'Whoever does not want to talk about capitalism should also be quiet about fascism'
The quote is from Max Horkheimer. Horkheimer was one of the Co-founders of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. In 1933 the Institute was closed by the Nazis, and Horkheimer, along with other members of the institute, forced to emigrate. The Institute was deeply informed by Marxism and many of its leading members were Jewish. On both counts it was targeted by the Nazis.
It is worth remembering Horkheimer et al’s hard earned truths about fascism, won at cost in a moment of immense danger, when the demand for truth had a genuine, possibly fatal urgency. It is worth remembering because it has recently been strategically forgotten and in some cases turned upside down. ‘Fascism’ is being re-written. For one thing, the Right are trying to disown it, engaging in the most shocking revisionism and paralogical torsions imaginable. Attempts to identify Fascism with the Left even go so far as quoting Goebbels to the effect that ‘we are socialists’, prepared, that is, to regurgitate Nazi propaganda if it means scoring a point. (They do not of course quote explicitly anti-Bolshevik and anti-Marxist statements). On the other hand, the terms ‘fascist’ and ‘totalitarian’ are banded around like so much devalued currency, without any attempt to define them or to situate them historically but with much concern for their resonances and rhetorical effects. Terms like ‘Fascist Left’ ‘Clerical Fascism’ ‘Islamic Fascism’ may, conceivably, I suppose, have conceptual content. But it needs to be argued and argued with rigour and theoretical labour. The first and obvious step would be a discussion of what Fascism was/ is, and it is precisely this that I have failed to discover in the polemical labours of those who use the cited terms. What I have encountered is the insistent repetition of these terms, like an underaged drinker insistently knocking on the door of a nightclub: “please let me in to the received political vocabulary.”
The ‘miscreants’ responsible for these frankly tiresome abuses shall remain nameless. They have had too much publicity already, and the point here is not about individuals and their agendas. It is about what I sense to be a gradual re-writing of the political vocabulary and the political spectrum, the end result of which will be finally to write off whatever still remains of a genuine and radical Left.
21/8 An interesting review of Fascism: Theory and Practice, by Dave Renton, at Voice of the Turtle.