4 November 2005: addendum
Just to add that someone at Sheffield University has taken since down the link to David Baker piece I cited below, which means that the text is no longer on the web anywhere; although there's still a reference to it on David's own page and of course it's also still in the Google cache.  I suppose people interested in David's original should just write to him at his email address: David.Baker@warwick.ac.uk.

22 October 2005: On being a punch-bag 

I recently read David Baker's piece up on the web arguing for a new 'political economy of fascism'. My book Fascism: Theory and Practice receives some pasting along the way: For example, a sentence in my original suggests that the ideological position of fascism as a 'neither right nor left' ideology corresponds in some ways to the weak economic situation of small producers under capitalism. This is now re-interpreted to mean that I see fascism as a class-ideology of the rich: 'Any conventional Marxist approaching the questions posed in this paper, would conclude that any "fascist political economy" was a "myth" - if judged by its own assertions, but a "reality" in terms of its capitalist class-biased intent - since all fascist doctrines are ultimately myths designed to masks a deeper collusion between the interests of capital and the leaders of fascism to preserve and protect the interests of the said capitalism, however they may be mediated by relative autonomy from the forces of capitalism itself.' 

In another damning aside, Baker claims that 'Renton’s assertion appears little more than a modern nuanced recycling of Trotsky’s original version of the Bonapartist thesis'. Take out the negative language, and that actually strikes me as a pretty accurate reading of how the book is presents itself: not as a new theory, but as a summary of the Marxist literature to date. 

Baker's paper then confronts very similar points to the ones which he claims are wrongly put in my book: including fascism's ideological incoherence and its tendencies to adopt to capitalist social relationships: in his words, 'the undoubtedly accomodationist (to big business) design of the actual corporative system under Fascist rule in Italy was a consequence of political decisions taken by Mussolini under pressure from political proponents and organic intellectuals (philosophers and jurists) within the fascist movement (most notably Bottai, Rocco, and Edmondo Rossoni) as well a business interests, rather than the fruits of any theoretical elaboration by leading professional economists.' 

Oddly, Tim Mason becomes Paul Mason. Odder still, but in a fashion depressingly familiar in British writers commenting on generic fascism (and it is a crime of which I am thorough guilty myself!), the speeches of Oswald Mosley are used to make historical comments about the character of Italian and German fascist governments in power. 

Then having accused Marxists of reducing fascism to myth, comes another paragraph in which the paper deprecates fascism's failure to rise precisely above myth: 'to fascism's supposed adherence to forms of "third way" economics, again when translated into the overheated rhetoric of fascist propaganda, this appears little more of a mobilising myth to identify fascism apart from its chief enemies and rivals - liberalism and communism (i.e. "we are neither for atheistic expropriatory communism, nor for crisis plagued and immiserating monopoly capitalism") instead of the sophisticated system of political economy Gentile intended it to be.' 

Reading it all, and reflecting that my book was written 9 nine years ago when I was 24, and published two years after that: I was rather surprised to see how well how much of the argument stands up, despite the intended mauling.