Defining fascism posed contested questions of national specificity versus general capitalist tendency.

Evidence

Was it a specific, national phenomenon or the precursor of an international trend? Was it a novel socio-political formation or one that was basically just the Italian equivalent of other, more traditional forms of reaction-such as the Russian Black Hundreds after 1905 or the anti-labour repression which ravaged American socialism in the early years of this century or the Freikorps which underpinned the social-democratic government of Noske and Scheidemann in Germany after 1918? Did its essence lie in its social base in the urban petty bourgeoisie and the rural bourgeoisie, or in its role as the new, more brutal instrument of big capital’s dominion? — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 31

Categorization

• XREF: The specific-general and base-versus-instrument framing recurs in debates over Islamophobia as unique formation versus variant of racism shared across societies.