Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Rabinbach, Anson
• Herzog, Dagmar
• Geroulanos, Stefanos

Titel

Toward a Marxist theory of fascism and National Socialism: A report on developments in West Germany (1974) 1

Ist Teil von

• Staging the Third Reich, 2020, p.295-318

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This chapter traces the development of Marxist theories of fascism in West Germany between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s. Against the background of a helpless, self-exonerating antifascism that characterized the early Federal Republic, contributors to the New Left magazine Das Argument attempted to develop a critical theory of fascism in the early 1960s that considered the connection between fascism and postwar capitalist forms of domination. Provoking renewed interest in Marxist literature of the 1930s and 1940s, late 1960s theories of fascism began discussing the transformation of the state, specifically the primacy of politics in National Socialism. After considering the 1970s turn of Marxist discussions toward a general definition of fascism, Rabinbach concludes by drawing attention to fascism’s historical situatedness, which reveals something essential about the dialectic of state and society, and emphasizes the indispensability of the Habermasian concept of the (decline of the) public sphere to understand the nature of political control in both fascism and advanced capitalism.