i'm not sure if I like that diagnosis either. At best you could say fascism is capitalism's defense in response to specific circumstances regarding a confluence of various things all happening at once, including but not limited to inflation, restless population, stark economic class division, and a pre-existing imperial state apparatus that either has nowhere to go or has become so bloated it turns inward. Also necessary would be either a robust leftist presence or at least the perception of a large leftist presence. Now this guy is a liberal, but Robert O. Paxton is a pretty good historian who defines fascism as "suppression of the left amidst popular enthusiasm." And while I think there's more to it, that is a huge component of it.

I say this because capitalism has other defensive tools for other circumstances, especially circumstances in which no robust leftist organization exists. Like austerity for instance, that one is a much more wielded tool in capitalism's immune system. Another would be increasingly complex abstraction of labor value, like I could point to the corporate raiding strategies that publicly traded companies took in the 1980s, and even the legal countermeasures put in place afterwards were part of further abstraction.

yeah so it is a good pithy statement to say fascism is capitalism's defense mechanism, but i do believe we should be aware there are others and that fascism requires certain circumstances to actually get off the ground. Since I do think there's a difference between an earnest fascist political movement and imperialist genocidal capitalism using fascist rhetoric (we have both of those two in the USA right now)