EMERGENCY ASSESSMENTS 37 militarism, uniformity, the ruthless pursuit of power and other horrors of the 20th Century; few claim the term to identify themselves. Although some of these (notably militarism) are components of fascism, the list itself betrays the shallowness of Ijberal ideology which is unable to specify the term beyond offering a simple description of the historical being of fascism (in Mussolinian Italy and in Nazi Germany). Fascism, on the terrain of liberal thought, is seen as ahistorical, it arises for no apparent structural reason, is fought against gallantly and then departs from the world stage to appear again perhaps without cause. Fascism is seen as an aberration, an excrescence on the democratic body politic and the logical anti-thesis to the rule of reason. In the Indian case, fascism came with the Emergency and departed at its demise; it may come again, but like any force of nature, we can neither anticipate it nor analyze the reasons for it growth. If liberal ideology is unable to grasp the dynamic of fascism, it is equally unequal to the task of analyzing the structural dynamic of fascism. Eager to lodge its political analysis on the effects of a process, liberal thought is able to offer no more than a superficial theory of society: such a thing happens, we are told, and it must not happen again. The process of the emergence of fascism is itself not an interest of our liberal conimon-sense. More than any other political tradition, Marxism catalogued and argued the particulars of 'fascism' from the late* 1910s. From the debate within the Italian Socialist Party, to the theses of the Rome Congress of the Italian Communist Party in 1922 through into the various spirited arguments within the Comintem which culminated in Togliatti's famous lectures and in Diyntrov's report to the 7th Congress in 1935, the tradition of Marxism said much about fascism in theoretical and tactical terms.3 One of the principle issues during these debates was the characterization of the relationship between the dominant classes and the fascists: were the fascists simply th^ representatives of the dominant classes who had dispensed with t^ie illusion of parliamentarianism? In that regard, was there anything specifically different between the fascists and the liberal-bourgeois ruling clique4? At the 1924 5th Comintern Congress, Amadeo Bordiga described the victory of the fascists in Italy as "a change in the governmental team of the bourgeoisie."5 In the same year, Joseph Stalin described the fascists and the Social Democrats as "twins," thereby dissolving the differences, between the two movements and their two distinct forms of political power.6 By 1929, the German Communist Party ((KPD) began to employ the term 'social fascism' to describe the terrorist tactics employed by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), notably the killing of the 29 workers during an illegal May Day parade in Berlin. Until 1935, Social Democrats were seen not just as'the moderate twin of the fascists, but as their willing accomplice. In 1935, under pressure from the growing victories of