The image is from a Swedish (female) fascist.
We have written this text for several reasons. It is in one way a guide to the analysis of fascism, meant for beginner activists to give them a clearer theoretic grounding. In another way it is an input in the left’s discussion of fascism. It is meant as a text to mobilize to the international women’s day demonstration in Lund March 6 (https://www.facebook.com/events/1687097554839088/) . Finally we hope that we will be to convince those who are positively inclined, but not necessarily radicals, feminists, and socialists of the need of an extraparliamentary movement and the historic necessity of this movement to unite socialism, feminism and antiracism in a well defined theory and practice. In this English translation we realize that some references to individuals, groups or discussions might be difficult to understand for someone not in our context. We have tried to add clarifying remarks where possible.
Fascism is a movement face with many masks, though behind these masks one always finds the same face. Fascists have been both anti-clerical and true believers, they have been both white Europeans and non-Europeans and they have had a variety of contradictory opinions and positions. Still, there are certain elements that always surface. In this text we describe this and at the same time try to develop further the left’s discussion on the nature of fascism. We will show why feminists and antifascists must fight for a classless society and for liberation from racism and sexism.
Fascism is a word or concept used to describe a certain political tendency, including Nazis, etnopluralists, Pegida, the Sweden Democrats ect. All attempts to do away with fascism as an analytical concept and either extend it to describe all authoritarian tendencies in society (such as police violence at demonstrations), or to lay down the ideological differences between f.ex. fascism and national socialism makes the concept meaningless and blurs out the analytical focus.
Generally, we use the traditional marxist understanding of fascism as an expression for the most backward and reactionary strata of the bourgeoisie which rises through popular mobilization across different segments of society. Fascism is always bourgeois and anti socialist, racist and misogynist at it’s core.
Beyond psychology: what is fascism?
Fascism is based on the nation, whether it is an existing or non-existing entity. Certain fascists espouse the idea of Europe (Pegida), others a united Nordic Republic (the Nordic Resistance Movement) or a region like Scania (the now defunct Fria Nationalister Skåne). At times these ideas create conflicts within fascist organizations, yet often fascist groups themselves go beyond these surface phenomena. This demonstrates the value in not trying to understand fascism as what it’s advocates would describe it as: we will not find the core truth about what fascism is through Jimmy Åkesson’s (leader of the Sweden Democrats) speeches about Sweden, or podcasts by Magnus Söderman (a fascist ideologue) about national socialist ideology though these both can be relevant at times, as seen in our quotes later in the text. Our movement has a faulty tendency to “psychologize” fascism where we instead should create a sociological analysis of it and ask the questions: what is fascism, and what is fascism in accordance with it’s social being forced into doing and being? What individual fascists themselves think about the matter is less relevant, since they are controlled by social structures beyond their control. The tendency to “psychologize” fascism most likely derives from the practice of antifascist research work, where success in part depends on knowing and understanding the ideological and psychological motives of individual fascists. A gender analysis of fascism is a necessary part in understanding fascism structurally, and should act as a guiding force in the practice of antifascism. Without a gender analyses, the understanding of fascism is doomed to be faulty.
The gendered nation state
The nation is always gendered, it is a virgin or a mother. In Sweden, the nation is “Moder Svea” (Mother Sweden). This symbolic woman needs the protection of her men, from other men that threaten to symbolically rape her. In nationalist thought this is connected with war (all nationalism is not fascism, but fascism grows out of nationalism): rape is a weapon to demoralize and insult the enemy men.
The text is a fascist tweet saying: “To all you who support #inteerkvinna: There is no one who would want to defend you from being raped. You deserve it.” The hashtag #inteerkvinna (which translates to “#notyourwoman”) was an antifascist and feminist social media reaction to antimigrant attacks in Stockholm where fascist assailants claimed to be protecting Swedish woman from rape and sexual harassment(by foreigners).
Here, rape isn’t really about women, and it is especially not about sexual pleasure: it is about men dominating other men. Woman are as in all sexist thought only instruments to be used in relationships between men. In fascism’s case it is the threat of rape by a foreign power, above all the immigrant, that is a further development on this train of thought. This type of thinking is pronounced in the quote from twitter above, but is thus more clarified by the quote below, from the fascist forum motgift.nu.
“But there is something darker behind this behaviour. Something as elemantary as biology. Since women, biologically, are the more valuable sex they won’t be killed in the same extent. So if one wants to end up as high up in the conqueror’s hierarchy as possible and enjoy their security, one should prove oneself loyal from the start. What #inteerkvinna expresses is nothing other than the desire to be conquered, even if they do not likely realize this themselves. No one loves a weak man, not even the weak man himself. Unpleasant to speak of? Yes. But to ignore the fact will make it even more unpleasant in the end.Don’t take the woman for their word, but for their actions. None of them live in multicultural areas, or have especially many immigrant acquaintances I assume. They want a safe, Swedish and white existence, they know it and so do we. When men act like men, than women will start acting like women.” From “When Father Government had a sex-change“
The quote from motgift.nu illustrates the point well. Here, the position of women is biologically pre-determined in that they strive to be in the good graces of the “conquerors” who take on the role of an enemy army. Sexism isn’t, as many routinely think, a prejudice that can be unlearned through education. Sexism is the ascription of characteristics to people based on their gender, e.g. such as in the quote above in which women are supposed to be more caring. Fascists always amplify these preexisting societal tendencies and clarify them. For fascists biology is central and all actions that go against (their view of) it are based on “brain washing”. Any agency in feminist resistance to fascism is written off, as in quotes above in their hatred of the feminist and antifascist #inteerkvinna hashtag.
In the quote we find a very specific view of masculinities. These thoughts are developed even further by other fascists:
“Despite repeated abuse against our women and children the men of Europe are embarassingly quiet and idle. We can’t accept this any more. In older western litterature (as well as in certain modern literature and film) the basic theme is simple and traditional. The men that finally cross the line do it because their women and children – their famelies- are threatened. Often this is the great mistake of the villain, to attack someone’s wife. Just read Lönn’s Der Wehrwolf or von Kleist’s Kohlhaas or watch Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. The men put up with a lot for their own sake, but when their families were threatened the shit hit the fan. This of course was back in the day when the man was the provider and protecter. This is no longer a given, neither for men nor for women since this tradional order of things has come inte question and under ridicule and in other ways been put aside.” – Magnus Söderman “Manna Upp och Beskydda Våra Kvinnor för Bövelen”(translation: “Man up and defend our women for god’s sake”)
Here we see that men too are brainwashed if they are not willing to live up to fascist ideals. For fascism masculinity entails a type of parodic Hollywood demeanor, a fantasy which is unattainable for a regular person. It is also definitely a jail for men. Fascists also always seem to falsify history: the society they yearn for is a product of capitalist relations after 1880 where the nuclear family becomes the main node in societal organization. Earlier the working class lived in extended family situations. The ways in which femininity and masculinity have been done has varied greatly throughout the millennia and between geographies.
The nuclear family, hatred towards women and the mass psychology of fascism
The nuclear family is a central part of fascism. It is a microcosm of the state. The man – the patriarch – protects the women he owns and controls. Se for example the Sweden Democrats on the family:
“The family with it’s caring, culture-inducing and pedagogical (fostrande) role is society’s most important and most basic community. Strong and safe families are a necessary condition for harmonic societal conditions. The role of politics is to support families without intruding on their freedom of action but also to create strong supportive structures and go to defend the children in the moments when the parents fail in their responsibility or when the family for some reason falls apart (sverigedemokraterna.se)
Please note that SD overall are more careful than what other fascists are, just like their general role and relation to the fascist ideology: thinned out and vague but still directly retrieved from fascism.
The supposed will of fascists to “defend” women against abuse is only the will for themselves to control these women. It is related to the fact that women in nationalist thinking are meant to do one thing: give birth to more children. Fascists in general are obsessed with fertility statistics and mean that the “white race” will die out because migrants give birth to more children than Swedes/Germans/European/etc. This makes fascists push women to become child-bearers, to fight abortion rights and control their entire lives:
“Discourage women in general to strive for full time careers. This will involve certain sexist and discriminating policies but should increase the fertility rate by up to 0,1-0,2points.” (Anders Behring Breivik, A European Declaration of Independence)
This hatred toward women and at the same time the fantasy of protecting them creates a strange schizophrenia in fascism which above all has been raised by Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. When the #inteerkvinna” hashtag appeared the hashtag was spammed by extremely misogynous comments from the same people who claim to protect women. The hatred which women in the public have been put through by Sweden Democratic online warriors, such as the 40-year old from Staffanstorp who was recently convicted by Lunds municipal court (http://www.skd.se/2015/12/10/fangelse-for-sex-sms-till-elva-rikspolitiker/), is no coincidence. Fascism is antifeminist and completely misogynous. It is not strange that most fascists, both in the clear-cut Nazi groups but also in the Sweden Democrats, are men and that women are the ones who are organised and vote for these groups the least. It is the case not just in Sweden but appears to be true in all of Europe which became clear from the talks we listened to from among other places Finland and Germany during the conference which we co-organized in the fall of 2015:
Reich means that it is in the nuclear family which the authoritarian personality which is a basis for fascism is created. It creates a personality which both hates and loves authority, which fantasies about submitting but hates it at the same time. This fits well in with the worship of power which fascists often express. It is no coincidence that it is a movement which fantasies so much about purity which is so impure (see for example the Swedish Resistance Movement members in Jönköping who pushed drugs http://snpf.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/SNPF_4-15.pdf) Again we see how the schizophrenia between their ideals and practice appear which rips people apart. We should, in a way, feel sorry for the fascists.
This schizophrenia is repeated in the paranoid, apocalyptic worldview of fascism: the nation is about to be destroyed, the bell is tolling! They have repeated this for decades. It does however motivate their followers to violent abuses and pure terror such as the arson attacks against migration centers in Sweden and abroad, the murders by Breivik and Peter Mangs and so on.
Not just discontent: racism and sexism as basis for fascism
Parts of the left are arguing that SD:s voters only come from discontent voters: if there was a real workers party which could channel these fascist votes they would go to the left instead. Their view of fascism is based on the idea that we all live in a post political stage where everyone follows a liberal consensus in economic politics. Right and left stops being real alternatives but instead become one big mess in the middle which makes questions of morality, which is the favorite theme of the right, to become more important than economical ones. We agree with this worldview in a sense but there are many issues with it.
The first issue is to say that there is a real working class politics which can be utilized from the parliament. Capitalism is in crisis. Reformism has become impossible through the specific ways which neoliberalism functions. It is not because the Social Democrats have abandoned their ideals which is why reformism does not work, is the other way around: reformism does not work and therefore Social Democrats abandon their ideals. The space for reforms is much smaller today than in the 70’s now that we live in a capitalism which was based on service production rather than the production of real value.
We of course have to connect this fact to the growth of fascism, not least through the concept “fear of falling” which masculinity researchers above all in the USA and England have discussed: that is that men lose their position in the nuclear family as the breadwinner through his work in the factory. This is a real problem for men which we have to be attentive to. At the same time we connect this to Reich’s analysis of the nuclear family: it is just as much the men losing their positions and power over their family members (which is an authoritarian and possibly fascist-oriented tendency) as the ongoing proletarianization which is pushing this development forward. Beyond this we have to be clear with one thing: social democratic reformism and parliamentary struggle has never served the revolution but instead functioned as a control- and power mechanism against the working class. To be sentimental over a dead welfare state and a disappearing reformism is therefore reactionary. Rather we should see the new openings and possibilities this gives us.
The second issue is that the analysis assumes that the only analytical category is class. It is a development from vulgar Marxism which is blind to other relations of power. The racism and sexism which form the basis of fascism which we have tried to show in this text is no coincidence. It is no false consciousness but rather directly connected to the social being of fascism. It is impossible to have fascism without sexism and racism. The class projects that fascism tries to create from below are always racist/sexist attempts, one example is the attempt to create a “Swedish” union that SD tried to launch (http://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/jag-var-sjukt-javla-less-pa-samhallet)
The third issue is that if it were the case that it was just sheer discontent there should exist some groups on the left which have grown. Some of all the tens of thousands who voted for SD should have moved leftwards, at least to groups such as the Communist Party which builds their politics on the idea that the left must be as reactionary as the CP believes the working class to be.
We repeat that we are convinced that we live in a post-political landscape and that this breeds fascism (but also creates possibilities for radical struggle). But we cannot analyze fascism as merely class based. Fascism is as much born from the racist imperialist wars which has caused the entire global situation we live in today, that is the “war on terror”, on micro political, authoritarian and gendered relations which are built in the family and in all the institutions of society. All these categories are woven into each other and express each other, the war on terror is built on economical and political power over resources and people, the nuclear family is an economical-social category and class is always gendered.
This is important to understand because fascism is also a reaction to struggle. The old slogan that “the best antifascism is a strong left” is a simplification. On some levels it is true: our struggles to democratize relations in the family and between people in the family, in the work place or in school can in the long run undermine microfascist authoritarian politics. At the same time we have seen that the struggles we are engaged in today, such as the Sorgenfri Roma camp, might have triggered a fascist reaction in the short run. Similar examples can be imagined when we think of reactions that might happen at norm-breaking queer moments, wildcat strikes against Swedish companies or riots during demonstrations.
This does not mean we should give up these struggles. It is not bad with a polarization of society, perhaps it is even a directly positive development. How many thousands of antiracists do not see their parties and associations betray their ideals today? The antiracist movement is abandoned by the liberals through the total capitulation of the so-called left-wing government of Sweden. The Green Party’s talk about “open borders” were lovely words and nothing but that, just like the “international solidarity” of the Social Democrats. Today it is the left, and above all the extraparliamentary left, which is fighting fascism and building resistance towards state racist politics from below.
Our goal is not to create a slightly more “fair” world, to make men and women a bit more equal or to “integrate” migrants into the nation state. To truly make our world free from racism, fascism and sexism we have to overthrow the entire system and wipe out capitalism which by necessity means to abolish the gender order and the racist structures. All capitalist institutions prop up and recreate each other. It is impossible not to have a racist society in a nation state, it’s entire function is to create subjectivity based on belonging to a nation. The classless society is something entirely different, it is not the construction of a Stalinist banana republic which the “socialist” states have been. This is not just the only way to once and for all get rid of the disease of fascism but also the only way to achieve all the goals of feminism for a free society where everyone is freed from the prison of the gendered order of power.
Organising Autonomously, February 2016.
Reading tips (mainly in Swedish):
- Gender & Nation, Nira Yuval Davis
- Frp-koden, Magnus M Marsdal (for an example on the argumentation on the Social Democratic betrayal and postpolitics for a basis for fascism, it concerns Norway and Fremskrittspartiet).
- Diana Mulinaris work on women in the Sweden Democrats http://www.lu.se/lucat/user/981c81630658f81fb93350cfdaca18a7
- The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich https://www.marxists.org/svenska/psykologi/reich/1933/fascismen.htm
- Lönlösa Liv, Kämpa Tillsammans (for a discussion on late capitalism and the impossibility of reformism)
Glossary:
Agency: The possibility for an individual or group to act, typically on a political level.
Gender, gendered: A verb to describe the process where an individual, group or institution creates gender/sex in an individual, group or institution. For example the parent which encourages their daughter to play with a doll and not a fire truck.
Gendered order of power, the: The specific ways in which gender is done where men, as a group has power over women as a group which is related to capitalism and racism.
Man/woman: The social construction of two specific genders according to the heteronorms of society.
Masculinity/femininity: The different socially constructed ways in which men and women are created.
Proletariat: See the working class.
Reformism: The political ideology and political tendency which means that capitalism can be reformed away through state actions until we reach socialism. Most clearly proposed by the Social Democrats in different countries.
Socialism: A society without private ownership where everything is owned collectively. This usually means through state ownership, but not in our or other radical thought.
Working class, the: Those who sell their labour power to capitalist to survive. The working class is thus a large group in society and does not merely include industrial workers.