The term that Conrad goes on to use, “a fascist state”, is illiterate from a Marxist perspective. The terms, “fascist”, “authoritarian”, “Bonapartist”, “bourgeois-democratic”, or “soviet” relate not to the nature of the state, but to the nature of the political regime. The nature of the state is determined not by these superficial characteristics of the political regime, but by its class nature, i.e. is it a capitalist state or a workers' state. Trotsky, for example, noted that Nazi Germany was a capitalist state, whilst the USSR was a workers' state, but, in terms of the political regime, of Nazism and of Stalinism they were indistinguishable other than for the greater brutality of the latter.
What determines the class nature of the state is the dominant form of property, and the social relations erected upon it. A state may be in a transitional period of metamorphosis. For example, the bourgeois state in England first took the form of Mercantilism, of a symbiotic relation between the landed aristocracy, financial oligarchy, and the rising commercial bourgeoisie, most evident in the development of colonial empires, based on unequal exchange, protectionism and monopoly, but it was the dynamic of this relation (what Lenin, in another context, described as an algebraic formula), the dependence of that state on bourgeois commodity production and exchange, which defined its nature, and inevitable course of development.. Similarly, the capitalist state which arises on the back of private industrial capital, and free trade, evolves into the imperialist state of the late 19th/early 20th century, through to today. As Engels described it,
“The Reform Bill of 1831 had been the victory of the whole capitalist class over the landed aristocracy. The repeal of the Corn Laws was the victory of the manufacturing capitalist not only over the landed aristocracy, but over those sections of capitalists, too, whose interests were more or less bound up with the landed interest - bankers, stockjobbers, fundholders, etc. Free Trade meant the readjustment of the whole home and foreign, commercial and financial policy of England in accordance with the interests of the manufacturing capitalists — the class which now [These words belong apparently not to Bright but to his adherents. See The Quarterly Review, Vol. 71, No. 141, p. 273.-Ed.] represented the nation.”
To the extent that “fascism” is characteristic of any particular class, it is the petty-bourgeoisie, not the bourgeoisie, which as Lenin describes, in State and Revolution, prefers to use the regime of bourgeoisie democracy. Imperialism specifically prefers social-democracy, which itself reflects the underlying contradiction within the dominant form of property – large scale, socialised industrial capital – which, objectively, is the collective property of the “associated producers”, i.e. workers, but, which continues to be controlled, in the case of joint stock companies, by its, non-owners, i.e. shareholders, the owners of fictitious-capital.
It is the heterogeneous nature of the petty-bourgeoisie/peasantry, which means that it can never, itself, become a class for itself, or, therefore, become the ruling-class. It defines itself not by what it is for, but by what it is against – which means both against large-scale capital, and against organised labour. But, where the bourgeoisie's strength lies in its ownership and control of capital, and control of the state, and the working-class's strength resides in its collective role in production, in the workplace, and its collective strength derived from it, the petty-bourgeoisie has none of those things. Its strength, as with the peasantry, resides only in its numbers, most obviously displayed when it is able to vote, as they did for Brexit, for Trump etc. But, when that proves impotent, its chosen method is that of violence, terrorism, and guerrilla warfare, as with the peasant movements of Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Castro and so on.
The bourgeoisie can engage in a capital strike, but the petty-bourgeoisie cannot, because of the dwarfish nature of its capital, and precarious nature of its existence. The bourgeoisie has built up its state, whose ideological arms reinforce the ideas that represent its interests, as being those that are “common-sense”, or eternal truths. When, that is not enough, it has the mighty power of the monopoly of armed force, represented by its military, and police. The petty-bourgeoisie has no such permanently organised force, which is why it relies on sporadic, disorganised violence, much as the peasantry did, in the past, in various peasant revolts.
Similarly, the workers represent a large social mass, today, larger than that of the peasantry or petty-bourgeoisie, but, unlike the petty-bourgeois, the workers are permanently organised and disciplined simply as a consequence of the fact that production is based upon their collective, co-operative labour. The fact of their role in production, means that they have a far more homogeneous nature, and that is the basis of them forming trades unions, and on the back of it, their own workers parties. The working-class can press its interests by engaging not only in strikes to protect wages and conditions, but in political strikes, i.e. a General Strike. The petty-bourgeoisie cannot do so, effectively, because it is its own employer, in large part. So, again, its method resorts to violence when its numbers are no longer decisive at the ballot box. Trotsky wrote,
"It is stupid to believe that the Nazis would grow uninterruptedly, as they do now, for an unlimited period of time. Sooner or later they will drain their social reservoir. Fascism has introduced into its own ranks such dreadful contradictions, that the moment must come in which the flow will cease to replace the ebb. The moment can arrive long before the Fascists will have united about them even half of the votes. They will not be able to halt, for they will have nothing more to expect here. They will be forced to resort to an overthrow."
It was also the method of Mussolini's Black Shirts, and Hitler's Brown Shirts, and of the Zionists, as well as of political-Islam. The Zionist state in Israel was established by such terrorism, and the only difference in that with the attempt to do the same by ISIL in Syria and Iraq, is that the former had powerful backers in the corridors of power in Europe, whereas the latter did not. As I have set out before, and as Conrad has, also, to admit, the determining factor is not the existence of these fascist movements, as expressions of the petty-bourgeoisie, but whether the ruling class mobilises the much more powerful forces of its state against them or not.
Usually, when one of the two main classes – bourgeoisie and proletariat – are dominant, this intermediate mass is drawn in behind it. But, for the last 40 years, both of the two main classes have been in relative decline. In part, that is, also, a reflection of the underlying contradiction set out above, of the nature of large-scale, socialised capital. Objectively, it is the collective property of the working-class, but that class has not recognised it, or taken control of it, instead, under the ideological leadership of social-democratic/Stalinist/reformist workers' parties, has settled for simply bargaining within the system over wages. Control of that capital continued in the hands of speculators and coupon-clippers, whose immediate interests are antagonistic to that of industrial capital.
Real large-scale capital in the developed economies, has seen deindustrialisation, and, also, its interests – the accumulation of capital, and creation of surplus value – subordinated to the interests of fictitious-capital, speculation, gambling, rent-seeking and so on. The working-class, decimated in the 1980's, by the new technological revolution, which introduced large quantities of labour-saving machines, as well as by that deindustrialisation, as part of globalisation, and which had no political leadership adequate to the task of responding to it, as it attempted to simply bargain within the system, has been weak ever since.
So, it is no surprise that, during that 40 year period, as the petty-bourgeoisie has grown by 50%, and its social weight has increased, we have seen that reflected within the realm of ideas, and the political regime. The Tories (petty-bourgeois nationalist throwbacks to the period prior to the Repeal of The Corn Laws) increasingly came to dominate the Conservative Party, with Farage's assorted groups acting as outriders. Similar developments occurred with the Republicans in the US, going through various stages of The Tea Party, up to its takeover by Trump. The same process has been seen across Europe, as the post-war, conservative, social-democratic model collapsed. The ruling-class owners of fictitious-capital had asset-stripped real capital to the bone, in order to try to maintain their revenues from interest/dividends and rents, and to hold down interest rates so as to sustain astronomically inflated asset prices, and 2008 showed that was no longer possible, although, they have tried to continue it, via the surreal adventure into negative interest rates/yields, fiscal austerity and other such means.
Indeed, faced with the inevitable crisis following the introduction of his tariffs, much as happened, on a smaller scale with the same policies pursued by Truss, Trump, has, now, tried to openly claim that he has crashed the economy, so as to reduce interest rates! That is nonsense, even though the effect is the same. But, as with many of these instances Trump has just said the quiet bit out loud. As I have set out over the last year or so, for example, we saw conservative social democrats like Larry Summers saying that, US unemployment would need to rise by 50%, to around 5%, in order to reduce inflation, by which, what he really meant was that unemployment would have to rise to discipline workers, and reduce the demand for labour, so as to prevent relative wages rising at the expense of profits.
Meanwhile, the organised labour movement, which provided the material basis, and stimulus for the kinds of progressive social-democracy of the post-war period, which amounted to little more than corporatism, and an extension of planning and regulation for the benefit of real capital, was in hibernation.
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