I wrote this a while ago – maybe even two years – and the world has moved on, but I think there’s enough in it still worth reading to keep it on file.

Dear Friends, Untimely Thoughts

If we try to take in, at a single glance, all the apparently diverse activities of the tsarist regime in the realm of “internal policy”, the meaning of these activities will appear before us as an all-out effort by the bureaucracy to check the quantitative and qualitative development of our thinking material. The old rulers were shiftless and giftless, but their instinct of self-preservation correctly showed them that their most dangerous enemy was the human brain, and, consequently, by all means available to them, they tried to hamper or distort the growth of the country’s intellectual forces. In this criminal activity they were successfully aided by a church enslaved by the bureaucracy and, no less successfully, by a society psychologically unbalanced as well as, in the last years, completely submissive to force.

Maxim Gorky, 1 May 1917 

The Reagan administration sought to enshrine a fundamental difference between totalitarian regimes, and authoritarian regimes. This was a very clever idea, largely due to Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s “Ambassador” to the UN: in 1981 it really wasn’t possible to deny that the US had supported, and continued to support, dictatorships. BUT … just look at the ones that we support, and compare them to the other ones that they support: ours have killed far fewer people than theirs.

Is this a really good justification for supporting murderers? Who can say. All these questions are so so difficult and complex. Anyway, I want to talk about something else. Kirkpatrick claimed that the distinction came from the work of Hannah Arendt. If Hannah had still been alive, we would have seen some fireworks. Unfortunately, since she wasn’t, this led many liberal and leftist writers – and the leftists really should have known better – to write her off as just another reactionary, and to dismiss the distinction.

Lesson1: never ever judge others according to the opinion that reactionary hacks (yes, I said reactionary hacks) have of them. By the way, I said “Ambassador” with scare quotes (I think they’re called) because Kirkpatrick was appointed to be not so much an Ambassador to the UN as, all in herself alone, the bandits (was it 40 against 7) attacking the village in Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven.

Hannah does indeed distinguish between totalitarian regimes – above all Nazism and Stalinism – and earlier forms of dictatorship – including Fascism. The distinction emerges from the overall break between the modern world and all that preceded it; but the break is within the modern world between forces attempting to sustain some link to the past, and forces that aim to sever all ties to the old order.

Fascism – the Italian form is eponymous and primary – inherits a modern problem rooted in the pre-modern world: the problem of maintaining order in the face of status antagonism; or, in modern terms, the problem of class struggle. Fascism – as bourgeois democracy does not – recognizes the necessity of this struggle, and the impossibility of its resolution within the existing – bourgeois, capitalist – economic order. The struggle between workers and capitalists arises necessarily from the necessary conditions of the capitalist economy, and cannot be resolved within these. The struggle can only be resolved by the state.

The struggle is between workers and capitalists, it is necessary, but must be resolved. Only the state can resolve it. So: create a fair balance between the demands of the two, that is, an equation, something with this

=

in between. Well, yes and no. It was always clear to Mussolini that the working class would be much more of a problem than the capitalists (capitalists can be bought off so easily), and that he needed the capitalists’ support more. The corporatist state, in part organized by the Fascists, in part spontaneously developing under Fascist rule, enshrined the class inequality.

Fascist Italy remained a class society. Now the corporatist state is not democratic, it, especially its leader, appoints itself (himself) for the good of the nation. But there may be some, many, even, who do not recognize its authority, do not recognize that the good of the nation depends on its leader. They must be suppressed by any level of violence necessary. State violence is a necessary instrument of Fascism. But here we come back to Hannah: for Fascism, violence is always an instrument.

Fascism’s aim is the conventional aim of modern class societies, including those based on bourgeois representative government: the orderly control of class difference. Its distinctiveness is quantitative, it is the most extreme in treating state violence as legitimate for realization of the aims of the state. Maybe it’s an exaggeration to say that it openly recognizes what bourgeois governments seek to conceal: the necessary role of violence in suppressing the working class. Maybe. Nonetheless, fascist governments remain on the continuum of modern states, facing a common problem. And they all face it instrumentally. Violence is legitimate, but only against attacks on the established social (class) order. Of course, different governments along the continuum will respond differently to attacks. But overall, the aim is to establish and to maintain the social order established by law. Fascism may be at the extreme end of the modern continuum of governments, but it remains a part of that continuum. So:

Fascism aims to maintain order. It establishes order through the instrument of violence; but once order is established it suspends violence provisionally: if disorder returns, so does state violence. 

Fascism treats violence as an instrument, not as an end in itself; however, violence in itself is an honored instrument, as one of its habitual subordinates, the sword, is also. Mussolini made a tremendous fuss about all this (to the extent of trying to abolish pasta as too soft – it didn’t go well). This actual glorification of violence distinguishes fascism from, for example, bourgeois democracy, or at least it does so in principle.

However, all modern class societies legitimize state violence including mortal violence. Glorification of violence is normal in fascist regimes, it is a public virtue. But reactionary elements, with links of one kind or another, past or present, to such regimes, continue to exist in bourgeois democracies; and glorification of violence is typical of such elements.

The instrumental practice of violence tends to make it not merely habitual in those who practice it, but also essential in their self-consciousness; this tendency exists in bourgeois democracies, and the reactionary elements encourage it. I’m talking in very general terms, but the current situation in the US is a very obvious exemplification.

So: broadly speaking, bourgeois democracies seek to marginalize the glorification of violence, and, so, the actual incidence of political violence. But the reactionary, fascist, tendency must be present in bourgeois democracies: it is integral to the modern class order. By contrast, fascist regimes are free to suppress both bourgeois democratic and socialist tendencies by any means necessary.

Lots more to say here, but let’s get to the difference between fascism and totalitarianism.   

The top four, classic, fascist regimes of the West are those of Benito Mussolini in Italy; Francisco Franco Bahamonde in Spain; António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal; and Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay. Three of the leaders, Duce, Caudillo, etc., died peacefully in bed at an advanced age. The fourth ended up hung upside down at a gas station in Milan.

Why did Mussolini end up that way? Because he couldn’t resist Hitler’s siren song. Both Hitler and Mussolini provided indispensable support to Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Afterwards they pressed him to join them in greater exploits, pastures new: “Yo, Francisco, look at how we wiped the floor with all those Bolshies – your Bolshies, by the way. Come along with us – the three amigos – we’ll wipe all the rest of ’em from the face of the earth!” To which Francisco replied: “Hey, Adolph, Benito, I love you guys! You two are the best! I am so blessed that you are my compañeros! Let’s do it again sometime: hunting, fishing? We have great opportunities here in Spain. This time, I think I’ll take a rain-check.” So, he died at an advanced age in bed.

Mussolini went with Hitler. Yes, his individual personality. But also, fascism chafes at its modern origins, its indissoluble link to bourgeois society. So dreary. Fascism has a drive beyond itself, just as does bourgeois democracy, only the two beyonds are so different – a nightmare, and a dream. But let’s think for a moment about the decision, embodied by Mussolini and Franco. 

Franco was not a Falangist (the party roughly equivalent to the Italian Fascist party); he was an old fashioned church and state reactionary for whom the army was the main source of power. He coopted the Falangist movement after the death of its leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera: on the one hand, you could say that Primo de Rivera, had he lived, would have taken the Falangist movement in a very different direction – and he does seem a far more interesting figure than the other Fascist leaders, and, certainly, than Franco – on the other, Franco managed the cooption of the Falangist Party with remarkable ease. Franco then managed to unite all the reactionary parties, into a Nationalist movement under his leadership.

You might say that Franco survived because he was a reactionary nationalist not a fascist: this is not to say anything in his favor – reactionary church and state nationalists can kill just as many people as fascists can – but it does say something about Fascism, especially in its original Italian form. Again, it’s possible that Mussolini could have lived longer if Italy had not been the descendant of Rome. 

So what about totalitarianism? Arendt says that totalitarianism is the result of something genuinely new in political history, and new political ideas are very rare. What is new is the application of the economic principle of limitless expansion to the state. I do have questions in detail about this (Hannah and I argue about them all the time) but the basic idea is unanswerable, it seems to me.

The position of the nation state – an achievement of modernity – is central. The territory of a nation state is, in its essence, limited. It is the territory of a nation, a people with long established customs, language, and, often, a common origins myth. It has boundaries with other such nations. Border disputes will arise – Alsace-Lorraine – and they may lead to armed conflict, but what is at issue is the borderland, not the integral territory of each nation.

Nationalism, Arendt says, has been given a bum rap – well, of course, she doesn’t put it quite like that, but it gets at her idea. Whatever else you may say against it, it is necessarily anti-expansionist. It holds to its own native territory, its own by Blut und Boden, blood and soil. Also by its language, unique in its oneness with its own Volk. The idea of language comes especially from Johann Gottfried Herder, usually neglected, but when recognized at all, only to be falsely accused as forerunner of reactionary nationalism and Nazism – for a corrective see Charles Taylor’s beautiful essay “The Importance of Herder”. Anyway:

Blut und Boden is a late 19th century slogan of German reactionaries, it was coopted by the Nazis. But the Nazis used it as a mask. They were interested neither in German soil nor German blood.

A movement for absolute expansion sees Boden (soil) as pretty much uniform, one bit as good as another, what matters is the amount: the Nazis aimed to accumulate all soil in the world – the German bit only counted as a beginning. As to Blut, Hitler had a pretty dim view of the Nordic Aryans vaunted by his propaganda machine. He calculated that it would take a good 200 years of careful eugenic engineering to whip them into shape – but what’s 200 hundred years for a 1000 year Reich?

Limitless expansion is the governing principle of imperialism – “I would annex the stars if I could”: Cecil Rhodes’ melancholy expression of the aspiration and of its impossibility. But Imperialism was restrained well before it could reach the final frontier by its necessary dependence on the nation state.

Totalitarianism can only arise through the internal destruction of the nation state, through the transformation of the necessary border defining the national territory as the nation, into the barrier that denies the people, all the people, their destiny. Arendt describes such central and eastern European pan movements, as conscious analogs of the territorial imperialism of the western European powers. Unlimited expansion is the common goal.

But the aim of unlimited expansion arises not from ethnic movements, but from the nature of capitalism – the pan movements are trying to catch up with the major imperial powers. Once the national economy becomes a capitalist economy, then the nation is on the market just as is an individual worker. It must submit to the laws of the market, and the supreme law is accumulation. Is the nation in the position of capitalist or that of labourer? Well, both, but more the latter.

The poor old nation state is torn between its original nature as a limited entity among other limited entities, and the possibility of a glorious imperial transformation, gold, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and elephants, yes! elephants! This at least is the way that Disraeli sold the idea not only to Queen Victoria (“when dealing with royalty you must lay it on with a trowel”) but also to the British people. But the rubies, sapphires, and elephants came at a very high price.

Imperialism created a new world, or, it created the world as a whole, the globe as we know it now. Globalism is imperialism at a later stage of development, nothing more.

So what was the very high price that the European nation states had to pay for the rubies, the sapphires, the elephants?

The simple answer is the First World War. For the main combatant countries – other than the US – it seemed that a generation of young men vanished as though they had never been. This, I think, must always be what comes first. This is what my mother and father, born just after the war’s end (1919, 1922), lived through, their primordial experience, just as the threat of nuclear war, lineal descendant of imperialism and world war, was the primordial experience of their children.

This comes first, but from whence does it come? The entire material, concrete and sensuous horror of the First World War, destroying men almost as much if they lived as if they died, a totality of horror, misery, pain, and death beyond comprehension, has a single origin: imperialism. Imperialism is the necessary development of the capitalist mode of production, and it imposes the logic of unlimited expansion on the nation state. The European border wars (Alsace-Lorraine, etc.) become existential crises for the nations.

Totalitarianism is not something other, alien, it arises from the necessary development of the capitalist mode of production, that is, from the economic core of the liberal state. The nation state is the necessary foundation for capitalism; capitalism is the necessary foundation for imperialism; imperialism is the necessary foundation for totalitarianism … yes … but … totalitarianism is a tall order, it needed a few tryouts in the provinces before it could hit Broadway.

A state may have unlimited expansion as its goal, but, in the end, totality is the whole, and the whole, the global whole, will be ruled by global capital. Yes, the metropolitan centers will wield more power, but, first, the power of any one may well diminish; second, just which are the metropolitan centers will change.

Totalitarianism is an immense and continuing threat, it is not the threat posed by a particular nation, it is the threat immanent in the capitalist mode of production at the global level. The threat will not come from a single totalitarian state, it will come from the totality of the global order: or, you might say, you cannot have totalitarianism in just one country.

The central claim of American ideology during the Cold War was that the Soviet Union, a totalitarian power, was by its very nature, expansionist, it aimed to conquer the world.

Originally, the Soviet Union, was expansionist not in the sense that it sought to expand its own territory, but that it aimed to assist proletarian revolution in other countries and worldwide. This, the Bolshevik strategy, advanced by Lenin and Trotsky, was reversed by Stalin, though obviously he didn’t say so. Stalin’s strategy reverted to that of the defense of the regime (his regime) at all costs, that is, the strategy of Tsarism. The proper territory of Russia, Tsarist or Soviet, must be defended, and this means establishing buffer zones against the Western European powers that have with some regularity assaulted Russia (1812; 1914, 1941). 

After 1945 the Third International (Comintern) aimed to prevent revolutionary uprisings, for fear of US retaliation against the Soviet Union itself. The Cuban Communist Party was only permitted to announce support for the revolution when Castro’s forces were already in Havana.

The US was the expansionary power after 1945, but in a new way. The term neo-imperialism is often used to describe this, and it’s a good term. But it must be understood as expressing the unity of imperialism with totalitarianism. Ultimately what expanded was not so much the US, or even the power of the US, but global capital.

The neocon fussing around with the authoritarian|totalitarian distinction now seems almost quaint; the global power of the US, still there, is diminished – capital has no nationality. And the relation of the US to its authoritarian friends is inverted.

Kirkpatrick blithely assumed that “we”, the most powerful nation in history could manipulate authoritarian states and their leaders, pushing them towards “democracy”, but always allowing that the process was slow and difficult: you must not blame them too much for one more massacre. “We” were always in charge, the puppet masters even when the puppets got a bit stroppy.

Today, we are dangerously close to the opposite, the “authoritarians” are becoming the puppet masters, “we” the puppets. They’re coming after us and making pretty good time. They are not totalitarians, at least not yet, and here, once again, Orban is the model. (Who knows what is Putin’s wildest dream, he’s not going to get it.) And the danger is not that they will invade us, as we so frequently invaded them; but that their siren song will prove irresistible to our very own reactionaries.

These, our own, home-grown, reactionaries describe the orderly procedures of the rule of law as turning the US into a banana republic, whereas their actions aim to reduce the US to one of the “authoritarian” regimes that Jeanne Kirkpatrick promised us were  at least a bit better than totalitarianism. Maybe she was right, but it’s cold comfort.

Love and solidarity,

Bobby