How to Stop Fascism, page 20
With stormtroopers patrolling the aisles around them, the SPD delegation in parliament stood heroically and alone to oppose Hitler’s demand for the power to rule by decree. Not a single vote from any other party was cast against. On 22 June 1933 the SPD was shut down. In July the NSDAP was declared the only legal party; all other parties of the right and centre dissolved themselves voluntarily. What had taken Mussolini four years took Hitler less than six months. It was not until August 1934 that Hitler fused the positions of chancellor and president, declaring himself Führer (leader) – but by then the German labour movement was reduced to a precarious underground existence.
Today’s left orthodoxy says that Nazism could have been beaten through a united front between the two left parties. But united around what?
As Daniel Guérin concluded, after a second tour of Germany in April 1933, the decisive battle was fought in people’s heads. Fascism, he wrote,
surged forth from the depths of the German people. It’s because of its popular appeal that it was irresistible, that it swept everything else away … In Germany I learned that in order to defeat fascism you have to oppose it with a living example, a flesh and blood ideal … 51
If you only remember one paragraph from this book, remember that one. The lesson should be: to defeat fascism, you have to win the battle of ideas, and well in advance of its electoral breakthrough. It is not the slogans you are up against – although slogans are important. It is the thought-architecture discussed in Chapter 2, the mythology fascism draws from, the self-contained logic, internally coherent but detached from facts: this is how fascism wins.
After their defeat the SPD’s leadership, exiled in Prague, concluded that the Nazi victory was inevitable. The Comintern, which had authored the disastrous Third Period line, reaffirmed it in April 1933:
The calm that has succeeded the triumph of fascism is only a transitory phenomenon. Despite fascist terror, the revolutionary surge in Germany will rise; the revolutionary resistance of the masses to fascism is bound to grow. The establishment of the open fascist dictatorship … is accelerating the rate of Germany’s advance towards the proletarian revolution.52
It wasn’t their failure to fight that doomed tens of thousands of workers to imprisonment, torture and death. It was their failure to understand the threat. They thought they were fighting a party, or a gang of violent thugs. In reality they were resisting a process of mass psychological conversion. And so are we.
Part Three
* * *
RESISTANCE
7
A Theory of Fascism
Beyond the Definition Wars
In 2020, when anti-fascists in America started a Twitter thread listing all known definitions of fascism, they came up with more than thirty. Some were a page long. Others were three-line sentences so crammed with academic jargon that they could give you a migraine. Many directly contradicted each other.1
It would be easy to shrug our shoulders and say: why does theory matter? You generally know a fascist when you see one. And the extreme right don’t sit around constructing cute definitions of their enemies – they act.
But, as we’ve seen, the need for a theory is urgent. Fascism achieved power in the twentieth century because neither the liberal centre nor the Marxist left understood what they were dealing with. Today fascism, once presumed dead, has revived, fused itself with right-wing populism, and stands poised to exploit all the instabilities of the twenty-first century. Without a coherent explanation of why it has returned, we risk the same outcome.
Today, any theory of fascism has to tackle four questions:
Why, in the 1920s, did the same kind of people start doing the same kind of things, with such devastating results for democracy?
Why is it happening again?
Is there a deeper cause underlying both iterations?
How can it be stopped?
The problem is that, for much of the post-1945 period, the study of fascism was focused on the first question, and the answers were always in dispute. Though we can learn much from the historians who thought fascism was ‘dead but interesting’, its resurgence means any theory based on that assumption has to be revised.
In addition, a theory that works for historians may not work for us, as politically engaged participants. Many of the definitions being screengrabbed and debated by anti-fascists today were written as research hypotheses, designed to guide investigation and analysis. We, by contrast, need theory as a guide to action. We can’t expect academia to produce this – though its data, case studies and insights are invaluable.
In 1930, as the German left debated how to respond to Hitler’s breakthrough, the most influential debates were conducted not in a university seminar but in a trade union theoretical journal. These debates were read and argued over in workplaces and party meetings, and the experience of activists fed into what political theorists wrote next. Activists, in other words, shared not only a political culture but a means of producing theory.
For us that’s a lost horizon. Today, the organized labour movement is in survival mode; to suggest running a theoretical journal would sound laughable to most union activists. Much of orthodox Marxism exists in the form of re-enactment groups, regurgitating the same theories that led to defeat the first time round. The centre-left parties, watching helplessly as their traditional voter base swings to the right and seemingly unable or unwilling to stop ceding political territory to the populists, don’t appear interested in either theory or strategy.
As a result, activists in social justice movements, trapped at the bottom of the hierarchy of degrees, PhDs and publication league tables, tend to treat academia as the only reliable source of knowledge. It has become heresy for any young activist to say – as I will below – that some highly regarded experts have got it wrong.
But we can make a start. What follows is a critique of both the academic and classic Marxist theories of fascism, and the outline of a new, materialist theory of fascism, drawing on the work of Marxists in the 1930s who looked beyond class, and beyond the world of capitalist exploitation, in search of fascism’s origins.
FROM LIBERAL DISARRAY TO ‘TOTALITARIANISM’
After 1945, writers in the liberal tradition produced competing accounts of fascism that reflected the bias of their existing disciplines. Historians specializing in Germany identified Nazism as a German problem. Psychiatrists studied the ‘demonic personalities’ of the Nuremberg war criminals; economic historians slotted fascism into the trend towards state-controlled economies; while sociologists studied the ‘fascist personality type’.2
The historian Roger Griffin described the result as liberal disarray: ‘a sustained Babel effect that lasted over half a century, proliferating largely incompatible and sometimes mutually incomprehensible definitions of minimal use to historians and political scientists’.3 But in 1951 the publication of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism seemed to produce clarity. Suddenly there was a popular, sweeping and generalized account, not just of fascism but of the whole twentieth-century phenomenon of totalitarian rule.
Between 1922 and 1925 Mussolini ran what we would today call a ‘managed democracy’. Critics were jailed, exiled and occasionally murdered with impunity; elections were rigged and the National Fascist Party inevitably won them by a landslide. If it sounds like Russia, Turkey or the Philippines today, that’s no accident: all modern strongmen treat Mussolini’s early years as a playbook.
But his opponents could see where things were headed: towards a single-party dictatorship, which would force its ideology into people’s brains like a new religion. Fascism’s end game, they warned, was to create a ‘totalitarian’ state.4
In response, Mussolini’s squadristi took up the word ‘totalitarian’ as a badge of honour. They were entirely open about their desire for a full fascist state – and in January 1925, Mussolini began to build it. He sidelined the legislature and judiciary, concentrating power on himself. He cancelled freedom of assembly, declared all other parties illegal, placed the press under state control, introduced the death penalty for sedition, and began to round up thousands of his opponents.5
By 1928 Mussolini had created a ‘party state’. But he was not done yet. Though he had come to power promising to liberate the private sector, after the Wall Street Crash he turned instead to outright state ownership. By the time Mussolini co-authored The Doctrine of Fascism in 1932, he had created the most state-dominated economy outside the Soviet Union. He decreed:
Everything is in the state and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has any value, outside the state. In this sense fascism is totalitarian, and the fascist state – the synthesis and unity of all values – interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people.6
Totalitarianism, then, was not a concept invented by Arendt, it was a term used both by fascism and its critics. But in the 1930s, after Hitler’s victory and Stalin’s turn to mass murder and repression, a theory emerged that claimed the whole world was turning totalitarian.
As early as 1931 Lucien Laurat, an Austrian Marxist, argued that because Italy and the Soviet Union were so similar, a new, bureaucratic form of exploitation had emerged to replace capitalism: a kind of technology-enhanced slavery. The differences between the Soviet and fascist systems, he proposed, were merely ones of degree.7 By the end of the 1930s Laurat’s ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ theory had become commonplace among left-wing critics of Soviet communism. But as an explanation of fascism – and indeed as a guide to action – it proved a dead end. Once fascism was destroyed, and replaced by fully functioning market democracies after 1945, it was worthless to the left. From 1951 onwards the totalitarian thesis would become the property of the Cold War right.
Arendt’s description of Nazism as an alliance of ‘the elite and the mob’ contains important insights for us. What the two groups have in common is the same desire she observed in 1920s Germany: ‘access to history even at the price of destruction’.8 That is, the desire to derail the global order and trigger a giant historical re-set – even if it destroys the society they live in and the country they claim to love. Trump and the middle-class crowds who adulated him fit Arendt’s description of ‘the elite and the mob’ perfectly.
Arendt’s dissection of Hitler’s reliance on conspiracy theories, discussed in Chapter 2, is also relevant. The Nazis, she said, had created a ‘lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself’. Her words could just as easily describe the collection of QAnon believers, anti-vaxxers, climate deniers and neo-Nazis that stormed the US Capitol in January 2021:
They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself.9
Significant and insightful as it is, as an account of fascism’s origins Arendt’s work is flawed. In the first place, by creating the overarching abstraction of ‘totalitarianism’ to describe both the USSR and Nazi Germany, she had to exclude Italy from the category until 1938. Up to then, wrote Arendt, fascist Italy was ‘not totalitarian but just an ordinary nationalist dictatorship developed logically from a multiparty democracy’.10
Second, because having established ‘social atomisation’ as the precondition for the rise of totalitarian movements, she admits it was not present in tsarist Russia, nor in the early Soviet regime, and had to be created during the 1930s using mass terror, famine, purges and intrusive surveillance.11
Third, Arendt’s account of Hitler’s rise to power is at odds with the facts. She argued that the original adherents of fascist movements were mainly ‘non-joiners who for individualistic reasons always had refused to recognize social links or obligations’.12 That’s how, to her, it may have felt. But as we saw in Chapter 6, from war veterans to students, to members of shooting clubs and shopkeepers’ guilds, the Nazi breakthrough happened among ‘joiners’, not non-joiners.
Finally, Arendt severs the link between fascism and capitalism. In no version of history did Russia’s factory owners wish for Bolshevism. In all accepted histories of fascism Hitler and Mussolini had encouragement from at least a section of the ruling class, and large sections of the business elite collaborated with them once in power.
Emilio Gentile, a modern advocate of totalitarianism theory, summed up the problem with Arendt’s theory. For her, he writes, totalitarianism is like a strange plant: in Russia it has no roots, but can germinate and grow; in Germany it has roots but grows slowly; in Italy it flowers despite having no roots and never germinating.13 The theory, in short, does not stand up, despite the acuity of her insights. If you are going to use the word ‘totalitarianism’ today, Gentile argues, you have to strip it of the abstract character it assumes in Arendt’s work.
Yet, after Arendt, totalitarianism became the signature tune of Cold War political science. Checklists were invented and the ‘six key features of totalitarian states’ rote-learned by undergraduates. For Friedrich and Brzezinski, who in 1956 wrote the most influential textbook on the subject, the regimes were the primary focus. Movements came a distant second, their ideologies dismissed as ‘trite restatements of certain traditional ideas, arranged in an incoherent way that makes them highly exciting to weak minds’.14
Throughout the 1950s it became an article of faith that fascism and communism were the same thing. And then, in the 1960s, the historians intervened.
FROM GRAND THEORY TO SOCIOLOGY
Ernst Nolte’s book Fascism in its Epoch signalled a return to the study of fascism as fascism, rather than a subcategory of something else. Published in Germany in 1963, at a time when hundreds of thousands of former Nazis were still alive, it was a cathartic moment: here was a figure from conservative academia coming to terms with the past. It also signalled a return to the study of mass movements, not just regimes in their final form; to the study of ideas as well as actions; and to seeing fascism as a product of something deeper.
Both Marxists and liberals believed that fascist ideas were an incoherent fiction and served only as a pretext for violent actions. Nolte, by contrast, insisted that fascist ideology is important: we must allow it to ‘speak for itself’ and understand its ‘staggering logicality and consistency, even though we disagree with it’.15 Drawing on the experiences of France, Italy and Germany, Nolte wrote the first influential definition of fascism:
Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always, however within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy.16
It’s not the catchiest definition. Broken down into bullet points it means:
Fascism is anti-Marxism: without Marxism and the Russian Revolution there is no fascism.
Fascism’s aim is to destroy Marxism as a movement and ideology, if necessary by killing millions of people.
Fascism’s ideology is the mirror image of Marxism, but with one crucial distinction: it’s based on nationalism, not class.
Fascism’s methods are similar to those of revolutionary Marxist parties, but modified according to its nationalist goals.
Not content with a definition, Nolte also produced a checklist. Any movement that can be called fascist has to have six attributes: anti-Marxism, anti-liberalism, anti-conservatism, an all-powerful leader, a party army and the expressed aim of a totalitarian state.
Finally, Nolte offered an explanation of the underlying cause that had driven millions of people to embrace the far right. Fascism, he wrote, is ‘the practical and violent resistance to transcendence’.17 This, too, needs unpacking.
Nolte identified the irrationalist ideas circulating before 1914 as indispensable to the rise of fascism. The French Revolution, and the rise of capitalist industry, he said, had made progress possible. In response, throughout the nineteenth century, conservatism tried to halt this progress, or roll it backwards towards the pre-revolutionary order of peasants, priests and aristocrats.
By the late nineteenth century, however, it looked like the reactionaries had lost. If science could refute the Bible, proving humanity’s origins in evolution, it could one day probably map the human brain. If music could move beyond tonality, if art could move beyond representation and machines could fly, then it was possible to imagine human freedom (what Nolte calls ‘transcendence’) coming soon.
Those devoted to the ideals of absolute monarchy, eternal war and social hierarchy realized that if they didn’t stop human progress now, it would be too late. They began to mobilize and act. That is what Nolte means by ‘practical resistance to transcendence’.
It is this fear of progress, rather than the mere loneliness and atomization produced by modern life, that for Nolte explains the emergence of mass fascist parties. Fascism is resistance to social progress, and to the idea of liberation, by a group whose social position makes them scared of the prospect. Fascism, in short, is a movement of people unwilling to think beyond the present.
Nolte ended up in a dark place. What began as an explanation of fascism became, in his work after 1968, a tacit justification for it. As German conservatism moved rightward he began to imply that the Nazi response to Marxism may have been justified; that the Bolsheviks’ crime of ‘class murder’ was the trigger for the Nazis’ ‘racial murder’; and that the Holocaust was not a unique crime in history. All of which sparked a bitter debate in German politics, and outright war among historians: Nolte was ostracized for the rest of his career, though more recently celebrated by the rising stars of the AfD.18
