From: rakeshb@stanford.edu
Date: Thu Jan 30 2003 - 04:54:47 EST
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex/2002/BanajiSept02.html
The Political Culture of Fascism
Jairus Banaji
[Talk delivered at a Gujarat Seminar organised by the Vikas
Adhyan Kendra in Bombay, September 2002]
I called this talk the political culture of Fascism because I wanted
to draw attention away from the conventional emphasis in left
theories of fascism to aspects that are much less emphasised or
not even seen, precisely because they are so widespread. I want
to do this by starting with the most doctrinaire and, unfortunately,
still the most widespread of the left’s theories of fascism, which is
the line the Comintern officially endorsed and repeated, endlessly,
throughout the late twenties and 1930s, while the tragedy of
fascism was being played out in Europe. This was the
Comintern’s conception of fascism as what it called the "open
terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and
most imperialist elements of finance capital". This was the
Comintern’s official understanding. It further states that fascism
"tries to secure a mass basis (I lay emphasis on the word ‘tries’)
for monopolist capital among the petty bourgeoisie, appealing to
the peasantry, artisans, office employees and civil servants who
have been thrown out of their normal course of life, particularly to
the declassed elements in the big cities, also trying to penetrate
into the working class" (cited Roger Griffin, Fascism, p. 262). In
short, in the Comintern’s line, fascism is the dictatorship of the
most reactionary elements of finance capital. Now, the Nazi party
described itself, formally at least, as a "workers’ party". The Nazis
saw themselves, at some superficial level, in terms of rhetoric
anyway, as appealing for the support of workers. This suggests
that there is something slightly specious about trying to explain the
rise of Nazism in the twenties simply in terms of the dictatorship of
capital.
Much of the Left still subscribes to the view that fascism is
primarily a product of the manipulations of capital or big business.
There are several things wrong with this view. It ignores the
political culture of fascism and fails to explain how and why fascist
movements attract a mass following. It embodies a crude
instrumentalism that conflates the financing of fascist movements
by sections of business with the dynamics of fascism itself. It also
views fascism in overtly pathological terms, as abnormality, thus
breaking the more interesting and challenging links between
fascism and ‘normality’. Finally, it contains a catastrophist vision: it
sees fascism as a kind of cataclysm, like some volcanic eruption
or earthquake, a seismic shift in the political landscape. So far as
the situation in India is concerned, this has surely demonstrated
that that is not how fascism grows. In India the growth of fascism
has been a gradual, step by step process where the fascist
elements penetrate all sectors of society and emerge having built
up that groundwork. So, if we in India have anything to contribute to
a theory of fascism, part of the contribution lies in disproving the
catastrophist element. This still leaves the other two perspectives,
which I called ‘instrumentalist’ and ‘pathological’ respectively. Both
are dangerously wrong and part of the reason why the left has
failed to establish a culture of successful political resistance to
fascism.
Now in contrast to the ‘official’ view, there is another group of
theories of fascism which also emanated from the left, although a
more disorganized left, a left outside the Comintern, driven out of
Germany by Nazism, and not collectively represented by any
school. I have in mind two rather brilliant analyses that were
developed in the 1930s against the background of German
fascism; one by Wilhelm Reich who was a practising
psychoanalyst. In his clinical work in Berlin in the early thirties,
Reich would have come across literally hundreds of active
supporters of Nazism. He was a committed socialist who fled
Germany when it became impossible to live there, and died,
ironically, in a US jail in 1957.
Then there is Arthur Rosenberg, who is not very well known. He
was a Communist deputy in the Reichstag in the mid twenties and
would later become an important influence on Chomsky. He was a
historian who wrote a brilliant essay on fascism in 1934, which we
translated for the first time, in the seventies, in Bombay. That
particular essay is called Fascism as a Mass Movement. Reich’s
book was called The Mass Psychology of Fascism and first
published in 1933. Already the titles of these two works suggest to
us a very different view of fascism.
Earlier I had emphasised the term"tries to secure mass support"
in the Comintern definition. This was said in 1933, after Hitler had
come to power in Germany. Imagine the Comintern trying to tell the
rest of the world that the fascists are "trying" to secure a mass
base! There is a way of characterising this. It is called living in
denial, bad faith, because if fascism has a mass base of any sort
then we have to try and understand the issue in different terms.
How is this mass base constructed? What allows for the
construction of a mass base by radical right-wing parties? These
are the questions that we need to confront, particularly if we want
to confront our problems in India. To answer these questions it is
not enough to have merely conjectural views on fascism, to say,
‘fascism necessarily presupposes a worldwide economic crisis’;
or ‘fascism is a product of economic crisis’. This does not answer
the question why people turn to fascism, because equally they
could have turned to the left. Or why don’t they become liberals
instead? In short, why do they support fascism?
The second group of theories of fascism is unified by a common
focus on the mass basis of fascism. ‘Fascism differs from other
reactionary parties inasmuch as it is borne and championed by
masses of people’, wrote Reich in the book I referred to. The
difference between Reich and Rosenberg is that Reich is
interested in the psychic structures that explain why individuals
and particular classes of individuals (e.g., the lower middle class)
gravitate to fascism, and explores the susceptiblity to fascism in
terms of a cultural logic, whereas Arthur Rosenberg tries to explain
the construction of a mass base in historical terms. These are
complementary perspectives, they certainly do not contradict each
other. Reich is interested in the cultural background/politics and
‘character structures’ that sustain fascism, the repressions that
fascism presupposes and draws upon, whereas Rosenberg
looks at the broad sweep of European history against whose
background right-wing ideologies flourished and conservative
élites found it possible to mobilise mass support. These
perspectives clearly support each other.
Rosenberg classified fascism in the most general terms as a
species of "anti-liberal mass movement". The emphasis here is
on a secular political liberalism that asserted the rights of the
individual against state authority and religious superstition, and on
the defeat of that liberalism in the latter part of the 19th century.
When I began to work on fascism in the 1970s, it became
increasingly apparent that German fascism was not the creation of
the Nazi Party. Rather, the Nazi party was, arguably, the creation of
German fascism. The whole groundwork of German society
prepared the way for the rise of the Nazi party.
German society in large parts had been ‘fascisized’, if one can call
it that; the preparatory groundwork was ready for some charismatic
leader or party to come along and ‘retotalise’/incarnate those
legacies to create the kind of political catastrophe that was created
in the 1930s. The groundwork had been intensively prepared,
though in an un-coordinated, non-centralised and dispersed
fashion by, for instance, the völkisch ‘Action groups’ that were
active in the twenties, organising pogroms and spreading hatred
against the Jews; by the numerous organisations of demobilized
veterans who experienced Germany’s defeat in the war as a
terrible national humiliation, a blow to the pride of all Germans.
There were within the top ranks of the German army which had
suffered defeat many who were implacably opposed to
democracy, to the November revolution and its overthrow of the
monarchy. There were numerous radical right-wing organizations
prior to the Nazi party that prepared the ground for the success of
the Nazis.
However, the strength of Rosenberg’s essay was an analysis
which showed that fascism largely reiterated ideas that were
widespread in European society well before the first war. He saw
the conservative élites of 19th cent. Europe adjusting to the era of
parliamentary democracy and mass politics with an aggressive
nationalism divested of its liberal overtones, canvassing active
support for strong states wedded to expansion abroad and
containment of the labour movement at home, and unashamedly
willing to use anti-Semitism ‘as a way of preventing middle-class
voters from moving to the left’ (Weiss, Conservatism in Europe
1770-1945, p. 89). The more traditionalist elements in Europe’s
ruling élites succeeded in defeating the liberalism of 1848 with a
populist conservatism that could garner parliamentary majorities
with xenophobic appeals and patriotic agendas.
What replaced the discredited liberalism of the 19th cent. were
new ideologies of the Right, and it is against the background of
these ideologies (racism, militarism, imperialism, and the cult of
authority) that we need to situate the emergence of fascism in
Europe. I’d like to suggest that fascism has to be deconstructed
"culturally" at three levels. The first among these, the level that
Rosenberg’s work points to, is nationalism. The rational core of
every fascist ideology is nationalism. Fascist movements deify the
nation, so that fascism can even be seen as projecting itself as a
sort of ‘secular religion’, and does this all the more effectively
insofar as the vocabulary (artefacts, myths, rituals, symbols) of that
deification is borrowed from religion itself. So when people ask
themselves how we fight fascism, one way of fighting it is by
confronting nationalism and beginning to build an opposition to it.
The second level of deconstructing fascism and offering elements
of a framework is cultures of authoritarianism and repression, be it
social repression, family repression, or sexual repression. For
instance, the emergence of a feminist movement in the postwar
era of the 1960s and 70s represented a significant advance,
because for the first time sexual politics arrives on the center
stage. The emergence of sexual politics in the shape of feminism
does contribute to the fight against fascism as an ideology. I
strongly believe that had feminism not been on the scene,
neo-nazism would be much stronger in Europe than it is today.
The third and final level has to do with the fascist use of what
Sartre (following Riesman) calls ‘other-direction’, and with
violence as common praxis, that is, organised action or the
‘common action’ of organised groups. Rosenberg himself saw the
peculiarity of fascism not in its ideology, which he thought was
widespread by the turn of the century, but in its use of the
‘stormtrooper tactic’. A form of genocide or ethnic cleansing is
implicit in the programme of every fascist movement, as it is in that
of the RSS, whose longest-serving sarsangch‚lak even glorified
‘German race pride’ and the extermination of the Jews. But the
holocaust is only possible as the culmination of a permanent
mobilisation ‘of’/‘for’ violence. Fascist violence works through
serial reactions which are retotalised at the level of a common
undertaking, that is to say, ‘reshaped and forged like inorganic
matter’ (Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 649-50). Thus
fascism works best in a milieu of alterity (in our case,
communalism), where the oppression of blacks or Jews or
Muslims produces itself as a determination of the language of
their oppressors in the form of racism, where the inert execration
of oppressed minorities betrays countless symbolic murders
(Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 58), and organised
groups (criminal organisations) fabricate religious mythologies to
spur campaigns of genocide. Mobilisation ‘of’ violence: in the
savage campaigns of hate propaganda directed against Muslims
in India, genocide becomes ‘virtual’; "totalising" propaganda
creates an enemy whose extermination it posits as possible,
alludes to, suggests, justifies, or advocates openly. Hate
propaganda clears the ground for physical attacks and mass
killings by producing a "climate" of violence where communal
‘riots’ (i.e. pogroms) can ‘flare up’ (be organised) at any time. The
"climate" is worked matter, the object of a concerted praxis.
Scapegoating, racism, and virtual genocide thus form the third
level: all of these require detailed, intricate, elaborate organisation,
and point to fascism as the concerted action of organised groups
working on serialities. Fascist spontaneity is manipulated
spontaneity, organised spontaneity. No explosion of violence
happens spontaneously. It presumes massive organizational
inputs, as Gujarat clearly shows. At one extreme the organised
group is the sovereign group itself, the state using the resources
of its machinery to aid and abet the work of other organised
groups. At the other extreme are the non-organised series
("masses") who are the permanent objects of ‘other-direction’.
Between them lie the organised groups that make up the fascist
movement itself and function as pressure groups on both the
sovereign and the series, exerting powerful networks of control
over both, and directing the violence. The reports filed by Teesta
Setalvad in the worst phase of the violence suggest that the
genocide was perpetrated by ‘mobs’ of 5000 to 15,000 that
‘collected swiftly’ to execute the carnage ‘with precision’. ‘It is not
easy to collect such large mobs even in a city like Mumbai, let
alone Ahmedabad’ (‘A trained saffron militia at work?’, 7/3/02). In
other words, these ghastly mobs comprised both directing groups
and directed serialities, bound together in dispersive acts of
murder and destruction orchestrated by activists of the VHP and
Bajrang Dal, who formed an organised element extracting organic
actions from inert non-organised series. A democracy that cannot
disarm these stormtoopers is a democracy well on the way to its
own destruction by fascism.
Thus the framework that I want to suggest to you consists of these
three levels. Nationalism as the rational core of fascist ideology,
with the "Nation" conceived as some living entity afflicted by
democracy, infected by minorities, in desperate need of renewal or
"rebirth" (what Sartre calls ‘hyperorganicism’, that is, the
simulation of organic individuality at the level of a constituted
dialectic); the level of male violence and male authority, of
repressive family cultures that indoctrinate women and youth in a
‘passive and servile attitude towards the führer figure’ (Reich), and
root out of children everything that contributes to their humanity, to
a sense of who they are as individuals (the capacity to think
critically, to resist domination, to have friendships of their choice).
In India, of course, we not only have gender repression, we have
caste repression at work, the oppression of minorities, the
appalling indifference towards children, etc. Thus as a culture we
are replete with examples of subterranean repressive cultures in
our society. I call them ‘subterranean’ because they are invisible in
their commonness, subtend the whole of our existence, and only
become visible in times of resistance. Finally, organised brutality
or violence as (common) praxis – the fabrication of religious and
racial mythologies and campaigns of genocide as concerted
praxes of organised groups acting on/conditioning serialities,
‘other-direction’.
When all this is put together in terms of an agenda for opposing
fascism, we need to ask, have we seriously been pursuing an
agenda on any of these levels? Do we have an agenda for fighting
fascism in India? And wouldn’t such an agenda have to go to the
heart of mainstream culture to break the stranglehold of an
oppressive seriality where millions of people must feel helpless
and confused by their inert complicity in the politics of a movement
that perpetrates violence in the name of ‘all’ ‘Hindus’.
One way of addressing some of this is by breaking the culture of
silence. By talking about these issues, by debating them publicly
and at home. Whenever we get the chance, we must ensure that
all these issues are not swept under the carpet. For instance, one
of my friends wanted to discuss Gujarat with members of his
union. They were journalists, yet some of them felt quite
uncomfortable and asked, "why should Gujarat be raked up once
again?" "What’s happened is done and forgotten, so let’s forget
about it". This attitude of "let’s forget about it" is precisely what the
Sangh Parivar thrives on. The great Palestinian poet Mahmoud
Darwish was actually living in Beirut in August 1982 when it was
intensively bombed by the Israeli airforce and navy. The
bombardment was spread over two months, and almost every day
about two to three hundred Lebanese and Palestinian civilians
were killed. To come to terms with that experience, he wrote a
diary which he called Dh‚kirah li-l-nisy‚n, ‘Memory for
forgetfulness’. It’s worth reflecting on what this title might mean.
Going back to a more specific characterisation of each of these
levels, let me start with nationalism. As you know, nationalism
constitutes a terrain which is common to both the Right and the
Left in this country. This is partly the reason why the Left is forced
to conclude that really the Right wing is not serious about
‘Swadeshi’. Actually the left sees itself as the defender of ‘national’
independence, which it interprets primarily in economic terms. The
left’s nationalism is isolationist, it views world economy as a
collection of relatively autonomous national economies and is
unwilling to accept that capitalism undermines national
self-sufficiency for ever, so that any attempt to go back to it (rather
than forward to further integration and rational collective
management of the world’s resources) is doomed to failure. The
nationalism of the fascist right is also deeply isolationist and its
rhetoric against ‘international capital’ even more xenophobic. But
there is another aspect to its nationalism which is not apparent in
other political currents. Fascist movements subscribe to a
particular kind of nationalism based on a promise of renewal or
‘palingenesis’, a term that comes from this book by Griffin, which
is a collection of readings by fascist writers (Griffin, Fascism,
Oxford 1995). ‘Palingenesis’ means regeneration. The idea is that
there is some living practical community, the ‘Nation’, which is in a
terminal state of decline, suffering a kind of incurable disease, and
fascism projects itself as the panacea that will cure the ‘Nation’ so
that ‘it’ is healed and regenerated. This is a common thread that
unites all the classical fascist and neo-nazi writings. Thus in We or
Our Nationhood Defined Golwalkar speaks of ‘revitalising’ the
‘Hindu Nation’ and of ‘National Regeneration’. The programme he
defines for the RSS is one of transforming India into an ethnocratic
state based on the utopia of a fantasised Hindu community that
recovers its pristine identity. He also has a racial idea of the
nation, since the entire nation is identified with a particular ‘race’,
similar to other Nazi race theories.
So far as the cultures of authority and oppression are concerned, I
think identification with authority is the crucial thing that we need to
tackle. It is a matter of the school, the workplace, the family,
communities, etc., all of which are factories of ‘reactionary
ideology’, producing serial individuals (conformists) in staggering
numbers, because in each of these sites of learning or
socialisation ‘everyone learns to be the expression of all the
Others’, to ‘feel’ like the Others, ‘think’ like the Others, etc., so that
what emerges is a total suppression of the human, an annihilation
of organic individuality, and eventually the kind of externally unified,
regimented mass that images of fascist Europe depict as
emblematic of fascist power. But Reich’s point is that the roots of
authority lie deep within the institutionalised repression of
sexuality and manipulation of desires which through the family,
pedagogy, etc., create an ‘artificial interest’ which ‘actively supports
the authoritarian order’.
But we still require a totalising conception of how authority
operates in Indian society, and how that interlaces with political
strategies, with the increasing strength of the Right wing in this
country. Sexual politics is equally important because it is in the
interests of conservative, right-wing establishment forces to mould
individuals, to control and manipulate their desires, and make the
young in particular feel guiltyand repressed about their sexuality.
This suppression of sexuality is a powerful factor in the
reinforcement of authoritarianism and the rise of fascist
movements, and there is no way we can respond to such
movements without encouraging reciprocity (that is, a free
relationship between individuals) and an active stake in freedom.
These three levels are so closely interlaced with each other that it
is difficult to separate them because violence and aggression run
as the common thread though all of them. If you look at
nationalism in its contemporary forms, for example in the Balkans,
it is no longer separable from the most horrific violence. The Serb
nationalism of Milosevic, as we all know, took the form of ethnic
cleansing. At the second level, of cultures of authority and
repression, there is always violence. The assertions of authority
are petrified violence and we have to be able to challenge them in
their institutionalised forms. At the third level - violence as praxis -
the issue is, can the ‘other-direction’ of organised (fascist) groups
be combatted by anything short of the political action of other
organised groups? In which case,which groups are these, and
where are they?
A final point relates to the fascist use of the spectacle. Fascism is
a politics of spectacles. The spectacle is a display of the power of
the organised group over the series. As such, it belongs to the
repertoire of forms of manipulation through which all authoritarian
movements seek to reinforce their hold over the ‘masses’, the
serial impotence of the latter, and their conditioning through the
hypnotic spell of symbols and images that resonate with serial
meanings (the spectacle as a Mass of alterity). Mussolini’s
theatrical style was strongly influenced by the theories of Gustave
Le Bon who believed in the intrinsic irrationalism of the ‘crowd’
and whose prescriptions to politicians on how to control the crowd
relied heavily ‘on the French research on hypnotism of the late
1800s’. Le Bon argued that the creation of myths would become
the leader’s means to excite and subordinate the ‘masses’, and
encouraged politicians to play on the power of representation and
to adopt theatrical modes. (Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle:
The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy, 20). Religious
processions and the artefacts and iconographies of religion
occupy a major place in the repertoire of Hindutva precisely
because spectacles play such an important role in the political
culture of fascism.
To conclude, therefore, I would point out that at each of these
levels we have to define our theatres of resistance. Spaces for
intervention have to exist at all these levels, but that requires the
articulation of a powerful, anti-authoritarian politics that
encourages individuals to think critically, fosters relationships
based on reciprocity, and promotes a social and political culture
which values freedom sufficiently to resist and undermine the
hypnotic spells of nationalism, hierarchy, and serial domination.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Jan 31 2003 - 00:00:01 EST