Fascism lost World War II. Communism lost the Cold War. Marxism is winning the historical imagination in the twenty-first century.
Fascism is everywhere used to describe anyone even slightly to the right of the far left. The virtues and values of the generation that defeated fascism in the 1940s would be labeled fascist today: Christian, patriotic, and pro-family. This is not accidental. It is essential to the Marxist imagination of fascism since the end of World War II.
Originally, fascism was the political theory of state corporatism and authoritarianism, where the State, headed by a dictator acting on behalf of the people (the “nation”), ruled with a sort of absolute supremacy. Giovanni Gentile, in his Doctrine of Fascism (co-authored by Mussolini), described fascism succinctly as the philosophy that would manifest “the century of the State.”
The fascist century dreamt by the original fascist theorists and leaders conceived itself as the energetic zeal emanating from the spirit of the people being channeled into the formation of a state that would act as the uniting spirit of newly formed nations. We must not forget here that though certain peoples had a long history, their nations had only recently been formed, like Italy (1861) and Germany (1871), or only recently gained full independence after the end of World War I, and thus state-building was conceived as the next step of national development.
No one nowadays means fascism to be a political philosophy of state supremacy, either self-descriptively or as a pejorative for political opponents. What happened?
What happened was fascism’s own self-transformation, once in power, and the analysis of it by critics (especially Marxists) during the 1930s and at the end of World War II. Having achieved political power, fascist governments promoted an aggressive foreign policy of territorial expansion, often with the goal of achieving “living space,” or Lebensraum, as famously adopted by the Nazi Party in Germany.
This aggressive foreign policy of aggrandizement tied to the idea of Lebensraum then united with late nineteenth-century race science, ensuring the eventual marriage of state supremacy with racial supremacy. The state is the ultimate actor of the will of the people, but the people the state is an expression of is a racial people, which excludes other groups even if they reside within the nation. Thankfully, fascism was defeated by the Allies in World War II.
However, the defeat of fascism alongside its spectacular rise to power in the decade after the tragedy of World War I caused Marxist philosophers and intellectuals to reanalyze capitalism, the nature of the bourgeoisie, and the new phenomenon that Marx did not live to see and therefore didn’t write about: fascism.
The East German playwright and philosopher Bertolt Brecht aptly summarized the emergent new Marxist understanding of fascism, “Fascism is a historic phase of capitalism.” Brecht would go on to say, “How can anyone tell the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth?”
To be against fascism, Brecht elaborated, meant one had to be against capitalism. To be against capitalism meant one was fighting against fascism. The Cambridge Five, the infamous ring of British spies working for the Soviet Union, thought the same: Marxism, in the form of the Soviet Union (at the time), was the best political system to fight fascism (capitalism).
In the new Marxist historical imagination, capitalism’s disintegration of all social bonds through its relentless industrialization and commercialization, its exploitation of humanity, and reorganization of social life around urban work made humans weak and prone to the eventual state authoritarianism of the dictator.
Fascism then appears as the bulwark against revolutionary socialism, which would attract the support of the bourgeoisie, the patriotic middle class of any nation who would fear the Revolutionary Other. Therefore, capitalism and fascism are interlinked and depend on each other. “In Fascist countries capitalism continues to exist, but only in the form of Fascism,” writes Brecht. “Fascism can be combated as capitalism alone, as the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive, and most treacherous form of capitalism.”
Under this new Marxist view, fascism is the final expression of exhausted capitalism, or what is also called “late capitalism.” Late capitalism, a term first used by Werner Sombart, was popularized by the Marxist economist and philosopher Ernest Mandel during the Cold War.
Late Capitalism, Mandel’s magnum opus, attempted to explain what Marx did not witness: the failure of the working class to launch the proletariat revolution, the 1950s and 1960s economic boom, and the shift of capitalist modes of economics away from industrial work to financialization leading to globalized markets and mass consumption for a significant portion of the world’s population.
The exhaustion of late capitalism into financial consumerism would lead to the re-emergence of fascism, which would be the attempt by capitalism to defend itself at the end of its exploitative and oppressive development wherein the racial majority of a capitalist country would vehemently scapegoat and go to war against the foreign other. The scapegoated other would be the image held up as the enemy by a devolving capitalism to hide the failures of late capitalism in its final descent into disintegration and authoritarian fascism within that process of disintegration.
So much left-wing rhetoric makes sense once understood through the Marxist historical imagination. We are living in the early stages of the new fascism, according to the Marxist mind.
Capitalism becomes fascism. Liberalism becomes fascism. Conservatism becomes fascism. Christianity becomes fascism. This is the basic narrative proclaimed by the new Marxists.
This idea and narrative of world history is pervasive among the Western educated elite and intelligentsia, a core segment of the professoriate at elite universities and state universities (especially those educated at the elite universities who read the many post-war Marxist thinkers), among lawyers and journalists, and also among a new generation of university students who have swallowed, wholesale, this basic vision of understanding history and the world.
To save the world from fascism means to save the world from capitalism, and especially to save the oppressed scapegoated victims of late capitalism from the abuse of would-be fascists. Fascists can be anyone. You. Me. Our neighbors. To be an anti-fascist means one must actively oppose capitalism and actively help the oppressed people exploited by late-stage fascistic capitalism. Fascists literally are everywhere in the Marxist view of world history because you either become a fascist or an anti-fascist.
Humans are instinctively narrative creatures. We live by stories. Our identities are shaped by the stories and narratives we tell ourselves. Unless a different story can be told in the current world epoch in which we live, the Marxist story of late capitalism and its descent into fascism and the emerging danger of fascist catastrophe will be the narrative that dominates our world and the next generation. Ignoring this is perilous. Confronting this story is the imperative of liberty.
Paul Krause is the editor of VoegelinView. A teacher of the humanities, he is also the author of several books, including, Muses of a Fire: Essays on Faith, Film, and Literature and The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books.
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