Leigh Meyers wrote: > > Doug Henwood wrote: > > > > Does that apply to the term "fascism"? > . > > I really really wish someone would write a one paragraph synopsis of > what fascism *is*, and post it, because I've read, and always understood > is that it's government by (or for the benefit of) corporations, > business, the power elite, with the remainder of the economic benefits > trickled down to the general society as needed to maintain stability of > the socio-economic structure... to keep the geese (the proles) laying > those golden eggs.
This exhibits the fundamental error, an error so deep its adherents may not be able to recover, in the loose use of the term "fascism." What you describe is not fascism but every single bourgeois state that has ever existed or ever will exist. Those states take innumerable specific forms, in the past, the present and, doubtless, in the future. Fascism was merely _one_ of those forms (repeat, WAS) that capitalism took in imperialist nations that had suffered huge military defeats and were confronted with mass working class movements truly threatening imminent overthrow of the capitalist state. Fascist states are extremely unstable and no capitalist class would opt for such a state except under extreme pressure from a powerful working-class movement which could not be controlled by any other means. There are (and will be) various forms of class rule that are in many ways as repressive as fascism; hence it is pointless to think that by adding up repressive symptoms you can prove that a state is fascist. In the U.S. at the present time the cry of "fascist" is merely a cover-up for unporincipled tailing of the DP. Carrol
