Fascism represents the interests of the money-lending class, the financial oligarchy. It represents the interests of that tiny class of shareholders who exert control over the majority of shares, and through which they exercise control over the real capital – socialised capital – they do not own. But, fascism becomes the actual representative of those interests only at specific times. Generally, the normal functioning of social-democracy protects the interests of shareholders as ruling class. During those periods when the demand for money-capital, relative to supply, is strong, interest rates, and thereby dividend and bond yields, are high and/or rising. The money lenders wealth and power flows from these large revenues. During such periods, the strong economic growth and rising capital accumulation produces the increasing profits out of which these rising revenues from interest are paid. In periods when economic growth is slower, and the demand for money-capital falls relative to supply, as for example happened from the 1980's onwards, interest rates fall, and with it dividend and bond yields, but with these falling yields goes a concomitant rise in asset prices. Now, this section of the ruling class obtains its wealth and power from these rising asset prices that inflate its paper wealth. When it has become dependent on these high asset prices, as in the 2000's, whenever they fall, the state intervenes with QE to boost them again, even if it has to damage the real economy to do so.
So, generally, progressive and conservative social democracy, in alternating periods of the long wave cycle, acts to protect the dominant section of the ruling class, which now owns its wealth almost exclusively in the form of fictitious capital. But, the danger to this ruling class comes when it can depend on neither rising revenues from rising interest rates, nor rising asset prices from falling interest rates, but when it also faces the potential of workers challenging its control over the socialised capital itself. Such was the condition in the 1920's and 30's. Its at this point that fascism becomes the active representatives of this class of money-lending capitalists.
However, this class is tiny. They represent less than 0.01% of the population. To mobilise in their interests a much wider mass is required. So, the fascists mobilise the petty-bourgeoisie, and in doing so they mobilise all of that other social rabble that is in close proximity to them, those whose small business dealings shade over from the unethical to the illegal, the outright criminals, and other anti-social elements. They mobilise around attacks on big-capital, often combining those attacks, as on the attack on organised workers, with conspiracy theories about foreign control and influence, which also, thereby, utilises appeals not only to nationalism, but also to outright racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and so on.
But, the real aim of the fascists is the destruction of the organised labour movement, which threatens the control over the socialised capital by shareholders. As soon as that goal is achieved, the true nature of fascism is exposed, as the anti-capitalist elements within it are exterminated, as Hitler did in the night of the long knives. And, that has to be the case, because the fascists themselves know that the modern economy is one based upon large-scale socialised capital. The fate of the state itself depends upon the fortunes of that capital. The idea that such a state could revert to an economy in which the large-scale, socialised capital could be subordinated to the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie, and its small scale capital is simply a reactionary delusion. That is why fascism should properly be described as conservative rather than reactionary. In Britain, today, the Libertarians, like Rees-Mogg, the followers of Mises and Hayek, who truly do want to go back to the days of the mythical past, in which small scale capital, and all out competition reigned, are the reactionaries. Those that have used them as foot soldiers, in the Brexit campaign, but who seek a more authoritarian means of promoting large-scale capital, and, thereby the interests of shareholders, are conservatives.
In the period ahead, the conservatives will seek to develop large-scale capital, including the use of government spending on infrastructure etc., when required, to do so in the same way that Hitler developed the National Economic Council, and built autobahns etc. They will do so whilst pressing down on the organised workers, the features of which can be seen in the measures proposed variously by Johnson in Britain, Orban in Hungary, and similar measures in Poland and elsewhere. In Britain, the conservatives erstwhile Brexit allies amongst the Libertarians will become their opponents, as they argue against this extension of the role of the corporatist state.
“The attitude of Narodism towards the “West” and towards its influence upon Russia was determined, of course, not by the fact that it “seized upon” this or that idea coming from the West, but by the small producer’s conditions of life: he saw that he was up against large-scale capitalism which was borrowing West-European technique, and, oppressed by it, built up naïve theories which explained capitalism by politics instead of capitalist politics by capitalist economy, and which declared large-scale capitalism to be something alien to Russia, introduced from outside. The fact that he was tied to his separate, small enterprise prevented him from understanding the true character of the state, and he appealed to it to help develop small (“people’s”) production. Owing to the undeveloped condition of class antagonisms characteristic of Russian capitalist society, the theory of these petty bourgeois ideologists was put forward as representing the interests of labour in general.” (p 441)
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