Shout ‘fascist’ long enough and a tired shrug of surrender may be the inevitable response

Well, if nothing else, the Italian election is making up for the week of new tedium created by the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The victory of the Brothers of Italy/Fratelli d’Italia (FDI), with a stunning 26% of the vote, has made its leader Giorgia Meloni the presumed prime minister. She will be the first elected prime minister of Italy in 14 years, the rest having been technocrats appointed by the president in deals with the European Union to continue the interminable and largely fruitless process of restructuring the country’s sclerotic institutions and economy and bring them within range of Germany, France and the Benelux countries.

The most recent government included all the major parties — except the FDI, which at that time was polling 4%. As your correspondent noted a fortnight ago, the FDI was gaining legitimacy from their anti-political stand, as all other parties became tarred with failure.

That has now come out spectacularly well for them, gaining right-wing votes from both the Lega (the old Northern League), down from 17% to 9%, and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia down from 14% to 8%. The “anti-political” populist Five Star Movement (5SM) went from 32% to 15%. The Democratic Party (PD) vote was unchanged at 19%, with the Green-Left getting 4%, pro-EU liberals 10%, and odds and sods 8%. Turnout fell from 72% to 60%.

That puts the right vote at 43%, the left at 23%. Split the 5SM down the middle, and the right gets a majority, while the left barely makes it to 30%. It’s a diabolical result, and it gets worse when you look at voting by class. Workers (“operai” in the linked graph) gave FDI the largest vote by group, at 35%, and only 11% of them voted for the PD. This is essentially the same story as in the US and elsewhere — workers have decisively left the left. Their active preference for FDI over the rest of the right and the 5SM gives the lie to the notion that FDI’s vote is just shuffled-round right-wing votes. The shift is real (though also inertial — turnout was extra-low in worker and low-income groups).

Meloni’s impending victory was not much commented on before the election. Now it has got everyone doing their best homage to Catalonia and the Spanish Civil War. The fascists are at the gates! They’re in the city! Are they? Well, yes… but also no. The desire to simply label Meloni and the FDI’s complex mix of politics as fascist is a desire to have a clear-cut enemy, and revive scattered and defeated liberal and progressive confidence. But really it reveals a need for us to reexamine the history of the 20th century, the ready-made categories it has handed us, and the need to rethink them in a way that is pretty much tap-dancing through a minefield.

Meloni’s FDI is a successor to the Italian Social Movement (MSI), the party founded by fascists and others after World War II. The MSI rejected fascism’s notion of arbitrary state violence as an expression of historical will, and retained its base, the notion of organic corporatism — the anti-liberal idea that a society is a mix of defined groups, hitherto unified by tradition, now, in modernity, by state action.

Liberalism, in the corporatist account, leads to meaningless and anomie. Only through group membership, and that group’s membership of the nation, does the individual’s life have meaning. Many of the actual fascists went into various illegal and shadowy groups, and would erupt in “black hand” political violence in the 1970s, probably aided by elements of the Italian state as part of a “strategy of tension” (their worst atrocities — such as the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing — are now often falsely remembered as Red Brigade acts).

The MSI leadership was precise, rational, democratic, led by the efficient Gianfranco Fini, and its membership was nuttier than an almond panettone, stuffed full of occultists and reactionaries. They followed the philosophies of Julius Evola and the “traditionalist” René Guénon who believed modernity would eventually come to a crisis. Until then, Evola counselled, “ride the tiger” and be ready to take power when the tiger, er, comes apart. Guénon’s anti-modern philosophy in 1945’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times was highly influential — and highly anti-Semitic.

You can see this stuff bubbling up in Meloni’s talk, captured on YouTube, about consumerism, slaves and the mastery of global financial speculators. You could call it the “anti-capitalism of fools”, I guess, drawing on shadowy notions of conspiracy to explain a global process. But it’s a global process that has had its champions and agents, and in a stagnant country like Italy, which EU trans-nationalism has helped make a backwater, it has a great deal of appeal now that every other explanation or approach has been exhausted.

So if Meloni’s party suspends democracy, throws thousands in prison and sends out death squads, one will agree that fascism has returned. Until then, it is best seen as a form of neo-reaction, which has had strong appeal on a range of economic, cultural and political grounds.

But here’s the real difficulty. The generalisation of the notion of “fascism” has been a barrier to our thinking about its continuities, and its place in the political spectrum. Mussolini’s fascism was seen, at the time, as simply a violent but acceptable answer to the problems of organising post-imperial Europe. Beneath its violent swagger was the imposition of a technocracy to fast-forward the national integration that the UK and France had achieved with capitalism and a resultant state. People of right and left queued up to praise Mussolini as he got the country working, built new cities (and good God, I’m sorry, but his train stations are fantastic), drained malarial swamps, etc.

That history is altered in memory because in 1938 he conformed fascism to Hitler’s Nazism, a movement genuinely outside the left-right political dialogue. Anti-Semitic laws were introduced in a country whose fascist party had been full of Jews, and whose navy trained hundreds of “revisionist Zionist” armed squads in the organisation that is the precursor of Likud. When Mussolini allied with Hitler in WWII, it was done. Nazism, with its genocidal exterminism, became what fascism was.

This is not to soften the notion of what Italian fascism was, but to point out how much of it survives elsewhere. Firstly, there were more violent things than fascism, and the historical memory is used to cover that up. For a long time, the left used that to avoid facing the violence of Stalinism and Leninist Bolshevism. Now the liberal right uses it to obscure what everyone understood at the time: that the empires of Britain, France and other European powers enacted violence and racism on a world scale, under the cover of parliamentary democracy at home, such as to make Italian fascism look like a piker.

Violent repression in Algeria, the Bengal famine of 1943, the partition of India-Pakistan, the concentration camps of British Kenya — all of these dwarf anything Mussolini’s fascism did (save for its own imperial adventures in Africa) until joining the Axis powers. But until the past decade or so, this was all obscured under the memory of World War II and the identification of fascism with the Axis powers. But if you wonder why, in the 1930s, people were unable to get as morally exercised about fascism — even when they went to fight it — as we do now, it’s because they were in a world where it was one violent player among many.

What about now? Well, using the term “fascism” for mere state authoritarianism calls up the ’60s/’70s style of Marcuse and Deleuze/Guattari, for whom democracy itself is fascism, and so too, eventually, is the happy family, stable subjectivity, etc. But at the same time, there are elements in modern societies which need to be named as on the edge of fascistic, in their use of aestheticised violence and state power, combined with corporatism.

Israel is the closest regime to being fascist today, the revisionist-fascist heritage coming out in its long occupation, its Jewish-state loyalty oaths, the meted-out cruelty of its apartheid internal pass system, the protected vigilantism of settlers, the steady demolition of Palestinian neighbourhoods under spurious ownership laws, and the stylishness of the IDF in their cool black uniforms as, for the world’s cameras, they beat the shit out of Arab kids in rags.

But look also at something like the Western Australian McGowan government. While the Andrews government can be described as merely “corporate authoritarian”, the McGowan government — with its Black kids in adult prisons, its new and distinctive indefinite detention laws aimed at defendants with a series of minor convictions in crimes that have a high Black perpetrator rate — is genuinely on the outer edge of fascistic, and one needs the word to be applicable to such, in order to make clear the horrors of what is going on. Ditto with the carceral regimes of the US.

Beyond that, you have to look at where the violence really lies. Nothing is really going to equal the toll of death and misery of decades of the global neoliberal “Washington consensus” in its various forms, still continuing today. Yes, not the radical evil of Nazism or Stalinism, just the quiet everyday destruction of the possibility of healthcare, education and development decade upon decade in vast areas of the global South.

Which brings us to an interesting point in the hail of horror directed at Meloni and her victory. The new argument seems to be that because she is both noxious and cultish, we must agree that any discussion of global consumerism and financialisation is anti-Semitic, that any notion of borders and the social centrality of the family is fascist. This is not anti-fascism. This is the progressivism of elite sections of the knowledge class making its peace with neoliberalism and going into an alliance, against all those who want an anti-globalism the left has been unwilling to provide.

That will end in predictable and obvious disaster. Shouting “fascism” at everything people want to protect, will simply, eventually have them shrug their shoulders and say “OK, I’m a fascist — so what?” It will thus restore the broken continuity with fascism as it was, and the movement will become mass again. Fascinating fascism, the eternal return of the repressed, a new violent history, blonde but with the brown roots showing.

Is history repeating itself in Europe, indeed worldwide? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.