NoFreeWill posted:

that's interesting, tell me more about how all fascists are petit bourgeois

Youre incredibly an enormous idiot

Since the 1920s, for instance, there has been general agreement that fascism originates socially in the grievances of the petty bourgeoisie or lower middle class. In the words of Luigi Salvatorelli in 1923, fascism "represents the class struggle of the petty bourgeoisie, squeezed between capitalism and the proletariat, as the third party between the two conflicting sides. "26 This was the commonest contemporary judgment and has been pursued repeatedly by both historians and sociologists, Marxist and non-Marxist alike. Most of the accumulated evidence (and a mountain of continuing research) is assembled in an enormous collection of essays recently edited by Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, and Jan Petter Myklebust, Who Were the Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism (1980), and while the aggregate effect of around 800 pages is hard to assess, it seems to confirm the received assumptions. There have been attempts to suggest that other social groups were ultimately more important in the fascists' makeup, or that class was less important than "generational revolt. "27 On the evidence of Who Were the Fascists, however, the fascist movement's social composition seems to have been disproportionately weighted toward the petty bourgeoisie (that is, small-scale owners and producers, together with the new strata of salaried employees, including lower grade civil servants, junior managerial and technical personnel, teachers, clerical workers, and parts of the professions).

At the same time, to call fascism flatly a protest movement of the petty bourgeoisie is clearly an oversimplification. As David Roberts observes in an excellent discussion of petty bourgeois fascism in Italy, the tendency is to "assume that if we can find social categories enabling us to distinguish fascists from non-fascists, we have the key to explaining the phenomenon," with consequences that are potentially extremely reductionist. 29 As Roberts continues, historians of Italian fascism habitually analyze it "in terms of socio-economic crisis and the traumas and frustrations which industrial modernization causes the lower middle class," and the same is equally true of writers on Nazism. 30 As suggested above, this argument conjoins with another popular thesis concerning the relationship of fascism to modernization, where the movement's specificity derives from "its appeal to certain kinds of people who see themselves as losers in modern technological civilization," who rejected "the modern industrial world" and took refuge in an ideology of "utopian anti-modernism. "31 The problem here is that the correlations between fascist ideology, the support of the petty bourgeoisie, and general economic trends are drawn in a way that is too general and mechanical. Though the casualties of capitalist industrialization were certainly prominent among the radical right's supporters, this was by no means the whole story.

As David Roberts reminds us, the deficiencies in this standard view "stem not from the insistence on the petty bourgeois role in fascism, but from the inferences about motiviation that are made from this fact of social composition. "32 Summarizing his own argument in The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism he highlights a quite different ideological tendency in the petty bourgeoisie: so far from "trying to preserve traditional values and repudiate the modern industrial world," its exponents were firmly committed to a heavily productivist vision of industrial progress, and harboured few "backward-looking" anxieties about the modern world in the way normally attributed. In fact, they were preoccupied less with the socioeconomic problems of declining preindustrial strata than with the long-term political questions of Italy's national integration and cultural self-confidence. Their resentments were aimed less at the bearers of capitalist industrialization than at the representatives of a narrowly based parliamentary liberalism (not forgetting, of course, the socialist left, whose growth the latter seemed irresponsibly to permit). In Roberts' view, petty-bourgeois fascism emerged as a critique of "Italy's restrictive transformist political system" under the radicalizing circumstances of World War I. As "political outsiders," its spokespersons presented themselves as a new populist "vanguard" capable of providing the ideological leadership effectively abdicated (as they saw it) by the old Giolittian establishment. Moreover, their urgency stemmed not just from the shattering experience of the war, but from the ensuing crisis of the biennio rosso, with its alarming evidence of Socialist electoral gains, working-class insurgency, and ambiguous Popolare radicalism. 33 Under these circumstances radical nationalism was an intelligible response to the social dynamics of national disintegration. Affirming the virtues of industrial power, productivism, and class collaboration, its architects offered a program of national syndicalism, which "could mobilize and politicize the masses more effectively and thereby create a more legitimate and popular state. "34

In other words, it is worth considering the possibility that fascism was linked as much to the "rising" as to the "declining" petty bourgeoisie.

Crow posted:

you should be like, humble and inquisitive instead of, aggressively stupid and wrong

Crow posted:

.custom252330{}NoFreeWill posted:that's interesting, tell me more about how all fascists are petit bourgeois

Youre incredibly an enormous idiot

Since the 1920s, for instance, there has been general agreement that fascism originates socially in the grievances of the petty bourgeoisie or lower middle class. In the words of Luigi Salvatorelli in 1923, fascism "represents the class struggle of the petty bourgeoisie, squeezed between capitalism and the proletariat, as the third party between the two conflicting sides. "26 This was the commonest contemporary judgment and has been pursued repeatedly by both historians and sociologists, Marxist and non-Marxist alike. Most of the accumulated evidence (and a mountain of continuing research) is assembled in an enormous collection of essays recently edited by Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, and Jan Petter Myklebust, Who Were the Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism (1980), and while the aggregate effect of around 800 pages is hard to assess, it seems to confirm the received assumptions. There have been attempts to suggest that other social groups were ultimately more important in the fascists' makeup, or that class was less important than "generational revolt. "27 On the evidence of Who Were the Fascists, however, the fascist movement's social composition seems to have been disproportionately weighted toward the petty bourgeoisie (that is, small-scale owners and producers, together with the new strata of salaried employees, including lower grade civil servants, junior managerial and technical personnel, teachers, clerical workers, and parts of the professions).

At the same time, to call fascism flatly a protest movement of the petty bourgeoisie is clearly an oversimplification. As David Roberts observes in an excellent discussion of petty bourgeois fascism in Italy, the tendency is to "assume that if we can find social categories enabling us to distinguish fascists from non-fascists, we have the key to explaining the phenomenon," with consequences that are potentially extremely reductionist. 29 As Roberts continues, historians of Italian fascism habitually analyze it "in terms of socio-economic crisis and the traumas and frustrations which industrial modernization causes the lower middle class," and the same is equally true of writers on Nazism. 30 As suggested above, this argument conjoins with another popular thesis concerning the relationship of fascism to modernization, where the movement's specificity derives from "its appeal to certain kinds of people who see themselves as losers in modern technological civilization," who rejected "the modern industrial world" and took refuge in an ideology of "utopian anti-modernism. "31 The problem here is that the correlations between fascist ideology, the support of the petty bourgeoisie, and general economic trends are drawn in a way that is too general and mechanical. Though the casualties of capitalist industrialization were certainly prominent among the radical right's supporters, this was by no means the whole story.

As David Roberts reminds us, the deficiencies in this standard view "stem not from the insistence on the petty bourgeois role in fascism, but from the inferences about motiviation that are made from this fact of social composition. "32 Summarizing his own argument in The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism he highlights a quite different ideological tendency in the petty bourgeoisie: so far from "trying to preserve traditional values and repudiate the modern industrial world," its exponents were firmly committed to a heavily productivist vision of industrial progress, and harboured few "backward-looking" anxieties about the modern world in the way normally attributed. In fact, they were preoccupied less with the socioeconomic problems of declining preindustrial strata than with the long-term political questions of Italy's national integration and cultural self-confidence. Their resentments were aimed less at the bearers of capitalist industrialization than at the representatives of a narrowly based parliamentary liberalism (not forgetting, of course, the socialist left, whose growth the latter seemed irresponsibly to permit). In Roberts' view, petty-bourgeois fascism emerged as a critique of "Italy's restrictive transformist political system" under the radicalizing circumstances of World War I. As "political outsiders," its spokespersons presented themselves as a new populist "vanguard" capable of providing the ideological leadership effectively abdicated (as they saw it) by the old Giolittian establishment. Moreover, their urgency stemmed not just from the shattering experience of the war, but from the ensuing crisis of the biennio rosso, with its alarming evidence of Socialist electoral gains, working-class insurgency, and ambiguous Popolare radicalism. 33 Under these circumstances radical nationalism was an intelligible response to the social dynamics of national disintegration. Affirming the virtues of industrial power, productivism, and class collaboration, its architects offered a program of national syndicalism, which "could mobilize and politicize the masses more effectively and thereby create a more legitimate and popular state. "34

In other words, it is worth considering the possibility that fascism was linked as much to the "rising" as to the "declining" petty bourgeoisie.

you're right and i'm wrong. thanks for posting a good source.

c_man posted:

.custom252330{}NoFreeWill posted:that's interesting, tell me more about how all fascists are petit bourgeois
tell me more about being a philosophy student who cant be bothered to read books about philosophy

i'm not a philosophy student and what book are you talking about?

NoFreeWill posted:

lower middle class is considerably different than bankers tho

i was talking about mark paslawsky, who was a retired banker. not all bankers are billionaires. and this says petty bourgeoisie AND the lower middle classes.

roseweird posted:

so now that i've learned and agree that the petty bourgeois are generally Fascists/the source of Fascism, where should i look for evidence to support the location of the source of anti-immigrant sentiment among the middle class business owners and managers who employ immigrants at low wages rather than among the propertyless workers (ha ha well not workers anymore but you know) who are displaced by those hires ? keep in mind that in this scenario, i know that the problem is really Capitalism, but the workers are not like me, they are stupid and they don't know about Capitalism

the point i am trying to make is that the interests of owners and managers, as a class, necessitates terrorizing immigrant labor, wipping up fascist sentiment, and dividing the working classes against each other. obviously that doesnt mean that members of the proletariat cant be fascist, but that the proletariat, as a class, are not fascist, and fascism does not serves their interests besides a small sliver of their general makeup (the contours of which would have to be calculated on a world scale, at this point). really you have to conceptualize classes in the political economy. why would racist attitudes be propagated by the propertied class? well, to keep labor costs down. why would proletariat seek to abolish racism. well, to unite all progressive forces and to seize power. people find common language among their class, you might underestimate it. they generally understand what Bosses do

roseweird posted:

alright, i'm with you, and agree that there is plain truth truth in what you're saying. but maybe i do underestimate the common language of class... because i see people to adhere much more strongly to the common language of their culture and nation. i understand the provisional and local power of class language, but i also think that it is hard for people to subordinate their culture to their class. maybe that's because i'm a gay fascist jew, i will let you decide, in any case i would love to change my mind.

well then how are culture and nation produced?

roseweird posted:

basically what i'm saying is yes business owners exploit racist/xenophobic rhetoric but it works because people genuinely hate and fear each other

yeah so

roseweird posted:

so i think a class-based materialist analysis is insufficient to explain these animosities or locate their beginning

how is it insufficient. are you saying that scientific research is insufficient to explain historical grievances and current pressure bearing down on communities