This is what I tried to explain to a French friend, but failed. It’s tempting to ascribe that failure to the inadequacy of my French, and God knows it’s inadequate enough.
However, my English is fairly competent, and yet I’ve been known to suffer similar defeats in an Anglophone environment. This encourages me to look for the problem elsewhere, starting with the observable fact that most people, including intelligent ones, don’t bother to ponder political concepts as deeply as it takes.
My French friend, a retired financier, is certainly nobody’s fool. Throughout his career, he always found some time away from fund management to read Le Figaro every day, and even a book or two every now and then.
Yet his interest in extraneous matters has always lacked the single-minded focus of unwavering concentration. Things like politics, philosophy, religion, art are merely hobbies to him, welcome diversions from debits, credits and market fluctuations.
That’s why, when I mentioned in two separate conversations that Starmer’s regime is at base Marxist and Putin’s fascist, all I got was an indulgent smile, a shaken head and a “mais non”. My interlocutor clearly thought I was an extremist devoid of the uniquely Gallic ability to appreciate nuances.
In fact, the difference between us is that I use ‘Marxist’ and ‘fascist’ as technical terms, while to him they are merely imprecise colloquial designations. ‘Marxist’ is fully synonymous with ‘Stalinist’, and ‘fascist’ with ‘Nazi’. (Thank God for small favours: at least he doesn’t describe conservatives as fascists.)
True, as my friend pointed out, Starmer isn’t guilty of mass murder, he hasn’t established a network of hard labour camps, he neither exterminates whole social classes nor imprisons his critics. Yes, he is a Left-leaning politician, but that doesn’t make him a Marxist. Calling him that, explained my friend, is emotive and unhelpful.
My interlocutor considers Putin a thoroughly nasty man, and he certainly doesn’t condone Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine. He is also aware of certain despotic tendencies in Russia’s domestic affairs, such as curbing free speech and imprisoning Putin’s critics.
Yet Putin boasts neither Treblinka nor Auschwitz, he neither gasses Jews nor castrates homosexuals, he doesn’t conduct experiments on people, he doesn’t even pour gallons of castor oil down the throats of dissidents. Yes, he is an aggressive, murderous authoritarian. But so were Russian tsars, and no one called them fascists.
We left it at that: a boozy dinner party isn’t an appropriate place to delve into philosophical depths. Yet this is a subject that can be elucidated by Thomistic metaphysics of substances and accidents.
Aquinas borrowed it from Aristotle because it explains the essential Catholic concept of transubstantiation. Since non-Catholics reject transubstantiation, they also reject St Thomas’s thoughts on this matter.
I’m not proposing to debate the intrinsic value of such metaphysics here. In this context, all I’m saying is that I find it a practically useful cognitive tool.
To sum up schematically, a species’ substance defines what it is. Substance is the unvarying, immutable property of a species, the key to its identity. Accidents, on the other hand, are various non-essential manifestations of the substance. They can come and go without the species losing its identity.
For example, a dog may be big or small, ferocious or cuddly, brown or black, fast or slow, with a loud bark or more of a yelp. All of these are accidents. The dog’s substance is that it’s a Canis lupus familiaris, and this is the essence of the very concept of dog.
All the characteristics my French friend ascribed to Marxism and fascism are accidents. For, in substance, Starmer is indeed a Marxist, and Putin is indeed a fascist. This will become clear once we’ve established the substance of Marxism and fascism, discarding in the process their self-vindicating rhetoric.
They are both secular cults preaching absolute, sacralised state power or its maximum approximation. Both seek to achieve it by fostering a revanchist hysteria of collective resentment against some alleged injustices committed over history to suppress the natural superiority of the controlled population.
The substantive difference between Marxism and fascism is that the former preaches resentment against allegedly oppressive classes, which have historically exploited the downtrodden but inherently superior masses. Fascism, on the other hand, defines the downtrodden yet superior masses in terms of a nation or race historically oppressed by other, inherently inferior, nations or races.
In substance, Marxism and fascism are close to each other. They are two different branches of the same tree, the mass rebellion against Christendom going by the misnomer of the Enlightenment. Where they diverge, more or less, is in the derivative accidents.
Both are egalitarian, preaching universal equality before (and beneath) the state, as embodied in a small élite or sometimes a single leader.
But, while Marxism denies the formerly oppressive classes the otherwise equal status of all, fascism advocates the equality of every member of a nation or race, regardless of social class. Hence the two doctrines use different methods of imposing state control over the economy.
Marxism seeks to reduce the private sector to a minimum or, better still, to eliminate it altogether. Ideally, a Marxist state should own the entire economy, and this ideal is actively sought and sometimes closely approximated.
Fascism, on the other hand, tends to be corporatist. A fascist state controls the economy, but it doesn’t technically own it. In practical terms, while Marxists seek to dispossess private entrepreneurs (‘capitalists’), fascism effectively turns them into managers. Officially, they still own their businesses, but that status is contingent on their compliance with the state’s diktats.
Politically and culturally, both Marxism and fascism seek total control, or as much of it as is achievable within the limitations imposed by the current ethos. Marxism tends to restrict freedom of speech more than fascism. The former seeks to control self-expression in every area of life, whereas the latter allows its subjects some latitude – provided they don’t abuse it by criticising the state.
I hope you accept these attempts at precise yet unavoidably prolix definitions. If you do, I won’t have to go over Starmer’s and Putin’s regimes point by point, showing why the former is inherently Marxist and the latter fascist.
Putin operates in an ethos largely shaped by Marxism and hence conducive to fascism. All he had to do was re-direct public resentment away from alien classes and towards alien nations or blocs thereof.
Those Untermenschen have historically exploited saintly Russians, not letting them achieve the global supremacy to which their unmatched spirituality entitles them. And only the heroism of the Russian people has prevented those beasts from conquering and enslaving the country.
The collective passions are thus re-channelled into the conduit of racial superiority, demanding the nation’s historical due and seeking revenge against those who have kept the nation down.
The sacralisation of the supreme leader wasn’t especially difficult to impose either, what with several generations of Russians growing up accustomed to worship the mummified relics of another supreme leader. All the other accidents of the fascist substance followed naturally: brutal suppression of dissent, political murders, elimination of free media – and of course external aggression.
By contrast, Starmer operates in an environment not organically conducive to Marxism. Commitment to parliamentary democracy, free press and essential civic liberties are all obstacles in the way of Marxist purity. These can be systematically eroded, but they can’t be cast aside in one fell swoop.
But Starmer and his government get full marks for doing their best, given the limitations. If you read that bible of Marxism, The Communist Manifesto, you’ll see how much headway the Labour government is making towards the ideal outlined there.
Systematic debauchment of free speech and private wealth, education that indoctrinates rather than educating, the state extending its tentacles into every aspect of culture, politics and family life, increasingly subjugating the law to the state’s diktats, falsifying history by portraying it as nothing but continuous capitalist/colonial oppression, imposing economic policies that have little to do with the economy and much to do with revanchist Marxist levelling – all of these come straight out of that same playbook, The Manifesto.
In substance, Starmer’s government is as Marxist as Putin’s is fascist. These aren’t just any old words used pejoratively or otherwise. They are technical terms designating specific phenomena – and technical terms thrive on precise definitions, while dying a slow death when used loosely.
Now you see the problem I had with my French friend. It has taken me 1,400 words to make here the same point I tried to make in a maximum of 20 allowed by the etiquette of a noisy dinner party. Predictably, I failed, and it’s all my fault. I ought to have known better.