this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
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I’ve heard the critique that Dutt’s thesis (fascism is the “death rattle” of “capitalism in decay”) is mistaken and dated. This was from a very interesting essay on redsails that noted primitive accumulation is basis for capital, not capitalism, therefore making it an ongoing process.^1^ With this understanding:
Overall I find this conclusion more much sound than ideas like fascism being just a particular petty bourgeois movement emerging from the conditions of interwar Europe. The history of the west is deeply fascist.
P.S. I haven’t gone deeply into the book and apologize if there’s some misunderstandings on my part.
Fascism is a type of imperialist government. Pre-imperialist capitalism, liberal/social democracies had some of the characteristics of fascism but not enough to warrant the term.
The thesis of the Redsails essay (Really Existing Fascism) is that capitalist/imperialist core relations vis a vis the periphery and often vis a vis the marginalised groups within the core and semi-periphery itself are fascist in nature (the capital accumulation stage, which having "used up" one group to accumulate capital from must move on to the next).
What we colloquially call fascism is simply this capital accumulation phase being reapplied to the previously privileged working people of the core.