Class 1: Classical fascism, colonialism, and international political economy

This four-part digital course is a collective and deep study of the history of fascism, which is oriented toward helping us, as organizers, elucidate how it functions, what drives it, how to see through its different guises, and what we can do to fight it. It begins with an investigation into different definitions of fascism, how it has functioned as a concept in the class struggle, and how it relates to capitalism and imperialism with a particular focus on fascist movements that consolidated state power. Classes also examine political and organizational debates and strategies for organizing against fascism as well as fascist movements in the U.S. from the early 20th century until today. The course is taught by Claudia de la Cruz, a popular educator, community organizer, and theologian who is Co-Executive Director of The People’s Forum and Gabriel Rockhill, a philosophy professor and member of the Liberation School Editorial Collective who is also the Director of the Critical Theory Workshop. Our first class starts by examining various definitions of fascism in order to foreground how it has functioned historically as a concept-in-class-struggle, while also emphasizing the importance of a dialectical approach. This will allow us to situate fascism within the deep history of capitalism and its imperialist expansion. We then analyze how the Italian fascists and the Nazis rose to power within the constitutional parameters of bourgeois democracy--by receiving abundant funding from big industrial domestic and international capital--to run populist electoral campaigns and whip up certain sectors of the population around an ultra-nationalist and colonial program. Since every capitalist country had fascist movements in the wake of the Great Depression, we also examine what happened to these movements in the cases when they fully consolidated state power. Finally, we discuss how an internationalist, materialist perspective can help us make sense of the capitalist ruling class’s decisions to favor hegemony or repression in specific instances, and what this concretely means for fascist political practices and their visibility as such. Course materials: Daniel Guérin, Fascism and big business https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/guerin/1938/10/fascism.htm José Carlos Mariátegui, “Biologia del fascismo” https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/1925/escena/01.htm Aimé Césaire, Discourse on colonialism, trans. J. Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 35-46.