Defining Fascism and the Persistence of Ideology

This is another post born from the thoughts and notes I have from the Revolutionary Communists of America's 2025 Marxist School of Chicago. (There will probably be at least one more of these; I have a lot of notes.) I want to say up front that, overall, I had a positive experience at the Marxist School; spending my weekend surrounded by friendly, passionate, and deeply intelligent leftists was awesome. I am writing about the ideas or concepts that I disagreed with or struggled with because that's where the interesting stuff is - there isn't much for me to say about the 90% of stuff I agreed with other than, "Yep, I concur."

Comparisons between Trump and Hitler were many at No Kings

So! With that noted, one major sticking point I had with the RCA's stances was their insistence that Trump is not a fascist. "That doesn't mean he's not bad! That doesn't mean he's not a problem!" they would always be quick to add. However, the RCA uses a very specific (they would say "scientific," I would say "jargonized") definition of fascism that Trump and his regime do not meet. To their credit, RCA members recognize that their specialized definition isn't widely known and can be detrimental to effective communication with other progressives or regular liberals. Multiple RCA speakers pointed out that when talking to people at the "No Kings" protests who said, "Trump is a fascist!" instead of going, "Um, ack-chew-ully," the RCA used that as a conversation-starter to engage with people who instinctively understood Trump is bad but might not have the language or framework to understand why or how Trump is symptomatic of larger issues. Which is genuinely smart outreach work, and kudos to them for that - I fully support that tactic.

I will concede that we can set aside the question of whether Trump, the individual, is a fascist. I'm inclined to believe he has no coherent ideology beyond, "I want, I want, I want." But what of his regime as a whole? The government is more than just one man; it's a system, so is that system currently fascist? 

Under the RCA's definition, fascism is not a discrete set of beliefs, but an emergent social phenomenon that occurs when the capitalist class is threatened by the power of an increasingly organized working class. This is pretty in line with a lot of leftist thought - "fascism is capitalism in crisis," is a pithy summation that I've seen used many times before attending the School. And I do mostly agree with this part of their definition; the antisemitism, the racism, the ableism, the misogyny, etc. - all those components of fascism are used to weaken the working class and consolidate wealth in the hands of an ever-shrinking number of elites, either by using bigotry to prevent class solidarity or by literally imprisoning and exterminating swaths of the working class. And fascism becomes ever more violent as it tries to squeeze every last drop of blood from the stone.

The RCA goes further, however, due to their strong adherence to dialectical materialism as an analytical framework. In essence, in order for a regime to be fascist under their definition, it must come to power under the same material conditions that caused fascism to first arise. That means it must 1) be preceded by/in reaction to a strong organized labor movement, and 2) gain power via a large populist (non-governmental) movement, such as the brownshirts or the blackshirts; while those groups may have been formally deputized once fascist leaders gained governmental power, they got their start via vigilante violence. It's for this reason the RCA does not consider the Trump regime fascist: there has not been a particularly strong labor movement that they're reacting to, and they do not have a mass popular movement behind them.

On the one hand, I agree it's important to point out how the Trump regime differs from past fascist movements. Indeed, I think it's very important to point out that Trumpism actually isn't very popular, as the most recent state elections have shown. While there will always be a loyal core of Trump supporters who are fully on board with all his cruelty, he does not have the broad popular support that Hitler and Mussolini enjoyed, and remembering that fact keeps us from succumbing to doomerism and defeatism.

The world has changed slightly since 1870s Germany

On the other hand, insisting that the definition of fascism requires the correct material conditions illustrates the limitations of using solely dialectical material analysis - because the material conditions that led to the initial rise of fascism can never and will never exist again! Because that's how linear time works! This feels so blindingly obvious to me that I almost feel stupid pointing it out. The US in the 21st century is not the same as Europe in the 20th century. They have different cultural backgrounds; there's a full century's worth of technological development between them; there's different economic conditions because of that technological development; and - most importantly, in my eyes - we now live in a world where fascism has already been invented. 

That is the thing that a strict dialectical materialist analysis misses, in my opinion: once an ideology is birthed, people can choose to continue adhering to it even after the material conditions that led to its development change. Fascism was not un-made when World War II ended. There are people who have chosen to actively identify as fascists in all the decades afterwards. They're throwing Nazi salutes on stage at Trump's inauguration. They're in Young Republican group chats saying, "I love Hitler," and fantasizing about gassing political opponents. They're in congressional offices hanging swastikas on the walls of their cubicles. They're running the official DHS Twitter account and posting fourteen words/HH dogwhistles. And so I have to ask: what do we call a government full of self-identified fascists, if not a fascist government?

I wasn't the only person at the Marxist School who questioned the RCA's strict definition. During the question/discussion section of our class on fascism, an RCA member asked, "Can't fascists gain power in more than one way? For example, you can become a king by either inheriting the crown for your father or by killing the previous king and seizing power." I had the exact same question, so I was glad she asked it. After all, the lecturer had pointed out during his presentation that fascists are consummate opportunists who will say or do anything to gain power. He said this in the context of Mussolini and Hitler parroting leftist economic ideas early on to gain support. However, there is no reason why that same opportunism can't also extend to other areas. If fascists don't need mass support to gain control of the government, then why would they bother?

The lecturer didn't provide a satisfactory answer to the question, in my opinion. He more or less just said, "Well, our definition requires that specific method of gaining power." He also pointed to another piece of evidence that the Trump regime is not fascist: there has not been a real crackdown on communist and other leftist groups. "The fact that we're able to meet like this at all is proof that fascism has not taken over," he said.

To be blunt, "It's not fascism because we, specifically, haven't been targeted," is not a compelling case. It's also INCREDIBLY FUCKING TONE DEAF when hundreds of people have been targeted and disappeared in this very city and we have multiple, ongoing court cases about the horrific conditions in the detention centers in which they're being held. No, we're not at the height of the Holocaust yet - one could possibly argue not at Kristallnacht yet - but we shouldn't have to wait until we are there to say that this is a fascist regime.

So how should we define fascism? I shouldn't spill all this digital ink critiquing the RCA's definition without providing an alternative. I do have a working definition, which I think is open to refinement, and I welcome commentary on it. That working definition is: Fascism is a capitalist ideology that believes violent, authoritarian bigotry and explicit state intervention is necessary to secure the ruling class's power and profit. Fascism is most popular when capitalists' power and profit is in question, whether due to working class movements or capitalism's inherently self-destructive tendencies.

I think this is a solid working definition because: 1) the first sentence can apply to an individual regardless of material conditions; even when capitalism is humming along nicely, a person who loves Hitler can believe that just one non-white person accumulating wealth is too many; and 2) the second sentence recognizes the social conditions in which fascism gains traction, while being flexible enough to allow it to occur at a point in time besides the first half of the 20th century in Europe. Our modern capitalist society is proving to be incredibly brittle, even without the presence of a strong workers movement like we saw in the 1920s/1930s; capitalism is eating itself, and fascism is the autoimmune disorder.

But I hope I've made it clear that, while I ultimately disagree with the RCA's definition of fascism, I don't think it's devoid of value. It helps us understand why and how the Trump regime can be stopped before it reaches the heights of the WWII fascists. The Trump regime hasn't been able to crack down as hard as previous fascist regimes have because it used a different method to gain power and because the material conditions are different. It turns out their regime is built on a foundation of sand, and that sand is already shifting. That's good! But it doesn't mean they're not fascist - as Maya Angelou has been quoted far too many times, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." They are explicitly fascists, but they're also fucking incompetent. Perhaps a compromise term that the RCA would accept would be "attempted fascists," or "incomplete fascists." But I think we agree that they're idiots and they're assholes and they're bigots. And because they're idiots, we can beat them. We will beat them. Together.

Marx, Meteors, and Buckthorn

This past weekend I attended the 2025 Marxist School of Chicago, hosted by the Revolutionary Communists of America, at the invitation of a friend who is a member. (To protect that friend's privacy I'll assign them the pseudonym "Sam" for this post.) At this time I'm just a fellow-traveler (I have always been wary of officially declaring allegiance to a specific political party), but I also think that it would be wise for me to get a more formal education on leftist theory, having up til now been largely self-taught via various blogs (in the 2010s) and "BreadTube" (in the 2020s).

It's ya boi, Karl Marx. 

During the opening remarks, the presenter said something that immediately got my hackles up: that capitalism had been "necessary" for human progress. He even went so far as to invoke chattel slavery as part of that, as it was through the stolen labor of enslaved people that the US was able to accumulate so much wealth. I will gladly concede that capitalism requires slavery to be successful; there's a reason why capitalists to this day keep trying to find ways to extract free labor from the working class. However, if capitalism requires slavery, and if capitalism was necessary for human progress, then it would follow that slavery (and the genocide of indigenous Americans, and all the other horrors of capitalism) was necessary for human progress. 

This is a conclusion that I flatly reject on multiple grounds:

1) If leftists (whether communists, socialists, or anarchists) concede that a past atrocity was "necessary" for human progress, that lays the groundwork for justifying future atrocities as "necessary" as well. I hope I don't need to explain further why that's a dangerous line of logic that should never be countenanced.

2) The claim that capitalism was "necessary" for human progress is un-falsifiable, which is something that should be of great concern to people who tout "scientific socialism." In fact, I'd argue it's a Panglossian sort of fallacy: it mistakenly concludes that because capitalism did become the dominant economic model, it was the only possible outcome, when we don't actually know that; we can't run the experiment of human history a hundred times to see if capitalism always dominates, or if other ways of organizing society could have persisted.

I raised my concerns to Sam during our lunch break, and amusingly enough they anticipated that I would take issue with that portion of the opening remarks. (Perhaps they noticed me furiously scribbling in my notebook.) I will provide the essence of their counter-argument to the best of my ability here and try to interrogate it a bit further.

A very rare chance event

When explaining my objection to Sam, I used the metaphor of evolution; it was not inevitable for humans to become the dominant species - that happened through a thousand chance events, one massive example being the Chicxulub impact that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs and allowed mammals to take over the ecological niches they left behind. Claiming otherwise is the sort of anti-scientific determinist thinking that one normally sees amongst "intelligent design" boosters. Sam conceded the point but countered that, continuing with the metaphor, evolution is still constrained by environmental factors ("material conditions," if we want to get Marxist in our language). Furthermore, chance events on the scale of the Chicxulub impact are incredibly rare, and they still ultimately are about changing the material conditions in dramatic ways; if the environmental pressures for a trait don't exist, that trait simply will not come about. Humans are not going to suddenly evolve wings; we can say that with certainty because our environmental conditions don't select for that trait, and the previous millions of years of evolution have taken our species down a path that renders our physiology completely unsuited to flight.

Thus, Sam's argument is that capitalism, while not strictly inevitable, was the most logical/likely outcome given the material conditions at the end of feudalism - in Europe.

I want to add that last caveat to their argument because I think that is where I still have hangups; it's the Eurocentrism of it all. Feudalism was not universally adopted by humanity; other systems of organization could be found all over the other five inhabited continents, some similarly hierarchical and unequal, but others much more egalitarian in nature. Even in those other feudal (or feudal-like) societies, capitalism did not arise - it was only in Europe, through whatever chance sequence of events and combination of environmental factors, and then through European colonialism it was exported.

Sam used this last point in their counter-argument: yes, other systems did exist, but capitalism steamrolled every one once they came into contact. Which is undeniably true! However, we don't say that buckthorn is a necessary step in the progress of North American plant life; it's a goddamn invasive species.

Buckthorn: almost as noxious as capitalism

Buckthorn did not evolve for the environmental conditions of North America. So when it was introduced to the continent (to "improve" the landscape), its evolutionary traits that were perfectly well-suited to its native range went haywire. The species crowds out native plant life and creates monocultures. It certainly provides some benefits to animals: the berries are eaten by birds, and its dense ground cover provides shelter to both birds and small mammals. That does not mean the spread of buckthorn is "progress," however, nor was it "necessary". It is the result of human selfishness and short-sightedness.

It's not a perfect metaphor, of course - no metaphor is - but I do think it serves the purpose of questioning the application of value-charged terms like "progress." Evolution is not a system of "progress" where organisms improve over time; it's just about change in response to environmental conditions. We are not "more evolved" or "better" than our Australopithecus ancestors; they were perfectly well-suited to their environment, and when their environment changed, so did they. Similarly, pre-contact indigenous American societies and pre-colonial African societies worked just fine for their environment, and the introduction of an invasive species (i.e. capitalism) should not be described as progress. (I'd also argue that the wave of diseases that wiped out up to 95% of the indigenous American population before the year 1700 was a catastrophic event comparable to the Chicxulub impact in terms of radically changing the environment to allow new organisms/ideas/systems to fill vacant niches.)

To be clear, I am not saying all this to "debunk" Marxist theory or dialectical materialism. I do believe they are among the best ways to study and describe history as it did actually happen, and they are critically important tools to analyze what is currently happening in the world as well. I just want to remind people to be cautious about confusing descriptivism for prescriptivism; accurately describing the way things did happen does not mean that it is the only way things should have happened.

And I want to give Sam their due credit, as they agreed that Marxist theory cannot/should not place a value judgment on the evolution of feudalism > capitalism > (hopefully) communism. Sam also pointed out that if communism is the thing that evolves out of capitalism, eventually the environment will change again, and communism will need to be replaced with yet something else altogether. That is evolution: it has no end-game. It has no stasis. It is always changing. Capitalism may have provided a very real benefit to the humans who developed it at one point, but clearly the environmental conditions have changed. Capitalism has become an invasive monoculture that is destroying the planet; a trait that once helped a select population of humans is now hindering pretty much all humans. So we must change, or go extinct.