By Fabian Van Onzen, Marx and Philosophy, May 2019
Around the world, fascism and the extreme
right have made significant gains. In Hungary, Viktor Orban has
established a fiercely xenophobic, anti-immigrant government, with
participation of the fascist Jobbik party. In the United States and
Brazil, Trump and Bolsonaro took power with the support a fascist mass
movement that openly attacks Muslims, immigrants, anti-communism, and
people of colour. This worldwide neofascist phenomenon has resulted in a
few new books, which use both Marxist and non-Marxist theory to account
for its emergence. One of the most significant of these books is a new
edition of the classic work, Fascism and Dictatorship by Nicos Poulantzas. The new edition of Fascism and Dictatorship contains a new introduction by Dylan Riley, a professor at UC Berkeley who recently wrote The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe.
Riley argues in the introduction that Poulantzas should be the starting
point for any serious study of fascism, both historical and
contemporary.
In a way similar to Georgi Dimitrov and
Paul Sweezy, Poulantzas argues that fascism has its ideological origins
in the petty-bourgeoisie during a capitalist crisis. According to
Poulantzas, the petty-bourgeoisie,–shop owners, small farmers, state
employees, and some professionals–have three ideological
characteristics: status-quo anti-capitalism, a mistaken belief in their
social mobility, and power-fetishism. During a political and economic
crisis, the petty-bourgeoisie tends to account for the crisis with
vaguely defined notions of ‘corruption’, ‘corporate greed’, and ‘the
rich’. Poulantzas points out that the petty-bourgeoisie has an interest
in defending its autonomy and property, and therefore is anti-capitalist
without challenging the status-quo. Their class position makes
them believe that corrupted, greedy politicians are preventing them from
moving up the social ladder. Hence, their solution to a political
crisis is not a socialist revolution, but the removal of corrupt
politicians and the creation of a strong state with a powerful leader.
These tendencies can be observed very clearly in Brazil, where fascists
have succeeded in taking power. In his Brazil: Neoliberalism Versus Democracy, Alfredo Saad-Filho shows how the Brazilian middle class blamed ‘corrupted politicians’
in the Workers Party (PT) for all social problems in Brazil. Through
the corporate media, they disseminated the idea that all politicians
are corrupt, and that only the removal of the Workers Party could
improve Brazilian society. Although these demands resonated primarily
with the petty-bourgeoisie, they won over many non-unionised workers,
criminal elements, and students. The Brazilian petty-bourgeoisie played a
significant role in the fascist mass-movement to impeach Dilma
Rousseff, put the former president Lula in prison, and got the fascist
Jair Bolsonaro elected. Although this movement was lead by the Brazilian
comprador bourgeoisie (capitalists aligned with imperialism), the large
sections of the petty-bourgeoisie were its foot soldiers and primary
mass base.
One of Poulantzas most important
observations for understanding the extreme right today is his four-stage
analysis of the rise of fascism. In the first stage, Poulantzas says
that fascism exists as a mass movement that has grown and succeeded in
establishing itself as a powerful force in society. The fascist movement
has grown to such proportions that it becomes a danger and has the
potential to seize state-power. In Brazil, this was the period between
2013, in which the right-wing seized control of leftist anti-government
protests in Sao Paulo and other parts of the country, until they put
Lula in prison in 2018. This mass movement posed a danger because they
constituted the popular forces behind Jair Bolsonaro, and could no
longer simply be ignored or dismissed as an isolated phenomenon. The
second stage of fascism is “the period from the point of no return until
fascism comes to power” (Poulantzas 66). One characteristic of this
stage is a paralysis of working class organisations, which tend to only
make economic demands, but fail to provide political leadership.
Poulantzas shows how the German Communist Party (KPD) in the early
1930’s called many demonstrations for higher-wages as a result of the
economic devastation of the post-war situation. Because the KPD did not
initially think fascism was a real danger–viewing it as a temporary,
passing phenomenon–they did not fight
the Nazi’s in the early 30’s, nor did they provide revolutionary
leadership to the working class. They spent a lot of time attacking the
SPD social democrats, instead of building a united front to defeat
Hitler and the Nazi’s before they came to power.
In the second stage, the working class
itself is significantly divided and the lack of political leadership
drives some sections of them into the hands of the fascists. Here, the
petty-bourgeoisie has succeeded in uniting the working class behind it
in order to consolidate the forces to take political power. In Brazil,
most Leftist parties and organisations had become critical of the
Workers Party by 2014, and did not provide the political leadership
needed to move the PT to the left. Some of them, such as the Unified
Workers Socialist Party (PSTU) put out slogans such as “get rid of them
all”, and agitated against both the Workers Party and the
Brazilian neoliberal elite. Although they were always opposed to the PT
since their founding in 1992, during the 2018 elections they escalated
their attacks against the Workers Party. Others, such as the Communist
Party of Brazil (PCdoB), tended to tail behind the Workers Party, and
while they were critical at times, they did not really challenge their
class collaborationist approach to governance. This left many working
people confused and as a result of this, many moved to the right and
joined the forces to help get Bolsonaro elected in 2018.
In the third and fourth stages,
Poulantzas argues that fascism changes as a result of transforming from a
mass movement to a fascist state. He points out how in the period of monopoly capitalism,
the state plays a more interventionist role by directly intervening
into capitalist production. During a crisis, such as the one in Europe
and the United States in the 1930’s, the bourgeoisie will utilise
interventionist strategies to save capitalism (i.e. Keynesian economic
policies, Roosevelt’s New Deal, etc.). When there is a significant
threat to its continued domination, fractions of finance capital will be
more willing to embrace fascism, which Poulantzas points out is a more
extreme form of interventionism. This
is exactly what happens during the third stage, in which the capitalist
class provides assistance to the fascist mass movement and helps them
get elected to power. The third stage represents the first period in
which a fascist takes power and begins building a fascist state.
Poulantzas says that during the third stage, the bourgeoisie staffs the
fascist state with members of the petty-bourgeoisie who helped fascism
come to power. The bourgeoisie will make concessions to the
petty-bourgeoisie, such as the imprisonment of politicians perceived to
be corrupt, the enactment of racist legislation, and the encouragement
of violence against immigrants and national minorities. Also, in the
third stage, the working class suffers significant political defeats.
The fascist state will criminalise communist and socialist political
parties, imprison their leaders, and eliminate legislation that protects
the working class. In Brazil, the fascist government of Bolsonaro has
removed LGBTQ laws, escalated attempts to prosecute important PT and
PCdoB leaders on trumped-up charges, encouraged violence against
indigenous people and minorities, and passed pro-gun laws on the pretext
of fighting crime. Many middle class Brazilians — lawyers,
professionals, some intellectuals — who were excluded from the state
during the PT years (2002-2014) have been given high posts in the
government, the federal police, and the educational system.
In the final stage of fascism, the
fascist state has consolidated power and freed itself of its
petty-bourgeois class origins. Poulantzas says that this is the most
brutal stage, for it involves violent purges at the state level to
remove the petty-bourgeoisie, and terroristic repression over the
masses. The fourth stage results when the opposition to fascism does not
succeed in removing the fascist government. One
defining feature of this period is the beginning of expansionist
imperialist wars. In Germany, this was the beginning of the camps in
Auschwitz, and the imperialist war against Europe and the Soviet Union.
Brazil has not yet achieved this stage, and the dynamics in which it
develops will probably be different than in Nazi Germany. Bolsonaro,
Trump, and the right-wing Colombian president Ivan Duque have formed an
alliance against the Venezuelan government of Nicolas Maduro. Furthermore,
Brazil and Colombia have both given the US access to its military
intelligence and allowed them to build military bases. The three of them
backed the counter-revolutionary Juan Guaido in an attempted coup
against Maduro, and spread anti-Venezuela propaganda in their media. The
beginning of the fourth stage of fascism in Brazil will likely be
accompanied by a direct military invasion of Venezuela, which will
receive assistance from the United States, Colombia, and other
right-wing states in Latin America.
The main strength of Poulantzas’ Fascism and Dictatorship is its strong theoretical foundation and class analysis. In recent works on fascism, such as Enzo Traverso’s New Faces of Fascism and Alexander Reid Ross’ Against the Fascist Creep,
there is a tendency to provide a descriptive account of contemporary
fascism rather than a theoretical one. Traverso provides a good account
of how the National Front in France became popular by exploiting a long
historical tradition in French culture of anti-semitism and racism.
Although his account is illuminating in many respects, his theoretical
foundation is weakly grounded in formulations from Hannah Arendt’s work
on totalitarianism and contains neither a class analysis, nor an account
of the structural dynamics of imperialism that bring fascists to power.
Poulantzas work has the strength that it can bring these structural
class dynamics to light, which are very significant for understanding
fascist movements. One reason why it is important to study Poulantzas
today is that it can provide the theoretical formulations that are
missing in these recent works. The concepts developed in Fascism and Dictatorship are therefore a good foundation to supplement future research on fascism and fascist movements.
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