of like that, it seems to me.) This isn’t per se a problem, though it’s obviously not ideal either.
It seems extra not ideal because for many usages, the term connotes urgency, and if it’s urgent then it might also be important to get the matter right, yet if multiple concepts lurk behind the same term then at least some people are not getting the matter right, it seems to me. I rarely say any of this, because the urgency of the term also tends to mean that people are not interested in laying out what they mean by the term and tend to take ‘what do you mean?’ as a hostile question. And fair enough, I suppose - for some people their usage in the present context obvious: if the theater’s on fire and I go ‘sorry, what do you mean by fire?’ I’m wasting time or being a jerk or trying to keep you in the theater longer for nefarious reasons, and, well, obviously the fire is right there, stupid, so how on earth is saying ‘fire’ unclear?! Something like that, I think. The thing is, the usage isn’t obvious to me and the present context doesn’t make it so. Why this is so related to the second reason I’m perplexed.
The second reason I’m perplexed is that I’m somewhat familiar with various definitions of fascism in the history of the far left. One longstanding definition is “terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” This was adopted by the Communist International in the 1930s. Dimitrov’s presentation of that understanding is online here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm This definition was endorsed by lots of other intellectuals in Communist milieus, and in the late 1960s the Black Panther Party used that definition - it’s my understanding they were reading Dimitrov - as part of their efforts to organizing a US-wide anti-fascist effort including a conference in 1969.
At a formative time I was somewhat influenced by some work by the Sojourner Truth Organization (there’s a good book on them, Truth and Revolution, by Mike Staudenmaier). The STO had an evolving conception of fascism tied to their analysis of the role of white supremacist ideology in the US historically and in their immediate moment (in the 1970s, and 80s) when they were doing some anti-Klan and related activism. Early on as I recall it, their analysis was that structural racism and white supremacist ideology would reduce the likelihood of an outbreak of anything like European fascism in the US because the former phenomena filled the needs that sparked the latter. This is represented in a paper by Don Hamerquist here https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-2/hamerquist-fascism.pdf - which he later repudiated - written in response to this other paper by someone else in the far left: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/litt-watergate.pdf. A few years later, STO’s position had shifted, arguing instead that there was a chance of those phenomena - structural racism and white supremacist ideology - becoming sources of some forms of fascism. The discussion papers here - http://www.sojournertruth.net/fascismintheus.html - lay out this evolving conception and address at least some of the ramifications of difference concepts. (Noel Ignatin’s “Fascism: Some Common Misconceptions” at that last link is a decent overview of some changing concepts of fascism in the far left/Communist world, and includes some criticisms of Dimitrov’s conception. Ignatin later changed his name to Noel Ignatiev and helped found the journal Race Traitor and later Hard Crackers.) Years after STO broke up, Hamerquist would become part of the Three Way Fight blog, a web site fleshing out another changing conception of fascism tied to organized far left politics.
I’m not saying any of these are right or wrong here, and I’m also not trying to just be a trainspotter about left ideas. What I’m trying to indicate with this whistle-stop tour of my reference points for understanding the concept of fascism is to indicate that there are multiple very intellectually serious analyses over time that have taken the question ‘what do we mean by this term?’ and the closely related ‘what do we think is in fact happening in the world right now?’ as questions needing in-depth study to ask followed by in-depth writing to expound the answers, and further that these were all taken as matters with direct bearing on political practice: if it’s fascism or not changes what we do or don’t do. The latter is different than at least some usages nowadays, where the thing we do is implicitly - and often explicitly - vote Democrat, a thing the speaker already thought we should be doing anyway. That’s to say, these prior usages were usages understood to inform strategy, with different meanings of term pointing to differences in practice.
My friend Rob Knox has a good paper from like 15 [!] years ago about the concepts of strategy and tactics in the far left, with a particular emphasis on international law but the points have broader purchase, with part of his argument being that these concepts have fallen out to a big degree, with very negative effects. I think current usages of the term fascism reflect that to some extent at least. That paper’s here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1921759. There’s a bit in the later repudiated Hamerquist paper that’s related, it’s on the first page of the text. It says that some people on the far left tend to find present conditions in the world and in the left daunting and so reach for imagined scenarios like ‘once workers have their backs up against the wall, then they’ll fight!’ whether due to economic crisis or fascism breaking out. (My internet friend and occasional correspondent Alex Heffron - hi Alex! - said something similar to me once about the covid pandemic, something to the effect that a lot of people seem to want to outsource the politics of a response to the pandemic to the pandemic itself, instead of treating politics as something that has to be actively made. It’s a good point and a bitter bill given current realities.) That’s to say, to some extent there’s been a long standing tendency to use ‘fascism’ to mean basically ‘it’s an emergency!’ with an implication sometimes that people, hearing that siren, will know how to act accordingly and choose to do so. Something like that may be part of some people’s irritation with ‘sorry what do you mean by the term?’, I’m unsure.
This has been on my mind a long time but I’ve not wanted to get into it much in part because it makes me upset. There’s a stanza in this Brecht poem that speaks to that:
The powers were so limited. The goal
Lay far in the distance
It could clearly be seen although even I
Could hardly hope to reach it.
And so passed
The time given to me on earth.
The full poem is here and definitely worth the time: https://harpers.org/2008/01/brecht-to-those-who-follow-in-our-wake/ The English translation comes after the German version at that link. I also haven’t wanted to bring it up because I don’t want to get yelled at, frankly!
I thought I’d write this up though because I just read this essay by the inimitable Werner Bonefeld, “Democracy, freedom and social order: on authoritarian liberalism.” It’s here, paywalled unfortunately https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03017605.2025.2460312. Part of Bonefeld’s argument is that maintaining a situation that is capitalism’s general normal, where a great deal of life is handled through private production of goods and services to be bought and sold on the market, requires a state that periodically cracks down hard. (Creating that situation in the first place involved massive open violence, as Marx details in his discussion of so-called primitive accumulation in the later chapters of the first volume of Capital. Incidentally if you’ve not read Capital and are daunted, start at chapter 26 and read through the end of 28, it’s far more readable than the opening. Then read chapters 10 and 15, again far more readable than the opening, then re-assess. If you’re still daunted by the beginning, after reading what I just said, then try reading chapters four through nine, skip to 25, then re-assess again. Not ideal, but not reading it at all is even less ideal.) I’ll note that this normal for capitalism itself involves a fair bit of fairly dictatorial power, since employers are basically small tyrants with few limits on them, as Elizabeth Anderson discusses in her very good and very readable but very limited book Private Government.
Bonefeld mostly focuses on some right-wing thinkers who tried to theorize and justify that periodic state crackdown. He stresses that’s productive of capitalism’s/capitalist normality and that while it’s relatively abnormal, it’s an abnormality within capitalism, a periodic occurrence rather than a big departure. That’s my gloss paraphrasing the article to be clear, I don’t want to put words in Bonefeld’s mouth.
Bonefeld draws on an old article by Hermann Heller on some of these themes. Heller notes that for all its authoritarianism, the authoritarian liberal state stops at the edge of the economy, so to speak, rather than extending its authority into that sphere. That’s a different sort of tyranny. In important respects that’s because the point of this sort of authoritarianism is to shore up and re-impose the power that constellation of small tyrants that we call the economy. That shoring up and re-imposing involves great violence - part of the whole point of my stupid little newsletter is to beat the drum about Engels and Marx’s analysis of social murder, which is to say, the underscore that the economy is huge death machine made up of little death machines, so that one aspect of that violence. Another aspect is the periodic smashing of institutions that partially shelter people from the market - temporary limited forms of public provisioning replaced by privatization, kinda thing. Brutal and ugly.
To my part of what’s at stake in this is understanding that while the problems of the Trump administration are very real and scary, so too are/were the problems in the Biden administration - deportations, crackdowns on student protestors, many many deaths by abandonment around covid, a fucking genocide, the list goes on - because the authoritarian turn, liberal democracy’s periodic recourse to authoritarianism, is to an important degree something that there’s nontrivial bipartisan consensus on, not solely a matter of one party where we can trust the other to save us. Part of what’s at stake is also what we pose as our desired goal instead - beyond ‘my god, make it stop!’ What I mean is that we don’t just want a return to, say, 2022, or 2014. As Bonefeld writes:
“ All too often, contemporary capitalism dubbed neoliberalism, is contrasted with earlier, supposedly democratic forms of capitalist organisation in order to emphasise its historical specificity, especially its authoritarian policies. The comparison between capitalist democracy and neoliberal authoritarianism is connected with calls for the restoration of a democratically based and regulated capitalism that is governed in the interests of the social majorities. The golden past of a supposedly democratic, state-regulated capitalism, which represents a progressive alternative to contemporary authoritarianism, is in no way subjected to critical discussion.Rather, it is assumed as self-evident. In this manner, for example, the earlier critiques of the ‘democratic’ welfare state as a ‘warfare state’, of the ‘national economy as a Keynesian myth’, and of ‘liberal democracy as a mode of domination’, not to mention colonial repression and Jim Crow laws in the US and beyond, are erased from the historical experience. The myth of a golden past transforms into the myth of the present as an exceptional manifestation of (an) authoritarianism (without history).”
In my opinion, this applies to Bernie Sanders’s recent efforts, as much as I’m also glad he’s making them, and his longstanding habit of calling Trump the worst president ever. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of Trump, but take, like, say, George Washington: he owned some people, and carried out a genocidal campaign against the Iroquois hoping to starve them to death. Truman dropped the bomb on Japan. Biden paid for the genocide in Gaza. To put it another way, as Walter Benjamin once wrote “whoever until this day emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot.” All presidents are gore-stained war criminals, that’s far more important than weighing exactly which ones have exactly how much blood soaking exactly which of their garments. I’m ranting now so I’ll stop in a sec.
Final thing I want to say: having first complained about there being a wide range of uses of the term fascism then mentioned a wide range among past far left actors it may seem like I’m contradicting myself. My point is in part that for the past left actors there was a sense that getting the term right mattered so that differences were to be addressed, not left implicit. My point is also in part that there used to be a pretty clear and strong sense that different usages had different ramifications. It’s not at all clear to me that this is a current view in regard to the now implicit differences in usages but it’s hard to tell when those differences are implicit. Lastly, as may be obvious and cliched, I’m inclined to say this reflects a problem of lack of adequate left organization and maybe a loss of conception of politics as arguably above all a matter of organization.