I agree that imperialism and fascism are twins. Imperialism (sometimes alongside settler colonialism) is applied to subordinate countries, while fascism is applied within.

I would argue that fascism is a method, when the bourgeoisie decides that the appearance of bourgeois democracy is unnecessary and decides to retrench into a mask-off bourgeois dictatorship. However, different cases of fascism can have different symptoms based on the exact response of the capitalists, because fascism does not have hard beliefs other than ensuring capitalist domination. In Nazi Germany, they decided to redirect all anger toward killing minorities as well as leftists. In Spain and Chile, they didn’t bother killing that many minorities, they just focused on killing leftists. Fascism behaved slightly differently in Indonesia, where they focused on killing all leftists and also anyone who was Chinese.

When the bourgeoisie deals with an imperially colonized country, often they do not bother with the appearance of bourgeois democracy. They just do bourgeois dictatorship from the beginning, which is how imperialism and fascism are siblings.

Ultimately, I think our disagreement is simply one of word usage. If you want, we can divide between “Imperial Core Fascism” versus “Periphery Fascism”. It’s just that from what I see in common US usage, fascism is only used to refer to occurences in imperial core countries. The US education system never say that the USA massacring protestors in banana republics proves the USA is fascist, even though the USA doing so within itself would immediately be termed fascism.

I think we disagree on the breadth of the application of the term fascism in this instance. I am referring to fascism mostly within the Western imperial countries, where it is used as a distraction to reinforce existing capitalism (Germany, Italy, Spain, also Pinochet’s Chile).

I don’t really think settler colonialism of the Global South should be included under the definition of fascism, at least when taught to American students. Otherwise, things become very messy and too broad, as we are now including a process which brings capitalism to areas that were never under capitalism before. Why can’t we just use the term ‘settler colonialism’ for that?

I agree completely. The most I can remember from my education about fascism in US school is that it is simply when you blame minorities for problems, and is just some form of ultra-racism. There is absolutely no analysis that fascism is a method to re-entrench the power of capital while distracting the masses away from fighting the capitalists to killing minorities instead.

This is because fascism was initially defined by Soviet political scientists as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital” ^[1]. It is only later, once the liberals were forced to fight the fascists, that they began formulating a non-Marxist definition, completely detached from class analysis, which simply revolved around the symptoms of hatred in fascism, and not the purpose of fascism.

She’s awesome, I’ve talked to her in person. She’s basically full ML. Through her work as both a political organizer and pastor, she acts as a bridge between PSL and liberation theology (MLK-style, which is more familiar to African Americans).

Is your country Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria, Greenland, or Canada? Trump’s threatened a lot of them.