What Is Fascism?

by Frank Scott

 

"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."

 

Giovanni Gentile* "Encyclopedia Italiana"

 

This definition from one of the exponents of the program has far more clarity than the over-used one coming from present day people of mostly liberal persuasion who define fascism as anything they don't like about present reality, without understanding that without capitalist reality there would be no possibility of what can become what is called fascism.

 

When capitalism is in its most critical state, pretense of democracy vanishes and big money power that always ruled from behind the scenes comes forward to publicly bring order to what seems to threaten chaos; democratic power accruing to the great mass of the people, which translates to chaos for the minority rulers who get away with being out numbered not only by employing imperial military forces but keeping majorities under control by use of consciousness controlling mind management techniques creating commercial distractions among them and hiding class behind false human differences like ethnicity, religion and race.

 

Far more important in the suppression of democracy than, say, pain management or anger management for individuals is the social ignorance management practiced by major political media, at the present moment in attempting to destroy a social democratic and even socialist consciousness rising among Americans by doing everything to suppress, misinform, disinform and otherwise bury that threat to fundamentalist, fanatic obsession with our economic private parts. This amounts to a form of masturbatory politics that finds us forced into identity groups reduced to primarily playing with, for, and against ourselves while remaining mostly unconscious of our human connections.

 

The present crisis in the capitalist political economic system, heightened by a tragic and potentially socially devastating if sometimes hysterically over-hyped pandemic, highlights the fact of a system at a severe stage of breakdown and the need for radical transformation that leads to democratic control and ends the bloody farce of a private profit marketplace assuring poverty, unemployment, illness and death to a population innocently financing the economic war killing people here and currently slaughtering thousands across the world. The danger is so great that recent austerity fanatics and fundamentalist public sector destroyers are proposing salvation of the system through methods that would have labeled them socialist-revolutionaries a short while ago.

 

Their hated "big government" has created trillions of previously unavailable dollars, mainly to save corporate business but also to bail out ordinary workers suffering the inability to buy what the businesses sell. This usually social democratic salvation for capital when it nears moving to fascism is coming from sources previously labeled fascist by the comfortable class which is becoming more uncomfortable each day. While label exchanges and ignorance combine to have unfortunates cursing alleged socialism for robbing ordinary workers and other unfortunates cursing alleged fascism for the same thing but from a slightly different perspective, the labeling and identity businesses profit for their minority owners by blaming the as yet unorganized majority suffering in maintenance of minority rule. But every downside creates an up, or at least offers the opportunity to do so, and the present approaching near if not total collapse of the capitalist market of private profit is helping bring about what could be a massive change for humanity.

 

While the American façade for democracy in November will produce the usual billionaire financed struggle in which a minority of the electorate supports a winner to proceed in maintenance of the system with different sectors of the population showing benefit while the majority pays, larger parts of that majority are seeing, feeling and gradually understanding that the system does not serve their interest, by design, and only a social revolution, whatever language it may be covered in by their supposed leaders, can bring about a reality that serves them and not just the nation's incredibly rich owners and their well-to-do professional servant class.

 

The threats to our social and natural environments grow more deadly, with the viral pandemic added on to the profits for those loaning imaginary money to private wealth and charging real debt service to the paying public. But calls for universal health care, public banking and even public ownership and control of the federal reserve system are growing at the same time, and while control remains in the hands of a tiny if most powerful sector of humanity, the opposition to them is not only a budding national movement but even more important a move towards global democracy. All over the world there are rising voices, organizations and demands for radical change in the political economics that bring incredible wealth to some but only by forcing more and more into unpayable debt and poverty, both physical and mental. Strikes among newly organizing workers are hardly featured in major media which is more busy telling people we'll all be killed by the virus if we don't follow often conflicting orders from leaders who follow one another around a circle of ignorance, but they are numerous and further signs that the conditions capital has created are teaching lessons people do not have to attend colleges to learn. And the overwhelming majority of Americans are workers fast becoming educated beyond the teachings of a minority able to expand horizons in higher education but too often having those horizons shrunk by being taught just how to maintain a system that offers them a possibility of some creature comfort only by falling into debt while making misery and deprivation absolutely essential for the great majority.

 

While many fear the intrusions in and control of individual lives by electronic authority created by the pandemic reaction, others see the possibility of a truly democratic system of life enhancing controls when power is removed from minorities and truly performs on behalf of the public good and not simply for private profit. An electronic watchdog to protect and enhance life itself and not simply some life for some people can be the outcome of control falling to majorities instead of the present situation which if allowed to continue will lead to an outcome even worse than the fears expressed by some who see "them" having too much control while "we" are kept from control, mainly by seeing individuals and not systemic forces as our major problem.

 

Capitalist political economics are why the market is near crashing, the pandemic struck, and wars continue in the Middle East and are threatened further in Latin America. And the creation of global socialist democracy is the only counter measure to global capitalist fascism. That creation is a job for an international majority of humanity but it begins in the national cultures we all inhabit and will extend long past any November election. We all need to learn, if not remember, that Trump, Republicans and Democrats are a problem, but capitalism, the system they serve, is the problem that must be solved if humanity is to have a future.

 

Note: This article was first published on April 10, 2020 at Legalienate.