Anarchism/Anti-State

Anarcho-Fascism: It’s a Joke, but Not Always

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By AntiBoomerEquation

Prophet Battlestone’s Amysterium

Those who put any effort into studying historical fascism will know that it was associated with syndicalism (worker self-management of industries) and corporatism (as in medieval or Roman society, where the different orders have representation on government and self regulation of affairs).

It just so happens that syndicalism originates as anarchist doctrine in France, from Georges Sorel primarily (though Proudhon also influenced its ideas) as an alternative to communism. Economist Ludwig von Mises styled syndicalism and the related medievalist idea, guild socialism, as ‘pseudo-socialism’ due to the fact that they retained private ownership of the means of production and a market in capital goods. Although critical of syndicalist ideas it is always a compliment, from Mises, to be something other than a socialist.

Syndicalism was picked up by the post-Boulangists and nationalized. French national syndicalism and Sorel were both influential on Benito Mussolini, who eventually nationalized himself.

Mussolini started as a leader of Squadristi in Northern Italy, essentially fighting communist unions and bandits with mercenaries – paid by local merchants. Mussolini, before he was a fascist, appears to have been an agorist PDA.

Corporatism and syndicalism both were influenced by medieval guild and corporate society, where each individual had multiple identities and corporate bodies representing and governing this aspect of life had various local and regional autonomies. These structures – burgher councils, craft guilds, various levels of church hierarchy – were part of the reason medieval society remained so decentralized and polylateral through its ages. Libertarians have often admired medieval sociery and its corporate institutions, including landed aristocracy.

Corporatist movements sought to bring these features back to the modern state, by giving the different interests a ‘seat at the table’ where different ‘stakeholders’ got to govern themselves and make decisions involving their shared and competing interests.

That is what is meant by Mussolini when he speaks of ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘nothing outside the state’ – not a system go bureaucratic regimentation of all society, but a state which excludes no Italian on the basis of his profession or economic status, and takes into consideration all of its members. In practice, Italian corporatism didn’t get very far (before the Second World War war Italy had a classically liberal economy of the sort common to most European states in the 19th century).

If we look beyond the fact that fascism is nominally statist (I will put aside the rather meaningless term ‘authoritarian’, as any hierarchical or structured system could be called authoritarian) we will discover anarchist and libertarian movements have much in common with fascism and, possibly, that fascism was not nearly so bad as American democracy in practice.

Most libertarians and anarchists will instantly deny this because 1) they are completely ignorant of intellectual history and have a tiny mental box from which they shoddily construct all their bigoted opinions; 2) they have Rightophobia or have otherwise been brainwashed by Victor’s History into believing that Fascists are Nazis and anyone decent must reflexively hate them. Thankfully, not being a populist, I don’t care what most libertarians (or anyone else) thinks, and continue to prefer Benito Mussolini to the Libertarian Party. When’s the last time those faggots stopped a commie?

The Anarcho-Fascist Manifesto (from the Revolutionary Conservative)

On the Anarchist and Fascist Overlap at Futurism Forever

On the Relationship Between Libertarianism and Fascism

Anarcho-fascism: An Overview of Right Wing Anarchist Thought

Categories: Anarchism/Anti-State, Left and Right

16 replies »

  3. Claiming that Fascism was not statist is just flat out retarded.

    The Sorelians could be considered anti-state as they believed in a Syndicate that was to be the army of the working class at war against the capitalist state. This syndicate however would have all the essential features of a new state, if not the name. Sorelians supported both revolutionary Fascism in Italy and revolutionary Bolshevism, two of the most statist ideologies in human history.

    Syndicalism did have an influence on Italian Fascism, but no apparent influence on Hitlerism. Syndicalism is put in the same box as liberal individualist anarchism but it is really a completely separate tradition that has almost nothing in common with modern anarchism on the left or the right.

    The essential development in Italian Fascism was that it abandoned the revolutionary Syndicate for the revolutionary State and it became a totalitarian cult of the state. In both Italian Fascism and German Nazism the explicit ideology and practice was to seize the state and to use the power of the state to radically alter society, start foreign wars and genocide people etcetera.

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    • I didn’t say fascism wasn’t statist. I said it draws on ideas which are not intrinsically statist, is congenial in many regards to anarchic ideas, and that one can view fascism as essentially a makeshift which is not a solution. This is in contrast to Marxism where building a total state that literally controls everything is the purpose of the movement. If fascists had been more actively syndicalist this would actually have decentralized the state and made it dependent on consensus, which is exactly why the Nazis and Commies didn’t like unions, medieval corporatism and the like. Fascists had a different conception of the state and even though they failed to engage in any of these possibly salutary projects they still did not aim at the total subordination of all things to bureaucracy and statute law, in contrast to the Soviet and Nazi governments – nor did they try to.
      Finally, I am not a pathological anarchist who is obsessed with ‘the state’ as some free floating entity which I blame for everything I dislike, it is instead a pathological product of mass society and bourgeoisie elites. Many kinds of political institutions and orders which rely more on consensus and locality I have no objection to, while modal libertarians who hate their parents scream and cry that someone has authority somewhere and therefor they can’t walk around naked in the town square. It is specifically the Weberian, bureaucratic, sovereign state I object to most keenly – various medieval and classical social institutions, while they may be bad at times, do not have the same intrinsic pathology as the Weberian bureaucratic state. First of all because they’re poorly funded, decentralized and privatized.
      Sorel praised the Bolshevik and Fascists because he believed that violence needed to be openly reintroduced into politics, instead of the bourgeoisie pacifism that had allowed monopoly violence to predominate – their aversion to private violence and feuds makes the bourgeoisie incompetent to stand against the national armed forces and police, which in turn are far more destructive and implicitly aggressive than any feudal prince or gang ever was.
      And while I am not a Sorelian I do agree with this general thesis, all society is founded in violence and no society can exist if it is not willing to use force to assert itself against others who want to impose their own standards over it. Might is right, whether leftists and moralizers want to admit it or not, and the problem of the modern state is not the state but the cowardice, subservience and conformity of the masses.

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    • As for imperialism, fascist foreign policy was retarded, if for no other reason that it was in no condition to conduct wars in Africa and Greece. But if other countries were no so weak and pathetic they wouldn’t risk attack. Victims usually bear a large degree of blame for their condition. But tribal imperialism is essentially inevitable and genetic, and even if you are not inclined to want to rule other people (I don’t give a damn about other people, for the most part) they will try to rule you if they think they can. And I am also rather indifferent in many cases of Imperialism, so called, such as Cortés against the bloodthirsty cannibal slave empires in Mexico. Huge numbers of the people he and his allies killed absolutely had it coming because their culture shouldn’t exist.

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  4. Citations (for anyone else reading the thread)

    Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought

    https://b-ok.cc/book/2879733/38b44d

    Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship

    https://b-ok.cc/book/4981928/e6b164

    The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution

    https://b-ok.cc/book/689901/b04610

    The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism

    https://b-ok.cc/book/5950852/c501b7

    Origins and Doctrine of Fascism

    https://b-ok.cc/book/5255718/a40aa3

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  5. Before the March on Rome, Mussolini insisted that “Fascism sees the nation before all else”—all else being subordinate to its interests. In the formal party program of 1921, it was insisted that while the nation was the dominant form of social organization in the contemporary world, it was by virtue of the state, as the incarnation of the nation, “that individuals and associations of individuals in families, communes and corporate bodies, are enhanced, developed and defended.”

    By the time Fascism had organized itself into a revolutionary movement, Panunzio had accepted all those tenets. He spoke of an emerging “state syndicalism”—a union of a “powerful state,” revolutionary syndicalism, and developmental nationalism. Under the auspices of that state, retrograde Italy would become a powerful nation. The state would stimulate and sustain the development of an industrial base that would render the nation the equal of the major European powers. The nation, so long humbled, would finally carve out its place in the sun.

    Gone was the anarchic antistate rhetoric of his youth. Equally absent was the individualistic, libertarian, self-governing syndicalism that gave substance to his thought in the years before the War of Tripoli. Now Panunzio’s syndicalism was collectivist—nationalist in content and statist in form and in structure. The state had become the hegemonic center of his political thought. It became the center of his system—its “ethical core.” In the new formulation, the state was understood to be “infinitely superior” to all its components.

    -Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship p. 90

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  6. The root of the misunderstanding that leads to ideas like “National-Anarchism” or “Anarcho-Fascism” is that early syndicalism had a deep contradiction between individualism and collectivism that was ultimately resolved into the hard collectivism of National Syndicalism and Fascism. Libertarian never had any contradiction, it is always and ultimately individualist.

    If you want to be a fascist or any kind of a nationalist, you have to delete all the individualist priors that are so deeply imbedded in your libertarian firmware. That isn’t going to happen because libertarianism is nothing but a Utopian version of the ideology of liberalism.

    So then when the precious libertarian individual tries to be “Anarcho-Fascist” you are confronted by the fundamental contradiction that the state is the standard of Evil in your libertarianism while Fascism was a totalitarian cult of the State. You solve it in a typically libertarian way by making up pure nonsense and then fanatically believing in it.

    So now you are Big Man Libertarian defending Fascism, which is really really funny, but we are laughing at you not with you.

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