"Together in Britain we have lit a flame that the ages shall not extinguish. Guard that sacred flame my brother Blackshirts until it illuminates Britain and lights again the Paths of Mankind."

-  Sir Oswald Mosley  -

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At this time of global financial collapse and widespread mass economic distress it is instructive (in terms of understanding just how far we have moved on in the past century) to look back at the example of the British fascist ‘Fuehrer’, Oswald Mosley, whose experiences of the Great Depression left him obsessed with creating an ‘economics of plenty’ - in stark contrast to the ‘cultural idealist’ fascism of A.K. Chesterton, his Director of Publicity and Propaganda, and first leader of the influential post-war National Front.^[i] Mosley's political economy driven fascism was based on rational thought, rather than Chesterton’s more familiar fascist appeal to instinct and emotion, which marked an unbridgeable gap between the two comrade fascists’ ideals. 

Mosley’s biographer Robert Skidelsky characterized this in terms of Mosley’s ‘cold, rational, logical’ cast of mind,^[ii] coupled with an acceptance of certain tenets of ‘materialist’ philosophy, which caused him to become an ‘authoritarian modernizer’ and pioneer of a perverted form of Keynesian state interventionism, publishing his ideas in his 1925 book Revolution by Reason, which cut through contemporary financial orthodoxy and proposed the raising of living standards through consumer credits, and artificially stimulating mass purchasing power in order to match the power of industry to produce.

Throughout his wayward career in British politics,(as a possible leader of both the Conservative and Labour parties, both of which he was a senior member), Mosley was concerned above all with the degraded material circumstances of most of his fellow Britons, and his decision to form the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932, rested largely upon his despair at the economic inertia and timidity of conventional liberal and social democratic politicians, when faced with depression and long term mass unemployment (a classic fascist preoccupation), who simply tried to return to the economic status quo ex ante. 

Mosley’s belief in the primacy of economics over politics made him a technocratic fascist, concerned to seek and apply ‘rational’ solutions to pressing economic and social problems, through anti-democratic and authoritarian means, having lost his faith in liberal democratic policies due to his direct experiences of the First World War and subsequent world depression.  Consequently,Mosley tended to place less emphasis on the ‘spiritual’ and irrational appeal of the Fascist creed and his vision of a future fascist utopia ended (as with De Man, Déat, and Gentile in contemporary France and Italy) with the technocrats in control of the planned ‘statistical state’.[iii]As a result, Mosley fitted well with contemporary Italian and French fascist traditions - a belief in the technological prowess of a modern managerial elite able to create class harmony and enter an age of wealth and prosperity beyond the wildest dreams of the ‘old gangs’ of liberal and social democratic politicians.

One thing we can be certain of is that future fascisms will not take the same form as that of Sir Oswald Mosley. His elitist-technocrat fascism is now largely dead, along with is mirror opposite, Stalinist authoritarian technocratic communism, as few now believe in such simplistic nationalist and technical solutions to catastrophic national and global economic and social problems. In contrast, his fellow fascist A. K. Chesterton’s cultural idealist fascism, with its enduring faith in returning society to a utopian past of a universal shared culture of the ‘white Anglo Saxon Imperial races,’ still pervades the ‘western’ extreme right around the world. However, one feature which inspired Mosley's fascism and the communism of the inter-war era is still with us - contempt for the seeming inertia and corruption of liberal economics and the dishonesty and duplicity of democratic politics. And this means that the dangers of a turn to authoritarian solutions within liberal democracies as well as non-democratic states, remain very real, and not only in the minds of fascistically inclined elites. In fact, the struggle to preserve a weakened global free economy may inspire a strong authoritarian response to protect a weakened liberal democracy from the rising number of have-nots and self-styled disenfranchised masses in the world today, along with the equal and opposite fundamentalist Islamic backlash against ‘western values’. Contemporary 'post-fascism' is gradually mutating, as exemplified by the British National Party (BNP) and the English Defense League (EDL), fight on a variety of new and old fascist ideological territories: militant-Islamaphobia; strident anti-immigrant and asylum-seeker messages and a linked denial of citizenship to all 'outsiders'; attacks on all forms of multi-culturalism and liberal political correctness; and support for the native 'white' under-classes whose jobs and homes are depicted as being taken away from them by weak democratic politicians, 'Jewish' global capitalists and low wage, low morals foreigners; and finally anti-globalization because of its inherent undermining of the autonomy of the nation state. Much of this plays well with disillusionment with politics in largely white under-class communities and attacks on egalitarianist welfare systems and affirmative action policies by democratic rightists invariably contain covert racial elements and this joins the post fascists with authoritarian forces on the orthodox democratic populist right in contemporary politics. Indeed it is the loss of Fascism's old radical revolutionary drive in  its new post fascist guise which makes it an all too easy partner for elements of the fundamentalist democratic right, as has been seen in alliances forged in the European parliament between the British Conservative party and various unsavory post-fascist groupings across Europe. Finally, in the US 'The Tea Party' movement also exemplifies this all too easy cross over between the democratic and post-fascist anti-democratic right, in that it effortlessly mixes libertarianism in economic terms with political and social authoritarianism; espousing imperialist style wars of aggression; advocating intolerance on cultural and in certain cases racial grounds; and promoting an exclusive form of religious ultra-patriotism, which also contains a strong anti- immigrant stance (in a country, paradoxically, founded entirely on immigration). This is a world that Mosley could only dream of locked as he was in his elitist form of purist fascism.