We welcome the question. Many liberals and middle-class radicals hurl the label of fascism around widely today. Their targets usually include the most prominent figures of the ruling capitalist parties, including President George Bush and leading members of his administration like Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Their objective in doing so is not a clear analysis of how fascism develops and how the working class can combat it but to rationalize their support for liberal imperialist figures—this year Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

Given the current level of the class struggle and political polarization in the United States, no significant section of the ruling class has felt compelled to throw its weight behind Buchanan. He is limited to trying to recruit and organize cadre who would serve as the foot soldiers of a street movement down the road that could impose radical solutions to protect capitalism in a time of extreme crisis. In this sense, Buchanan and Buchananism represent an incipient fascist movement, not a full blown one.

Capitalism’s World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium by Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes (see ad on page 6) contains several useful references on this question. In a section of the book entitled “Buchananism: What It Is and How to Fight It,” Barnes explains the error of viewing fascism as an extension of bourgeois conservatism. While fascist currents do originate in part within the right wing of existing capitalist parties under crisis conditions, Barnes says these “are radical movements that base themselves on popular grievances of increasingly economically insecure and devastated small business people, other middle-class and professional layers, and sections of the working class. They are street action movements in their trajectories.”

Leon Trotsky—a central leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, along with V. I. Lenin—makes a similar point in an article first published in 1944, which can be found in the Pathfinder pamphlet Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It. Trotsky rejects the designation by Stalinist currents of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in Spain in 1923-30 as fascist. “The fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous movement of large masses, with new leaders from the rank and file,” Trotsky said. “It is a plebian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from the proletarian masses; Mussolini, a former socialist, is a ‘self-made’ man arising from this movement.”

Primo de Rivera, on the other hand, Trotsky explained, was an aristocrat who overthrew an elected government with the aid of the state and military forces. “Mussolini had difficulty in reconciling many old military institutions with the fascist militia. This problem did not exist for Primo de Rivera.”

Since his bid to win the Republican Party presidential nomination in 1992, Buchanan has used the platform of bourgeois politics to organize incipient fascist forces. He has used anti-capitalist demagogy and posed as a defender of the “little man” against the corrupt “elite” in Washington. Two days before winning the New Hampshire primary in 1996 Buchanan told his supporters, “All the knights and barons will be riding into the castle, pulling up the drawbridge because they’re coming. All the peasants are coming with pitchforks after them.”

Buchanan’s subsequent, and inevitable, break with the Republican Party registered the fact that this vehicle no longer served his aims.

In another section of Capitalism’s World Disorder Barnes says that incipient fascist movements “never begin with broad ruling-class support. At first, the rulers in their majority alternately scorn and fear this rowdy ‘rabble’; only handfuls of capitalists back them at the outset. But as the bourgeoisie become convinced they confront an irresolvable social crisis, and as the working class puts up an increasingly serious challenge to capitalist rule itself, growing layers of the exploiters start supporting, or tolerating, the fascists in order to try to smash the workers and their organizations. That is the job the fascists are finally enlisted to do by the bourgeoisie when the threat to capitalist rule reaches a certain threshold.”

Until such objective conditions become reality, the ruling class does not need fascism to maintain its rule. “Fascism is nowhere close to conquering anywhere in the world today,” Barnes says. “What we are seeing today… is the nuclei of incipient fascist movements in more and more countries.”

Similarly Trotsky wrote in the pamphlet referred to above that fascism develops as a full-blown movement when two conditions are realized: a deep social crisis that throws the petty bourgeois masses off balance, and the lack of a revolutionary party capable of leading the working-class and its allies to resolve the crisis in the interests of the proletariat. Trotsky described the fascist movement as the “party of counterrevolutionary despair.”

Trotsky returned to this lesson during a discussion on the prospects for the development of a fascist movement in the United States in the late 1930s. He explained that in all countries where fascism had been victorious it was preceded by a wave of mass radicalization of workers, poorer peasants, farmers, and other middle-class layers who were defeated. This was true in Italy before Mussolini’s triumph, as well as in Germany prior to Hitler’s ascendancy to power.

“In the United States you will have the same thing,” Trotsky wrote. “We can set it down as a historical law: fascism was able to conquer only in those countries where the conservative labor parties prevented the proletariat from utilizing the revolutionary situation and seizing power.”  
 
 
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