The nature of fascism, its characteristics and properties have been in dispute ever since it was first identified as a distinct phenomenon growing out of Italy’s state-supported and developed industries in 1922. Whole libraries have been written around the subject. There have been a hundred “party lines” on just exactly what fascism is. But both Marxists and non-Marxists agree on at least two of its general factors: its capitalist orientation and its anti-labor, anti-class nature. These two factors almost by themselves identify the U.S. as a fascist-corporative state.
An exact definition of fascism concerns me because it will help us identify our enemy and isolate the targets of revolution. Further, it should help us to understand the workings of the enemy’s methodology. Settling this question of whether or not a mature fascism has developed will finally clear away some of the fog in our liberation efforts. This will help us to broaden the effort. We will not succeed until we fully accept the fact that the enemy is aware, determined, disguised, totalitarian, and mercilessly counterrevolutionary. To fight effectively, we must be aware of the fact that the enemy has consolidated through reformist machination the greatest community of self-interest that has ever existed.
Our insistence on military action, defensive and retaliatory, has nothing to do with romanticism or precipitous idealistic fervor. We want to be effective. We want to live. Our history teaches us that the successful liberation struggles require an armed people, a whole people, actively participating in the struggle for their liberty!
The final definition of fascism is still open, simply because it is still a developing movement. We have already discussed the defects of trying to analyze a movement outside of its process and its sequential relationships. You gain only a discolored glimpse of a dead past.
No one will fully comprehend the historical implications and strategy of fascist corporativism except the true fascist manipulator or the researcher who is able to slash through the smoke screens and disguises the fascists set up. Fascism was the product of class struggle. It is an obvious extension of capitalism, a higher form of the old struggle—capitalism versus socialism. I think our failure to clearly isolate and define it may have something to do with our insistence on a full definition-in other words, looking for exactly identical symptoms from nation to nation. We have been consistently misled by fascism’s nationalistic trappings. We have failed to understand its basically international character. In fact, it has followed international socialism all around the globe. One of the most definite characteristics of fascism is its international quality.