Vol. 76/No. 24 June 18, 2012
The following excerpt is from Fascism and Big Business, written in 1936 by French revolutionary Daniel Guerin (1904-1988). The book explains how incipient fascist groups use anti-capitalist and socialist demagoguery to attract primarily disaffected middle-class social layers, radicalized under the impact of deep economic and social crises of capitalism. As the crisis reached a high pitch and mass struggles by millions threatened capitalist rule in Germany and Italy, the book explains, the ruling class, particularly the big bourgeoisie, turned as a last resort to fascist groups, bringing murderous brutality to bear in order to subdue and demoralize the working class and maintain political power. Copyright © 1973 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY DANIEL GUERIN
“Mysticism” is not enough; it fills no bellies. The individuals composing the fascist troops are not all equally fanatic, and even the most fanatic do not forget their material interests. Concern for these interests continues to dwell in their subconscious. In order to win them and keep up their enthusiasm, fascism must also hold forth to them a practical solution for the ills from which they suffer. Although in the service and hire of capitalism, it must—and this is what radically distinguishes it from the traditional bourgeois parties—make a show of demagogic anti-capitalism.
But this anti-capitalism, if closely examined, is quite different from socialist anti-capitalism; in fact it is essentially petty bourgeois. Fascism thus kills two birds with one stone: on the one hand it flatters the middle classes by becoming the faithful interpreter of their most reactionary aspirations; on the other, it feeds the working masses, and particularly those categories of workers lacking class consciousness, with a utopian and harmless anti-capitalism that turns them away from genuine socialism.
But this “pass-key” demagogy will not satisfy everybody. Fascism is obliged therefore to speak, not without understandable embarrassment, to the conscious workers, and to the small peasants hungry for land, in a more radical language. We shall see that they will push this self-styled “socialism” very far—in words. Is it really useful, the reader will ask, to go to such pains to dissect this lying phrasemongering? The undertaking is indeed necessary, both to understand what slogans the fascist demagogues have used to dazzle their followers, and to point up the gulf between promises and fulfillment.
Fascism’s game is to call itself anti-capitalist without seriously attacking capitalism. It first endeavors to transmute the anticapitalism of the masses into nationalism. An easy task! In all periods, as we have seen, the hostility of the middle classes towards big capital is accompanied by a tenacious attachment to the idea of the nation. In Italy and Germany particularly, the masses as well are disposed to believe that the enemy is less their own capitalism than foreign capitalism. Hence fascism has no difficulty in shielding its financial backers from popular anger by diverting the anti-capitalism of the masses to the “international plutocracy.”
In Italy
Long before the war, the syndicalists of the school of Sorel—who were later to become fascists—coupled their revolutionary syndicalism to an increasingly pronounced nationalism. Rossoni discovered that “the fate of the Italian workers is indissolubly linked to that of the Italian nation.” Labriola demanded the right of Italy to try its fortune by leading the crusade against plutocratic Europe. Syndicalists and nationalists joined in proclaiming Italy the great proletarian. Mussolini had only to delve into their writings. From 1915 to 1918 he incessantly repeated that “the war must be given a social content.” Later he declared that the League of Nations “is only a sort of insurance policy of the successful nations against the proletarian nations.” The minister Rocco recalled that “there is not only an internal but an international problem of the distribution of wealth,” and counterposed the poor nations to the rich nations: “The Italian proletariat suffers from the inferior position of the Italian nation with respect to rival nations far more than from the avarice or greed of its employers.” Therefore, in order to improve the condition of the Italian masses, it would be necessary first to improve the international position of the “proletarian nation.”In Germany
As early as 1919, the founder of the National Socialist Party, Drexler, asserted that “Toiling Germany is the victim of the greedy Western powers.” Moeller van den Bruck took up the formula of the proletarian nation: “Socialism,” he wrote, “cannot give justice to men if there is no previous justice for nations. The German workers should realize that never before have they been enslaved as they are today by foreign capitalism…. The struggle for liberation that the proletariat is carrying on as the most oppressed section of an oppressed nation is a civil war that we are no longer waging against ourselves but against the world bourgeoisie.”However, it was Gregor Strasser who became the brilliant and tireless propagandist of this synthesis: “German industry and economy in the hands of international finance capital means the end of all possibility of social liberation; it means the end of all dreams of a socialist Germany…. We young Germans of the war generation, we National Socialist revolutionists, we ardent socialists, are waging the fight against capitalism and imperialism incarnated in the Versailles treaty…. We National Socialists have recognized that there is a connection, designed by providence, between the national liberty of our people and the economic liberation of the German working class. German socialism will be possible and lasting only when Germany is freed!”
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