A-Infos (en) NZ, AWSM: On Fascism and the Three Way Fight by Paul Bowman (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

[Ed. note: The article comes from a much larger set of essays attempting to give 
some analysis and definition to modern fascism, the broader reactionary currents 
that fascism often emerges from-but can break from, too-and what kinds of 
thinking our side needs to develop a working practice of countering fascism. On 
this last bit, Bowman starts with a comradely review of the three way fight 
concept of revolutionary antifascism and builds on this with his own experiences, 
analysis, and estimates. ---- Bowman came of age in the mid-80s and was a 
founding member of Leeds Anti-Fascist Action in 1986, remaining active within it 
until its self-dissolution in 2004 (folding into the 635 Group successor). Over 
that period Leeds AFA was involved in removing the fascist presence from the city 
center and at the Leeds United FC football ground, as well as founding the AFA 
Northern Network, which later became the format for the AFA National Network. 
Aside from militant anti-fascism he was also involved in groups such as the Class 
War Federation (UK) and Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland) and politically 
identifies as an anarchist of the especifista tendency.]
----------------
I want to thank Three Way Fight for reaching out to me to solicit this article. 
All the usual disclaimers about whatever you find disagreeable or wrong about it 
is my fault alone, and not the editors of this blog. I also want to start by 
saying I don't believe that theory is either right or wrong in any absolute 
sense, independent of what practical use it is to us in guiding our practice. So 
I don't think that there is an objectively "correct" definition of fascism, 
simply more or less useful ones.

Because this article is extracted from a chapter of a much longer draft 
work[i]I'm going to start, however jarringly, with a brief list of points that 
summarise the ideas or themes of the longer text in the hopes that this will make 
what follows less puzzling than it might otherwise be. In no particular order 
then, the summary points of the broader theoretical framework of "Ideology and 
Practice" are as follows:

1. A social materialist outlook which rejects idealism and the conceit that 
ideologies can be separated from practices and social situation-a conceit that 
follows the template of capitalist separation of mental and physical labour.

2. Methodological collectivism-which is not the symmetrical inversion of 
methodological individualism, as collectives are composed of individuals-which 
holds that the object of study is the dynamics of collectivities. This has 
certain implications, such as the rejection of psychologising fascism, amongst 
other things.

3. A three-dimensional distinction of collective processes and shared "commons" 
into ideological, political, and cultural categories. And that much of what is 
commonly called "politics" is in fact ideology and vice versa. (This is without a 
doubt the most contentious bit, because it means challenging the generally 
accepted meaning of common terms, which as a rule is to be avoided like the 
plague, but sometimes needs must).

4. A historical materialist appreciation of the upside down view of the dominant 
superstructural or "ideological classes," that the ideas and actions of the 
political, legal, religious, police, military, and philosophical/academical 
leaders and institutions are the main agents of social change-the superstructure 
as "protagonist" of history. The contrary historical materialist view being that 
the real origins of social change are within the so-called "base" of society, 
specifically the class struggle.

5. The so-called "political" field of bourgeois democratic societies can be 
categorised into far left, centre left, centre right, and far right. And that 
logically these four categories all mutually rely on a working definition of 
centrism as an actual social process, rather than a casual slur.

6. A fundamental distinction between power and counterpower as being not only 
quantitatively but qualitatively different. The liberal concept of "civil 
society" made up of organisations that are neither an extension of the 
superstructure and bourgeois class rule, nor organs of counterpower, is a delusion.

7. A consequent difference in strategic orientation between "protagonistic" and 
"antagonistic" models of social change, left and right. Centrists being 
protagonistic more or less by definition and far left and right divided between 
protagonistic, antagonistic, and confusionist tendencies.

8. That the "antagonistic" strategy of counterpower is not exclusive to 
anarchists or the revolutionary left in general, but can be adopted even by 
radical reformists. In other words, the "antagonist left" and "revolutionary 
left" are not synonyms because there are ideologically self-identifying 
revolutionary leftists who are protagonistic or confusionist in strategic 
orientation, and there are reformists who are antagonistic in their strategy.

9. That militant anti-fascism is a strategy of counterpower and thus an element 
of the antagonistic left, even if not all participants are necessarily 
revolutionary leftists.

10. That fascism is a combination of far right ideology with an insurgent 
politics of counterpower. Not all far right movements are necessarily fascist. A 
distinction that cannot be made or acted on without properly distinguishing 
ideology from politics.

That final point is the main job of this article to outline and support as best 
possible. Again, my apologies for front-loading the article with a litany of 
abstractions, but hopefully it will illuminate some of what follows.

Three-way fight concept as opposed to the two-way perspective
The[Popular Front]line, albeit a U-turn from the disastrous Third Period 
ideology, still persist[ed]in framing fascists as a simple tool or instrument of 
the bourgeoisie, with no autonomy of their own. In other words, this was also a 
two-way fight perspective. Significantly, although dressed up in economistic 
language - the necessity of siding with the "good capitalists" of the 
manufacturing and "progressive" national bourgeoisie, and their liberal middle 
class supporters, against the "bad" finance capitalists - effectively aligned 
Popular Front anti-fascism along the same line as liberal "subjectivist" 
anti-fascism.
As this article will be published on the Three Way Fight blog, I'm going to take 
familiarity with the concept (as outlined in the "About" statement here and the 
associated basic texts list) as a given. The aspect of the three-way concept I 
want to focus on is that the struggle between anti-fascists and fascists and the 
state cannot be conceived as a two way fight, on a political (as opposed to 
ideological) level. This needs a little unpacking.

Schematically speaking, liberal anti-fascism sees the struggle against fascism as 
a two-way fight between the defenders of liberal democracy and the fascists and 
far-right forces that would overthrow it. The reluctance of the police and other 
state forces to properly repress the enemies of democracy may be seen as a 
problem (even denounced as "fascist pigs" in the more radlib variants), but 
essentially the struggle is seen as between the partisans of liberal, 
anti-racist, egalitarian democracy, against the forces ranged against it. In 
other words, the struggle is seen primarily as an ideologically motivated one, in 
which class conflict and capitalist crisis play no agential role. This is the 
liberal two-way fight perspective.

So far, so orthodox, from a class-conscious leftist perspective. The second 
paragraph here really spells out the heterodoxy of the three-way fight concept 
compared to an orthodox Marxist perspective. Elsewhere[ii]I related the story of 
the disastrous Third Period where the consensus of the Communist parties 
following the Comintern line was that fascism was simply a violent adjunct or 
auxiliary to the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. That 
is, the problem or challenge of fascism was subsumed under the two-way fight of 
the class struggle, as seen through the orthodox Marxist lens. If the Third 
Period was on the threshold of a new revolutionary period, then all defenders of 
capitalism - i.e. non-Communists - were equally "fascist," and those claiming to 
do so in the name of the workers, i.e. the hated Social Democrats, were the 
biggest threat of all, before even the Nazis.

After the Nazis came to power and liquidated the German Marxist movement, the 
Comintern belatedly realised the need to make a drastic U-turn and drop all the 
"social fascist" BS. The new line, in preparation for coming Popular Front 
policy, was expressed by the then Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov in the 
following formulation that "Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the 
most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of 
finance capital." Which is often since referred to as the "Dimitrov line."

However, the new line, albeit a U-turn from the disastrous Third Period ideology, 
still persists in framing fascists as a simple tool or instrument of the 
bourgeoisie, with no autonomy of their own. In other words, this was also a 
two-way fight perspective. Significantly, although dressed up in economistic 
language - the necessity of siding with the "good capitalists" of the 
manufacturing and "progressive" national bourgeoisie, and their liberal middle 
class supporters, against the "bad" finance capitalists - effectively aligned 
Popular Front anti-fascism along the same line as liberal "subjectivist" 
anti-fascism. In the post-war period, this aspect of popular frontism has been 
criticised at times by the radical left as reformist and opportunist. But these 
are functionalist or even ad hominem arguments, compared to recognising the 
structural effect of viewing a three-way fight through two-way fight blinkers.

A perspective that constrains you to choosing one side as the "main enemy" and 
allying with the other as the "lesser evil."

The failure of the economistic dogmatic doctrine of official Marxism in 1930s 
Germany led some thinkers, particularly individuals associated with the Frankfurt 
School, like Wilhelm Reich or Erich Fromm, to retry an analysis of Nazism and 
fascism by switching to a psychoanalytic framework instead. But in many ways this 
was a case of jumping from the frying pan into the fire, metaphorically speaking, 
as psychoanalysis was no less of a totalising discourse than the economic 
determinism of Comintern doctrine. Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism 
is recognised as a classic of the genre. But it has to be said that despite its 
seminal role in forming the problematic of "how did the masses come to turn to 
their own repression," his proposed answer boils down to sexual repression, which 
is frankly absurd. Admittedly not as dementedly self-annihilating as the KPD's 
"Nach Hitler, uns!" perspective. But that's a very low bar. Not to mention 
Reich's post-war spiral into orgone accumulators and other such woo nonsense. 
Fromm's more existential Escape from Freedom has stood the test of time better, 
but is ultimately no more convincing as an analysis of the causes of the rise to 
power of Nazism in Germany than Reich's sexual repression thesis.

If we can now appreciate the relative novelty of the three-way fight perspective, 
that doesn't mean that the concept in itself presents a finished analysis. It is 
a political starting point that demands the elaboration of a worked out 
strategic, ideological, and theoretical analysis. So I'm going to propose an 
analytical framework in that general orientation.

Towards a multi-dimensional analysis of fascism
The conservative believes that the traditional order is under threat from 
subversion and "society must be defended." The fascist believes that the 
conservative is too timid to face the truth that there's nothing left worth 
defending and "society" can only be re-established by violent insurrection.
My proposed model is a "portable" definition[iii], in that we don't restrict 
fascism to a historical phenomenon specific to the 1920-1940 period. The model 
recognises the significantly protean nature of fascism in its ideological 
flexibility in terms of perceived main internal enemy, which has historically 
ranged from anti-communist, anti-Jewish, anti-Black, anti-Islam, you name it, 
conspiracies of enemies & "traitors."

The first question of any multi-dimensional model is how many dimensions? 
Clearly, in order to properly reflect the distinction between ideology and 
politics, a minimum of two dimensions is required. But I propose that it is 
impossible to grasp the specificity of fascist energies without including a 
cultural dimension. "Culture" is a hopelessly ill-defined word and my attempts to 
give it a more specific meaning here (the collective commons of 
socially-constructed shared hedonic practices-music, food, fashion, sex, sports, 
dancing, gaming, anything a subculture can be defined by) are obviously arbitrary.

Let's start with the big one. Griffin and liberal anti-fascism may be erring in 
making this the sole dimension, but there's no denying that it's a major one.

Dimension 1 - Ideological
- Far right/anti-centrist/anti-populist

Despite occasional bad faith attempts to pose as being "neither left or right," 
fascism is both determinedly outside and against the political centre ground and 
very much to the right - they are violently opposed not only to socialism, but 
also to liberalism and democracy. But if all fascists are far right, it doesn't 
necessarily mean that all devotees of far right ideologies are fascists. Far 
right is a relative ideological position defined against the centre ground. When 
politicians try to drag the Overton window towards a far-right position using 
conventional electoral means, they are far-right but not fascist. Fascists don't 
want even a racially exclusive democracy, but race war and dictatorship - the 
revolutionary overthrow of the existing electoral representative system. For 
similar reasons, even though fascists often try to pass themselves off as 
right-populists for tactical reasons, they distrust and despise "mere populists" 
as simple opportunists and tail-enders without any real beliefs. As 
counter-intuitive as it may appear, given the contradictory mess that is fascist 
ideology, they sincerely believe in the absolute necessity of people having 
beliefs strong enough to kill and die for.

- Redemptive ultranationalism

Fascists believe in the nation, but that the nation is currently "fallen" and 
corrupt and needs a violent, revolutionary rebirth, to remake the social. This is 
Griffin's palingenesis. The difference between mere patriotism or "ordinary" 
nationalism and ultranationalism is qualitative as well as quantitative.

 It is the fervent belief in the utopian possibilities for a reborn nation as an 
ideal society. The need for violent redemption is tied intimately to a narrative 
of national humiliation. "Death to the traitors!" is the rallying cry. There is a 
deep emotional need for revenge, not just on chosen scapegoats, but for the 
current social order itself. We have to see the difference between the 
revolutionary revenge fantasies of the fascist and the conservative's fear of 
change. The conservative believes that the traditional order is under threat from 
subversion and "society must be defended." The fascist believes that the 
conservative is too timid to face the truth that there's nothing left worth 
defending and "society" can only be re-established by violent insurrection.

- "This is what they took from you"-Imagined bereavement for a past solidarity 
that never was

The idea of a lost golden age of past social solidarity (whether "white" or 
"national" or other exclusionary far right identitarian category) haunts the 
present day resentment of the far right. The real relative absence of social 
solidarity in existing capitalist society is projected backwards into nostalgia 
for a lost age of cross-class "white" (or other) solidarity. A Kübler-Ross style 
"stages of grief" of denial, anger, bargaining, despair is the simultaneously 
experienced turmoil of fascism's emotional monologue. The grand irony being, of 
course, that this mythical age of cross-class solidarity between bosses and 
workers on the grounds of shared "whiteness," never really existed. As any 
knowledge of actual class history will show.

There is a particular danger here from radical liberal responses to this fascist 
mourning for a past white solidarity that never was, which is to reinforce that 
fantasy by, effectively, saying that that imagined past did in fact really exist. 
Here, strategically, the line must be drawn between militant, class-conscious 
anti-fascism and the liberal and radical liberal deformations.

The only sustainable counter to the fantasy of a lost racial or national 
solidarity that never was, is to build a real class solidarity in the present. 
Even militant anti-fascism can never be the whole answer to the threat of 
fascism. Ultimately the positive side of anti-fascist counterpower is to build 
effective models of functioning class solidarity here in the real world.

- Conspiratorial by instinct and ideological necessity-"Who is ‘they'?"

If both liberals and the left mainly persist in seeing the fascist vs 
anti-fascist struggle as a two-way fight, fascists take the two-way fight 
perspective to extremes. To do this they rely on conspiratorial narratives of how 
all the apparently mutually hostile forces ranged against them, from liberals, 
the left, the state, the oligarchs, the migrant poor, etc., are all part of a 
united conspiracy against them, the "true people." These conspiracies don't have 
to make any logical sense; they just need to support the main narrative of a two 
way fight in which they, the fascists, are the forces of good, and all the others 
are pawns of the darkness. Similarly social conflicts do not arise from 
"structural" causes (like class conflict) because "structural" doctrines are part 
of the conspiracy.

Dimension 2 - Political

- Politically insurgent

In this model this political character of fascism as a "revolutionary" force or 
following the strategy of counterpower - or political "antagonism" in the 
parlance here - is the real differentia specifica that separates fascists proper 
from mere adherents of far right ideological beliefs. It doesn't just need to 
dream like a duck, it needs to quack like a duck, walk like a duck, swim like a 
duck, and generally make aggressively duck-like actions to be a duck. Fascist is, 
as fascist does. "By their deeds shall you know them." In a collapsing social 
order (whether that collapse is institutionally real or politically subjective), 
the fascist ability to project force where the state is no longer able to (or 
willing to, from a fascist perspective) is the power to transform a "corrupt" 
society into a new fascist utopia. At the risk of sounding arch or wantonly 
Deleuzian, it is the strategy of violent reterritorialisation of the terrain of 
reproduction and civil society that marks out fascism from the far right or populism.

- Führerprinzip (ultra-factionalism)

Again following the political typology sketched out in the summary points above, 
fascist politics compensates for the contradictory and tendentially incoherent 
character of their conspiracy-addled ideologies by ultra-factional political 
practices. Leadership and loyalty to leaders is a necessity for fascist 
group-formation at all levels from smallest to highest. US fascist Louis Beam may 
have popularised the concept of "leaderless resistance" amongst the American far 
right in his essay of the same name.

 But in my definition, politics is the process of forming collective bodies 
capable of exercising collective agency, and from that specific perspective, 
isolated cells and lone wolf terror attacks, while generally ideologically 
inspired, are functionally apolitical. We'll come back to this in the discussion 
on incels below. At a movement level, the leadership principle produces the 
elevation of a maximum leader, demanding ultimate personal loyalty from every 
member and cast in the role of messianic saviour of the nation.

Two things must be specified about this characteristic. First, it is not 
necessarily specific to fascists alone. Most right-wing populist movements also 
rely on a charismatic saviour/leader figure. Bolsonaro, Trump, Orbán (Modi, not 
so much) are all charismatic leaders in the right-populist mode, without so far 
really empowering the fascist fraction of their fanbase. Second, within fascism 
proper the leadership principle is often in tension or even conflict with the 
lust for revolutionary counterpower amongst the acolytes. In the late 80s I once 
had a member of the "Political Soldier" wing of the NF, a self-declared 
"Strasserite," declare to us in all seriousness that we couldn't accuse him of 
being a Hitler fanboy "...because Hitler was a reactionary who sold out the 
movement." Which, within his ideological framework actually made sense (didn't 
stop us laughing at him, though). The leadership principle is a pragmatic 
necessity for a fascist mass movement, but that doesn't mean that fascists are 
always happy with their current incumbent Führer, to say the least. And it 
doesn't mean that the leadership will not sell out the followers whose muscle 
brought them to the negotiating table when it's time to cut a deal with the 
captains of industry and the armed forces of the permanent state, as the 
Brownshirts found out to their peril.

Dimension 3 - Cultural

- Cultural machismo and misogyny

Machismo is the cultural glue that binds all the elements of the other dimensions 
of fascism together. It's the cultural chauvinist part of ultranationalism. The 
willingness to kill, indifference to mass death of non-nationals, is not just an 
ideological value but also a matter of pride and emotional pleasure. The "death 
cult" aspect lurks within the cultural-hedonic darkness of fascism. Speaking 
metaphorically, if the toxins in toxic masculinity could be extracted as an 
essential oil, it would be the engine fuel of the fascist war machine. It goes 
without saying that this all presupposes the general rightist view of masculine 
and feminine roles as natural, biologically rooted binaries and essentially unequal.

However, if cultural machismo was as much part and parcel of fascism a century 
ago as it is today, there have been substantial changes in recent years. Sexism 
and misogyny used to be combined within the unitary body, behaviour, and speech 
of an identified individual in the company of their peers. Now the disaggregating 
effect of online virtual spaces have allowed misogyny to strike out on its own, 
find its own line of flight and end up dispensing with many of the macho stances 
that real-world performative masculinity imposed. Now the misanthropic aspect 
("sympathy is for the weak") of machismo is separated from the misogynistic 
("sympathy is for p--s"). Incel beta male culture is emblematic of the cultural 
forms that could not have existed prior to the new virtual terrains opened by the 
internet.

- The aestheticization of politics[sic]

Ever since Walter Benjamin declared, in the epilogue of his 1936 essay "The Work 
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," that "The logical result of 
Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life," the concept of 
fascism as somehow the "aestheticization of politics" has entered the discourse. 
The first paragraph of Benjamin's epilogue is worth quoting in full:

"The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of 
masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the 
newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which 
the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses 
not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a 
right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression 
while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of 
aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with 
its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of 
an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values."[iv]

In the rest of the (brief) text of the epilogue, Benjamin goes on to quote 
Marinetti's manifesto enthusing over the aesthetics of war and concludes that war 
and destruction is the inevitable perverse result of the aestheticization in the 
vein of Luxemburg's "socialism or barbarism." This was a very common perspective 
in the 1930s for fairly obvious reasons. Today the age of colonial empires is 
over. The failed US invasions of Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq mean that white 
supremacists no longer dream of new colonial empires.

If the original context of Benjamin's concept no longer plays, its evocative 
resonances are still with us. Fascism does have a culture of victimisation, that 
narrative of national humiliation mentioned above under the heading of redemptive 
ultranationalism, which is founded in a specifically identitarian take on "We are 
nothing and yet we should be everything." We need to pare Benjamin's aesthetic 
dimension from the "high culture" notions of art that haunt the intellectual 
milieu of his time and the later Frankfurt School, and relocate it solidly in 
popular shared pleasures (hedonics), like music.

Fascism loves memes and music. Not in the literal sense of specific musical 
genres, be it Wagner, Skrewdriver, Neofolk, Scandi-death metal or whatever. But 
because music represents the special power of aesthetics of being able to invoke 
emotions directly, especially amongst a mass audience. Viral memes can do 
likewise. And so fascism can use these cultural mediums to inspire and 
communicate the emotions of fascist desires, hatreds, rages, and ecstatic visions 
directly. Directly, that is, in a way that is obviously influenced by and 
channelling ideological values, but not intermediated by them.

Summing up
As I said at the outset, this article is a shortened extract from a longer text, 
"Fascism and the Three-Way Fight,"[v]which is a chapter in an unfinished 
book-length text "Ideology and Practice." In the original text I preface the 
proposed model above with an engagement with writers from the 3WF perspective, 
including Don Hamerquist, J. Sakai, and Matthew Lyons, before presenting my own 
alternative framework. For brevity, I've omitted that critical engagement here, 
so for anyone further interested in those critiques I'll redirect you there.

I discussed above the limitations of liberal anti-fascists' "two-way fight" 
perspective of the struggle as one in defence of democracy. But for those of us 
coming from a radical left perspective, we shouldn't assume that all of the 
obstacles are coming from the liberal side of the fence. The radical left has its 
own blindspots and long-lasting misapprehensions. As I've argued, in my view one 
of the most damaging of these is the habit of confusing the ideological with the 
political. The old sayings "my enemy's enemy is my friend" and "politics makes 
strange bedfellows" mean that at a basic level we understand that politics can 
cut crossways to ideology, usually in damaging ways. But leftist discourse tends 
to conflate the two dynamics, for contingent reasons of our own history. We 
understand why liberals want to view fascism one-sidedly from a purely 
ideological viewpoint, because their political solution and only tactic, 
ultimately, is to call yet again for votes for a bankrupt Democratic zombie 
neoliberalism. As militant anti-fascists we need to distinguish between the 
hatefulness of far right ideologies and fascist politics of violent street 
counterpower. In the struggle for the hearts and minds of the working class, the 
legitimacy of our direct action tactics is founded on the old maxim that "he who 
lives by the sword, shall die by the sword." And for that we need to be able to 
clearly discriminate between the fascists and the mere haters in a way that can 
be witnessed and understood by all.

[i]https://eidgenossen.medium.com/ideology-and-practice-43a7e512f0f7

[ii]https://eidgenossen.medium.com/a-history-of-confusion-part-2-marxism-and-ideology-b49796cb8da0

[iii]I have taken the term "a portable definition of fascism" from an essay by 
Geoff Eley, "What is Fascism and Where does it Come From?", published in History 
Workshop Journal, Issue 91, doi:10.1093/hwj/dbab003, and at the time of writing, 
available online at https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/91/1/1/6329186. Although 
the term appears earlier in the introductory chapter "Introduction: A Portable 
Concept of Fascism" by Julia Adeney Thomas, in the 2020 book "Visualizing 
Fascism: The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right", 
doi:10.1215/9781478004387, a collection of essays edited by both herself and Eley.

[iv]https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

[v]https://eidgenossen.medium.com/fascism-and-the-three-way-fight-4a05b87a4eec
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