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Fascism is the empire turning inward to manage its internal contradictions.
I do think it's useful to frame this as decay, but it's decaying in the sense that the empire is coming home.
I think that's an incomplete analysis of fascism. Hitler wrote clearly that the USA model of eugenics, apartheid, slavery, indigenous concentration camps, cultural genocide, and propaganda was the model he wanted to build from. The first gas chambers were French ships during the Haitian revolution. When America went to WW2, they went to save the fascists from the communists. Through Operation Paperclip they worked with the Vatican to save fascists from all levels and integrated them into their global neo-empire. Through NATO they took the fascist officers and gave them new jobs leading an undemocratic transnational nuclear military that was specifically organized to counter Russia and internally create a culture of fascism. Through Operation Gladio the USA used NATO and the CIA to create fascist partisan militias that they funded, trained, protected, and armed all over Europe.
If the only standard for fascism is that all the dominance that was applied to non-white people starts being applied to white people, I don't find that to be a useful definition. Fascism did to Europeans what Europeans had been doing for centuries to the globe. I don't think it's useful, except for liberals, to distinguish between the historical period before the Third Reich and the period of the Third Reich solely by the racialized categories of the victims.
That's literally what it is, though. It's when the empire stops using superprofits generated by the empire to manage internal contradictions and switches to imperial management of the entire internal population, including the previously elevated segments of the population. Fascism did to Europeans what Europeans had been doing for centuries to the globe, that's what makes it fascism.
This is a useful framework if you understand that a segment of privileged workers within the imperial core are boureoisified by the distribution of superprofits, and that this is why revolution is impossible within the empire. It's only when the empire can no longer generate enough superprofit to pacify that racial/caste/ethnic segment of the working class that they become a revolutionary subject.
Revolution only becomes possible in the imperial core when the empire comes home.
I think that definition potentially suffers from being non-universal. It's not clear to me that the logic of society requires such conditions to exist as clearly as the definition states. That is to say, it sounds like a very accurate definition of a very specific time and place, namely Europe. It's unclear to me that, given the colonial nature of America that such a clear delineation between America being not fascist and then becoming fascist is accurate in the least. It's not like Germany or Italy was out there committing genocide against an entire continent and then eventually needed to bring it home. The conditions are completely different.
If we expand the scope to try to include the historical underpinnings of Eurofascism, it appears not to be a distinct phase but rather a continuously ongoing process that simply has come to include some group of people it didn't previously include. If we take a 1-into-2 analysis, that would point us to the recognition that such arbitrary groupings of people can't possibly be the demarcation between fascism and non-fascism.
As far as I can tell, fascism has been around since the Western European powers started going around genociding and dominating everyone they could. And when it finally came back via the Third Reich, it was the liberal imperial society that imagined this as a net new phenomenon that required a new name as it appeared to them to be a rupture from the past. But that's an ideological myopia. The reality is that all of the elements of what liberals identify as fascism have been ongoing processes for several centuries.
And when we consider how Eurofascism was inspired by, funded by, and lauded by the bourgeoisie in the USA, and then how that Eurofascism was protected from eradication, internationalized, cultivated, and extended into the present day, I have a hard time saying that fascism was born and then ended and that we are at risk of it reemerging. Instead I think the historical reality is that it has been an ongoing process for the last several centuries and the USA is its epidemiological reservoir.
Fascism is a stage of colonial development, when the rate of imperial superprofit began to fall and the empire came home. It "emerges" in the sense that it's just the exact same thing the empire was always doing but turned inward. Fascism never went away, it just turned outwards again with the emergence of neocolonialism. Now that neocolonial development has again reached a stage when the rate of profit begins to fall and the empire turns inward, fascism (or some kind of neofascism) is the next stage of development.
It's only useful as a way to understand historical development, and it's not as if fascism and colonialism are truly different things; they're part of the same ongoing process, two sides of the imperial boomerang. When fascism "emerges" is when the revolutionary potential of the imperial core is at its highest, which is why the empire has to come home to manage the internal contradictions and stave off revolution. As a way to define political moments its only useful as a way to understand revolutionary potential within the imperial core.
Umm… Europeans have been colonizing other Europeans long before 1492. The most notable example of this was Ireland:
(Source.)
Capitalist colonialism within Europe was phenomenal years before the Fascist era. A byspel of this was World War I:
(Source and see Elusive Alliance: The German Occupation of Poland in World War I for more.)
If by ‘empire coming home’ you mean ‘white capitalists superexploiting their fellow white citizens’, then that is likewise a prefascist phenomenon:
(Source.)
All that aside, what really disappoints me is seeing another person overlook the Fascist colonies in Afrasia. It bums me out. I try to regularly inform other users on that subject, so when I see a statement like ‘Fascism is the empire turning inward’, it makes me feel like my topics haven’t been of much help and haven’t really made a difference.
But this didn't actually happen! Germany was crushed under the new WW1 order, wasn't fielding an imperial colonial army abroad, and it didn't come home. It emerged from the material conditions where it was, it did not leave and come back.
In fact, all the examples of the empire turning inward that we have are not examples that people would call fascism. For example, the system in the USA called "state police", which are different from local police, was a returning of the empire to their home in that the model for the state police was the design of the USA occupation forces in The Philippines. The rise of military weapons in the hands of USA cops is a direct returning of the empire to home, yet people are still talking about the USA as if it might become fascist later.
I understand the points you're making, I just don't think they reflect history at all.
I think they aren't different things - they are the same side of the process. I don't think there is an imperial boomerang. Again, I think the entire idea of the boomerang and the idea that fascism is when fascism becomes fascism is a white liberal ideological construction and doesn't match the material reality. If the only time its fascism is when powerful white people become oppressed, then that's not a useful analysis. White people are oppressed all the time in the USA and Europe - not to anywhere near the same degree, and not systemically/structurally on the basis of their racialized grouping, but it's undeniable that there are plenty of white people under the boot domestically.
Again, also not borne out by history. You can say that fascism is deployed when there is a risk of revolution, but to say the potential is the highest is to ignore the reality that the states and periods we traditionally label as "fascist" did not exhibit any meaningful revolutionary potential.
Maybe. This hasn't been shown though. The greatest revolutionary potential in the imperial core doesn't seem to be associated with anything like what happened in the Third Reich nor what happened to the American Indians nor what happened to Haiti. Instead, it seems to have been associated with labor organizing and with anti-war movements. Once European fascism materialized in the "Axis", revolutionary potential was gone.