Are we threatened by “21st Century Fascism”?

William I. Robinson

At the very least, William I. Robinson’s article “The Crisis of Global Capitalism and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism” has the merit of seeking to make a clear distinction between what took place in the 20s and 30s and what might be happening now, even if it ultimately fails:

A 21st fascism would not look like 20th century fascism. Among other things, the ability of dominant groups to control and manipulate space and to exercise an unprecedented control over the mass media, the means of communication and the production of symbolic, images, and messages, means that repression can be more selective (as we see, e.g., in Mexico or Colombia), and also organized juridically so that mass “legal” incarceration takes the place of concentration camps. Moreover, the ability of economic power to determine electoral outcomes allows for 21st century fascism to emerge without a necessary rupture in electoral cycles and a constitutional order.

This is certainly a step forward from the sort of thing I have been hearing for the past 40 years or so when politicians like Richard Nixon were being described as fascists getting ready to crush the left. Oddly enough, Democratic Party presidents were never described in such terms. To Robinson’s credit, he has tried to theorize a new type of fascism that owes little to the kind of hysteria found in the pages of CPUSA publications that was mostly intended into motivate a vote for the Democrats.

Despite my disagreements with Robinson over this matter, I should state that I have the highest regard for him as both an intellectual and a revolutionary journalist. Back in the late 1980s, Nicaragua solidarity activists relied on his Guardian articles (the defunct America radical weekly, not the British newspaper) co-written with Ken Norsworthy. He was a member of Union of Nicaraguan Journalists (past member and officer 1984-1990).

Back in 2009 Robinson became a target of the Israel lobby after an email he wrote to his class at U. Cal Santa Barbara compared Israeli treatment of Gaza to the Nazis. Frankly, I find this analysis rather emotionally engaging even if I am dubious about it politically.

The major emphasis in Robinson’s article is on what he perceives as an intractable and systemic economic crisis, one that he likens to the Great Depression:

This is not a cyclical but a structural crisis – a restructuring crisis, such as we had in the 1970s, and before that, in the 1930s – that has the potential to become a systemic crisis, depending on how social agents respond to the crisis and on a host of unknown contingencies. A restructuring crisis means that the only way out of crisis is to restructure the system, whereas a systemic crisis is one in which only a change in the system itself will resolve the crisis. Times of crisis are times of rapid social change, when collective agency and contingency come into play more than in times of equilibrium in a system.

Despite his attempt to ground his analysis in 21^st century realities, he cannot avoid analogizing to the 20^th. In characterizing the Obama administration as “a Weimar Republic in the United States”, he suggests that history might repeat itself in Hitlerian fashion. Robinson is not the first highly respected thinker to invoke the Weimar Republic. Last April, when Chris Hedges interviewed Noam Chomsky for Truthdig, the two concurred that the USA was like the doomed German republic. Chomsky said:

It is very similar to late Weimar Germany. The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.

My response to Chomsky focused on the economic differences:

To start with, the economic situation during the late Weimar Republic was far worse than today in the U.S. In 1932, there were 5 million unemployed German workers out of a total population of 66 million, an unemployment rate of 30 percent–twice what we are suffering in the U.S. today. Also, keep in mind that unemployment insurance, which had been introduced in Germany in 1927, was the victim of fiscal austerity after the 1929 market crash. All public funding was suspended, which resulted in higher contributions by the workers and fewer benefits for the unemployed.

To Robinson’s credit, the economic analysis is far more engaged with current day realities than most comparisons with the 1930s. He highlights three developments:

1. Militarized accumulation: He states that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “generate enormous profits for an ever-expanding military-prison-industrial-security-financial complex.”

2. Raiding and sacking of public budgets: “Transnational capital uses its financial power to take control of state finances and to impose further austerity on the working majority, resulting in ever greater social inequality and hardship.”

3. Financial speculation: The collapse of 2008 marked the culmination of years of speculation in much the same way that 1929 did. Although he does not specifically to Black Friday, it is clear that he conceives of the subprime meltdown as a turning point in the capitalist system’s ability to function normally.

One of course might question whether the analogy with 1929 makes as much sense as would one with the 1890s when both the U.S. and Britain were deep into Empire-building. In a period of rampant social Darwinism, speculators such as J.P. Morgan virtually ran the government—regardless of whether a Republic or Democratic occupied the White House. You also had state and municipal governments that did little to assist the unemployed or the poor, as a visit to New York’s Lower East Side or London’s East End would attest. Finally, you had war after war. Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Sudan, China, and Egypt all experienced the sting of gunboat diplomacy.

Indeed, if you pay close attention to the words of Tea Party politicians and the hired guns of the Heritage Foundation, you will see that their model is not Nazi Germany but Grover Cleveland’s America. Of course, we should never forget that Cleveland, an enemy of trade unions and an arch-imperialist, was a Democrat just like his protégé in the White House today.

Robinson’s invocation of the Weimar precedent is not that far from Chomsky’s:

Obama’s campaign tapped into and helped expand mass mobilization and popular aspirations for change not seen in many years in the United States. The Obama project co-opted that brewing storm from below, channeled it into the electoral campaign and then betrayed those aspirations, as the Democratic Party effectively demobilized the insurgency from below with more passive revolution.

In this sense, the Obama project weakened the popular and left response from below to the crisis, which opened space for the right-wing response to the crisis – for a project of 21st century fascism – to become insurgent. Obama’s administration appears in this way appears as a Weimar republic. Although the social democrats were in power during the Weimar republic of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s they did not pursue a leftist response to the crisis but rather sidelined the militant trade unions, communists and socialists, and progressively pandered to capital and the right before turning over power to the Nazis in 1933.

As I have stated often to the point of becoming tedious, it makes little sense to talk about fascism without reference to the “disease” it was meant to cure, namely proletarian revolution. In Spain, Italy and Germany in the 20s and 30s there were massive revolutionary parties that fought pitched battles with the cops and the army. The social and political crisis was so deep that the ruling class made a pact with the devil. It backed an Adolph Hitler as a last resort against their sworn enemies in the trade unions and socialist parties. Who are the enemies of big business today? A Rich Trumka whose most “rebellious” gesture is being interviewed by Rachel Maddow? And what kind of “popular and left response” has the ruling class shaking in its boots? In the 2008 elections, Gloria La Riva of the Party for Socialism and Liberation received 7,333 votes. By comparison, the Communist Party of Germany got 14.5 percent of the vote in 1932. What’s more important, however, is that the CP had the ability to call workers out on a general strike and often exercised that option, often to the point of engaging in open fighting with the cops and the army. Of course, the militancy did not compensate for a suicidal ultraleft policy that equated the SP to the Nazis, a topic for another article.

Turning now to Robinson’s characterization of “21^st Century Fascism”, we have to respect the seriousness of his effort even if we reserve the right to disagree with him. He enumerates six features:

1. The fusion of transnational capital with reactionary political power. This is a reference to the Tea Party being funded by ultraright billionaires, etc. While it is certainly true that German big business, particularly in heavy industry, backed Hitler’s storm troopers, there is little evidence today that the Tea Party is involved in the kind of violent attacks on the left and the trade union movement that took place in the 1920s. As odious as they are, they are primarily a bloc of voters who seek to elect politicians committed to turning back the clock to 1890, not 1933.

2. Militarization and extreme masculinization. Robinson worries about the top brass becoming more involved in policy making. There is something to be said for this, but one wonders if this is something that can be linked to fascism. Going back again to the 1890s, the German state was dominated by the military but it followed bourgeois democratic norms, which is to say that it harassed the socialists, embarked on a colonization program, etc. Perhaps the more things change the more they stay the same.

3. A scapegoat which serves to displace and redirect social tensions and contradictions. This is a reference to the crackdown on “illegal immigrants”. One has to note that the movement for immigrant rights developed a powerful momentum before Obama’s election but has maintained a much lower profile since then. Unfortunately, this appears to be a product of ideological confusion over having a Democrat in the White House rather than fascist terror.

4. A mass social base. Robinson alleges that a social base is being “organised among sectors of the white working class that historically enjoyed racial caste privilege and that have been experiencing displacement and experiencing rapid downward mobility as neo-liberalism comes to the US – while they are losing the security and stability they enjoyed in the previous Fordist-Keynesian epoch of national capitalism.” This is a most intriguing proposition. I look forward to Robinson’s documentation in support of that.

5. A fanatical millennial ideology involving race/culture supremacy embracing an idealised and mythical past, and a racist mobilisation against scapegoats. This sounds pretty much like a permanent leitmotif of American society going back at least to the Know-Nothing Party but then again what do I know?

6. A charismatic leadership. Robinson admits that this has been “largely missing” in the U.S. but points to figures such as Sarah Palin and Glen Beck as harbingers. One can only wonder if this article was written before Fox TV booted Beck for low ratings.

There certainly will be a fascist threat in the future in the U.S. since the objective conditions will force more and more workers to emulate the vanguard (I use this term in the true sense and not as the nutty Marxist-Leninists use it) that emerged in Wisconsin. As attacks on the trade unions escalate, working people will be forced to organize themselves and to escalate their militancy. The fact that the cops refused to crack down on the protesters indicates that this movement will have the capacity in the future to paralyze the forces of repression. In such an event, the state will be forced to call upon the dregs of American society. This will be a lumpen element that has little in common with the couch potato fans of Glen Beck who go to Tea Party rallies. The American fascist movement will recruit the same sort of people who joined the KKK, except that the appeal will be on the basis of defending the American “way of life” rather than Dixie. You will also see the coffers of the Koch Brothers opening up to such scum. In a time of rising unemployment, there will be plenty of lumpen types who would be happy to break up a meeting in exchange for a couple of hundred dollars.

When that time comes, we will certainly respond to the call issued by Robinson in the final paragraph of his article:

The counterweight to 21st century fascism must be a coordinated fight-back by the global working class. The only real solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power – downward towards the poor majority of humanity. And the only way such redistribution can come about is through mass transnational struggle from below.