[Reader-list] The Political Culture of Fascism (Jairus Banaji)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web | 3 November 2002
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The Political Culture of Fascism

Jairus Banaji

http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex/2002/BanajiSept02.html

[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 left¹s 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 Comintern¹s 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 Comintern¹s official understanding. It 
further states that fascism "tries to secure a mass basis (I lay 
emphasis on the word Œtries¹) 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 Comintern¹s line, fascism is the 
dictatorship of the most reactionary elements of finance capital. 
Now, the Nazi party described itself, formally at least, as a 
"workers¹ 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 Œnormality¹. 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 Œinstrumentalist¹ and Œpathological¹ 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 Œofficial¹ 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. Reich¹s 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, Œfascism necessarily 
presupposes a worldwide economic crisis¹; or Œfascism is a product of 
economic crisis¹. This does not answer the question why people turn 
to fascism, because equally they could have turned to the left. Or 
why don¹t 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. ŒFascism differs from other reactionary 
parties inasmuch as it is borne and championed by masses of people¹, 
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 Œcharacter structures¹ 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 Œfascisized¹, if one can call 
it that; the preparatory groundwork was ready for some charismatic 
leader or party to come along and Œretotalise¹/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 ŒAction groups¹ that were active in the 
twenties, organising pogroms and spreading hatred against the Jews; 
by the numerous organisations of demobilized veterans who experienced 
Germany¹s 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 Rosenberg¹s 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 Œas a way of 
preventing middle-class voters from moving to the left¹ (Weiss, 
Conservatism in Europe 1770-1945, p. 89).  The more traditionalist 
elements in Europe¹s 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. I¹d like to suggest that fascism has to be deconstructed 
"culturally" at three levels. The first among these, the level that 
Rosenberg¹s 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  Œsecular religion¹, 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 Œother-direction¹, and with violence 
as common praxis, that is, organised action or the Œcommon action¹ 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 Œstormtrooper tactic¹. 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 ŒGerman race pride¹ and the 
extermination of the Jews. But the holocaust is only possible as the 
culmination of a permanent mobilisation Œof¹/Œfor¹ violence. Fascist 
violence works through serial reactions which are retotalised at the 
level of a common undertaking, that is to say, Œreshaped and forged 
like inorganic matter¹ (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 Œof¹ violence: in the savage campaigns of hate 
propaganda directed against Muslims in India, genocide becomes 
Œvirtual¹; "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 Œriots¹ (i.e. pogroms) can Œflare up¹ (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 
Œother-direction¹. 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 Œmobs¹ of 5000 to 15,000 that Œcollected swiftly¹ 
to execute the carnage Œwith precision¹. ŒIt is not easy to collect 
such large mobs even in a city like Mumbai, let alone Ahmedabad¹  (ŒA 
trained saffron militia at work?¹, 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 Œhyperorganicism¹, 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 
Œpassive and servile attitude towards the führer figure¹ (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 Œsubterranean¹ 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, 
Œother-direction¹. 

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 wouldn¹t 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 Œall¹ ŒHindus¹. 

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?"  "What¹s happened 
is done and forgotten, so let¹s forget about it". This attitude of 
"let¹s 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, ŒMemory for 
forgetfulness¹. It¹s 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 ŒSwadeshi¹. 
Actually the left sees itself as the defender of Œnational¹ 
independence, which it interprets primarily in economic terms. The 
left¹s 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 world¹s resources) is doomed to failure. The 
nationalism of the fascist right is also deeply isolationist and its 
rhetoric against Œinternational capital¹ 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 Œpalingenesis¹, 
a term that comes from this book by Griffin, which is a collection of 
readings by fascist writers (Griffin, Fascism, Oxford 1995). 
ŒPalingenesis¹ means regeneration. The idea is that there is some 
living practical community, the ŒNation¹, 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 ŒNation¹ so that 
Œit¹ 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 Œrevitalising¹ the ŒHindu 
Nation¹ and of ŒNational Regeneration¹. 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 Œrace¹, 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 Œreactionary 
ideology¹, producing serial individuals (conformists) in staggering 
numbers, because in each of these sites of learning or socialisation 
Œeveryone learns to be the expression of all the Others¹, to Œfeel¹ 
like the Others, Œthink¹ 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 Reich¹s 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 Œartificial interest¹ which Œactively supports the 
authoritarian order¹. 

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 guilty and 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 Œother-direction¹ 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 Œmasses¹, 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). Mussolini¹s theatrical style was 
strongly influenced by the theories of Gustave Le Bon who believed in 
the intrinsic irrationalism of the Œcrowd¹ and whose prescriptions to 
politicians on how to control the crowd relied  heavily Œon the 
French research on hypnotism of the late 1800s¹. Le Bon argued that 
the creation of myths would become the leader¹s means to excite and 
subordinate the Œmasses¹, and encouraged politicians to play on the 
power of representation and to adopt theatrical modes. 
(Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in 
Mussolini¹s 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.