I was looking for his metaphysical theories, if any, on the level of Marx's view of the historical dialectic.
Righto. You just expressed, in a nutshell, the problem that the Left has in understanding fascism. There is no overarching metaphysical theory of fascism, especially not German fascism. There is no Fascist Manifesto.
I expect that you, as an academic, have access to JSTOR, so I recommend that you read Paxton, Robert O., "The Five Stages of Fascism," Journal of Modern History 70 (March 1998): 1-23. He lays that out rather well. One of the things he says is that the Left had a really hard time coming to grips with fascism for just that reason, so tried to pigeon-hole it into one of the contradictions of capitalism.
Paxton lists five difficulties in defining fascism. The five difficulties are timing, mimicry, the wide disparity among individual cases in time and place, the ambiguous relationship between doctrine and action, and overuse.
I wrote an essay about fascist images in Hollywood movies a couple of semesters ago.
A few paragraphs from that essay:
>>The most salient (of the difficulties Paxton listed) to my definition are the first four. The first is a problem which he calls "timing." When fascism first appeared, it was unexpected by political theorists, who expected that universal enfranchisement would lead to greater democracy.
For two generations, fascism was poorly understood by Leftist scholars because it was not predicted by Marxist ideology.
The second is a problem which he calls "mimicry." The popularity of fascism in the 1930's led to the wide-spread adoption of fascist symbols, e.g., shirts - black shirts, grey shirts, brown shirts, silver shirts - as fashion statements.
The third, the wide disparity between individual cases in time and place, and the fourth, a problem Paxton identifies as the ambiguous relationship between doctrine and action, are probably the most significant.
The fascist movement in America during the Great Depression was similar to the fascist experience in Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain, and other countries, and yet it was different. In light of the fact that German fascism differed from Italian Fascism, which differed from Spanish fascism, which differed from Japanese fascism, it should come as no surprise that American fascism did not resemble fascism in Germany, Italy, Spain or Japan. Nevertheless, historians and political scientists persist in denying that fascism existed in America, because, for example, American fascism was not totalitarian in aim, nor did it admire dictators.
Scholars will always quibble over the fine points of fascism, because there is no great "Fascist Manifesto," thus there is no text to consult in order to determine whether an expression of ideology was fascism or not.
After the horror of World War II, especially the Nazi death camps, it may seem perverse to assert that some of those who adhered to fascism or admired the fascist ideology were well-intentioned, yet it was so. American fascism was seen as a solution to the breakdown in the social order during the Great Depression. Hollywood mirrored America's fascination with fascism, from flirtation in 1933-34, to revulsion in 1936-37, and outright rejection in 1940. <<
My view, which is shared by many, is that fascism is an extreme version of populist reactionism. See, e.g., Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America (New York, 2000), Chapters 5-7; Tom Brass, Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism (London - Portland, Or. 2000), passim; Brinkley, Alan, Voices of Protest (New York 1982) Appendix I "The Question of Anti-Semitism and the Problem of Fascism;" Leo P. Ribolo, The Old Christian Right (Philadelphia 1983), Chapter 1; George Seldes, You Can't Do That (New York, 1938), passim; Raymond Gram Swing, Forerunners of American Fascism (Freeport, New York 1962), passim.
As you probably remember from my discussions with Lindybill earlier on this topic, the problem that the Right has in understanding fascism is that they thinks it's just another variety of socialism or communism. You know that's wrong, I know that's wrong, but they think if it walks like a duck, it's a duck. |
