The fascist response to society's
problems has very often featured what is
called a "strong man". The way this game is
played out politically is that the
society as it begins to crumble, and
we're talking about capitalist societies
whether in the 1920s and 30s in Germany,
or Italy, or Japan ,or any of the other
countries which had this kind of problem,
when capitalism begins to unravel, to
fall apart one of the responses,
understandably, is for someone to step up
and say "Well, the society is falling
apart, the traditional political parties
are not being able to function or
they're not saving the situation, so here
I am, the strong man, who will lead us out
of all of this trouble". So let's go
through the current crop of strongmen.
You all remember the old crop: the
Mussolini, the Hitler, etc. Well today we
have in Hungary, Viktor Orban, in the
United States, Donald Trump, in Brazil,
Jair Bolsonaro. I could go on but you get
the picture.
They're popping up all over the place. In
France you don't yet see them in power
but you see them running political
parties: Marine Le Pen in the National
Front Organization. In Germany there's a
political party that has zoomed into
prominence called The Alternative for
Germany (Alternative für Deutschland). And
again you can see it in Spanish politics,
you can see it in the government of Italy and
so on; the emergence of strong popular
leaders like Mr. Trump who's gonna sort
it all out.
First, throw away the old Republicans and
throw away the old Democrats and he's
gonna do it all. But beyond that
political
game there is something very serious
going on.
Whenever capitalism has crashed, suffered
not just another economic downturn (they
have that in capitalism every 4 to 7
years) but a real big one where millions
of people lose their jobs, not for six
months, not for 18 months but for years
on end, whenever that has happened you
begin to see anxiety. And you see two
kinds of anxiety. One: "We have to do
something to save capitalism. It's in
mortal danger".
That's one reaction. That's where fascism
lies. But there's also another reaction.
There's the reaction of "capitalism is
irreparably broken and we need to go to
a different, better, system". So the
solution isn't save capitalism but go
beyond it, take society to a new and
different system that doesn't crash like
this capitalism just has. Sometimes both
of these movements get lumped together
under names like "populism". That's the
popular one this time The idea being
people are scared, people are worried,
people are looking for new directions,
people are angry about what's happening
to the mass of people from this
crumbling economic system. So you can
lump them all together but lumping them
is itself a political act, an ideological
act, because they are fundamentally
different. Saving the system through a
strong man who can carry us through is a
very different political project from
saying goodbye to capitalism and moving
on to one or another alternative. So we
have names over time. The name for the
effort to hold on to capitalism, to keep
it going in a new way with a strong man,
that's called fascism. The effort to go
beyond a broken capitalism usually goes
by the name socialism or
communism. And as I'll point out, these
two alternative reactions to crashes of
capitalism usually hate each other,
struggle tremendously against each other,
and have often been very, very unkind as
I will explain.
