There is a growing discussion of fascism, and I want to clutter up the board with another thread on the topic.
What passes for “fascism” in many contemporary debates is a sloppy label. The rightward drift across bourgeois parliaments in Europe and the United States is primarily intensified bourgeois rule — not fascism. It is class rule without Klassenfrieden: the worker shall no longer suckle the teat of the imperialist state freely. The imperialist state is running on fumes; it may last decades more, but exhaustion is its long-term condition, not immediate fascist seizure.
Fascism, historically, is not a mood or a personality syndrome; it is a specific political form that arises under specific material conditions. Three interlocking preconditions must obtain: (1) a deep systemic crisis of imperialism/capitalism — typically culminating in inter-imperialist war; (2) a real or imminent threat of proletarian dictatorship or mass working-class power; and (3) a decisive victory by reactionary bourgeois forces that then organize open, systematic terror to annihilate the left. In short, fascism is the extralegal, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary sections of finance capital — the “open terrorist dictatorship” Dimitrov named.
This explains most of the regimes in interwar Europe that we classify today as fascist. It also explains why, without point (2), there is no imminent threat of fascism. For example, Hitler had to crush many syndicalists and communists before taking power—this aligns with the idea of organized white terror, rather than with some purely psychological explanation of fascism. Many fascist states had similar regimes (Sanacja, monarcho-fascism, the numerous Baltic quislings). Where condition (2) is absent, the dynamics are different — repressive, illiberal, authoritarian, but not structurally fascist. Consider debates over Japan: if the communist movement there never posed a tangible seizure-of-power threat, then labeling Tokyo’s authoritarianism “fascism” in the interwar sense requires argument, not assertion.
Use the term carefully. If we want politics that prevent genuine counter-revolution, we must analyse preconditions, not flatten distinct phenomena into the single word “fascism.”
Japan was a power that, prior to the great depression, managed to enter the world economy by exporting cheap goods to Europe and North America, which they were able to produce by exploiting their proletariat to extreme rates. This made their economy dependent on exports, since their own proletariat did not have an average wage sufficient to purchase the products they were producing.
When the great depression hit, all of a sudden, the European/North American demand for cheap Japanese goods plummeted. This caused a fierce demand by the Japanese bourgeoisie to seize Asian markets to replace the European/North American market. Hence the Japanese bourgeoisie was practically entirely unified in the crazed search for colonies, it wasn't just a gamble that might pay off or might not pay off for them; if they failed to seize those markets the Zaibatsu would never be able to continue their rule. Even though there was no Communist threat since ~1933, there was still a crisis and a need for unity amongst the bourgeoisie for the sake of waging most efficiently an imperialist war to seize foreign markets and save the Zaibatsu.
For the Japanese bourgeoisie, this need for imperialist war was an all-important necessity, and the bourgeois democratic structure that existed even into the 1930s was causing constant party splits and bickering. In 1938, they voted on a law (State General Mobilization Law) that essentially banned bourgeois opposition media, and in 1940, all of the bourgeois parties dissolved themselves to form the Taisei Yokusankai, which was the sole legal party and which modeled the state it built specifically off of Nazi Germany. It was fascist, in the sense that it was enforcing a "unity" of the bourgeoisie (of course, the bourgeoisie cannot unify on any permanent basis) that was enforced to secure bourgeois rule when bourgeois democracy is deemed incapable to.