Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Reviewed Work(s): Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of
Fascism by Nicos Poulantzas and Judith White
Review by: Anson G. Rabinbach
Source: New German Critique, No. 8 (Spring, 1976), pp. 157-170
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/487727
Accessed: 21-03-2017 21:09 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New
German Critique
This content downloaded from 128.104.46.196 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 21:09:27 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
REVIEW ESSAYS:
by Anson G. Rabinbach
Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third Internation
Problem of Fascism. Translated by Judith White, London: New Left Bo
366 pages.
1. For a discussion of recent literature in the Federal Republic see my: "Towards a Marxist
Theory of Fascism and National Socialism: A Report on Developments in West Germany," New
German Critique, S (Fall, 1974), 127-153.
2. See Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London, 1973) and Ralph
Miliband, "Poulantzas and the Capitalist State." New Left Review, 82 (November-December,
1973), 85-92.
This content downloaded from 128.104.46.196 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 21:09:27 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
158 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE
3. For a sympathetic discussion of this approach see Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., "Fascism and
Modernization," World Politics, 24 (July, 1972), 547-564; A.F.K. Organski, "Fascism and
Modernization," in S.J. Woolf ed., The Nature of Fascism (London, 1968), pp. 19-41. For a
general theoretical statement see Reinhard Bendix, "Tradition and Modernity Reconsidered,"
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 9 (1967), 292-346.
4. Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy; Lord and Peasant
in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966).
5. Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London, 1970), p. 99.
This content downloaded from 128.104.46.196 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 21:09:27 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
REVIEW ESSA YS 159
This content downloaded from 128.104.46.196 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 21:09:27 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
160 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE
and more important, the constellation of national social formations that arises from it,
constitutes the structural basis for the political crisis that is the crucial component.
The political crisis that stands at the center of Poulantzas' interpretation is above all
characterized by the inability of the economically dominant capitalist class to achieve
political hegemony among those classes that make up the coalition constituting the
power of the state. Thus, those classes that share power are unable to find a way out of
the stalemate in which no single class or faction in the ruling power bloc can take
command, including the historically obstructed monopoly interests.
In Poulantzas' view the origins of the crisis must not be sought in the instrumentalist
thesis that capitalism produced fascism to save itself, or that the class interests used the
fascist movement and the state as its "agent." For Poulantzas, a class analysis of
fascism proceeds from "the conjuncture of class struggle," which refers to the
short-term constellation of socio-economic forces produced in a given national
framework by the context of global development. The political crisis that calls forth a
fascist solution is formed by the "specific historical transition to the establishment of
monopoly capitalism" (21) in the imperialist stage of capitalist development. Fascism
belongs to a global framework in which a significant degree of state intervention is
necessitated by the "transition between two modes of production in a single social
formation" (21).
As Poulantzas recognizes, however, fascism is not a universal characteristic of this
transition, but specific to the situation where exceptional circumstances brought it to
power (Italy, Germany, Japan). The fascist form of state intervention took root only
where certain types of national development made impossible a "normal" transition to
monopoly capitalist hegemony; where the dominant class could not achieve control
within the state apparatus. The critical factor is not the level of economic
development, but rather the structural weaknesses that occur within the "weak links"
of the global capitalist chain. From this standpoint Poulantzas provides us with a
textual reading of the "conjunctures" and "displacements" iwhich give the social
pathology of fascism its historical purpose.
There are two essential aspects in Poulantzas' crisis theory: first, the internal crisis
and the disintegration of the power bloc which turns into a general crisis of politics
and ideology; and second, the rise of fascism as a stage-like process. Here Poulantzas
adapts Gramsci's essentially 'historicist' analysis of the crisis of authority to a pre-
fabricated structuralist model. On a political level the internal crisis takes the form of
"the breaking of representational ties and the political parties" (71), i.e., the ruling
classes and class fractions loosen the ties binding them to their respective political
parties, while at the same time those parties are increasingly unable to organize
political hegemony over the classes they represent. This delegitimization is transposed
to the ideological level where a parallel crisis of the dominant ideology takes place,
accompanied by a general ideological crisis enveloping the labor movement and the
petty bourgeoisie. In the case of the latter there is an "offensive" of "imperialist-
feudal" ideology. This aspect of the crisis is accompanied by a simultaneous process of
the "steps in the growth of fascism" (65), a complex of factors which results in the
This content downloaded from 128.104.46.196 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 21:09:27 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
REVIEW ESSA YS 161
consolidation of power of the monopoly capitalist class. This process has four stages:
1) the growth of the fascist party to a mass party that wins the support of large
capital; 2) the period of the class alliance between the monopoly interests and petty
bourgeois following of the fascist party; 3) the first period of fascism in power, during
which the monopoly interests consolidate their hegemony while continuing to make
concessions to the masses; 4) the final period of stabilization which secures the
hegemony of the monopoly interests as the dominant class, resulting in the repression
of petty bourgeois interests.
The political crisis thus emerges as a consequence of the gradual disintegration of
established political constellations and dominant ideologies which obstructed the path
to monopoly capitalist hegemony over the state apparatus. Fascism and its
development from a weak movement to final control over the state thus acts as a
conductor for the current that leads from the historical impasse of a given social
formation to the establishment of monopoly rule. The political crisis is resolved by
fascism which abandons its autonomy to the monopoly interests once in power.
Fascism is therefore not a specific social formation unto itself, but rather a transitional
moment in the development from liberal capitalist (or pre-capitalist) forms of
domination to monopoly domination, placed within a backdrop of global
developments that can be seen as exceptional in themselves.
Poulantzas' attempt to provide an alternative to crude economism is based on a
theory in which economics is not a priori primacy, and in which multiple deter-
minations are given significant status. Events are important only insofar as they are
functional components of the structure as a whole. But the modernization theory
implications of this perspective are unmistakable throughout: fascism is a purgative of
the restraints on capitalist development. Lenin's theory of the imperialist chain is
ultimately the determining force from which Poulantzas' global perspective develops.
In his view only this starting point breaks with the economism of the Comintern and
the reduction of history to simple causal and linear national development.7 Germany
and Italy exemplify "weak links" not simply as the most backward economically, which
they clearly were not, but as the most unevenly developed internally of those social
formations. In Italy and Germany extremely accelerated industrial capitalist
development and embedded traditional social structures collided internally.
Poulantzas argues that it is only in this context that the epochal character of fascism is
comprehensible. It was a product of the political crisis that emerged from structural
This content downloaded from 128.104.46.196 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 21:09:27 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
162 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE
8. For a recent example of this tendency see Wolfgang Fritz Haug's "Faschismus-Theorie in
antifaschistischer Perspektive," Das Argument, 87 (November, 1974), 537-542. Not only has this
tendency meant a return to theoretical orthodoxy of the worst sort, but is in fact a legitimation
for the Current 'Biindnispolitik' policy of the DKP. For a critique see Eike Hennig, "Faschistische
Oeffentlichkeit und Faschismustheorien; Bemerkungen zu einem Arbeitsprogramm," Aesthetik
und Kommunikation, 20 (June, 1975), 107-117. For an example of French Maoist writings along
this line, see Andre Glucksmann, "Der alte und der neue Faschismus," in Foucault, Geismar,
Glucksmann, u.a., Neuer Faschismus, Neue Demokratie; Ueber die Legalitat des Faschismus im
Rechtsstaat (Berlin, 1972), pp. 7-68. These essays are from a special issue of Les Temps
Modernes, 310 (1972). Foucault's critique of the Maoist position is the most valuable part of this
collection.
This content downloaded from 128.104.46.196 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 21:09:27 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
RE VIE W ESSA YS 163
10. On this problem see Jtirgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans., Thomas McCarthy
(Boston, 1973).
This content downloaded from 128.104.46.196 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 21:09:27 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
164 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE
financial support from the dominant monopoly interests did not "flow" to the Nazis.11
Furthermore, financial support is not evidence of support by advanced monopoly
interests, and it seems that it was not the strongest but the weakest capitalist interests
that first sought refuge in the Nazi camp.12 The ruling monopoly interests supported
fascism only after they had become sufficiently powerless, and after the mass
movement had achieved a significant base of support, and then only reluctantly and
partially. Moreover, the "identity of interests" (Neumann) which brought fascism to
power consisted of more than bourgeois groups, and necessarily included conservative-
aristocratic, military and even "socialistic" elements (left wing of the Nazi party,
syndicalists in Italy). Finally, fascist forms of integration and the predominance of the
party continued long after the ruling interests could no longer "control" the fascist
political structure (it is questionable that they ever did).
In short, it is not the politics of fascism that produces class domination by the
monopoly interests, but rather the primacy of fascist politics and integration that
secures the existing social domination of a class at the expense of its political power.
The work of Arthur Schweitzer, Franz Neumann and Tim Mason has rightly pointed
to this aspect as a decisive characteristic of fascism. Poulantzas, however, is forced by
his structuralist method to defend a teleology of fascism against its history. Though
fascism indeed arises from a crisis in which the ruling groups cannot be assured of
hegemony, it does not necessarily prove functional, even if it may ultimately maintain
the socio-economic status quo. The dangers of dysfunction, and in the long run, of
destruction, are not to be discounted. By placing the veil of teleological necessity over
history, Poulantzas may in fact "give his displacements the necessity of a function,"
but only at the expense of any meaningful discussion of the genesis of fascism. Since his
purpose is to provide such a theory, the primacy of method over history ends with the
defeat of both. Moreover, the argument that a division of labor is possible in which
"Marxism emphasizes genesis over structure when dealing with historical events, and
emphasizes structure over genesis when dealing with historical theory," only legitimizes
the antinomy (and implicitly restores the validity of the subject-object problem that is
ignored by structuralism).13 Rather, as Poulantzas' work demonstrates, the result of
this method is as Althusser admits, to "purify the concept of the theory of history... of
any contamination by the obviousness of empirical history."14
11. See Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., "Big Business and the Rise of Hitler," American Historical
Review, 1 (October, 1969), 56-70; and Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., "Grossunternehmertum und
Nationalsozialismus 1930-1933; Kritisches und Erganzendes zu zwei neuen Forschungsbeitra-
gen," Historische Zeitschrift, 221 (September, 1975), 18-68.
12. See Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Oekonomie und Klassenstruktur des deutschen Faschismus
(Frankfurt am Main, 1973), p. 49.
13. Zimmerman approvingly cites this remark in his attempt to rescue structuralism by
arguing that it is in fact an inherent necessity of the concept of totality, even among non-rigid
and "critical" praxis-oriented Marxists such as Lukacs and Goldmann. Zimmerman concludes
that "Marxism and structuralism complement each other, since the first stresses change and the
second resistance." Zimmerman, p. 87.
14. Althusser, Balibar, p. 105.
This content downloaded from 128.104.46.196 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 21:09:27 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
REVIEW ESSAYS 165
15. Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature, trans. Clemens Dutt (New York, 1940), p. 7.
16. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans., F. Max Mtiller (New York, 1966), p. 521.
Walter Benjamin made this point when he wrote: "The puppet called 'historical materialism' is
to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which
today, as we knlow, is wizened and has to keep out of sight." Walter Benjamin, Illuminations,
trans., Harry Zohn (New York, 1969), p. 253.
This content downloaded from 128.104.46.196 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 21:09:27 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
166 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE
17. Nicos Poulantzas, "The Problem of the Capitalist State," New Left Review, 58
(November, December, 1969), 77.
18. This statement provides an interesting example of the structuralist mis-reading of Marx.
Marx's formulation clearly refers to the element of 'transcendence' in Bonapartist ideology and
psuedo-universal political myth rather than to any continuity with the structure of the state. He is
referring to the Rousseauian tradition of "civil religion," manifest throughout the Bonapartist
epoch. See Ibid., 74.
19. The one-sidedness of Poulantzas' reading of Gramsci is especially evident here, since
This content downloaded from 128.104.46.196 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 21:09:27 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
RE VIEW ESSA YS 167
Significantly, both Marx's and Gramsci's formulations revolve around the situation of
crisis, the latter as an anticipation, the former as a response. Poulantzas, however,
locates his definition in relation to the continuity of all capitalist state forms, and
specifically against Miliband's argument that it is the fascist state that above all
demonstrates autonomy vis-d-vis the dominant social classes. Now, in his more recent
work, Poulantzas presents us with the paradox that he has universalized the
Bonapartist conception of the state, only to assert that fascism and Bonapartism
represent exceptional forms.
The problem becomes especially acute in the discussion of the specific character of
the fascist state. Poulantzas characterizes fascism, not by a change in the nature of the
state, but by a displacement within its apparatuses, e.g., greater autonomy for the
organs of repression, or tighter control over ideological aspects. The four elements
that distinguish the fascist state are: 1) the mass party in the framework of the
ideological apparatus provides a permanent mass mobilization; 2) the party first
dominates the repressive state apparatus and later becomes dominated by it; 3) the
political police is predominant in the repressive apparatus; 4) there is a diminishing
relative autonomy of the ideological apparatus (resulting in the integration of the
family within the state apparatus).
Despite these considerations, however, Poulantzas so underestimates the importance
of specifically fascist elements that he ultimately reestablishes the identity of the fascist
state with all other capitalist state forms: "In spite of everything that has been written
to the contrary, it therefore has the features peculiar to the capitalist state" (310). By
collapsing the specific characteristics of fascism within a distended and
one-dimensional concept of the state, Poulantzas misses the significance of precisely
those aspects which characterize the primacy of fascist politics: the autonomy of the
mass movement, and the abolition of the distinction between bourgeois public and
private spheres through the abolition of traditional bourgeois forms of legitimacy. The
fact that these aspects are mentioned only in passing is a chronic weakness of the book.
Moreover, Poulantzas also underestimates fascism as a qualitatively different crisis
form, peculiar to the advanced capitalist state: that it no longer functions in the
interests of capital as a whole (or mediates the dominant interests), but in fact
abdicates this role in favor of the primacy of state activity to both secure a solution to
the crisis (economic autarchy, public works, militarization), and to provide legitimacy
through ambivalent forms of social integration (repression, mass organizations, social
policy, and symbols which ensure mass quiescence and mobilization at the same time).
The result is that Poulantzas subsumes these qualitative characteristics of fascist
cultural organization under the flat category of the "ideological apparatus."
These aspects involve not only a simple displacement within the state apparatus, but
an actual primacy of politics in which both the state and the mass movement are
Gramsci also includes the " 'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the population to
the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group" as part of the
category of "social hegemony." Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and
trans., Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, 1971), p. 12.
This content downloaded from 128.104.46.196 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 21:09:27 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
168 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE
fundamentally freed from the constraints of political control and legal legitimacy in
order to carry through expedient policies. The fascist state is not simply another form
of the relative autonomy of the capitalist state, but is its direct elimination. In the
context of 19th-century liberal capitalism, even in the already largely statist French
situation, the relative autonomy of the state in maintaining authority and legitimacy
was restricted to crisis situations. In the 20th century the Bonapartist model broke out
of its crisis constraints and became a permanent fixture. It is this state that is the basis for
Weber's theory, and Gramsci seems to have had this in mind when he characterized the
post-Risorgimento Italian state as "Bonapartist." But the crisis situation of the
modern state in its fascist form represents more than a restructuring of its normal
form. Fascism represents the failure of the institutionalization of the relatively
autonomous capitalist state, its inability to establish itself and maintain its hegemony.
This is especially important insofar as fascism directly creates a new form of public
sphere that competes with the traditional agencies of socialization by constituting a
separate mode of mass integration and propaganda. For this reason Poulantzas'
functionalism cannot account for the way that the state is able to organize mass support
and secure the hegemony of the dominant class. The absence of a theory of fascism as a
mass movement which can explain the success of its symbols and organizational forms
reduces the problem to a one-way theory of ideological manipulation.
This content downloaded from 128.104.46.196 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 21:09:27 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
REVIE W ESSA YS 169
20. For an excellent critique of Bettelheim, see Ralph Miliband, "Bettelheim and the Soviet
Experience," New Left Review, 91 (May-June, 1975), 57-66.
21. Gilbert Padoul, "China 1974: Problems not Models," New Left Review, 89 (January,
February, 1975). 73-84.
22. See Paul Mattick, Jr.'s review of Paul Sweezy and Charles Bettelheim, The Transition to
Socialism (New York, 1972) in Telos, 20 (Summer, 1974), 167-174.
This content downloaded from 128.104.46.196 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 21:09:27 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
170 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE
explanation of the false politics of the Comintern which rests on the fantasy that if
Mao's theory of the "third phase" or some such thing had been understood, fascism
could have been prevented and the correct line blissfully adopted by the masses,
cannot be taken seriously. Yet, it illuminates Poulantzas' attempt to escape the vise of
structuralist determinism through its real counterpart: an orthodox "voluntarism."
Perhaps it is for this reason that structuralism has become so attractive to American
Marxists in the 1970s. The eclipse of a radical opposition in the West has forced the
now somewhat jaded generation of the 1960s to seek its red star over China. The more
tenaciously the structures of western domination seem to assert themselves, the more
alluring become the sirens of the East. But the mysteries of the orient have already
been pierced by the Nixon visit which revealed that the people's palaces were filled
with Realpolitik. The danger is that structuralism may in fact become to the Marxism
of the 1970s what Diamat was to the epoch of Stalin and Hitler. As a result, any
advantages that might have been gained from the adoption of the Gramscian notion of
the "crisis of hegemony" in the theory of fascism are ultimately lost in Poulantzas'
structuralist epistemology. Attempting to turn Marxism into a science of history,
Poulantzas comes far closer to natural theology and loses sight of Gramsci's own
prescient warnings against a "mechanical historical materialism" that "assumes that
every political act is determined, immediately, by the structure."23
Anson G. Rabinbach
PAUNCH
No. 44 May 1976
An examination of the deepest problem in the Marxist tradition: the unresolved dual
definition of freedom as the absence of necessity, and as the sensual interaction of
subject and object. With discussion by Raya Dunayevskaya, Rollo Handy, Jeremy J.
Shapiro, Carmen Sirianni, Bernard Murchland, and Kingsley Widmer. Reply by
Harrell. $3.00 per copy.
This content downloaded from 128.104.46.196 on Tue, 21 Mar 2017 21:09:27 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms