The idea of generic fascism is commonplace, as evidenced by a couple of empirical tests via Google and Bing. Type “generic fascism” into Google and 13,000 results appear. For Bing, an astounding 2, 950, 000. (I wonder about my naiveté of the search methods in Bing, however, as an unquoted “generic fascism” returns far fewer findings.)
A search for “generic communism,” in contrast, delivers a mere 379 results in Google and a paltry 23 in Bing. (Unquote “generic communism” and, as expected this time, the number rises to 315,000.)
It would seem that unlike generic fascism, the idea of generic communism has little currency. The first result for “generic fascism” is a scholarly article entitled Fascism: The Origins of Generic Fascism. The first result for “generic communism” is an article by Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou, wherein he reads into Marx and Engels’ Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts an idea of “generic communism” that could be termed such, as a kind of mental exercise.
Enter “list of fascist parties” into Wikipedia and a convoluted set of lists of nominally fascist parties – actually, described as “movements” – by country appear. Nominally because a disclaimer at the top of main page warns that there is no “single, universally accepted definition of fascism,” making most of the entries “bound to be highly controversial.” Said movements are without political power but likely on the FBI’s watch list, e.g. the Aryan Brotherhood. Note the word “fascist” appears very infrequently in these listings. By my quick count, 230 entries total.
In contrast, type “list of communist parties” into Wikipedia and a one-stop shop for a worldwide listing of parties is presented. Unlike the above listings, movements are not included, omitting some number of “antifa” squads no doubt. Note the word “communist” appears in almost every entry. 182 entries total.
Given the global dissemination of communist ideas, one would think the concept of generic communism would have gained some adherence by now. I suspect that the generic part – the egalitarianism, the populist conception of capitalists vis-à-vis the working folk – is undermining the recognition of such a concept as something deserving of a category all its own. It’s essentially the default condition of the modal western intellectual, not something to be observed or “on the lookout” for.
Entitled to an Opinion 
January 9, 2010 at 5:21 pm
What you describe as “generic communism” (i.e., egalitarianism, populist conception of capitalists vis-a-vis working folk) is better known as “vulgar Marxism.” Entering that phrase in Google just returned approx. 491,000 results.
January 10, 2010 at 12:15 pm
I think attributing what constitutes “generic communism” to the typical western citizen and calling it vulgar Marxism would elicit accusations of paranoid right-wing despair and political ignorance. OTOH, calling Hamas or the Taliban “fascist” is not considered inaccurate, hysterical or ignorant.
January 11, 2010 at 6:08 pm
Actually, ‘vulgar Marxism’ seems to be pretty well accepted. One of the articles found by Google in my search was one by Mickey Kaus from “Slate,” in which he applied the description to himself.
The words communism and socialism generally carry a more pejorative connotation in the United States than they do elsewhere in the world. This does not mean people don’t like the concepts – they tacitly, perhaps unwittingly, accept them. They just don’t like to be reminded of what they really are. I remember once reading some screed claiming to wonder why there was no socialist party in the U.S. My reaction was – of course there is one. It just calls itself the Democratic party.
This is part and parcel of the habit of euphemism so typical of Americans – to call socialists “Democrats” or “liberals” is what one would expect of people who say someone “passed away” rather than “died,” and that “the dear departed was laid to rest” rather than “the corpse was buried.” Yes, we must have a nice coat of calcimine on our sepulchres.
January 12, 2010 at 6:41 pm
>>”I think attributing what constitutes “generic communism” to the typical western citizen and calling it vulgar Marxism would elicit accusations of paranoid right-wing despair and political ignorance.”
Perhaps. But is it true?
January 12, 2010 at 6:40 pm
Even better, try “cultural communism”, which returns 4.26 million hits, and “cultural Marxism” for another half million.
January 12, 2010 at 7:17 pm
Have you tried them in quotes? Far far fewer. 4,210 and 56,000 respectively.
I found it interesting that when I entered a quoted “cultural marxism” into google I got opinion pieces from conservative websites, a watch list entry from SPLC, and a single academic entry from Douglas Kellner, who is also prominently mentioned in the Wikipedia entry on the subject, as the go-to guy actually located in a mainstream educational establishment (UCLA).
In contrast, “generic fascism” in quotes returns a popular book available at Amazon.com, jstor and sage publishing links, and a Google book result. It’s got mainstream academic credibility as a concept.
January 10, 2010 at 12:11 am
Didn’t Marx and Engel’s believe that the primitive society is characterized by communism? Some libertarians agree, and believe that is responsible for widespread “folk Marxism”.
Fascism always had an anti-rational aspect to it, and was not really about any articulated theories. I view it as very much the creation of a certain time and place, and not very helpful to talk about fascism outside that context.
January 10, 2010 at 12:24 pm
I believe they did describe it as a kind proto-communism, and evo-psych has backed them up.
Big-f Fascism, the authentic, original formulation dreamed up by Mussolini et al. did articulate a theory, buttressed by the philosopohy of Actualism detailed by Giovanni Gentile. A. James Gregor at Berkeley has written alot on this topic. One can disagree with Gregor’s assertion that Fascism is a left-wing heresy, but Fascism is not simply an opportunistic coalition of mere anti-communists and big business interests.
January 10, 2010 at 3:23 pm
I don’t quite understand why you think a particular turn of phrase is significant. “Generic fascism” is a useful concept only because fascism has in its core the notion of an extreme volkisch nationalism; ie, it is in theory quite specific to a particular ethnicity. However, the fact that fascist movements arose simultaneously in a great many nations means that there is something generic to fascists as a class and “generic fascism” serves to indicate that by contrast.
On the other hand, communism always had universalistic aspirations and thus the idea of “generic communism” makes little sense — it’s generic by default. When a more nationalistic version of Marxism was proposed by Stalin and Bukharin then it had to be given a name of its own (“Socialism in one country”).
January 10, 2010 at 11:36 pm
Good point. It’s generic by default, making its widespread appreciation nearly unconscious and thus difficult to observe.
January 10, 2010 at 3:46 pm
[…] Mupetblast – “Generic F vs. Generic C” […]
January 10, 2010 at 4:21 pm
“Fascism has in its core the notion of an extreme volkisch nationalism”?
That is descriptive of Nazism, not so much of the original Italian fascism. It should be borne in mind that both Germany and Italy were relatively new countries, having been unified only in the latter half of the nineteenth century, respectively by the Hohenzollern kings of Prussia and the house of Savoy. Nationalist sentiments in those countries pre-existed the rise of Hitler and Mussolini. British fascism, under Sir Oswald Mosley, did not appeal nearly so much to nationalist sentiment, because Britain already was a world power and already had an empire. Mosley, at least in the post-war years, favored a united Europe (much like today’s EU) and dismissed nationalists as “yesterday-patriots.”
The common thread of Nazism in Germany, Fascism in Italy, British fascism, and Roosevelt’s New Deal was economic dirigisme. All rejected economic liberalism, as it was then understood (and still is in Europe). Unlike communism, these movements left nominal ownership of the means of production in private hands, but took over most of its direction through regulation, and most of its profit through taxation. Fascism is, at bottom, central economic planning without nationalization.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch wrote an excellent book entitled “Three New Deals.” Its extensive quotations from original sources show that the kinship of Nazism, Fascism, and New-Dealism with respect to economic policy was widely acknowledged by the partisans of all three of these philosophies of government.
January 10, 2010 at 7:24 pm
Fascism has always been fundamentally pan-European.
Our rather jaundiced, and certainly Anglo view of it, precludes an understanding of European nationalism.
Yockey’s Imperium is largely a sympathetic elaboration of the age-old dream of European unification, a goal obscured to the Anglo view, because of England’s inherent opposition to European unity.
Radical nationalism comes entirely out of the Enlightenment, and in view of it’s historic exploitation of ethnicity with regard to various ethnicities, it’s interesting to note mtraven’s regurgitation of the standard and mainstream historical view of fascism.
Nazism was divided among Slavophiles, Anglo-philes, (like Hitler) and Nordicists, to name a few of the parties active in the NDSWP prior to WWII. The leftwing of the NDSWP under Niekisch made little secret of their desire to embrace Gandhi, who was initially quite enthusiastic about fascism
Perhaps the full-scale effect of non-European fascist elements has never really been properly studied.
The crisis which the war created, did not entirely eliminate the German desire for a federated Europe. (A French SS division were among the last defenders of Berlin before the Soviet onslaught)
As history continues to unfold, we will continue to lose track of the differences between Hitler and Charlemagne and pay greater notice to their common goals in uniting Europe, perhaps.
As Maurice Bardeche wrote, fascism is simply the definition of an idealogy which comes naturally to classes of peoples when confronted with terrible and destructive phenomena like liberalist-democracy.
Fascism, for example, is the only even vaguely rightist ideology which appeals to Third-Worlders on a broad-scale.
Let’s not forget that WWI was a liberal-war. It was the last-hurrah of liberal-nationalism.
Or what Ernst Nolte wrote,
“the ideological and political conflict for the future structure of a united world, carried on for an indefinite period since 1917 (indeed anticipated as early as 1776) by several militant universalisms, each of which possesses at least one major state.”
The odious neo-con and former FR poster, Michael Ledeen, (one of the most intelligent and influential neo-cons, who anti-semites may note, is not in fact Jewish) has called himself a “universal fascist,” and written a book on the subject, by the same name. It’s a seductive idealogy, in which conservatives can have their liberalism and eat it, too.
Marx was a kept-academic, and Proudhon, by contrast was a federalist in the end, (his anarcho-syndicalism, aside) and his socialism, influential as it was, in the early 20th- cenury fascist movement, is equally popular among European New Rightists to this day.
Marx’s views were first, utopian, and secondly bought and paid for.
Lenin’s extensive modifications of the various platforms created by the various “Internationals” is what got them somewhere.
January 11, 2010 at 8:28 pm
OTOH, calling Hamas or the Taliban “fascist” is not considered inaccurate, hysterical or ignorant.
Not considered as such by ignorant people.
I think there is some justification for denying that the Dems are a socialist party. For one thing, the Republicans are hardly less socialist! For another, they were founded before the rise of socialism and labor unions.
Fascism was dirigiste, but dirigism seems a much broader category than fascism and was already considered the wave of the future. John T. Flynn’s “As We Go Marching” points out how the economic policies of the fascist governments (as well as FDR’s) were presaged by the liberal administrations that preceded them.
I know Italian fascism didn’t emphasize all the same racial theories as Nazism, but was it really not volkisch? I had been under the impression it was.
I have heard of individual Nazis who were Slavophiles, but Slavs seems to have been extremely far down the totem pole of the Nazi hierarchy in practice. My guess is that Slavophiles were a very small minority.
I’m also not familiar with the fascist yearnings for a federated Europe. I know that Hitler though England a natural ally, but I don’t recall much about a federation. I hadn’t heard anything like that for Mussolini or Moseley (not to mention fascists elsewhere) either. I don’t hear as much about Charlemagne (I forget if his was supposed to be the first reich), but comparisons of Hitler to Napoleon aren’t that uncommon.
I know Gandhi said some odd stuff about Hitler, but that seems to stem more from his weird pacificism than affinity with fascism (Gandhi was hardly the type who would glom onto futurism!). Sobhas Chandra Bose was the Indian who actually allied with the Axis, but as with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem I think that was mere opportunistic anti-colonialism.
It was the last-hurrah of liberal-nationalism.
What would you say is the major difference between liberal-nationalism and fascism?
Ledeen’s Wikipedia page says he is Jewish. If that’s wrong, than his strong interest in Italy would make Italian the next-best guess for his ethnicity. I looked up his surname at ancestry.com and surnames.behindthename.com but there were no results at either.
January 12, 2010 at 10:13 am
Karl Haushofer’s school of geopolitics considered Germany and Russia to be land-based powers, naturally pitted against maritime powers such as Great Britain and the U.S. This is perhaps the source of the claim that there were Slavophiles amongst the Nazis.
I have not read much comparison of Hitler with Charlemagne, but the Holy Roman Empire founded by Charlemagne was indeed the First Reich. The Second was the German empire formed by Kaiser Wilhelm I, which permitted Hitler to call his empire the Third Reich.
Although Hitler was distinctly not friendly towards it, there was a considerable occultist element within the Nazi party (including Hess and Himmler) that was much influenced by Theosophy and kindred delusions. This naturally led to interest in India and the caste system which was imposed by the invading ‘whiter’ Indo-Aryans upon the chthonic peoples of south India. There was an effort by Germans in WWII, as there was in WWI, to stir up disaffection within the Indian empire of Great Britain. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has written a book on Savitri Devi, entitled “Hitler’s Prophetess” or some such.
January 12, 2010 at 6:33 pm
>>”Given the global dissemination of communist ideas, one would think the concept of generic communism would have gained some adherence by now.”
I think it has, regardless of how often the term shows up in a search engine. America today is run by people who are “generic communists” of one sort or another. So is much of Europe, where the literal communists from behind the Iron Curtain were seamlessly integrated into post Cold War European politics.
January 12, 2010 at 6:41 pm
Yea, I see now I put too much stock in the words “generic communism” specifically.