The 3rd Position Viewed Historically

By d'Arma

MUCH has been said about Fascism and its numerous counterparts and off-shoots, yet very little

There is a gigantic flaw in the method of which mainstream scholars derive their understanding of Fascism from, and it’s time to uncover the truth. 

 what does the average person think when he hears the word "Fascism"? In general you would assume, Hitler, Racism, War, Death, and the "bright" few might think of Mussolini or Italy. I will discuss how and why we got there and the proposed remedy to this epistemological flaw.

There's an obvious (although, overlooked) logical inconsistency within using the historical to understand the theoretical with little to no consideration of the background and the full story, the correct axiom is viewing things from the point of view of the doer since every action has reasoning behind it and our goal is finding that in other words we need to find the reasoning behind actions to correctly interpret history in regards to theory, because correlation ≠ causation. 

When considering history to make an observation or to understand something, we shouldn't reach conclusions from simply what happened which gives us (and I'm being generous here) half of the picture, but rather, we should try to find why it happened. Here we have a consistent method from which we fan deduct observations, propositions or conclusions.

So what does Fascism or more broadly the 3P have to do with all of this? The academic and popular conclusions on these things are deduced entirely from incomplete historical observations, we accuse regimes and people of being Fascist very liberally then deduce conclusions from observing them. This is a circular logic fallacy which almost all of academia has fallen for.

Now, let's fill in the gaps to reach to the real stuff. Fascism is unequivocally and indisputably associated with things such as Genocide, Racism, Nazism, Totalitarianism, etc because we again, entirely deduce our conclusions from incomplete historical observations, we don't ask ourselves if the Nazi regime in Germany or many other Authoritarian regimes throughout history really represented the theory of Fascism, and even if we manage to find a valid Fascist regime (such as that of Italy) we don't ask ourselves about the reasoning and theoretical grounds which led the leaders of that time do that they did from which we interpret the theoretical grounds of Fascism. for example, we view Fascist Italy's campaign in Libya and Ethiopia as proof of the imperialistic nature of Fascism, yet we forget that most of Africa was, for a long time, under the might of a foreign European power, including Italy! So the correct conclusion from Fascist Italy's participation in colonialism isn't necessarily that it was part of their grand Fascist scheme but rather due to the specific conditions of that time, this is in no way defense of Fascist Italy's participation in genocide and imperialism but rather it is a logical observation deduced from that fact.

This isn't even including all of the Authoritarian regimes which are almost universally considered examples of Fascism when they had nothing to do with it. the most critical example of that is Nazi Germany.

Prior to Italy's alliance with Germany and the end of WW2 there was little if any connection between the ideology of the NSDAP and the theory of Fascism, in fact there are records of the Nazi party explicitly denouncing Fascism, and indeed many Fascists and 3rd Positionists lead a struggle aganist them in the interwar period and during the war itself; Strasser(Otto), Gollong, Paetel, Severen, Niekisch, Valois, Maurras, Lagardelle and many others led a struggle aganist the Nazi domination of Europe which from a historical-reductionist point of view should seperate the 3P from Nazism. but unfortunately these people are forgotten in most history books.

Now, we should compare the two theoretically; the origins of Fascism can be traced back to the crisis of the French Revolutionary Syndicate the C.G.T. which lead to the creation of Cercle Proudhon, forging an alliance between Nationlist-Integralists and Revolutionary Syndicalists, of course they didn't explicitly call themselves Fascist but their basic ideas were eventually culminated by numerous Italian intellectuals creating Fascism. Nazism or "National Socialism" is much more tricky to trace back, it has contradictory origins in both modernist and anti modernist thought and there were numerous ideological rivalries in the party, however it is clear that there is no trace of many of the crucial elements of Fascism in their theory, most notably being organic pluralism, syndicalism and their Nationalism was far from the Nationalism of Fascism.

In concluding remarks; most of our understanding of Fascism is derived from erroneous and inconsistent epistemology supplimented with poor and biased reading of history. To get out of this cancer we need to radically alter our methods and principles of obtaining and interpreting knowledge.

FURTHER READING/BIBLOGRAPHY 

Various,. Declaration of the Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon, Retrieved on 29/6/2022 from p3p-l.blogspot.com

Laborde, C., 2000. Pluralist thought and the state in Britain and France, 1900-25. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Various,. Readings on Fascism and National Socialism. Retrieved on 29/6/2022 from gutenberg.org

D'Amato, David S,. Praxeology Over Positivism. Retrieved on 29/6/2022 from mises.org