Gramsci analyzed fascism through its social base rather than abstract class form

Evidence

Both accepted only the united front “from below”, and stressed the need to struggle not only against the regime itself but equally—or even primarily—against the social-democrats, the “left wing of the bourgeoisie”. But whereas Bordiga saw fascism and social-democracy simply as two inter-changeable forms of bourgeois rule, rejected the notion that whether one form or the other happened to be adopted by Italian capitalism could be of any consequence to the P.C.I., and foresaw a direct replacement of the existing regime by the dictatorship of the proletariat, Gramsci’s conception was a less reductionist one. He had always analysed fascism in terms of its social base, and he saw its disintegration in terms of the detachment of sections of this base—above all the urban petite bourgeoisie. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 186

Categorization

• XREF: Gramsci’s social-base analysis of fascism connects forward to how Islamophobia readings analyze right-wing movements as rooted in specific class fractions rather than abstract ideology. — connects to: Fascism exposes bourgeois universal reason as an instrument of particular privilege; Bourgeois class behavior explains the subjective key to fascism — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1421; Social Democratic analysts diagnosed European fascism’s spread as early as 1928