Thread by @GlumBird

I’ve been doing a lot of reading around fascism and modes of production in decay for this year’s @ProlekultFilms and I’m increasingly unconvinced that the term fascism has any use when considered as an abstract force.

The dominant modern reading of the 1930s communist analysis of fascism is really illustrative in this way. Rajani Palme Dutt puts forward the clearest articulation in his wonderful book “Fascism and Social Revolution“.

He argues that fascism is capitalism in decay (something that gets attributed to Lenin a lot but makes no sense to attribute to him if you apply a modicum of histriography). In the modern frame, this gets read as “capitalism in decay gives rise to fascism as a social force”.

This is a misreading of Dutt. He is looking at movements across Europe, each calling themselves fascism and claiming they represent something new. Dutt is *demystifying* that, saying *there is nothing new here*, that these real forces are simply realising tendencies of decay.

In other words, Dutt is saying that fascism is neither a new social order or a supra-historical political form. He is being very concrete when he says things like “fascism is the organisation of decay”, referring to concrete movements that *identify themselves* as fascist.

This is an import point imo, because we actually reverse what he’s trying to do when we accept premises like the reading that all capital in decay is fascism. That implies fascism has a supra-historical nature, a unique class character etc, all of which he argues against.

Now, this isn’t to say that there aren’t common lines of development held between fascism and contemporary neofascism, there are. The ideological components do rhyme.

What I think is a more important root, however, is the operative category here: decay. That requires much more investigation to understand than generalising reactionary political organisation of decay as a description of political violence.

So, whilst we are drifting into fascism in a sense, I think we need to be particular about what sense. The reactionary forces and neofascists today on the rise are fascist *in the sense* that they represent an organisation of capitalist decay.

That decay is, however, different in composition, and that is what we really need to understand to stand any chance of fighting it.

There are huge problems of historiography thrown up by adopting the misreading here btw. It becomes technically possible to argue that the decay of feudalism represented fascism, a historical fallacy, if you aren’t concrete.

Perhaps a rather more particular grumble this has highlighted for me is the notion that fascism “creeps”, which I’ve always found absurd given historical fascist movements have always the most rickety, blundering and noisy political formations around.

Fascism doesn’t creep: economic decay progresses slowly until the contradictions reach their limits, then it explodes into politics.

Conclusion: this year‘s film is going to be about two hours of comparative history and historiography of fascism to make a very particular point about the contemporary historical development of political reaction.

Yes, it is more depressing than anything else I’ve ever written.