…If capitalism was in its death-agony, then fascism was the expression of the weakness of the system in its terminal stages. Poulantzas observes:

“The blindness of both the PCI and KPD leaders in this respect is staggering. Fascism, according to them, would only be a ‘passing episode’ in the revolutionary process. Umberto Terracini wrote in Inprekorr, just after the march on Rome, that fascism was at most a passing ‘ministerial crisis’. Amadeo Bordiga, introducing the resolution on fascism at the Fifth Congress, declared that all hat had happened in Italy was ‘a change in the governmental team of the bourgeoisie’. The presidium of the Comintern executive committee noted, just after Hitler’s accession to power: ‘Hitler’s Germany is heading for ever more inevitable economic catastrophe…The momentary calm after the victory of fascism is only a passing phenomenon. The wave of revolution will rise inescapably Germany despite the fascist terror…”

Deleuze and Guattari see fascism as a permanent feature of social life. Class is not so important to them. They are concerned with what they call “microfascism”, the fascism that lurks in heart of each and every one of us. When they talk about societies that were swept by fascism, such as Germany, they totally ignore the objective social and economic framework: depression, hyperinflation, loss of territory, etc.

This is wrong. Fascism is a product of objective historical factors, not shortcomings in the human psyche or imperfections in the way society is structured. The way to prevent fascism is not to have unfascist attitudes or live in unfascist communities, like the hippies did in the 1960’s. It is to confront the capitalist class during periods of mounting crisis and win a socialist victory.

In a key description of the problem, they say, “The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropolitical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran’s fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole.”

…Fascism is not intolerance, bad attitudes, meanness or insensitivity. It is a violent, procapitalist mass movement of the middle-class that employs socialist phrase-mongering.

 www.columbia.edu/…

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