To understand American politics circa 2020, and the GOP of the past eighty years, we need to devote more attention to the ‘deep roots’ of fascism in the ‘deep roots’ of modern capitalism, which is colonialism by a different name:
W.E.B. Du Bois exposed capitalist and colonialist roots of white supremacy.
Joel Wendland-Liu/People’s World
February 21, 2020
The “collapse of Europe,” however, stood out above all else in Du Bois’s mind. Its colonialist, white supremacist, and capitalist systems made the disasters of the 20th century. The crisis of the first global war and the subsequent collapse of capitalism directly resulted from the rivalry for control of colonial territory.
Du Bois argues that the insurgency of the working class represented by the Russian Revolution shaped the political terrain in the interwar years. The capitalist class responded with its support for the wave of emergent fascist regimes in Italy, Portugal, Germany, Spain, and their spheres of influence. Initially, colonialist regimes in Britain and France appeased the fascists to maintain capitalism’s power and to construct a militarist front against the working-class revolution in the East.
In straightforward terms, Du Bois defined the West’s attempt to appease Hitler as the natural outcome of its demand for profit, need for cheap labor, and logic of surplus-value extraction. According to Du Bois, Hitler was allowed some expansion, but not “the balance of power” in Europe. Meanwhile, Britain, France, and the U.S. stood ready to fight to protect their control over their colonies and semi-colonies.
Because Hitler’s logic (identical with the logic of capitalism and imperialism) demanded that he seek more than what the West offered, war and conflict were inevitable. The West wanted Hitler to fight the communists rather than to claim Western colonial possessions or try to restore Germany’s economic power.
The commentariat in the West, including many historians, have gone to great lengths to eradicate the truth:
To hide the atrocities, poverty, and violence of European colonies, European ideological and educational institutions buried the truth about the rich history, diversity, and complex cultural systems that had historically developed in what had since become the colonized world, producing a pattern of enforced ignorance. On top of this willing ignorance, European thinkers theorized the racial superiority of whites, twisting subjugation in the colonial world into a progressive improvement for the world’s non-white peoples.
DuBois was having none of it:
Marxists, then, tended to regard human development to that point in history to have universally fallen into four or five major modes of production: slavery or Asiatic, feudalist, capitalist, and a still emergent socialist/communist phase still emergent. Many Marxist theorists argued that all human societies must pass through these stages in order to arrive at the most developed and democratic form: communism.
Du Bois, however, showed that contact with Europeans in the “Age of Discovery”—code words for imperialism, capitalist development, and systematic slavery—meant a disastrous detour from the unique paths of economic, cultural, and historical development that the diverse and complex peoples of Africa had already embarked upon. They had already built sophisticated economic systems, modes of production, social institutions, cultural practices, educational processes, and material cultures. Du Bois clearly recognized that the world did not have to turn out the way it did; the complex and diverse cultures and peoples of Africa could have led the world on a different path toward the fullest possible human development had not the brute force of European racism, colonialism, and capitalism ascended.
Before his death, political economist Samir Amin elucidated the attempts to obscure how capitalism and fascism are symbiotic:
The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism
Samir Amin/ Monthly Review
Sept. 1, 2014
Political movements that can rightly be called fascist were in the forefront and exercised power in a number of European countries, particularly during the 1930s up to 1945. These included Italy’s Benito Mussolini, Germany’s Adolf Hitler, Spain’s Francisco Franco, Portugal’s António de Oliveira Salazar, France’s Philippe Pétain, Hungary’s Miklós Horthy, Romania’s Ion Antonescu, and Croatia’s Ante Pavelic. The diversity of societies that were the victims of fascism—both major developed capitalist societies and minor dominated capitalist societies, some connected with a victorious war, others the product of defeat—should prevent us from lumping them all together. I shall thus specify the different effects that this diversity of structures and conjunctures produced in these societies.
Yet, beyond this diversity, all these fascist regimes had two characteristics in common:
(1) In the circumstances, they were all willing to manage the government and society in such a way as not to call the fundamental principles of capitalism into question, specifically private capitalist property, including that of modern monopoly capitalism. That is why I call these different forms of fascism particular ways of managing capitalism and not political forms that challenge the latter’s legitimacy, even if “capitalism” or “plutocracies” were subject to long diatribes in the rhetoric of fascist speeches. The lie that hides the true nature of these speeches appears as soon as one examines the “alternative” proposed by these various forms of fascism, which are always silent concerning the main point—private capitalist property. It remains the case that the fascist choice is not the only response to the challenges confronting the political management of a capitalist society. It is only in certain conjunctures of violent and deep crisis that the fascist solution appears to be the best one for dominant capital, or sometimes even the only possible one. The analysis must, then, focus on these crises.
(2) The fascist choice for managing a capitalist society in crisis is always based—by definition even—on the categorical rejection of “democracy.” Fascism always replaces the general principles on which the theories and practices of modern democracies are based—recognition of a diversity of opinions, recourse to electoral procedures to determine a majority, guarantee of the rights of the minority, etc.—with the opposed values of submission to the requirements of collective discipline and the authority of the supreme leader and his main agents. This reversal of values is then always accompanied by a return of backward-looking ideas, which are able to provide an apparent legitimacy to the procedures of submission that are implemented. The proclamation of the supposed necessity of returning to the (“medieval”) past, of submitting to the state religion or to some supposed characteristic of the “race” or the (ethnic) “nation” make up the panoply of ideological discourses deployed by the fascist powers…
Obviously, the collapse of the Nazis and Mussolini’s Italy obliged rightist political forces in Western Europe (west of the “curtain”) to distinguish themselves from those who—within their own groups—had been accomplices and allies of fascism. Yet, fascist movements were only forced to retreat into the background and hide behind the scenes, without really disappearing. (emphasis added)
As had DuBois, Amin uncovered the efforts to obscure historical truth in contemporary political and economic discourse:
The clever way in which the “moderate” media (which cannot openly acknowledge that they support avowed fascists) hide their support for these fascists is simple: they substitute the term “nationalist” for fascist. Professor Dontsov is no longer a fascist, he is a Ukrainian “nationalist,” just like Marine Le Pen is no longer a fascist, but a nationalist (as Le Monde, for example, has written)!
Are these authentic fascists really “nationalists,” simply because they say so? That is doubtful. Nationalists today deserve this label only if they call into question the power of the actually dominant forces in the contemporary world, i.e., that of the monopolies of the United States and Europe. These so-called “nationalists” are friends of Washington, Brussels, and NATO. Their “nationalism” amounts to chauvinistic hatred of largely innocent neighboring people who were never responsible for their misfortunes: for Ukrainians, it is Russians (and not the Tsar); for Croatians, it is the Serbs; for the new extreme right in France, Austria, Switzerland, Greece, and elsewhere, it is “immigrants.”
I’d add that when the media (and too many self-described progressives) resort to using such terms as ‘populism’, and ‘the white working class’, they are also (perhaps without awareness) engaging in the intellectual dodges and devices of code and euphemism that serve to camouflage the elements of fascism in the GOP, and among its rank and file voters.
Amin, writing two years before the elevation of Trump by the GOP, offers a chillingly prescient view:
In the current state of things, the electoral successes of the extreme right stem from contemporary capitalism itself. These successes allow the media to throw together, with the same opprobrium, the “populists of the extreme right and those of the extreme left,” obscuring the fact that the former are pro-capitalist (as the term extreme right demonstrates) and thus possible allies for capital, while the latter are the only potentially dangerous opponents of capital’s system of power.
We observe, mutatis mutandis, a similar conjuncture in the United States, although its extreme right is never called fascist. The McCarthyism of yesterday, just like the Tea Party fanatics and warmongers (e.g., Hillary Clinton) of today, openly defend “liberties”—understood as exclusively belonging to the owners and managers of monopoly capital—against “the government,” suspected of acceding to the demands of the system’s victims.
One last observation about fascist movements: they seem unable to know when and how to stop making their demands. The cult of the leader and blind obedience, the acritical and supreme valorization of pseudo-ethnic or pseudo-religious mythological constructions that convey fanaticism, and the recruitment of militias for violent actions make fascism into a force that is difficult to control. Mistakes, even beyond irrational deviations from the viewpoint of the social interests served by the fascists, are inevitable. Hitler was a truly mentally ill person, yet he could force the big capitalists who had put him in power to follow him to the end of his madness and even gained the support of a very large portion of the population. Although that is only an extreme case, and Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, and Pétain were not mentally ill, a large number of their associates and henchmen did not hesitate to perpetrate criminal acts. (emphasis added)
There is a disturbing amnesia about colonialism, capitalism, and fascism with those who might characterize themselves ‘on the left’, and this amnesia can lead some progressives to echo the nonsensical pronouncements of such intellectual luminaries as Dinesh D’Souza:
Nazism, socialism and the falsification of history
Matthew Fitzpatrick and A. Dirk Moses
At a time when conservative governments, the Murdoch press and their corporately funded think-tank supporters run down university departments of history in this country, the need for careful interpretations of the past has never been more evident.
At stake is nothing less than the meaning of twentieth-century history and the historical origins of modern ideologies.
Whether out of ignorance or on political grounds, the shape of the political spectrum - from left to right - is being challenged by revisionists backed by vested interests that seek to undermine the welfare state…
Under Hitler, the party looked squarely to the middle classes and farmers rather than the working class for a political base. Hitler realigned it to ensure that it was an anti-socialist, anti-liberal, authoritarian, pro-business party - particularly after the failed Beerhall Putsch of 1923. The "socialism" in the name National Socialism was a strategically chosen misnomer designed to attract working class votes where possible, but they refused to take the bait. The vast majority voted for the Communist or Social Democratic parties.
The minority anti-capitalist strand of Nazism (Strasserism) on which van Onselen fastens was eliminated well before 1934, when Gregor Strasser and the Storm Trooper (SA) leader Ernst Roehm were murdered with over eighty others in the "Night of the Long Knives." In fact, Strasserism had already been defeated at the Bamberg Conference of 1926 when the Nazis were polling under 3% of the vote. Here, Hitler brought the dissidents back into line, denouncing them as "communists" and ruling out land expropriations and grassroots decision-making. He heightened the party's alliance with businesses small and large, and insisted on the absolute centralisation of decision-making - the "Fuehrer (leader) Principle."…
After fighting four elections between 1930 and 1933 on an anti-left and anti-Jewish platform that pledged to slay the mythical beast of "Judeo-Bolshevism," Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 and made good on his promises to business and his voters to destroy socialism in Germany. Most of 1933 was spent persecuting socialists and communists, liquidating their parties, incarcerating and in numerous cases killing their leadership and rank-and-file members…
The current revisionist bible is Dinesh D'Souza's The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left published in the United States last year to predictable applause from the right-wing parallel universe. It inverts the left-wing case that Trumpism is an incipient form of fascism (a view with which neither of us agrees, and that Dirk Moses has explicitly criticised) to argue that the Democrats and left in general are the true heirs of fascism. Not Trump but Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are Mussolini or Hitler's ideological offspring.
D'Souza stands in the tradition of neo-liberals like the Austrian economist F.A. Hayek, who conflated fascism and communism as forms of collectivism inimical to the market economy and freedom it claims to represent. Peter van Onselen makes a related point by trotting out the venerable theory of totalitarianism to equate fascism and communism as similarly illiberal. In D'Souza's rendering, the American New Deal that rescued millions of Americans from poverty after the Great Depression was a form of fascism because it entailed state intervention. (Was the much greater state economic planning during the war effort that aided Hitler's defeat also a form of socialism/fascism, one wonders?)
Herewith we come to the effect, if not the point, of the revisionist exposition: it is not only to transfer the stigma of the Second World War's genocidal violence from the right to the left, so that criticisms of racialized populism can be dismissed as "leftist fascism." It is also to suggest that the war was a crusade against state collectivism of all types - including the welfare state for which many Westerners, in fact, fought. They reason by means of a simplistic, ahistorical syllogism: since socialism is statism/collectivism (like public health and public transport), and Nazism was statist/collectivist (and promoted public health and public transport), social democratic public health and public transport measures must be fascist…
The collective ignorance displayed by this revisionist commentariat is proportionally related to the outlandishness of its historical interpretations and its sophomoric ignorance of the recent history of Western civilization.
The revisionists likely neither know nor care that the monument erected to the German strikers who lost their lives confronting the Kapp Putsch was ritually destroyed by the Nazis in 1936. But others do. Whether those who remember the past can confront the slow-motion putsch against welfare states and the historical experiences of the catastrophic twentieth century that spawned them remains an open question. (emphasis added)
How to extricate ourselves from the distorted, dishonest and ahistorical nature of the relationship of modern capitalism and fascism?
Listen to those who have been giving us the accurate picture for decades:
The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism
Recent debates have centered on whether it’s appropriate to compare Trump to European fascists. But radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.
Alberto Toscano/ Boston Review
Oct. 28, 2020
In the wake of the 2016 election, public intellectuals latched onto the new administration’s organic and ideological links with the alt- and far right. But a mass civic insurgency against racial terror—and the federal government’s authoritarian response—has pushed hitherto cloistered academic debates about fascism into the mainstream, with Peter E. Gordon, Samuel Moyn, and Sarah Churchwell taking to the pages of the New York Review of Books to hash out whether it is historically apt or politically useful to call Trump a fascist. The F-word has also been making unusual forays into CNN, the New York Times, and mainstream discourse. The increasing prospect that any transfer of power will be fraught—Trump has hinted he will not accept the results if he loses—has further intensified the stakes, with even the dependable neoliberal cheerleader Thomas Friedman conjuring up specters of civil war.
Notwithstanding the changing terrain, talk of fascism has generally stuck to the same groove, namely asking whether present phenomena are analogous to those familiar from interwar European dictatorships. Sceptics of comparison underscore the way in which the analogy of fascism can either treat the present moment as exceptional, papering over the history of distinctly American forms of authoritarianism, or, alternatively, be so broad as to fail to define what is unique about our current predicament. Analogy’s advocates point to the need to detect family resemblances with past despotisms before it’s too late, often making their case by advancing some ideal-typical checklist, whether in terms of the elements of or the steps toward fascism. But what if our talk of fascism were not dominated by the question of analogy?
Attending to the long history of Black radical thinking about fascism and anti-fascist resistance—to what Cedric Robinson called a “Black construction of fascism” alternative to the “historical manufacture of fascism as a negation of Western Geist”—could serve to dislodge the debate about fascism from the deadlock of analogy, providing the resources to confront our volatile interregnum. (emphasis added)
A diary I wrote a few years back, based on the work of Prof. Robinson (cited in the above quotation), explicitly identified the the origins of both contemporary capitalism and fascism in the colonial enterprise: ‘Black Marxism’: To fight economic inequality, fight systemic economic racism (long read) (Nov 1, 2017)
This diary is, in a sense, a continuation of a process of educating myself, a process that began in the aftermath of the 2016 election, which exposed my wishful thinking and assumptions about what America is, and what it had become over the course of my life, especially in regard to matters of race and gender.
I reviewed one of my initial steps in this education in a diary not long after the election— ‘Racism without Racists’: Pretending the election wasn’t about white supremacy won’t help. (Nov. 29, 2016). That diary was based on the indispensable work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, and his exposure of structural racism in Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.
Bonilla-Silva demonstrates how structural racism resides at the very foundation of American society, its political and economic institutions, and provides countless examples of how it operates outside of our awareness, existing as a pernicious scaffolding around every aspect of public life.
This realization— structural racism resides at the very foundation of American society— leads to a very specific conclusion: there can be no successful fight for economic justice that does not explicitly address racial justice.
Among the implications for those who sincerely wish to pursue racial, gender and economic justice, is that we must understand how they are intertwined, and how these categories rest upon an edifice of philosophical pretenses and maneuvers, so fully ingrained in every Western academic and professional discipline as to be rendered invisible, just as anyone not white, male or heterosexual is rendered invisible in most academic, political and professional settings (this conceptual invisibility is in fact part of the mechanism for enforcing the social invisibility of ‘others’). (For a comprehensive and searingly incisive critique of the legal reification of Whiteness in American legal and political culture, see also the work of Prof. Cheryl Harris, whose work I outline in my diary White privilege and white entitlement give rise to white supremacy: Whiteness as Property.)
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If we learn to see the pervasive presence of these philosophical pretenses and maneuvers, and how they perpetuate systems of inequality, how they are a crucial element of white male heterosexual dominance in society, we arrive at another conclusion: to dismantle systems of inequality and dominance, we must dismantle the intellectual edifice upon which they are constructed.
Cedric J. Robinson sets about to do just that in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.
Robinson explicates the intent of his book this way in his preface:
This work is about our people's struggle, the historical Black struggle. It takes as a first premise that for a people to survive in struggle it must be on its own terms: the collective wisdom which is a synthesis of culture and the experience of that struggle. The shared past is precious, not for itself, but because it is the basis of consciousness, of knowing, of being. It cannot be traded in exchange for expedient alliances or traduced by convenient abstractions or dogma. It contains philosophy, theories of history, and social prescriptions native to it. It is a construct possessing its own terms, exacting its own truths. I have attempted here to demonstrate its authority. More particularly, I have investigated the failed efforts to render the historical being of Black peoples into a construct of historical materialism, to signify our existence as merely an opposition to capitalist organization. We are that (because we must be) but much more.
The scope of the book evokes awe:
Black Marxism is far more ambitious than its modest title implies, for what Cedric Robinson has written extends well beyond the history of the Black Left or Black radical movements. Combining political theory, history, philosophy, cultural analysis, and biography, among other things, Robinson literally rewrites the history of the rise of the West from ancient times to the mid-twentieth century, tracing the roots of Black radical thought to a shared epistemology among diverse African people and providing a withering critique of Western Marxism and its inability to comprehend either the racial character of capitalism and the civilization in which it was born or mass movements outside Europe. At the very least, Black Marxism challenges our "commonsense" about the history of modernity, nationalism, capitalism, radical ideology, the origins of Western racism, and the worldwide Left from the 1848 revolutions to the present…
… capitalism emerged within the feudal order and grew in fits and starts, flowering in the cultural soil of the West-most notably in the racialism that has come to characterize European society. Capitalism and racism, in other words,did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of "racial capitalism" dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide. So Robinson not only begins in Europe; he also chips away at many of the claims and assertions central to European historiography, particularly of the Marxist and liberal varieties. (from the foreward, pp. xii-xiii)… (emphasis added)
In the United States of 2020 (and the past eighty years), the fullest expression of the modern colonialist project— in theory and practice in capitalist and fascist guises— is found in the GOP.