The great elephant that was Oliver Kamm’s discussion of ‘Fascism and the Left’ turns out to have been standing on nothing more substantial than the following fragile tortoise:
The definition of fascism I am working with is the one from Roger Eatwell that I quoted in the second post in this series: "a form of thought which preaches the need for social rebirth in order to forge a holistic-national [An utterly rebarbative hyphenation] radical Third Way."
The idea that Fascism is primarily a ‘form of thought’ [a form of thought??], i.e., that it is primarily a matter of ideas, is - to say the least - highly contentious/ culpably incomplete; the irony, of course, is that it is just this idea, a frankly idealist one, that a Left analysis would want to contest and, I would argue, it just this error that a left analysis is able to correct. Even in its own terms (which are false) it is dubious – if Fascism preached the need for ‘rebirth’ one surely needs to qualify this by pointing out that this typically took the rhetorical form of a ‘return to roots’, pseudo-atavistic appeals to ‘Blut und Boden’ and so on. (For some reason Shelley’s proto-fascist lines “the world’s great age begins anew, the golden years return” just popped into my head.)
Kamm continues: ‘The value of this definition lies in its stress on the radical character of fascism.’ And the redundancy of it is that it is unusably broad, yokes together inherently diverse phenomena and fails completely to address the historical specificity of fascism; perhaps worse, it makes fascism itself sound rather innocuous. Of course, all this could also be seen, depending on your point of view as a ‘value’, in that emptying fascism of precise intellectual and historical content also frees it up for all kinds of rhetorical and polemical trickery.
The second point I intended making was that Kamm, in his eagerness to glue together an argument, had quoted without comment an embarrassing piece of whimsy by one Jeffrey Ketland, who refers casually to ‘the post-modern literature’ as if this were an uncontroversial and understood canon, rather than a watery pseudo-conceptual solution in which Foucault’s thinking can be painlessly dissolved. . Anyway, it now seems that a number of Kamm’s correspondents, including his own brother, have alerted him to the fact that Ketland may not have been rowing with both oars in the water (the one oar being knowledge, the other analytical rigour). What I will add is that the phrase quoted by Ketland regarding Foucault’s enthusiastic reception of the Iranian revolution (‘political spirituality’) is exactly the phrase that appears if you type ‘Foucault’ and ‘Iranian revolution’ into Google. Now this may well be a coincidence, as might the fact that Ketland makes no attempt to allude to the original context of this phrase. For those of you genuinely interested in the matter (as opposed to those seeking only polemical returns on their cursory reading investment) see Foucault, 'A quoi revent les Iraniens?' in Dits et Ecrits (1978) and the interview translated as 'Questions of Method' , in (I think) the 'Power' volume of Penguin’s Essential Works. Anyway, restored to its context the phrase has nothing to do with anything that is specifically Islamic, quite the contrary, and is meant, I think, have a faintly provocative ring to it. Frankly, I don’t care if Ketland is a ‘philosopher’ -whatever rubric/ title he goes under isn’t prepotent enough to lend his argument any legitimacy.
Kamm however has an even more egregiously vapid interlocutor up his sleeve, one who has wisely remained anonymous after less than wisely offering the following pearl:
‘Just like the fascists, the New Left also work on the basis of assertion and resolution - there is no truth, so we must allow people to define their own and follow through the results.’
The ‘assertion’ with which this worthless proposition ends is ascribable to neither the New Left nor to Fascism. Fascism is hardly renowned for epistemological relativism and epistemological relativism has no one political consequence (on thinks of Richard Rorty’s liberalism), but in any case, the ‘New Left’ are not defined by such a stance, so it matters little.
So there we are, Kamm’s tortoise is belly up and, for what its worth, only historical materialism can stand it back on its feet. The following thoughts on fascism are by one of its victims, Walter Benjamin, who was sure also that historical materialism could ‘win every time’ in thinking about mankind’s protracted endgame. These musings represent not an exhaustive definition (of course), but an eloquent and arresting starting point, and a view of the fascist catastrophe as it appeared to a man ‘singled out by history at a moment of danger’:
The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Fiihrer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.
Benjamin knew that one should not do fascism the courtesy of taking it at its word (its 'ideas').
(For a critique of ideas based theories of fascism, see the text cited at the end of this post).
27/8 Actually, if one examines Eatwell's words, notice that the ‘forging of national unity’ is primary and the ‘thought’ of ‘social rebirth’ etc is only instrumental in procuring that goal. Thus the ideology of fascism (in this definition) serves an end external to itself. How this sheds light on the SWP is not clear.