Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism

364 Pages·2019·2.43 MB·English

by  Nicos Poulantzas

Fascism and Dictatorship
Fascism and Dictatorship
The Third International and
the Problem of Fascism
Nicos Poulantzas
Foreword by Dylan Riley
Translated from the French by Judith White
Translation editors Jennifer and Timothy O’Hagan
This edition published by Verso 2018
New Left Books edition first published 1974
First published as Fascisme et dictature by François Maspero 1970
© François Maspero 1970
© New Left Books 1974
© Verso 1979, 2018
Foreword © Dylan Riley 2018
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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Foreword by Dylan Riley
Introduction
PART ONE: THE PERIOD OF FASCISM
1. Imperialism and Fascism. Monopoly Capitalism and the Imperialist Chain
2. The German and Italian Links of the Chain
I. Germany
II. Italy
3. The Period of Fascism and the Third International
I. The Comintern’s general view and its changes of course: the problem of the
period and steps in the class struggle
II. Immediate effects on the Comintern’s analysis of fascism
4. Conclusion: the Transition to Monopoly Capitalism, and ‘Economic Crisis’
PART TWO: FASCISM AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE
1. The Political Crisis: Fascism and the Exceptional State
I. The problem and the Comintern
II. Thalheimer, Gramsci, Trotsky
III. The analytical framework: political crisis, class struggle and the
institutional system
2. The Growth of Fascism
PART THREE: FASCISM AND THE DOMINANT CLASSES
1. General Propositions
I. Contradictions between dominant classes and dominant fractions of classes
II. The crisis of hegemony
III. Modifications in hegemony
IV. The breaking of representational ties, and the political parties
V. The ideological crisis
VI. The offensive by big capital and the power bloc
a. On attack and defence
b. The steps in the process
VII. The fascist parties, fascism and the dominant classes and class fractions;
domination, hegemony and the ruling class: the relative autonomy of fascism
2. Germany
I. The economic contradictions
II. Big and medium capital: was fascism ‘economically retrograde’?
III. The crisis and the politico-ideological process
IV. The Nazi Party, Nazism and the dominant classes and class fractions;
hegemony and the ruling class
3. Italy
I. The economic contradictions
II. Big capital and landowners
III. The crisis and the politico-ideological process
IV. The fascist party, fascism and the dominant classes and class fractions;
hegemony and the ruling class
PART FOUR: FASCISM AND THE WORKING CLASS
1. General Propositions
I. Steps and characteristics of the ‘process of defeat’ and the working-class
defensive
II. Forms of the ideological crisis: the crisis of the revolutionary organizations
III. Social Democracy: class nature and function, policy, and the thesis of
‘social fascism’
IV. The Communist Parties and their policy: the turns of the Comintern and
the strategy of alliances
V. The fascist organizations, fascism and the working class; the condition of
the working class under fascism
2. Germany
I. The process of defeat, the defensive and the politico-ideological crisis
II. German social democracy
III. The German Communist Party (KPD)
IV. National Socialism and the working class
a. The Nazi organizations and the working class
b. The condition of the working class under Nazism; the questions of the
fascist trade unions
3. Italy
I. The process of defeat and the defensive
II. The politico-ideological crisis: Sorel and revolutionary syndicalism
III. Italian social democracy and the Maximalists
IV. The Italian Communist Party (PCI)
a. The Bordiga tendency and party policy
b. Gramsci and the workers’ councils: the Comintern, the trade-union
question and the problem of the ‘union-party’ relation
V. Fascism and the working class
a. Fascist organizations and the working class
b. The condition of the working class under fascism: the CGL and the
fascist trade unionists
Appendix: The USSR and the Comintern
PART FIVE: FASCISM AND THE PETTY BOURGEOISIE
1. The Class Nature of the Petty Bourgeoisie and Petty-bourgeois Ideology
2. General Propositions
I. Monopoly Capitalism and the petty bourgeoisie: its economic situation
II. The political crisis and the petty bourgeoisie as a social force; the fascist
parties and the interests of the petty bourgeoisie
III. The ideological crisis and ‘fascist ideology’: Imperialist ideology and
petty-bourgeois ideology
IV. The condition of the petty bourgeoisie under fascism
3. Germany
4. Italy
PART SIX: FASCISM AND THE COUNTRYSIDE
1. Classes in the Countryside
2. General Propositions
I. The economic situation in the countryside
II. The politico-ideological crisis
III. The fascist parties, fascism and the peasant classes: town and countryside
IV. Monopoly capitalism and the countryside: the condition of the peasant
classes under fascism
3. Germany
4. Italy
PART SEVEN: THE FASCIST STATE
1. The State Apparatus and the Ideological Apparatuses
I. Gramsci
II. Ideological apparatuses as State apparatuses
III. Branches of the repressive State apparatus; characteristics of the
ideological State apparatuses
2. The Exceptional State and the Fascist State: Type of State, Form of State and
Form of Regime
3. General Propositions on the Exceptional State
I. Forms of State Intervention
II. Modification in the relations between the repressive apparatus and the
ideological apparatuses
III. The displacement of the dominant branch or apparatus
IV. Modifications in the juridical system: regulation and limits
V. Significance of modifications in the electoral principle; on the single-party
system
VI. The extent of bureaucratization
VII. Centralism and internal contradictions: parallel networks and
transmission belts
4. General Propositions on the Fascist State as a Form of Exceptional Regime
I. The established system
II. The rise of fascism within the state apparatuses
5. Germany
I. The rise of fascism
II. The established system
6. Italy
I. The rise of fascism
II. The established system
Notes
Conclusion
Index
Foreword
Dylan Riley
FASCISM AND DICTATORSHIP IN CONTEXT
Why would a Greek Communist (Poulantzas had joined the KKE as a student in
Paris) write a long and difficult book about inter-war fascism in the heady days
of the late sixties?1 To answer this question requires placing the work at the
intersection of two major ‘external’ historical events, and Poulantzas’s own
intellectual development. Fascism and Dictatorship was written in the aftermath
of the 1967 military coup in Greece, and the student uprising of May 1968 in
Paris. While the coup prompted him to carefully specify a typology of
authoritarian regimes in reaction to what he saw as the erroneous but widely held
view on the Greek Left that the regime was fascist, the May events brought
home the urgency of an explicit treatment of revolutionary strategy.2
Fascism and Dictatorship, in addition to its connection to the conjuncture of
the late sixties, must also be understood in relationship to its author’s intellectual
biography. Following his legal training, Poulantzas’s initial project was to blend
existentialism with the philosophy of law. It was only in the later sixties that he
emerged as a theorist of the State, with the publication of Political Power and
Social Classes. In this text, Poulantzas dealt with fascism in the context of some
extremely interesting, but highly abstract, remarks on the concept of
‘totalitarianism’. However, its main thrust was to establish the ‘Fundamental
Characteristics of the Capitalist State’, which Poulantzas treated in an openly
functionalist way, arguing that all capitalist States had the dual task of preventing
the political organization of the dominated classes, and of organizing the
dominant class.3 In part because of his ambition to identify the common features
of all these States, Poulantzas neglected the problem of explaining their different
forms. In particular, he never posed the question of the conditions under which
capitalist societies might be ruled through dictatorship or democracy, to
paraphrase Barrington Moore. Fascism and Dictatorship attempted to address
part of this problem: to explain the conditions under which capitalist classes