Introduction

This and the next chapter discuss the two main alternatives to capitalist democracy: fascism and communism. They were also responses to the need to bring the masses onstage in the theater of power, but they attempted active mobilization of the masses through their invention of the party-state. The Communists originally saw the party as active mobilization from below, although once in power this reversed into top-down mobilization. Fascism was double-edged before the seizure of power, but equally top-down afterward.

Chapter 6 discussed leftist revolutions in central Europe after the Great War. When they failed, rightist counterrevolutions imposed stronger and more despotic states mobilizing an “organic” nation, influenced by fascism. The fascist-inflected state combined infrastructural power – the capacity of the state to enforce policies through infrastructures penetrating its territories – and despotic power – the ability of state elites to make their own arbitrary decisions. The state was militaristic, and fascism was in a way the culmination of the long tradition of European imperial militarism. The nation was supposedly without internal divisions, organic or integral, intolerant of political, ethnic, and religious diversity; this was a reaction against globalization, an erection of stronger bars around state cages. Many rightists saw mass society and parliamentary democracy as widening social divisions, deepening political conflict, and producing chaos and violence. Carl Schmitt said the parties had become like mass armies confronting each other on the battlefield. Corruption was deemed endemic in liberal politics; instead, a despotic state would impose order, unity, and morality. Fascism was the most extreme form of these authoritarian nation-statisms, as I explained in my book Fascists (2004). I refer the reader there for empirical and bibliographic detail on fascism. This chapter will generalize, refer to some more recent literature, and refine some of the arguments I made in the book.