Steven J. Rosenthal
in The Life and Work of Oliver C. Cox;  Herbert Hunter, editor, JAI Press, 2000.
 

 ABSTRACT

 INTRODUCTION

    In his Prologue (xxix-xxxviii), Cox affirmed the centrality of war and fascism in his study and described how it shaped his analysis of Caste, Class, and Race.  “Great wars are crisis situations which seek to resolve…antagonisms…Wars are…functions of social systems…With the rise of capitalist civilization, the nations of Western society began to go to war…over markets and exploitable resources; but the era centering about World War II began the fateful period of political-class wars, or the struggle for dominance of the capitalist world by the democratic masses...The next great war,” Cox predicted, will be fought over “who shall rule the social system, the few or the many.” (xxix-xxx).

    “Racial antagonism,” Cox continued, “is part and parcel of this class struggle…The interest behind racial antagonism is an exploitative interest—the peculiar type of economic exploitation characteristic of capitalist society…We can understand the Negro problem only in so far as we understand their position as workers…Both the ‘master race’ ideology and fascism…are social attributes of a particular social system…Probably in no other country of the world are the philosophies and practices of racial mastery so openly and tenaciously held to as in the South…the master-race idea and fascism can be purged from the social system only by a change in the system itself…as the nations prepare again for war, the nature of the social systems that are actually in question should be as clearly understood as possible”  (xxx-xxxviii).

    In this prologue Cox set forth the broad theoretical assumptions that guided Caste, Class, and Race.  Racism was created by capitalism to exploit and divide the working class.  Oppression of blacks in the American South and fascism in Europe and Asia are similar manifestations of the most extreme forms of racism.  Capitalist nations have often fought each other over control of resources and markets.  Now, however, that war is being superseded by war between the democratic masses (the proletariat) and the capitalists.  Fascism represents the most politically organized and conscious elements of the capitalist class, while communism represents the most politically organized and conscious elements of the proletariat.  Ending the exploitation of black workers thus depends on the victory of the communist proletariat over the fascist bourgeoisie in what Cox called the “political-class” struggle.

    In the decades following publication of Caste, Class, and Race, fascism as a subject of research and analysis virtually disappeared from U.S. sociology.  The resurgence of fascist movements both in the United States and throughout the world in the final decade of the twentieth century has led to renewed scholarly interest in the study of fascism.  In the United States scholars have investigated neo-Nazi organizations (Ridgeway, 1990), religious fundamentalists (Diamond, 1995, 1989), skinheads (Hamm, 1993), militias (Novak, 1995; Berlet and Lyons, 1997), and soldiers of fortune (Gibson, 1994).

    Historians have documented continuities between World War II era fascists and their contemporary descendants (Bellant, 1988; Kuhl, 1994; Lee, 1997).  Social scientists have argued that the “war on drugs” and the resultant increased incarceration of African Americans, xenophobic anti-immigrant politics, campaigns against reproductive rights and for “family values ” abolition of affirmative action and welfare, and renewed promotion of academic racism are symptoms of a resurgence of fascism (Miller, 1996; Berlet, 1995; DeGrazia, 1992; Rosenthal, 1996, 1995).

    Analysts of resurgent global racism, nationalism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide have also identified disturbing parallels with World War II-era fascism (Greider, 1997; Rosenthal, 1994).  Sociologist Howard Winant (1994:121) reviewed recent U.S. and global “political logic” and concluded in phrases that echo Oliver Cox:  “Unquestionably, a clear potential exists for the resurgence of fascism (author’s italics)…What it foreshadows is nothing less than a global struggle between fascism and democracy.”  It is time to reexamine Cox’s analysis of fascism in Caste, Class, and Race and to assess its historical accuracy and contemporary applicability after a half century.
 

COX’S ANALYSIS OF THE FASCISTS AND THEIR WAYS

The fascists are the cream of a capitalist society.

     Cox began with a Marxian “class analysis” of fascism.  Fascism is the organization of a “political class,” of “the most respectable and respected people.”  The fascist party includes “the majority of men who have achieved great business success, of politicians of upper chambers, professional men of the highest order, distinguished scholars, eminent bishops and cardinals, the most powerful newspaper owners and editors, learned judges, the valiant upper crust of the military forces, and so on…The fascists constitute essentially the cream of a capitalist society.” (188)

    Fascists “have achieved political-class consciousness; they have become organized for action against the proletariat, and especially for defense against the normal disintegration of the capitalist system…Fascism is outspokenly anti-democratic;” it is a “capitalist dictatorship!” (189-90)  Fascism and communism are both dictatorships, “but these two types of economic organization lie at opposite extremes of modern social systems…Fascism is born of and perpetuated by irreducible conflict…It is an attempt to halt and to turn back a democratic trend…the capitalists cannot conceivably eliminate the proletariat as a class.”  In contrast “the proletariat can eliminate the capitalists completely; it must do this if socialism is to be achieved.” (191-92)  To summarize, Cox argued that the capitalist class installs fascism, that fascism is a dictatorship of the capitalist “political class,” and that fascism and communism are fundamentally opposite social systems.

Fascism Promotes the Ideologies of Racism, Religion, and Nationalism.

    Because fascists “cannot themselves fight their counterrevolution;” they must attempt “to create a popular mass movement for the protection of monopoly capitalism” (192).  So that the people “may be consciously prepared for the fascist counterrevolution,” fascists promote racism, religion, and nationalism.  First, “in any fascist movement emphasis on race superiority and racial antagonism or intolerance helps to confuse the masses” (193).  Second, “fascism and the established religion, or rather the modern Church, are on the whole closely associated…Indeed the function of the Church as a prime deflator of social movements has been repeatedly recognized.”  Cox cited as examples the support by the Catholic Church in Italy and the United States for the fascist side in the Spanish civil war and for Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia (193-96).  Third, “nationalism is essential to fascism because mature capitalism is not only concerned with internal political-class struggle but also with international struggle for world markets…Extreme nationalism makes it possible for the capitalist state to muster its full strength in international conflict” (197).  Racism, religion, and nationalism, Cox argued, are ideological mechanisms that prevent workers from developing political-class consciousness.  They bind workers to the capitalists of their own race, religion, or nation, and they incite violent opposition to workers of other races, religions, or nations.

Fascism Leads to Wars.

    Cox observed that “nationalism breeds counternationalism,” and that fascism thus makes inter-imperialist war inevitable.  Interpreting the “paradoxes” of World War II is only possible with an understanding of both the “internal and external conflict” that fascism produces.  World War II, Cox trenchantly noted, was both an inter-imperialist war and a war between fascism and communism:  “In so far as the aim of the fascists is the destruction of the proletarian movement, they are the allies of the ruling class in all the capitalist countries; but in so far as their aim is the redivision of world markets and territories, they face head-on collision and war with the capitalists of other states.  Thus the basis of many of the seeming inconsistencies in the politics of World War II lies in the fact that the capitalist alliance was interested in destroying the fascists as competitors for world markets and natural resources but in saving them as bulwarks against the proletariat” (197-98).

There are no anti-fascist capitalist classes.  Only proletarian revolution can destroy fascism.

    Cox’s analysis of the nature of World War II led him to two strikingly revolutionary conclusions.  First, he asserted that “fascism cannot be destroyed by war between capitalist nations.  Since a fascist state is a capitalist state in a certain stage of degeneration, the most that brother capitalist nations can hope to accomplish for a defeated fascist nation is the artificial setting up of a ‘capitalist democracy’ which, if left to itself, will move rapidly back to its former position.”  For example, Cox wrote that, after the fall of Adolph Hitler, the “anti-fascist” Winston Churchill became “the outstanding champion of fascist governments all over Europe.”  Second, “fascism, as a political-class phenomenon, can apparently be liquidated only by intranational action, revolutionary action, of the opposite political class” (198).
 

COX AND THE EXPLANATORY POWER OF MARXISM

    Cox was influenced by Marxism and by the international communist movement.  During the 1930s communist parties throughout the world built a mass movement against fascism, defended the Soviet Union, and warned of an impending second world war.  By the latter half of the 1930s communists in the United States had developed a mass influence in the labor movement, among blacks, and among students and intellectuals.  Cox cited the principal communist analysis of the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, R. Palme Dutt’s Fascism and Social Revolution (1935), four times in Caste, Class, and Race.

    It has also been suggested that Cox’s West Indian background made him more sympathetic to Marxism and communism than were black Americans.  Certainly, the West Indies produced many Marxian intellectuals, such as C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, Eric Williams, and others.  During the same time period, however, American blacks such as Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, and Richard Wright joined or worked closely with the Communist Party.  Thousands of black workers from Harlem to Birmingham joined or supported the Communist Party, comprising in the late 1930s some fifteen percent of party membership (Naison: 1983; Kelley: 1990, 1994).  Cox himself, however, was more of a loner than an activist, and did not participate either in communist party activities or in mass organizations in which communists were influential.  It seems more likely that Oliver Cox was influenced more indirectly by communism because he was strongly opposed to racism and fascism, and communists were visibly and influentially involved in the fight against racism and fascism.

    The broad coherence, the historical accuracy, and the boldness of Cox’s analysis of fascism flow from his adoption of this Marxian explanatory framework.  Capitalists did finance, organize, and promote fascist movements throughout the world in an effort to restrain the disintegration of capitalism and crush proletarian communism. (Pool and Pool, 1978; Seldes, 1943, Brady, 1937, Dutt, 1935, Higham, 1983).  Fascism and communism are fundamentally opposite movements.  Whereas communism is an anti-racist, internationalist anti-imperialist movement that seeks to unify the working class in support of anti-capitalist revolution, fascism is a racist, nationalist movement that seeks to unify all classes within a nation in support of capitalist counterrevolution and imperialist war (Knapp and Spector, 1991).

    Cox demonstrated considerable insight into the complexities of World War II.  He recognized that, as capitalist nations, the United States, Great Britain, and France went to war against Germany, Italy, and Japan not because of opposition to fascism, but as a result of imperialist rivalry.  As a political class opposed to working class communism, all capitalist ruling classes were strategic allies.  Cox emphasized that capitalists nations were racist and imperialist nations, and was skeptical of the professed anti-fascism of the U.S., British, and French ruling classes.  Subsequent research has provided support for Cox’s position.  For example, the United States protected and employed thousands of European fascists in the post-World War II struggle against communism (Simpson: 1988; Bellant: 1988).

    Cox also recognized the similarity between anti-black racism in the U.S. and European fascism.  Other contemporary African American sociologists, but few whites, demonstrated this insight.  E. Franklin Frazier opposed Southern segregation, defended the role of the Communist Party in the 1935 Harlem rebellion, and spoke out against fascist aggression against Spain and Ethiopia (Platt: 1991; Steinberg, 1995).  W.E.B. DuBois recognized the similarity between  twentieth century fascism and the centuries of slavery and colonialism.  DuBois wrote, “There was no Nazi atrocity—concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood—which the Christian civilization of Europe had not been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world” (1965:23).

    Writer Langston Hughes also articulated a similar Marxian insight (Berry: 1992:101-03).  Speaking at an International Writers’ Congress in Paris in 1937, he proclaimed, “We are the people who have long known in actual practice the meaning of the word Fascism…Yes, we Negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is in action.  We know.  Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”  Like Cox, Hughes supported a Marxian solution to racism and fascism:  “We represent the end of race.  And the Fascists know that when there is no more race, there will be no more capitalism, and no more war…because the workers of the world will have triumphed.”

    Cox recognized that fascism did not die in World War II, and he predicted its future resurrection.  Indeed, he predicted that the United States would become the main promoter of worldwide fascism:  “The burden of making a capitalism, collapsing all over the world, work rests squarely on the shoulders of the American ruling class…Capitalism cannot offer to the masses of people that better world for which they now hunger and thirst; it can give them only reaction supported by military might…” (580).
 

CRITIQUE:  LIBERALISM VERSUS MARXISM IN COX’S ANALYSIS

    Oliver Cox wrote that proletarian revolution was the only way to destroy fascism.  Yet Cox also wrote in other chapters of Caste, Class, and Race that Franklin D. Roosevelt “sought the subjugation of the power of big business in the interest of democracy.”  He asserted that FDR “deserted the ruling class,” and believed that “the charge of the capitalist politicians that Roosevelt was a communist is in its essence correct.  His policies and actions had the potentialities of taking the economy out of the hands of the bourgeoisie and of turning it over to the people as a whole” (257, 261-62).  Cox also wrote, “A great leader of Negroes will almost certainly be a white man…Negroes are auxiliary in the American proletarian struggle for power” (581-82).  Why did a Black sociologist who put forward a Marxian analysis of fascism think that a white capitalist president of the United States was leading the movement toward communism, while black workers would play only an “auxiliary” role in that movement?

Cox’s Reformist View of the State.

    According to Manning Marable, Oliver Cox was a New Deal liberal who adopted certain Marxian ideas for explanatory purposes.  Cox’s prediction of an imminent resurgence of fascism after World War II and his expectation that the proletarian movement would be led by a white male capitalist were both rooted in a liberal sociological paradigm.  Although Cox put forward a class analysis of fascism, he did not develop a class analysis of the state and, especially, of liberal reformism.  Nor did Cox apply a Marxian class analysis to other crucially important aspects of the “political class struggle,” such as the AFL and CIO unions, anti-immigrant movements on the West Coast, relations between Black and Jews, and gender and sexism.

    Marx and Lenin argued that the state in capitalist society is the instrument by which the bourgeoisie rules over the working class.  Democracy is therefore also a form of class rule.  There cannot be political equality between the exploiting class and the exploited class.  There may be profound divisions within the ruling capitalist class based on conflicting interests, ideologies, and strategies, but all factions of the capitalist class are committed to maintaining the dictatorship of their class over the working class (Marx and Engels, 1976; Lenin, 1970).

    Oliver Cox misunderstood the nature of President Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms.  These reforms were designed by the main sections of the U.S. capitalist class, especially by policy planners politically and financially connected to the Rockefeller empire (Domhoff, 1996).  These reforms were intended to prevent the growth of a revolutionary communist workers movement, not to promote it.  Significant sections of the capitalist class strongly opposed FDR not because he was a communist, but because they favored a different strategy for dealing with the crisis.  These differences were so sharp that in 1934, the heads of General Motors and DuPont, along with representatives of the Morgan banks, asked General Smedley Butler to lead a fascist coup against FDR.  General Motors and DuPont had close ties with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and had provided considerable support to the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Legion, the Liberty League and other violent fascist groups in the U.S.  General Butler leaked the plan to the White House, and it never came off.  Nor were any of the conspirators ever punished (Higham, 1983:163-65).

    Oliver Cox mistakenly concluded that these conflicts within the capitalist class demonstrated that FDR had betrayed his own class.  After all, that is what many capitalists were saying about Roosevelt.  Cox failed to recognize that capitalists can have violent conflicts amongst themselves without becoming anti-capitalist or betraying their class.  Cox understood that this was true on an international level.  He analyzed the two world wars as battles between capitalists for control over resources and markets.  He did not see that capitalists within a country in times of severe crisis can also go to war among themselves.  After all, U.S. capitalists did in fact wage a bloody civil war in the nineteenth century over such issues as chattel slavery versus wage slavery.

    Cox did not recognize that reformism could be a capitalist alternative to fascism.  If capitalists could weaken, tame, or destroy the communists and make concessions to sections of the working class, they could rule through bourgeois democracy for an extended period of time.  This strategy worked in all the major capitalist countries throughout the second half of the twentieth century.  Fascism was primarily employed in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where  capitalism has always ruled much more by naked force (Chomsky and Herman, 1974).  Only when economic crisis reappeared, or inter-imperialist rivalries threatened another world war, or a new communist movement developed, might fascism become a necessary capitalist strategy again.

    Oliver Cox’s misinterpretation of reformism and of divisions within the capitalist class was shared by most of the contemporary organized political left.  In 1935, when the Communist International called for a “united front against fascism,” the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA).distinguished between fascist and democratic segments of the bourgeoisie and sought to form an alliance with the latter (Naison: 1983; Kelley: 1990).  Ironically, after World War II, “democratic” reformists such as President Truman and Hubert Humphrey unleashed a sharp attack on the communist party and its base.  At the same time, they embarked on anti-communist wars to prop up fascist dictatorships in Korea and Vietnam.  The left was destroyed by their erstwhile “lesser evil” allies.

    It would have been unlikely that Oliver Cox would develop and articulate an analysis of fascism and the New Deal that was further to the left and more revolutionary than the contemporary organized left.  Indeed, the Communist Party reinforced the liberal reformist beliefs of many of its friends and allies.  After all, if communists were supporting and defending New Dealers against fascists, then perhaps it was true that FDR had betrayed the capitalist class and was leading the struggle for proletarian democracy.

    If this was true, then the emancipation of the working class was not going to be led and carried out by the working class itself.  Indeed, throughout the rest of Caste, Class, and Race, Oliver Cox consistently presented liberal non-Marxian analyses which clearly indicate that he did not expect the working class to unite, rise up, and overthrow capitalism.  In fact, Cox believed Figure 1 that FDR was politically to the left of the working class and therefore “had to pay lip service to capitalism” because workers “were ideologically enslaved” by capitalist propaganda (261).

Cox’s Liberal Analysis of Ethnicity and Gender.

    Cox’s view of workers as politically backward can be seen in his analyses of Black, white and Jewish workers, citizens and immigrants, women and men.  Perhaps the best known and most frequently cited example is Cox’s assertion, “A great leader of Negroes will almost certainly be a white man…Negroes are auxiliary in the American proletarian struggle for power” (581-82).  The white man Cox had in mind as an example was FDR, who, according to Cox, “ undoubtedly did more to elevate the status of Negroes in the United States than all other leaders, white and Black together” (582).  Cox argued that Blacks have been taught to look to whites for “guidance” and that “it will surely be easier” for Blacks to follow a white than a black leader (582).  These statements reveal in a very striking way Cox’s belief that Blacks were effectively conditioned to be passive and docile, and moreover, that Blacks would not transform themselves through involvement in mass movements into activists and leaders.  Cox therefore looked to white leaders to remove barriers to Black integration and assimilation.

    Cox also considered most white workers to be as politically backward as Black workers.  In his analysis of hostility toward Asian immigrant workers on the West Coast in chapter 18, “Race Prejudice, Intolerance, Nationalism,” Cox wrote, “A remarkable fact about the California anti-Oriental movements is that they have been mainly initiated by white workers instead of exploiters of labor, the class which we have attempted to show is responsible for all modern racial antagonism” (410).  Cox too readily abandoned his Marxian framework.  Had he conducted further research, Cox would not have blamed West Coast xenophobia exclusively on white workers.  He would have discovered the extensive network of capitalist financial and political leadership behind the nativist agitation in California, and he would have learned that many workers’ organizations, such as the CPUSA-led Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers union, fought against anti-immigrant policies and tried to unite citizen and immigrant workers.

    Cox similarly abandoned a Marxian analysis in his discussion of anti-Semitism and his comparisons between Blacks and Jews.  In his extensive discussion of this topic in chapter 18 (392-408), Cox identified only differences and no similarities between race prejudice toward blacks and anti-Semitism toward Jews.  As Cox saw it, Jews refused to assimilate and were regarded as an alien enemy, while blacks were eager to assimilate and were regarded as a friend “in their place.”  Cox surely overstated both Jewish opposition to and black desire for assimilation.  After all, it could be plausibly argued that Jews have been much more in favor of assimilation than Blacks.  The main flaw in Cox’s analysis again grew out of his application of a liberal race relations model instead of a Marxian framework.  Throughout his discussion of Jews Cox never recognized the existence of Jewish workers.  To Cox “Negroes are almost entirely a proletarian group, while the Jews tend to be professional and businessmen” (396).  Cox failed to recognize that, at the time he was writing, a large majority of Jews both in the United States and Europe were workers.  Jewish workers were very active in labor union activity and in communist movements.  Had Cox applied his insight that European fascism and U.S. racism were very similar, he would have been more likely to identify similar efforts by capitalists to exploit and scapegoat Blacks and Jews.

    Oliver Cox also did not apply a Marxian  approach to his analysis of sexism and gender.  Cox discussed women only in the context of caste and race.  His primary focus was on rules and customs governing marriage.  In his critique of An American Dilemma, Cox sharply refuted Myrdal’s argument that white men’s fears of Black men having sex with white women was the main cause of race prejudice.  Cox astutely pointed out, “Sexual obsession functions in the fundamental interest of economic exploitation” and is not the cause of but the pretext for lynching.  It distracts whites from the economic and political consequences of racism and enlists whites in maintaining the subordination of black labor (527). Cox, however, did not even mention the famous Scottsboro case, in which the Communist Party mobilized masses of people to confront the racist and sexist myths that incited lynchings.  He therefore did not link the “woman question” to capitalism, as he attempted to do with the “race question.”  He did not discuss the issue of inequality between women and men or the economic exploitation of women workers, nor did he cite any Marxist or communist literature on this subject.
Consequently, Cox did not analyze how the woman question or male chauvinism was intertwined with racism, nationalism, and religion in the ideology and practice of capitalism and fascism.  Fascists in Germany, Italy, and Japan demanded that women serve their fatherland by producing children who would grow up to be loyal soldiers and workers for their nation.  Fascists made abortion inaccessible to all but ruling class women.  Fascists carried out mass campaigns of extermination, enslavement, sterilization, and rape against women.(de Grazia: 1992).

    Thus, in his discussions of Black and white workers, citizens and immigrants, Blacks and Jews, and women and men, Cox remained largely within a liberal sociological framework.  He apparently had little knowledge of the class struggles that involved millions of workers during the 1930s.  Worse still, he did not discuss at all Jewish workers, women workers, and Black women workers.  Black women workers often played a leading role in the class struggle in the United States during the 1930s and again in the 1950s and 1960s (Kelley, 1991).  From the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 to the national postal strike in 1970, Black domestic workers, postal workers, auto workers, sanitation workers, and hospital workers led the most militant strikes during the 1960s.  Black workers, students, and soldiers led revolts in communities, schools, and the armed forces.  Although Oliver Cox was much more pro-working class and anti-capitalist than the vast majority of U.S. sociologists of his day, he nevertheless wrote little and perhaps knew little about contemporary working class struggles.

    Like many other academics, Oliver Cox appeared to know much more about the bourgeoisie than he knew about the working class.  He extensively cited the speeches of FDR, but throughout Caste, Class, and Race he included virtually no discussion of the massive wave of union organizing drives, sit-down strikes, murders of workers by public and private police, mass demonstrations in support of the Scottsboro boys, or other examples of working class struggle throughout the 1930s.  In chapter 11, “Facets of the Modern Political-Class Struggle, Cox devoted nine pages (204-12) to a discussion of labor unions in the United States.  Remarkably, most of the discussion focused on the conservative business unionism of the AFL, with only passing references to the militant industrial unionism of the CIO.  Reviewing  two decades (1929-1948) of unprecedented class struggle and union advancement in the United States and throughout the world, Oliver Cox seemed preoccupied with lamenting the lack of political-class struggle.  It is no wonder he did not expect leadership in social change to come from workers.
 

FIFTY YEARS LATER:  THE RELEVANCE OF COX’S ANALYSIS

    Moreover, if fascism promotes the most extreme racism, as well as the closely related ideologies of nationalist and religious hatred, then a sociological analysis of racism that omits an examination of fascism is an analysis that leaves out the most significant and deadly form of racism.  It is the equivalent of studying twentieth century wars without examining World Wars I and II or studying genocide without examining the African and Jewish Holocausts.  If Cox’s analysis of fascism was described in every textbook of sociological theory, race and ethnic relations, and social stratification, and in every chapter on race in every introductory sociology textbook, it would constitute a significant improvement in each of these textbooks.  Yet it is impossible to find even mention of Oliver Cox in virtually all of the textbooks, and the few that summarize his analysis of racism and capitalism do not mention fascism (i.e., Hurst, Social Inequality, 1995: 111-12).

    Oliver Cox also emphasized that nationalism and religion are significant ideological components of fascism, and that they serve to mobilize the masses so that the capitalist nation state can wage an imperialist war.  These are important assertions about nationalism and religion that sociologists should be discussing and analyzing.  Nationalism and religious divisions are frequently mutually intertwined synergistic forces.  Together, they have played a major role in virtually all of the most violent and prolonged international conflicts that have erupted during the latter half of the twentieth century:  In the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, in Rwanda, the Sudan, Nigeria, and other sub-Saharan countries, in India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, in the former Yugoslavia and Ireland.  In many of these conflicts fascist movements and governments have carried out deadly campaigns of ethnic cleansing and/or genocide.

    Oliver Cox’s analysis of fascism also provides a theoretical framework for interpreting a wide range of recent developments in the United States.  Oliver Cox the Marxist would inspire interpretation of many recent developments in the United States as symptoms of fascism promoted by the capitalist political class.  Examples might include the increased incarceration of Black men by the criminal justice system, the demonization of Black women and the repeal of welfare, the elimination of affirmative action,  the promotion of biological determinism and eugenics via The Bell Curve, xenophobic campaigns to deport “illegal aliens,” the formation and growth of militia revolts against a “New World Order,” and Christian fundamentalist efforts to outlaw abortion and promote “family values.”

    At the same time, Oliver Cox the New Deal liberal might interpret many of these phenomena in a decidedly non-Marxian way.  He might regard the assaults on welfare and affirmative action, the attacks on immigrants, and the formation of militias as reactions of white workers or “angry white men.”  At times Cox argued that divisions within the working class were created by the capitalists and harmed the working class as a whole.  At other times, Cox argued that racial, ethnic, religious, and gender divisions were created by workers themselves and protected privileged sectors of the working class against perceived competitors.  Just as Cox was sometimes a Marxist and more often a liberal, social scientists today articulate these contradictory interpretations of divisions within the working class.

    Cox the Marxist argued that the capitalist political class are fascists, but Cox the liberal argued that FDR betrayed his class and led the struggle for proletarian democracy for Black and white workers.  In the 1930s segments of the capitalist class denounced FDR and went so far as to plot a fascist coup against him.  Cox and many other progressive forces supported FDR as a barrier against fascism.  In the United States today conflicts within the capitalist class are often very sharp.  Political struggles among various sectors of industrial and finance capital are evident on every major contemporary international and domestic political issue.

    The liberal Oliver Cox supported FDR and later on supported President Johnson’s civil rights reforms in the 1960s.  It is likely that the liberal Cox would today support President Clinton against the apparently more racist Republicans.  Yet President Clinton has played a leading role in repealing the very reforms enacted during FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society.  Liberal reformism led Cox seriously to misinterpret President Roosevelt, and it similarly leads many sociologists today to remain confined within the choices provided by different factions of the capitalist class.  Indeed, the most politically influential and well connected sociologists, such as William J. Wilson, Jill Quadagno, and Amitai Etzioni—all recent presidents of the American Sociological Association, have promoted a closer alliance between the ASA and the Democratic Party.  Like the liberal Oliver C. Cox, these contemporary sociologists have portrayed the Clinton administration as a progressive alternative to right wing extremism.

    Yet the Marxian aspect of Oliver C. Cox’s analysis suggests that it is the capitalist political class as a whole, led by its “progressive” sector, that needs and installs fascism in capitalist societies.  If the economic crisis in Asia spreads throughout the world, if the United States capitalist class requires fascism in order to intensify its exploitation of and control over the working class and in order to compete economically and militarily against rival Asian or European imperialists, that fascism will most likely be imposed by the “progressive” forces with which liberal sociologists are today allied.  As we analyze the contradictions in the theories of Oliver Cox, the liberal who used Marxian ideas, there is much at stake in our efforts to determine which aspect of Oliver Cox came closer to the truth about racism, capitalism, and fascism.
 

REFERENCES