This series I think does a great job of analyzing and eventually defining fascism.
Feel free. You can see what I dug up on the internets, and I looked at the Chicago Manuel of Style, too. It seems to be all about pronunciation.
Yes, I see people define fascism similarly to that, frequently, and I don’t find it a useful definition at all, since that strikes me as pretty much the typical form of the state, following the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th through the 20th centuries. I’m not sure how you can look at the history of the US – the use of slavery, enabled by the state and by paramilitary slave patrols, in commercial agriculture in the 19th century; or the use of mixed forces of government troops, mercenaries, and vigilantes to suppress labor movements in the late 19th and early 20th century – and conclude that the convergence of private and state power is a recent development.
My definition of fascism focuses on paramilitary groups which use intimidation and physical violence against popular left organizations and against oppressed groups, which are mobilized by far-right ideology, especially nationalism. Fascist groups were organized deliberately as counters to communist, socialist, and labor organizations, and in some respects were a distorted reflection of the groups they were attacking.
Which, by the way, reminds me of one of the things that’s irritating about the insistence that the Nazis were socialist: by and large, the socialist movement was emphatically internationalist, often making efforts to encourage solidarity across national borders, and to oppose imperial wars, and you can often see “international socialism” used as almost a set phrase and appearing as the name of various journals and so forth; the “National Socialists” were, deliberately, negating what was generally understood as one of the fundamental characteristics of the socialist movement. It’s as if you had a group of people who went around poisoning and stabbing the sick and injured in their beds, who were known as “evil nurses”, and years later, people would insist that murder was an intrinsic part of nursing, because the “evil nurses” had “nurse” right in the name.
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If you believe Gunder Frank and the World-systems crowd, there were globalizations prior to the 19th century… But I think that the 19th century is when people start talking in such terms. But yeah, I don’t know how people got the idea that modern Europeans invented such things, when goods have been circulating for as you point out ages before that…
I agree with the comparison some have made with Michel de Nostredame. The blog post cherry picks some ideas, glues them haphazardly to current stuff, and add a linkbaity title (“You won’t believe what this Communist does next !”).
The paragraph about the iphone is especially cheesy. It’s an invented need ? Wow, really, did you figure this out on your own ? We’re not mindless zombis who buy what the TV says we should. Then we get “Chinese families fall sick with cancer from our e-waste”, part of the cliché that the mean Americans are killing the poor little Chinese. China manufactures and sells to the whole world, not just your new phone.
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True, but the iphone 5 isn’t the most popular phone sold on Earth, I’m sure the title goes to some cheap Lenovo we haven’t heard of.
If by popular, you mean best selling, and by earth you mean to include every country’s involvement and development along the path of capitalism as equal then your point stands.
That’s a popular opinion among Holocaust deniers.
Umberto Eco’s article on the definition of Fascism is very useful… He grew up under Mussolini, so he understands it pretty well.
I take it you mean Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.
It’s interesting as an outline of the ideology of fascists, but I think I’ll hang on to a preference for a functional definition, since it describes my immediate concern: bands of thugs beating up my friends, family, and comrades. In the last paragraph, Eco says,
It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple.
Which rather misses something critically important, which is that you do find people saying similar things, and worse, acting on them and attempting to organize around them: there are overt fascists in the world, and they actually use violence against those trying to resist oppression. It’s valuable to think about the cultural and ideological aspects of a social and political movement, but I think it’s a mistake to assume they’re more important than the concrete, practical aspects, and of course it’s worse to outright deny the existence of concrete, practical aspects.
My sense of Eco is that he’s a classic example of what Marxists call an idealist (it has a different meaning than in most other contexts, which often confuses people), in that he tends to emphasize ideas rather than material relationships as the driving force of history.
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