I want to offer up a rough and ready definition of fascism, trying to keep it grounded in history.
Note that this is not meant to define, simply, the political party in Italy that called itself "fascist". For example, this fascism would also include Nazi Germany.
Note that this is not meant to summarize the way the word "fascism" is often used, today, in the press. I think the word is currently used in contradictory ways.
This is just meant to point out what fascism was in history — why suddenly there were multiple fascist countries.
It's to ask just which countries were/are or weren't/aren't fascist.
And it is meant to be useful: Knowing that a state is fascist, maybe this definition suggests what can be done about it.
Before defining "fascism", let me say what I think is the classical capitalist state.
The classic capitalist state — sometime called the laissez faire state — has just one main job: to secure property rights for the bourgeoisie. The right to privately own large farms, factories, rental housing, and so on is the primary business of the classical capitalist state.
Once an orderly right to property is established, the owner class can freely engage in more or less pure capitalism. They can hire workers, they can buy inputs, they can produce outputs, they can sell their outputs in markets.
No country has ever perfectly been such — but from the late 18th through the late 19th century, the US was pretty close to a classical, capitalist state.
Countries like England, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan all had comparable periods — different in every case. The US was probably the most straightforwardly capitalist, though, lacking the historical baggage of some of the others.
Classical capitalist states also tended to be or become imperialist states — to be empire builders. I'm not going to get into that much here.
By the end of the 19th century a few things were going on. One was that the severity of major economic crises was worsening, and their regularity was increasing. Another development was the increasing importance of monopoly capitalism.
Those two phenomena are taught even in (halfway decent) US high schools. We learn all about the great industrialists, the monopolists, and so on. The early millionaires. And we learn a bit about crises — especially the big one in the late 1920s, and the 1930s.
The two phenomena - monopoly capitalists and crisis — both relate in a deep way to something else: massive advances in technology, and growing problems with unemployment.
In a flurry of innovation that lasted over a century, society figured out how to produce more and more using less and less labor. That's because if you had a factory, and you could make twice as much with your current workers, or make the same amount with half as many workers, you had a real leg up on your competitor with his less advanced factory.
One side effect of that pattern of development, though, is that the productivity of the average worker gets sooo... high, and fewer and fewer workers are needed.... so unemployment becomes more and more of a problem.
The better capitalism perfects production, the more useless are the workers.
It doesn't stop there. Once the machines are doing so much of the work, and so many are idle, demand dries up.
Out of work people can't buy much.
At the exact same time that capitalism keeps reducing the amount of workers needed, it also kills off demand for its products!
Not everyone agrees with that analysis, of course. I think Austrian economists might have something else to say. Larry Summers might. But what I've said so far is just a pretty ordinary Keynesian take, and it is also consistent with Marx's theory in Capital.
What I can tell you with absolute certainty — and can prove from the historic record — is that in the 1930s and ever since, capitalist governments generally came to accept this theory of a demand shortage.
Even if you don't believe in the Marx or Keynes analysis, your government does.
By the 1930s — really this starts earlier but you can see it very clearly in the 1930s — there were two great forces at work.
On the one hand, there was this huge crisis of low demand and massive unemployment.
On the other hand, there were monopoly (or oligopoly) capitalists, multi-millionaires, who among themselves owned most of the industrial capital of the whole world.
And so the politics of the 1930s (and again, really starting a little earlier) strongly reflects the influence of those fat cats.
The classical capitalist state, as I defined it above, existed mainly to secure the right of private property (for the benefit of capitalist fat cat owners).
That was no longer enough and in the 1930s, the monopoly capitalists were trying to figure out how to "fix" government, to solve their economic crisis.
Attempts to return to gilded age capitalism were failing. Monopoly capitalists hated the idea that laissez faire capitalism wasn't working, but the empirical evidence was too stubborn for them to ignore.
And so, the monopoly capitalists stopped viewing government so much as the property-cop that sometimes they might bribe to get a railroad right-of-way or a parcel of California desert.
Instead, the capitalists turned to the idea of using the state — the government — to more directly try to manage their national economies as a whole.
In the US, this first appeared as some drastic banking interventions and then the New Deal. In Germany, it appeared as some drastic banking interventions and then the nazi programs to rebuild the nation and create a War Machine.
Each of these countries had some differences but they all also had similarities: (1) a move to directly manage the economy from the seat of government, while still keeping private ownership and profit intact for the big Capitalists; (2) the gradual conversion of the nation into, in some sense, One Big Conglomerate in competition with other nations in the same situation.
Put it this way: Washington D.C. stopped being the traffic cop for property rights, and instead became the Board of Directors over all the nations' big capitalists. The government became the "holding company".
Libertarians, Austrians, etc. to this very day make the argument that that could have been avoided — that laissez faire capitalism could have been re-established, etc.
I'm not going to take up those arguments here, right now — I'll just mention that I think they are very silly and wrong.
The point is that that is the definition of fascism: the government taking on the role of economic management in response to the central crisis of capitalism.
This is not a new or innovative view. Aside from Marx and Engels, who foresaw this development, it is very close to the view in "As we go marching", by John T. Flynn, a book which you can find on the web site of the Mises Institute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_T._Flynn
https://mises.org/library/we-go-marching
Once the national government is the board of directors of the nation's capital, it faces a pretty ordinary problem for corporate management: optimizing the workforce, particularly the size, coherence, and loyal obedience of the workforce.
That problem of workforce optimization has both a directly brutal aspect — like doing away with excess workers you don't need — and a more complicated social aspect — like issuing just the right propaganda to get everyone working for the state, and everyone pulling in the same direction.
It is on that latter, social question that the competing fascist nations of the 1930s (principally Japan, UK, Germany, US, and Italy) differed.
Thus there were, for example, a couple of fascist countries more or less embracing Jew-hatred as a unifying theme, but there was also the US, embracing a slightly more multi-ethnic white supremacy, and promoting a national identity as the capitalist vanguard.
In common, though, all these countries had a kind of false front: populism.
Each fascist country was, in the corridors of power, the activity of monopoly capitalists who had merged. At the same time, each fascist country was, in its propaganda, a state of, by, and for the worker.
In this way, I actually kind of agree that the "alt-reich" and its centrist opposition, including everyone from Trump, to Romney, to the Clintons, to Sanders, to many people who participate in antifa —— yes, they are all pretty much fascist.
But now you know what I mean by fascist.
They are not fascist because of speech policing.
They are not fascist because of violence either in aggression or defense.
They are fascist because they promote the false story of a workers' state that is in reality controlled by monopoly capitalists.
And those monopoly capitalists, by the way, are saying to all those socially divided workers:
"Let's you and him fight."
Well.. let me take that back a bit. It's not quite that simple.
Even there, I want to qualify my words. Because frankly, what I just said there, about the capitalists dividing the workers — is just a metaphor. The workers are perfectly happy to divide themselves.
The politicians don't divide and conquer this way because they are geniuses.
The politicians divide and conquer this way because the workers demand it of them.
There is no Jewish conspiracy behind fascism, in other words.
There is not even an old-white-men conspiracy behind fascism.
Fascism is just what capitalism had to become if it was to survive the end of the industrial revolution.
Workers all around the world demanded fascism, and would settle for nothing less.
p.s.:
There are reasons to believe the fascist era is coming to an end, though not necessarily for the better.
Modern minor fascist states are disappearing — consider Italy, Greece, and Spain for example. They are retaining the surface appearance of democracy but their governments are paper tigers.
It is not just the EU. In the US there is no European Central Bank to muscle in — but there is a corporate order. We retain a surface of democracy but have a government which is systematically neutered by an emerging corporate order.
It is as if the veil of illusion — the conceit that somehow these fascist states are "workers states" — is falling.
It is less and less important to do any more than pay the vaguest lip service to workers — if Obama didn't make that clear enough then surely Trump does.
Perhaps that is, in part, why there is such a resurgence of American nazism: parts of a frightened and beat down working class are demanding a return to the days of (the illusion of) a Workers State. For some of those folks, if that means kicking out the Jews and the Blacks, then so be it.
And on the liberal, progressive, or even "radical" side that's in the news — the workers state just has a different emphasis: a social safety net, the illusion of well regulated markets —- classical liberalism, at core.
How can either side be right? The state is being dismantled by the global power of monopoly capital. Workers think they have a say in this, on any side? That's funny as Hell.
