I’ve written a few posts on this blog laying out a basic reading of fascism as a political and broader social movement. In short, I see fascism as the ’emergency management’ mode of capitalism. Serious crises and leftist threats to capitalism produce the conditions that allow it to flourish. And fascism tends to arise in specific kinds of countries – peripheral capitalist states facing political and economic crises, credible threats to the capitalist system, et al.
However, competing accounts of fascism tend to emphasize the peculiarities of specific fascist systems, especially Nazi Germany. They point to, for example, some of the mystical elements of the Nazi system. As well as its persecution of religious and ethnic minorities. And they draw from that various general conclusions about fascism as a system.
I think that doesn’t really work. And having recently read Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography, I found that even Hitler’s own description of his political system shows that even Nazi German fascism fits my account quite well.
In his book, Hitler discusses in chapters 7 and 8 how he first got into politics. He traces it to the Marxist revolution in Bavaria at the end of World War I. And he uses it as a springboard to rethink the relationship between capital and the state. While Hitler’s ‘theory’ is rather glib and limited, he basically says that capital should serve the state rather than vice-versa. In light of Bavarian politics, I’d interpret this as the claim that the state has to step in to save capital from Marxism. In other words, it’s the emergency management mode of capitalism.
And so, even the ‘best case’ for an identitarian reading of fascism turns out to not work all that well.
