Comintern factions defined fascism as armed dictatorship of capitalist fractions

Evidence

As Zinoviev was shortly to do at the Fifth World Congress, they defined social-democracy as the “left wing of fascism”. They saw “workers’ governments” as a mobilising slogan useful for convincing the more backward sections of the masses that the conquest of power was on the agenda, but warned against the illusion that there must be intermediate phases before the installation of the proletarian dictatorship—indeed they stated that “the existence of a regime of permanent armed dictatorship opens up for Italy a period of ‘permanent revolution’”; they defined fascism as “the armed dictatorship of a fraction of the capitalist bourgeoisie and the big landowners”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 164

Categorization

• DEFINE: The Comintern’s classic definition of fascism as ‘armed dictatorship of a fraction of the capitalist bourgeoisie and big landowners’ — a working definition the reader’s toolkit should retain before later Islamophobia-as-authoritarianism comparisons.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did this economic-class framing of fascism compare with Gramsci’s own later analysis of fascism as a ‘passive revolution’ / mass mobilisation phenomenon?
• XREF: connects to: Fascism exposes bourgeois universal reason as an instrument of particular privilege; Neumann rejected orthodox Marxist accounts of fascism as finance-capital dictatorship — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 509; Horkheimer’s fascism theory generalized beyond orthodox communist capitalism-as-agent doctrine. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1070

Related

• Fascism’s essence was disputed among revolutionaries in 1926 (similarity 0.82)
• Gramsci analyzed fascism through its social base rather than abstract class form (similarity 0.80)
• Horkheimer’s fascism theory generalized beyond orthodox communist capitalism-as-agent doctrine. (similarity 0.80)
• Gramsci came to see fascism as unifier of the ruling class, not just terror (similarity 0.80)
• Fascism arrested class polarisation before the bourgeoisie formed its own party (similarity 0.78)
• Fascism originated in the petite and rural bourgeoisie then served capitalist class interests (similarity 0.78)
• Neumann rejected orthodox Marxist accounts of fascism as finance-capital dictatorship (similarity 0.78)