Early Debates

In the beginning, claiming ignorance about the nature of fascism was easy. The word “fascism” derives from the Italian “fascio” and the Latin “fasces” — a bundle of switches symbolizing strength through unity, representing the bundle of ideologies that make up fascism. A fascist dictator was generally understood to wield state power to create an economy that benefited monopolies while crushing labor and repressing the racial “other,” but the underlying dynamics — the forces that support such a dictator — remain far more contentious and misunderstood. Mussolini himself did not define fascism until 1932, calling it a “revolution of reaction.” This definitional ambiguity from one of its leading practitioners further highlights the question: Is fascism so complex that it can’t be pinned down? Is there truly no “elemental fascism”?

One can imagine the great minds of the twentieth century, witnessing the rise of Mussolini, Hitler, and Francisco Franco, grappling with the sense that these movements were somehow connected — linked by some shared essence. And so we get, as we see in the books summarizing these debates, Leon Trotsky’s definition emphasizing the reactionary middle class, Umberto Eco’s fourteen general properties of fascism, and Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality. These thinkers seem to say to the confused cynics that there is a unifying thread; there has to be.

Throughout the collected works in Did it Happen Here?, the reader finds both those twentieth-century debates and contemporary ones. Beginning with essays from Trotsky, Hannah Arendt, and Eco, we eventually arrive at articles debating the character of Donald Trump’s GOP. Jan-Werner Müller argues in “Is it Fascism?” that nothing today can “plausibly be called fascism” except “the most recent versions of Putinism.” Ruth Ben-Ghiat counters in “What is Fascism?” that obscuring fascism’s transformation in places like today’s Hungary and Italy — both controlled by supposed “neofascist” parties — dilutes its meaning and aids in its potential resurgence.

Despite its tangled history and varied interpretations, the persistent efforts to define fascism reveal a fundamental conviction: understanding fascism, however complex it may be, remains both urgent and necessary.

The Communists Were Right

Liberals, conservatives, postmodernists, Trotskyists, Maoists — all find aspects of their views on fascism echoed in today’s mediasphere. Talking heads in mainstream media call anyone on the Right a fascist; both ultraleftists and Trump supporters call liberals fascist; academics claim nothing is fascist. Painfully missing, however, is the definition once central to much of the globe — particularly within the communist-aligned “Second World.” Despite its erasure from recent literature, this understanding of fascism remains pivotal, even if unspoken, in contemporary debates. Like the baker who tries to cheat on doughnuts by enlarging the holes, working around the communist definition for decades simply takes more dough.

In one of the crucial scenes in David O. Russell’s 2022 film Amsterdam, General Dillenbeck (played by Robert De Niro) is expected to deliver a speech at a veterans’ gala calling for a march on DC to overthrow President FDR. Instead, he reads his own speech denouncing tyranny and fascism, foiling the plot and exposing those behind the coup attempt: some of America’s biggest industrial capitalists. Based on the true story of the Business Plot, the film presents fascism as an elite-driven campaign to take power. Amsterdam’s narrative offers a perspective largely erased from contemporary discourse — one that shaped the 1930s left and could help our understanding today.

A month after the Nazis seized power, the Reichstag (parliament) building was set ablaze. The Nazis used the arson as a pretext for rounding up communists, who were blamed for the fire. Among the accused was an indivudal who would become instrumental in defining the political project of fascism: the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov. After mounting an impassioned and successful defense at trial, Dimitrov fled to the USSR, where he became general secretary of the Communist International.

In 1935, Dimitrov delivered a report to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, articulating a definition of fascism that resulted from years of debate among communists — including figures like Clara Zetkin and Antonio Gramsci. Fascism, Dimitrov declared, was “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”

How to Misunderstand Fascism

In the forward to Palmiro Togliatti’s Lectures on Fascism, Vijay Prashad highlights the importance of a clear definition of fascism. He writes that “the bourgeoisie is split,” referencing the early stages of fascism, “with the most reactionary section pushing towards a fascistic solution to the capitalist crisis.” Communists in Italy and Germany were quick to identify the role of big financiers and beneficiaries in this shift. In 1926, Gramsci observed that fascism was not a “pre-democratic regime” which would one day mature into a liberal democracy but instead was “the expression of the most advanced stage of development of capitalist society.”

Journalists at the time also tracked this progression. Works like Facts and Fascism detailed how industrialists such as Fritz Thyssen and Alfred Krupp funded and benefited from fascism’s rise. Such figures gradually aligned with fringe fascist movements, supporting them as a bulwark against communism, which, in the wake of socialist revolutions, struck fear into the hearts of capitalists. As Daniel Guérin observed in his 1939 book Fascism and Big Business, fascist parties were formed out of coalitions of armed anti-labor militias that brutalized strikes and socialist meetings. While plenty of industrialists and finance capitalists supported “bourgeois democracy,” fascism required funding only from a reactionary segment of that class to deliver its message to a mass base.

In time, the Comintern’s 1935 definition — i.e., “the terrorist dictatorship of reactionary finance capital” — sparked both opposition and distancing by theorists who sought to avoid association with Joseph Stalin. Contrary to those like Timothy Snyder who claim that it was the communists who blurred the definition of fascism with the overuse of “social fascism,” today’s obscuring is directly birthed out of anti-communist theories about fascism that have resulted in enduring chaos and confusion.

There’s an old joke about malfunctioning stamps in fascist Italy. After Mussolini issued a stamp with his face on it, it was quickly recalled because Italians were spitting on the wrong side. The joke symbolized hatred for fascism at the time, but today the joke is reversed: with historians and cultural theorists reluctant or unable to define fascism, they contribute to very obscurity that fascists exploit.

Historians in the “postmodern” age, especially the late twentieth century, have compounded this problem. In the 1997 book In Defence of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, Ellen Meiksins Wood criticized this turn in the 1990s as “a rejection of totalizing knowledge.” In the same book, John Bellamy Foster described postmodern history as “signs and signifiers without significance.” In the preface to Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano bluntly omits “the deliberations of the Communist International” in favor of the 1970s debates from postmodernists like Michel Foucault. By rejecting metanarratives, they advance — whether intentionally or not — the fragmented ideologies that make up fascism. Fascism employs its own foundational stories, but thinkers like Kuklick and Steinmetz-Jenkins offer no counter-framework — they simply omit narrative entirely. How can we understand structural causes of change if we abandon the very narratives and “elemental” characteristics that make them intelligible?

The House That Material Analysis Built

Perhaps the solution is to reject the postmodern fragmentation altogether. To understand the anti-postmodern position, we need to circle back to the Marx Brothers.

In Animal Crackers, the Marx Brothers search for a missing painting. When they can’t find the thief, they conclude it must be in the house next door. “That’s great,” Groucho says, but “suppose there is no house next door?” “Well,” Chico says, “then of course we gotta build one.”

The lost painting — or, in our case, the lost systemic origins and unified logic of history — has to be discovered, according to Wood and Foster, not through unending skepticism that devolves into cynicism but through material analysis, a Marxist process once called “historical materialism.” With so much obscuring of an ideology like fascism, the structural analysis has to be rebuilt to discover it.

Looking back to Duck Soup, we see that the Marx Brothers might have actually understood the class basis of fascism more keenly than they are given credit for. The film’s Mussolini-like leader is installed after a rich widow donates millions to the country in exchange for his appointment.

Instead of waiting for the next war, as Benchley suggested, we should look to those who sought to translate truth into meaning and revive the purged analyses of the old left. As Wood argues in Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism, “we should not confuse respect for the plurality of human experience and social struggles with a complete dissolution of historical causality.”

Today’s most pressing task is to fight the defeatist tendencies that reproduce the received wisdom of dominant ideologies and strive to understand — and ultimately defeat — fascism. The communists provided invaluable tools for doing so. To understand fascism, we must use those tools and follow the Marx Brothers’ example to build the house next door.