Rev Left Radio - Blood in my Eye: On Fascism and Class Warfare

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

In this second installment of our ongoing mini-series on George Jackson's "Blood in my Eye", Breht walks us through Jackson's chapter "On Fascism" and elucidates his views on what it is, where it comes from, and its relationship to monopoly capitalism and the U.S. state. ----- Please Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Okay, so the first point that I want to pull out of George Jackson's sort of analysis of fascism is that George Jackson has a really admirably dialectical understanding of fascism. And this is incredibly important because I think so often we get sort of bogged down in trying to create a checklist for what is fascism, or we get bogged down in these static, almost metaphysical debates about what the actual definition and elements of fascism are as if they can be extracted from the dialectical process of history continually unfolding. And all of these things treat fascism as some discreet thing that one exists outside of a continuously unfolding process. And two, especially in Hannah Arendt's take, it separates it from capitalism itself and by so doing obscures the deep fundamental connections between capitalism and fascism.

George Jackson clearly does not make that mistake and he clearly sees fascism as an unfolding process, not a static state of affairs, making the search for a simple definition impossible. How this manifests in our own situation today are these debates over, you know, whether or not Trump is fascist, right? We'll hear discussions constantly of like, well, okay, he's not ideologically fascist. He doesn't have an ideology. But those crackdowns on the Black Lives Matter protest this summer, that was fascist. And then you have liberals saying, well, now that Joe Biden has won the presidency, we've defeated fascism, right? or we've at least over, we've overcome its, it's a rising for the moment. And that can be connected to to worse takes on the liberal center of like, you know,

this is a revolution, you know, electing Biden as a revolution or, you know, just like with Obama, that we've somehow overcomeed or made some huge advancement against racism. And this just gives rise to more confusion and it sets fascism again aside as something separate from the underlying. capitalist system itself. And that's dangerous because by separating capitalism and fascism as two distinct things, it provides cover for the very conditions that give rise to fascism. It provides cover for the roots of fascism, which is the capitalist system. And what emerges from George Jackson's take on fascism is that it is this global,

expansive, ever-changing and developing phenomena that is capital's reaction to, to use some simplified terms, the antithesis of socialism. So as capitalism degrades people's standard of living, as capitalism oppresses and dominates, of course, it gives rise and it always has given rise to revolutionary currents that are anti-capitalists, that want to reject capitalism,

fight for the working class, fight for the colonized, et cetera. And so fascism is what happens when capitalism meets that counterforce. And that counter force is sharpened enough, organized enough to be an actual threat to power. And that can take any form. It can be armed militant resistance

or it can be literally democratic processes giving rise to a socialist president like we saw in Chile, for example. So understanding that, I think, is crucial. And here are some lines that point toward George Jackson's understanding of fascism in a dialectical way. He says, you know, stuff like pure fascism, absolute totalitarianism is not possible. And what that references is this idea that there's no static state of affairs in anywhere that fascism has taken over. It's an unstable sort of situation.

You know, fascism doesn't last for 100. and hundreds of years in an acute form of fascism, because once you understand fascism as an outgrowth of capitalism, you can see that once the revolutionary threat is defanged and disbanded, the re-entrance of normal capitalism with the facade of bourgeois democracy comes back online, and the fascist sort of pure violent force is really no longer needed. So that's an important part to understand, too. he goes on to say to call one or two or a dozen setbacks defeat talking about socialist defeats or setbacks is to overlook the ebbing and flowing process of revolution coming closer to our calculations and then receding

but never standing still a thing if a thing isn't building it must be decaying as one force emerges the opposite force must yield as one advances the other must retreat and so in the same way that Jackson understands fascism dialectically. He also understands socialism, the revolutionary force as not a singular static event or

not a thing that we can reach and check off like, okay, we've done that, that and that therefore this is socialist, but as an ever-developing, ever mutating resistance to capitalism and resistance to fascism that must be ongoing. And so when we talk of revolution,

even on the left, we talk about it often as an acute event. And, you know, there are acute events where the forces of revolution come together at such a sharp point that we get a Cuban revolution or we get a Bolshevik revolution or a Chinese revolution or one of the dozens of national liberation struggles that have succeeded to relative degrees in the past century. And it's a sort of static bourgeois mistake to then extract those from history and say, you know, that was a revolution and it started on this date and it ended on this date, right? As opposed to seeing it as an unfolding process whereby there becomes very acute sharpening of the contradictions, resulting in the socialist forces

succeeding, perhaps for a time and then receding, but always present. And so as revolutionaries, it's not like we're waiting for a revolution to happen at some point in the future. This this day or week or month-long event where we all take to the streets and storm the capital and burn down the White House and take over, but rather to understand revolution as an unfolding process of which we're all taking apart right now. And while the revolution here in this localized part of the world might not be acute enough to say, okay, now we're in the midst of a real revolution. The fact is the machinations of revolution, the operations of revolution, the operations of revolution are always at play, and the operations of counter-revolution are always at

play. The huge protests this summer, right? That was not a revolution, right? It didn't topple the government and institute a new way of life, but it was a sharpening, making more acute the forces of revolution for a moment, which also brought out a more acute fascism. And so in the streets, we saw heavy police forces with militarized gear bashing people's heads in, brutalizing women, old men, defenseless people who, for the most part, were out there peacefully protesting, holding signs, refusing to go home when some authority figure said it's curfew, it's time to go home. And so to understand revolution and fascism dialectically is to understand this is a continuing event that we're all participating in and not something that just happens at a certain date and ends

a certain date as if it's a static thing and then we can set back from that extract from that and check off the list was this fascist okay was this socialist okay um that is a that is a an unproductive and anti-dialectical way of understanding what fascism and socialism are and capitalism right these are all inexorably intertwined forces um developing historically going back to uh the text george jackson says quote the second notion that stands in the way of understanding of fascist corporativism is a semantic problem. When I am being interviewed by a member of the old guard and point to the concrete and steel, the tiny electronic listening device concealed in the vent, the phalanx of goons peeping in at us,

his barely functional plastic tape recorder that cost him a week's labor, and point out that these are all manifestations of fascism, he will invariably attempt to refute me by defining fascism simply as an economic geopolitical affair where only one political party is allowed to exist above ground and no opposition political party is allowed. But examine that definition of totalitarianism, comrade. No opposition parties are allowed in China, Cuba, North Korea, or North Vietnam. Such a narrow definition condemns the model revolutionary societies to totalitarianism. Despite the presence of political parties, on the other hand, there is only one legal

politics in the U.S., the politics of corporativism. The hierarchy commands all state power. There are thousands of ways, however, to attack it and place that power in the hands of the people. So right here, Jackson is pushing back against these static definitions of fascism, right? He talks about how the FBI is wiretapping them and peeping in through their blinds and monitoring them, and there's an FBI vehicle out front, and he talks to his friend and says, you know, this is fascism. and the friend, whether it's a made-up person just for this to make this point or not, you know, well, so actually, you know, fascism is this specific economic geopolitical situation where there's a party with no other party, you know, he wants to go out and abstract away

from the actual machinations of fascism as a developing situation and set it out into some vacuum where, you know, it exists only in these conditions. And George Jackson is saying, no, fascism is here, fascism is present, it must be present, and it becomes particularly acute when there is any movement of reasonable effectiveness in the society that wishes to push back against the ruling order. In this case, black radicals coming together to discuss revolutionary strategy and being peered upon surveilled by the forces of reaction by the capitalist state. You know, that is fascism. And on the other hand, to make a little swipe at, you know, the Hannah Arendts of the world, if you do this horseshoe totalitarianism, bullshit where you create fascism or totalitarianism as some static state of affairs with a

specific definition that you can check off, then what happens is a lot of socialist movements, which just by virtue of the forces of reaction descending upon them, they cut off, you know, other parties. Like Cuba's not going to allow a Batista party, right? Cuba's not going to allow a U.S. puppet party, right-wing fascist party in Cuba that, you know, is seen as legitimate and that can organize for power in cahoots with the U.S.

imperial state. That is suicide in a revolutionary context. So if we define fascism and totalitarianism in these simplistic liberal static ways, you end up demonizing the very movements that have successfully combated fascism, capitalism, and imperialism.

And clearly, that serves the ideological interests of any liberal philosopher, thinker, politician, leader, member of the ruling class that wants to maintain some semblance of the status quo. And so I think that is an important thing to remember as well. Back to the text. George Jackson says, 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 Marxist and non-Marxists agree on at least two of its general factors. One, its capitalist orientation, and two, it's 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. 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. So here again, we have this point being made in a different way,

while also putting on the table some common features of fascism, right? Wherever fascism arises, there is this capitalist orientation, right, in Franco, Spain, Pinochet in Chile, you know, Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy, even when they're sometimes wrapped up in the garb of, you know, working class rhetoric, it is always, ultimately, and with hindsight, we have the clarity to see, the re-entrenchment of capitalist domination. And another thing is it's anti-labor, anti-class nature. And we see that very clearly. Not only with the petty bourgeois strata of society being like the dominant force of fascism in a lot of cases,

but also like in, you know, Hitler's Germany, the first attacks were waged against the trade unionists, the socialists, the communists, to get that resistance out of the way so that it could then, you know, do whatever it needs to do in any given a situation. Here in the U.S., it's really interesting, right? when we have these pro-Trump rallies, we don't see the masses marching downtown. That's a left-wing thing. When the left gets pissed off, we hit the streets. The masses swell in these city centers,

thousands, tens of thousands of people marked down the street, chanting, you know, shouting, rallying, etc., squaring off with the police. What do we see in the U.S. when the forces of reaction come out to meet those protests? We see them in two really interesting ways. We've seen them with their big 2019 Dodge trucks with 10 flags out the back with their extended cab pickup trucks.

And we saw what Trump calls his beautiful boaters, right? This petty bourgeois class strata of people who can't afford these nice ass boats with, you know, 17 Trump flags flailing off the back. So we see just in the ways that these movements manifest in our own context and our own time right now the difference, the class difference in what happens. you know the left pulls out the lower classes the working classes and some middle class lots of middle class you know sympathizers and all of that which is always a play there's not some neat you know sectioned off arbitrarily delineated class strata like okay this is just poor and working people over here and this is just the petty bourgeois over here no but those are the the the major compositions of those forces at this time so to understand that is to understand the inherent connection of capitalism to fascism. And then, of course, he goes back and points out this dialectical understanding of, you know, the definition of fascism is still open precisely because it's a developing movement. And he says, we already have 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. And again, when do we see that? We see that with the rise of Trump and the attempt by some to make sense of it and to pin it as fascism by resorting to comparisons to Nazi Germany. Oh, you know, Trump is doing this, which is very similar to something that Mussolini did, or that's very similar to something that Adolf Hitler did, right? And what are they doing? They're trying to understand the present through a discolored glimpse of a dead past because if fascism is a open, moving, living, breathing, dialectical, historical process, trying to understand it through snapshots of

how it manifested, you know, 75 years ago in a different country can only lead to more confusion and thus less ability to combat it and to understand it. So I think that's another thing that comes out of this text that I think is so important and immediately applicable to our own situation. So I'll read some other chunks to drive. this point home further. George Jackson says, quote, 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, It's international quality.

This is important because what he's saying is while we often think of fascism as discrete orisings in certain national context, right, this time in Germany as the Nazis, this time in Italy with Mussolini, this time in Spain with Franco, some would say this time with Trump in America, right? The truth is that it is an international ongoing process. And so to understand it simply in its nationalistic trappings, simply in its nationalist contexts, is to fail to understand it as a global movement. Capital is global. The fight against capital, particularly during, you know, when he's writing in the early 70s, you have the national liberation struggles all around the world, pan-Africanist approaches, et cetera, international solidarity. We see socialism is international. But yet when we talk about fascism, we tend to shrink it down to just its national contexts.

And that's another way of misapprehending the fascist phenomena and thus breeding confusion. It is an international movement. Because capital and socialism are international movements, fascism must be by definition. And we see that in the global south. We see that with the contras. We see that with coups and assassinations around the world. Fascism takes many forms and it is international. scope. It always has been. We have to remember that as well. Back to the text, Jackson says,

at its core, fascism is an economic rearrangement. It is international capitalism's response to the challenge of international scientific socialism. It developed from nation to nation out of differing levels of traditionalist capitalism's dilapidation. The common feature of all instances of fascism is the opposition of a weak socialist revolution. When the fascist arrangement, when the fascist arrangement begins to emerge in any of the independent nation states, it does so by default. It is simply an arrangement of an established capitalist economy, an attempt to renew, perpetuate, and legitimize that economy's rulers by circumflexing and weighing down, diffusing a revolutionary consciousness pushing from below.

Fascism must be seen as an episodically logical stage in the socio-economic development of capitalism in a state of crisis. again pointing at these deep inherent connections which all liberal commentators will try not even consciously right they don't understand it and then try to be cynical and deceive they just don't understand it because the whole bourgeois way of understanding and capturing the world excuse dialectics and therefore gives rise to plenty of confusion and misunderstandings and insofar as liberal is just liberalism is just the ideology of capitalism there's an entrenched interest for anybody who identifies as a liberal or sees their political project as liberalism to try and disassociate fascism from capitalism. And out of that attempt to disassociate, we get stuff like horseshoe theory. And Hannah Arendt's totalitarianism, I keep coming back to it precisely because it has so much sway in academia and the media, and it is such the perfect example of a liberal's conception of these things and how out of that conception stems,

nothing but more confusion and an utter inability to combat fascism and its many myriad manifestations, just an absolute inefficacy liberalism puts up in the face of fascism, in part because it can't comprehend it. Again, here George Jackson says that the ultimate aim of fascism is the complete destruction of all revolutionary consciousness, which is impossible, which is why earlier he had that statement where he says pure fascism, absolute totalitarianism is not possible, right? The ultimate aim of fascism is the complete destruction of all revolutionary consciousness. But you can't do that. And the more you try to repress, the more you try to beat into submission, the forces of

revolution, the more you agitate, antagonize, and energize those very forces. So fascism cannot be a static state of affairs. It cannot be a stable recipe for any society. It doesn't offer any long-term solutions and it's not outside of capitalism itself and understanding it as a living moving thing which is what jackson calls it i think it is crucial in having that uh that dialectical understanding uh back to the text jackson says quote one has to understand that the fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity it has programmed into its very nature a massive complex and automatic defense mechanism for all old methods for raising the consciousness of a potentially revolutionary class of people.

The essence of a USA totalitarian socio-political capitalism is concealed behind the illusion of a mass participatory society. We must rip away its mask. And then a page or two later, he says something which I think is kind of interesting. He identifies as a Marxist, Leninist, Maoist, fanonist. A mouthful, but I'm right there with him. So, This quote goes, I am one Marxist-Leninist Maoist fanonist who does not completely accept the idea that the old capitalist competitive wars for colonial markets were actually willed by the various rulers of each nation, even though such wars stimulated their local economies and made it possible to promote nationalism among the lower ranks. War taken to the point of diminishing returns weakens rather than strengthens the participants. And if the rulers of these nations were anything at all, they were good businessmen. Expansion then, which often led unavoidably to war, was the traditional recourse and the solving of problems created by a vacuous, uncontrollable system, which never considered any changes in its arrangements, its essential dynamics, until it came under a very real, directly threatening challenge from below to its very existence.

So here we see this historical, dialectical understanding of imperialist, colonialist expansionism. And he says it's not the, you know, it's not the ideas in the minds of the rulers who willed this to happen, but it's rather just a natural outcome of these processes unfolding. So it's not like the leaders of individual countries had some sort of autonomous freedom and great will to control and direct these things. or even knew in their heads consciously and systematically what was happening, but rather they were swept up in historical processes that they didn't even fully comprehend, and the results were the natural results of the system as it stands. And again, we see this expansionist international dimension to capitalism necessitating an internationalist understanding of fascism itself.

Okay, moving on from that first point about understanding these things dialectically, Jackson moves into a subchapter called Classes at War. And in this chapter, still focusing on fascism, he's seeking to, as he says, analyze fascism objectively, its antecedents, its prime characteristics, and its goals. and how he starts off this chapter is denying the ideological importance of fascism. So he's basically putting forth the idea that fascism is not a coherent ideology with a checklist of beliefs, but rather a, as I said earlier, right, a process that can take different forms given the conditions it's operating in. And he pulls out what he says are three forms that fascism can take.

And he says, quote, the real reason why the importance of ideology and fascism must be denied is the fact that it exists in more than one form. And so we'll get to those three forms in a second. But that's one of the things he wants to do. Talk about fascism as a process that develops in different ways in different societies and that it really can't be understood as some checklist of ideological. beliefs. The other thing he does in this chapter is he really goes deep into charting out the history and the political economy of how fascism develops. He talks about, you know, in detail, how fascism developed in Italy. And then he shifts over and talks about how fascism develops in America, talks about Nazi Germany. And a lot of this analysis is incredibly deep. It's rooted in

political economy and historical materialism. And obviously, I'm not going to read this whole chapter to you, but I just wanted to put that up as one of the things he's trying to accomplish and one of the things he's doing in this chapter. And then at the end of the chapter, and this is sort of the thrust of it, is he's laying all throughout the chapter, he's laying down these arguments that ultimately point toward the fact that

America is fascist, right? And not only is it fascist, but it's fascist of the third type. And so that is his conclusion. and he talks about the psychosocial dynamics of fascism. He talks about the pseudo culture that fascism gives rise to, which will definitely make a lot of sense and be incredibly coherent to anybody that lives

in the United States of America. And then at the end, he ends it with an inspiring sort of call the arms and a point forward to how we can move beyond fascism, how we can move beyond the American situation and create the socialism that we all want to create. So the first thing I want to address is the three different faces, right? The three different faces that fascism takes. And Jackson says the first one is the out-of-power face, right?

Not in power. The out-of-power that tends almost to be revolutionary and subversive, anti-capitalist, and anti-socialist. And we can see that formation all throughout history. We can particularly see it in the Italian expression under Mussolini who, you know, before he went fascist, was sort of trained in socialism, was part of a socialist organization, et cetera, a Marxist one, I believe. And obviously he skewed all that, left that all behind for fascism, but it's this fascism being out of power and it takes on this garb of being revolutionary or subversive, right? neither capitalism nor socialism sort of approach. The second face

is in power but not secure. And this is as Jackson says, the sensational aspect of fascism that we see on screen and read of in pulp novels when the ruling class through its instrumental regime is able to suppress the vanguard party of the

people and workers' movement. And the third face of fascism exists when it is in power and securely so. And those are the three faces. out of power, in power but not secure, and in power and secure. And ultimately, as I said earlier, he's pointing to America as being the third one, and he traces its development in great detail.

Reading a little bit about the non-ideology, as he calls it, the pseudo-intellectual origins of fascism, Jackson says, quote, the pseudo-intellectual origins of fascism can be traced all the way back to ancient Greece. The German National Socialist Apologist Alfred Baumler and Expressionist Gottfried Ben both recognized Hegel, as did some of the Italian intellectuals and Eastern European fascists. The Western Europeans, however, favored the primitive withdrawn ideals of Nietzsche, or a confused combination of Nietzsche and Hegel with a bit of Plato's philosopher king added for window dressing. Actually, there have been as many different fascist ideals and arrangements as there have been fascist society. which brings us to the relevant point of inquiry. The importance or form of a particular political regime

can never be understood simply as it stands alone. Its social and economic past must be investigated and clearly defined before the distinctive being of the political realm takes shape. So he's talking dialectically about how you cannot understand something as a static set of state of affairs that stands alone. It must be understood through a deep investigation

of its social and economic past and talking about the ideology of fascism as really just being thrown together different ideas from whatever cultures are going fascist, right? Again, speaking to this lack of an actual fascist ideology, which I think is really interesting and important for us to understand

as we try to understand fascism and its manifestations in our own culture. Moving on, Jackson, a couple pages later, he says, quote, big business was in a crisis, of course, after the short boom following World War I. The giant cartels and the national, industrial, and financial monopolies were starved to the bone in both periods of fascist rearrangements, the early 20s and all of the 30s. This gave the movement its seemingly middle-class antecedents.

Where large-scale manufacturing was not in complete control, its straining to emerge as the dominant force within the economy, was resisted by the petty bourgeois, the landed classes, and the medium proprietor. Here we see fascism in its out-of-power stage one. We hear its language sounding deceptively anti-capitalist, parasitic capitalism, illegitimate capital, rapacious capital, etc, etc. This was true in Italy and with early fascism in phalanjus Spain and in Germany.

Mussolini, who set up the first successful fascist regime, was a man trained all of his life in the revolutionary tactics and strategy of scientific socialism. His departure from the international socialist movement dated from the moment he gave his unreasonable support to a nation-state war in which the working class of one or more nations was manipulated into the murder of the working class of other nations by the ruling classes of the respective states. So here again he talks about the class dynamics of the antecedents of fascism and talks about fascism using the example of Mussolini in its first stage, right, out of power. and the way that it co-ops certain aspects of leftist rhetoric and dresses itself at times, you know, at pro-working class, in pro-working-class garb. And I think we're seeing that now with the modern GOP, not that it's out of power, right?

Because we're going to get to the point where Jackson makes very clear that America is the third kind of fascism in power and secure. But we do see some machinations in the GOP, which we talked about on Red Men, where there is this attempt to have a critique of capitalism to take the Republican Party in the direction of being the aggrieved white working class party

not that that's probably going to happen or anything but you start to hear some critiques of capitalism coming out of the GOP which is an interesting development as far as explicit rhetoric goes but moving on a couple pages later Jackson

says quote the point here is that fascism emerged out of a weakness in the pre-existing economic arrangement and a weakness in the old left and the weakness must be assigned to the vanguard party not the people as a side note jackson is is going back to the the old phrase that you know i think it comes from mao which is if the revolution fails it's not the fault of the people it's the fault of the vanguard party it's the fault of the of the leadership not the fault of the people back to the text jackson says quote the people's party failed to direct the masses properly with positive suppression of their class enemies and their goons.

Mussolini was able to proclaim that fascism held the only solution to the people's problem by default. Fascism, the new arrangement, the rearrangement, the strengthening and reforming of laissez-faire competitive capitalism was anti-socialist from its inception. It attempted to conceal the reality of class struggle by disguising itself as a new solution to national problems, by deifying the interests of the whole nation-state, which turned out to be the interests only of the state's ruling classes. Fascism is always a response to a threat to the establishment. Any anti-establishment actions taken by the strictly political

arm of a forming fascist arrangement are simply attempts to centralize or upstage the capitalist industrial sector, either to establish it as in Spain or modernize it, as in those cases where marginal productive interests are absorbed or destroyed by the arrangement. It is significant to note that no fascist regime in power has advocated the abolition of any form of private ownership. The fascist regime and private ownership work hand in

hand. No modern political regime can exist for long without the cooperation of those who control the means of production. He goes on. The shock troops of fascism on the mass political level are drawn from members of the lower middle class

who feel the upward thrust of the lower classes more acutely. These classes feel that any dislocation of the present economy resulting from the upward thrust of the masses would affect their status first. They are joined by that sector of the working class which is backward enough to be affected by nationalistic trappings and the loyalty syndrome that sociologists have turned the authoritarian personality. One primary aim of the fascist arrangement is to extend and develop this new pig class, to degenerate and diffuse working class consciousness with a psychosocial appeal to man's herd instincts.

Development and exploitation of the authoritarian syndrome is at the center of totalitarian capitalism, aka fascism. It feeds on a small but still false sense of class consciousness and the need for community. The collective spirit in fascism is a morbid phenomenon that grows out of the psychopathology of mob behavior, end quote. So again, let's focus on that little part. It feeds on a small but still false sense of class consciousness and the need for community. And that is certainly present in most fascist appeals.

And in fact, if you look at the fascist appeals today in the U.S., you'll often see, you know, in terms of race, right, appeals to white families and white communities and how globalism and the machinations of global capitalism are disintegrating these bonds, right? It's always coded racially. But it is, it is this sort of small and false, as Jackson says, sense of this need for a community. And we see that very much in our own times. And then Jackson goes on and he makes a really interesting point about what he calls the pseudo-mass society under fascism. And so if you understand his point that America is this third kind of fascism in power and securely so, then we can look at this examination of culture and see how that fascist culture manifests. Jackson says, quote, the psychosocial dimensions of

fascism become quite complex, but they can be simplified by thinking of them as part of a collective bargaining process carried on between all the elites of the particular state with the regime acting as arbitrator. So this, as a side note, this idea that the fascist state is this arbitration mediating force between different sections of the elites in a particular state. Back to the text. The regime's interests are subject to those of the ruling class. Labor is but a partner in this arrangement. At the head of any labor organization in the fascist state, there is an elite which is tied to the interests of the regime and consequently tied also to the economic status quo.

As a side note, we can look at the leadership of unions in the U.S. as a perfect example of this. If we take Jackson's argument seriously that the U.S. is a fascist state and we understand this argument that, as he says, that the head of any labor organization is the fascist state, right, then we can understand why unions are not mechanisms by which there is militancy, at least union leadership, right? by which there's militancy, by which there's a connection to the militant, radical, revolutionary past of labor unions in this country, et cetera. They've been defanged, they've been neutered, they've been co-opted, and they are now mere arms, mere limbs of the overall state apparatus. At the highest leadership of the biggest unions in the U.S., you can absolutely see this as being 100% true.

Jackson goes on, quote, the trappings of this pseudo-mass society are empty, cheap, spectacular leisure sports, parades where strangers meet, shout each other down and often trample each other to death on the way home, mass consumption of worthless supersuds or aspirin, ritualistic, ultra-nationalistic events on days to glorify the idiots who died at war or other days to deify those who sent them out to die. a mass society that is actually a mass jungle. At its core, fascism is capitalistic and capitalism is international.

Beneath its nationalist ideological trappings, fascism is always ultimately an international movement. End quote. So again, we see the trappings of this pseudo-mass society are very familiar to any of us who exist in the U.S. spectacular, cheap, empty leisure sports, parades, rallies where strangers meet in the streets and shout each other down, trampling each other, beating each other in the streets, and the media co-opting that and those images for the continuation of profiting off of that sensationalism, mass consumption of worthless, meaningless

consumer goods, and then the ritualistic, ultra-nationalistic events, whether those are Trump rallies or Super Bowls where we have a hundred-yard American flag and fighter jets flying over. Or it's like when Trump bombed the airstrips in Syria and the media, the so-called liberal media, waxed poetic about how beautiful the bombs were as they were launched. So we really see all of these aspects clearly in our own society and in our own culture right now and for our entire lives if you're an American. Quote, it is extremely important not to confuse the three faces of fascism when studying Latin America. The second phase, in power but not secure, is the really significant part of the whole fascist episode.

Regime after regime has failed to increase internal demand or unseat the traditionalist landed elite in favor of the small industrial interests. This means a permanent dependence on foreign trade and investment for a machine. machine tools, for weapons to control the people's movements, and for raw materials to feed their light industries and flea markets. Consequently, we see these areas as the most glaring dichotomy of socioeconomic injustice. In the shadow of their plush beach resorts, which attract degenerates from all over the Western world, literally within Rifle Shot, live the people who service these vacation resort complexes in disease-infested, corrugated, tin shanties on hillsides, constantly ravaged,

by mudslides, a strange combination of the first two phases of fascism. Without the massive military aid of the United States, Gestapo death squads, and the most intensive right-wing terror, the guns of liberation would by now have certainly filled the streets and forests

with blood to the horse's brow. It is important never to lose sight of Latin America's neo-colonial status. A victory for the people's liberation armies entails a victory over international capitalism and especially of victory over their colonial masters.

The puppet regimes of these areas cannot move firmly into phase three of the fascist arrangement for two reasons. The people are willing to use arms and are learning to use them more effectively, and because the regimes are imitative, not indigenous. They do not reflect the

real interest of the nation's elites, but rather the interests of the ruling elites of the parent imperial nation, the United States of America. So here we see Jackson applying this three-face of fascism to the Latin American context and showing how it's unable to break through to this third, you know, in power but secure face that America has achieved precisely because it is

the subordinate of the United States of Americans and precisely because the people in these countries are much more willing to take up arms in their fight for liberation, their anti-imperialist struggles, et cetera. And so, you know, you need the United States funding these contra-duty. death squads, these right-wing death squads, and right-wing terrorism to be highly funded and well-armed throughout the country to keep the situation at bay, to keep it from spilling over into socialist revolution, civil war, etc. So it's very interesting how he steps back and looks at Latin America's situation in conjunction with understanding U.S. imperialism's presence in the area and showing how fascism

you know can't really fully take the form it does in America in these interests precisely because of these reasons and so I thought that was an interesting way to analyze the situation and it certainly rings true to me and the idea of these beach resorts right of these tourists these tourists destinations as forms of sort of neo-colonialism and as these very stark and explicit ways by which we can see how they're tending to the needs of often western travelers right that want to get out of the country and go have some resort beach experience, but the people who make those things run,

the laborers live in horrific conditions of depravity. And certainly, the Cuban example is very illustrative here because before the Cuban Revolution, what did we have? We had the exact same situation where, you know, Cuba under the Batista puppet dictatorship was really a place for Western and particularly American elites to go, to gamble, to engage in prostitution, etc. The people of Cuba were kept illiterate, were kept incredibly poor,

even as, you know, the Westerners would come in and disperse their money to live these luxurious, you know, these luxurious vacations, enriching certain aspects, right, the very aspects, the national bourgeoisie, the privileged people in Cuban society who benefited directly from this tourism, right? And then the Cuban Revolution came along, said no more. A lot of those people were forced to flee to the U.S. And now we have a hardcore right-wing Cuban community in Miami as a result. But this whole analysis of Latin America's neocolonial status

and how that shapes those societies, I think, is 100% on point. He also makes a point about class consciousness. He says, moving on to Europe, he says, class consciousness in Germany was better developed than in any other European nation before and after the fascist takeover. so consciousness alone is obviously not the factor that determines which way a disintegrating society will develop fascist or socialist and that's just an important point that he makes in passing that I think is is worth noting you know class consciousness it was highly developed

in Germany wasn't enough to stop the rise of fascism and so that in and of itself is insufficient Another essential point that Jackson makes in this chapter is the connection of monopoly capital to the development of fascism. We know through Lenin's imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, that the development of monopoly capital was part and parcel is synonymous with the development of imperialism around the world. and here we have Jackson making the argument based off of that in a lot of ways that monopoly capitalist he says is the central object of corporative fascism so he is tying the development of monopoly capital to the development of fascism in the same way that Lenin tied the rise of monopoly capital to the rise of imperialism so Jackson says quote

industrialized centralization i mean the refined tactics of monopolized capitalism may have been developed right here in the u.s this is the logical place to question some of the old left's historical assumptions about the last hundred years of life analysts of the old left are completely confused by the differences between bourgeois democracy and monopoly capital and their manifestations on the american scene they seem to feel that both can coexist in the same society actually one simply grows rose out of the other. Monopoly Capital is the central object of corporative fascism. Prior to the Civil War and the emergence of the trends toward monopoly capital, America was dominated by bourgeois democratic economics and political rule. The economy was based upon the diverse ownership of many thousands of factory units

and a political arrangement to reflect that fact. However, with the emergence and expansion of monopoly capital after the economic impetus of the Civil War, bourgeois democracy naturally began to fade. Bougoir democracy, the political rule of the bourgeoisie, simply cannot exist after the emergence of monopoly capital. Monopoly capital has its own political expression. It develops as bourgeois democratic political rule declines. The roots of corporativism, fascism were laid with the expansion of monopoly capital

into the giant cartels, corporations, and interlocking trusts. The owners of the largest share of the nation's GMP will always control the political life and government of the state. Monopoly capital is corporativism, is fascism. He goes on to say, I don't think anything that ever happened in Italy, Spain, Germany, or any of the other capitalist states can match the centralizing process that the U.S. went through

in the last hundred years. Even the so-called public utilities are owned by financial institutions that, on examination, always turn out to be controlled by a few families, who are descendants of the industrial expansionists of 1865 through 1895. And at the end of this little part before I move on to the last part, he says, Every time I hear the word law, I visualize gangs of militiamen or Pinkertons busting strikes,

pigs wearing sheets and caps that fit over their pointed heads. I see a white oak and a barefooted black hanging or snake eyes peeping down the lenses of telescopic rifles or conspiracy trials. That is particularly trenchant and immediate for those of us who are living in an era where stuff like law and order is tweeted in all caps by the president of the United States. And so it's just worth revisiting the idea that law and order under the bourgeois order, under this regime under the United States legal framework, is always a false promise, right? It's always law for some and lawlessness for the ruling elite. You know, busting strikes, murdering people in the streets, the resurgent fascism, the surveillance state, the obvious crimes of elites and even the president himself, all of that is fine. It's fine for those who want to scream law and order. It's the pushing back against the system by the poor, by the lower classes, by the oppressed, that.

needs to be dealt with by strong law and order. So while criminal charges on protesters increase white-collar crime prosecutions in the U.S. over the four, the last four years, for example, had dramatically went down. So law and order for some and lawlessness and disorder for others. And after all of that, Jackson ends this chunk of the book on fascism with the following lengthy paragraph. Which I'll sort of skip over some parts, but read the end here because it's important to conclude his argument and point towards the future of fighting the fascist U.S. state. Quote, the necessary shock troops and tools for creating the false, contrapositive, psychosocial basis of a fascist type, pseudo-society were in short supply in this country prior to and during the process of the

fascist takeover. There was little of this consciousness among the middle classes, so the first terror came from the specially formed and hired goons of the Dupons and Rockefellers, the Black Legion, the Guardians of the Republic, the FBI. They destroyed the already disintegrating vanguard, leaving the degenerate elements of the working class as the only available mass. Class relations were slowly altered as a result of this action by the co-opted labor sectors. Government agents were sent to infiltrate scattered labor movements. The disguise was complete. The satisfaction of labor's short-term economic interests was made possible by the giant consumer's markets and the military industrial complex.

Ties were formed between rulers and labor leaders. The elites of the proletarian movement were compromised. A ruling class in its governing elites were centralized. and were carefully co-optive, a fascist arrangement. Death and prison for all who object. Fascism in its final and secure state. It has happened here. And the only recourse is an appeal to arms.

The corporative state allows for no genuinely free political opposition. They only allow meaningless gatherings where they can plant more spies than participants. They feel secure in their ability to mold the opinion of a people interested only in wages. However, real revolutionary activity will, We'll draw panic-stricken gunfire or heart attacks. So what is to be done after a revolution has failed? After our enemies have created a conservative mass society based on meaningless electoral politics, spectator sports, and a 3% annual rise in purchasing power strictly regulated to negate itself with a corresponding rise in the cost of living? What is to be done about an expertly, scientifically calculated contrapositive mobilization of the entire society?

What can we do with the people who have gone through the authoritarian process and come out sick to the core? There will be a fight. The fight will take place in the central cities, and it will be spearheaded by the blacks of the lower class and their vanguard party. And here I want to step outside the text to remind you of this position, which I have articulated in the past, and George Jackson makes very clear, that the elements of the vanguard party that the spearhead of any revolutionary movement, movement in this society will have to be led by black folks and indigenous folks precisely because of white supremacy, because of racism, because of who benefits most from a revolutionary confrontation with the powers that be, because of colonialism, because

of settler colonialism, etc. We see what happens when predominantly white ostensibly radical organizations form. They default towards liberalism. The revolutionary edge, is chopped off, they engage in electoral politics, they give us a Bernie Sanders and the DSA. Not to say there's no place for those movements and whatnot, but if there's going to be a real revolutionary

vanguard party in this society, it will be led by those who are most invested in a real revolutionary rupture from the status quo and not simply in their own advancement up the hierarchy of the status quo, or

their own comfort with their already existing sort of relative position in the hierarchy because that comfort will always be a mechanism by which such a formation defaults to liberalism. And he ends it this way. Fascism has established itself in a most disguised and efficient manner in this country. It feels so secure that the leaders allow us the luxury of faint protest. Take protest too far, however, and they will show their other face. Doors will be kicked in in the night, and machine gun fire and buckshot will become the medium of exchange. I am an extremist, a communist, not communistic, a communist, and I must be destroyed, or I will join my comrades in the only Communist Party in this country,

the Black Panther Party. I will give them my all every dirty fighting trick in the annals of war. Nothing will defeat our revenge, and nothing will countervail our march to victory. We come to our conclusion the only historical recourse that is left to us freedom means warmth and protection against harsh exposure to the elements it means food not garbage it means truth harmony and the social relations that spring from these it means the best medical attention whenever it's needed it means employment that is reasonable that coincides with the individuals necessities and feelings we will have this freedom even at the cost of total war George Jackson ends that chapter.

Again, there's so much in this book that I can't get to. There's so much in that chapter alone that I can't get to. Him charting out the history of the development of fascism in the U.S. and in Italy are things that really take considered reading, and I would encourage you to go do that. And this will be the second installment of Blood in My Eye by George Jackson. I shifted my strategy a little bit in this one, and perhaps to put a bow on it and have the final and third installment, I'll have somebody on to just take a bird's eye view reflecting on the text as a whole and pulling out the necessary lessons because while I can do some of that and I can read some of it

and point to his analysis, I think the discourse between two or more people talking about this book can bring out even more and won't be limited just by my individual understanding in the confines of my own intellect. So that will be forthcoming in the coming weeks. And I hope people are happy with this. And I hope people go out and read blood in my eye because regardless of whether you agree or disagree with every form of analysis, it will definitely, without a doubt, sharpen and challenge your understanding of what's going on in the present. Because so much of this is utterly relevant to what we're dealing with in the here and now.