Fascism. David Renton

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СКАЧАТЬ telling his judges, ‘From the very first I have aimed at something more than becoming a mere Minister, I have resolved to the destroyer of Marxism.’ From this single and determining perspective, Hitler was willing to borrow aspects of the left’s approach to politics – its emphasis on public marches, its pageantry.⁵⁷ In his autobiography Mein Kampf(My Struggle), Hitler justified this method:

      When from his little workshop or big factory, in which he feels very small, he [the fascist], steps for the first time into a mass meeting and has thousands and thousands of people of the same opinions around him, when, as a seeker, he is swept away by three or four thousand others into the mighty effect of suggestive intoxication and enthusiasm ... The man who enters such a meeting doubting and wavering leaves it inwardly reinforced: he has become a link in the community.⁵⁸

      Hitler did not call his party socialist because he wanted to reform capitalism. He did so because he wanted to use parts of the socialist repertoire to different ends. He did so rather to confuse and demoralise his enemies, to defeat them.⁵⁹

      Part of the argument for the socialist character of the PNF and the NSDAP rests on the existence of a small number of fascists who had been on the left. This was more notable within Italy, as Mussolini had spent several years as a socialist before breaking with that party over its unwillingness to support Italian involvement in the First World War, and his leadership attracted former revolutionary trade unionists who had abandoned a belief in class struggle for the idea that the competition between nations was the driving force of history.

      The former leftists included Edmondo Rossoni, who had been a member of the Socialist Party between 1900 and 1907 and then a supporter of syndicalism, the belief that workers’ strikes could grow in number until the trade unions were a revolutionary alternative to capitalism. In America in 1910, he was a supporter of the Industrial Workers of the World. In 1914, he called for Italy to join the war, and on his return to Italy he worked through a union federation the Unione Italiana del Lavoro (UIL), which vacillated between nationalism and syndicalism. In January 1922, Rossoni accepted an offer to quit the UIL to become the general secretary of the Confederazione dei Sindicati Nazionali, a fascist party organisation but one which grew rapidly, reaching a peak of 1.8 million members in 1924 which, even allowing for some paper membership, was still significantly larger than the fascist party itself, whose claimed membership was just 650,000 people.⁶⁰

      In a position of seeming importance, Rossoni had to weigh the discontents of the workers he was supposedly leading against the hostility of the factory owners who were determined to resist any possibility of Italy’s recently turbulent industrial relations reasserting themselves, even under the protection of fascist rule. The arbiter between the two sides, Mussolini, had no more interest than the industrialists in a fascist ‘socialism’. Removed from his union position in 1928, Rossoni went on to hold several junior posts before, in 1935–9, being promoted again to the middle-ranking position of minister of agriculture and forestry.⁶¹

      Another former syndicalist who played a role in the literary defence of the regime was Sergio Panunzio, an academic lawyer and philosopher who had argued for the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism prior to 1910. Like Rossoni, he had later called for a fusion of nationalism and revolutionary syndicalism. He wrote for Mussolini’s papers during the First World War but remained aloof from the fascists and only joined them in 1921. From 1924, he served in the Chamber of Deputies and later as undersecretary in the Ministry of Communications. Panunzio was appointed to an academic post as the head of Fascist Faculty of Political Sciences at Perugia University in 1928, the first specifically fascist institution of higher education, and wrote a number of books for fascist publishers maintaining that the regime was in continuity with the radical theories of the pre-war Italian left, and an alternative to the universal decadence of liberalism.⁶²

      In the case of Germany, the existence of a fascist ‘left’ narrows to the figures of Gregor and Otto Strasser. The two brothers were born into a strongly Catholic and conservative, Bavarian family. Gregor, the oldest, was a young soldier at the front during the war, and this experience left him with a romantic, even sentimental belief in the comradeship of military experience. Gregor Strasser worked briefly as a pharmacist before becoming a career Nazi and member of its paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA).⁶³ He served as the party’s head of organisation from 1927. In that role, he was given responsibility for negotiating with conservative and nationalist groups outside the NSDAP. Gregor was, however, distrusted and isolated by Hitler. He resigned from all party roles at the end of 1932 and was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, along with other SA leaders and rivals of Hitler on the right.

      In comparison to his elder brother, Otto Strasser was a more complex character. A member of the Freikorps in 1920, and therefore associated with the extreme right of German politics, quixotically he also joined the Socialist Party in the same year. Between 1925 and 1930, he was a Nazi and controlled a Berlin publishing house, the Kampfverlag, which claimed to be seeking a synthesis between Communism and fascism. In 1930, following a furious meeting with Hitler, in which he was ordered to pledge his loyalty to the Nazi leader or cease publishing, but declined to do either, Otto Strasser resigned from the National Socialists, forming a small rival party on the far right, the Black Front.⁶⁴

      Otto Strasser criticised capitalism, albeit as a nationalist and from the right. But it would be a real exaggeration to portray his five-year membership of the NSDAP as in any way significant to the development of that party.

      Prior to 1934 Gregor Strasser had, by contrast, been within the two dozen figures at the head of German fascism. Yet his critique of Hitler or of Nazism was shallow. As his biographer, Peter Stachura, indicates, Gregor Strasser’s ‘“socialism” was vacuous, amounting to no more than an emotionally based, superficial, petty-bourgeois anti-capitalism ... [He] cannot be regarded in any meaningful sense as the leader of a “Nazi left” because such an entity simply did not exist as a coherent ideological, organisational, or political entity.’⁶⁵

       Misogyny and Agency

      The interwar Marxists were fascinated by the question of who joined the fascists. Often, as we shall see, this turned on an appraisal of how deeply fascist support extended into the working class, the ruling class or the classes in between. But it was also obvious that part of what made fascism possible was the world war, the desire of large numbers of people to return to something like wartime conditions and the ability of the fascists to organise a street-fighting militia made up of men nostalgic for war. In the words of one historical sociologist, Michael Mann, ‘Italian fascism triumphed more through violence than the ballot box’.⁶⁶ The interwar Marxists would have agreed with him, and it is possible to find any number of passages commenting on the success of the Italian or the German fascists in recruiting a private army of street-fighters to be employed against the left. As Trotsky wrote in November 1931, ‘Without a doubt, the fascists have serious fighting cadres, experienced shock brigades. We must not make light of this: the officers play a big part even in the civil-war army. Still, it is not the officers, but the soldiers who decide.’⁶⁷ Trotsky went on to compare the limited social weight of the fascists with the deep roots of the Socialists and Communists.

      Although interwar Marxists were keenly aware of the importance of private militia to fascism, relatively few Socialists or Communists commented on the ways in which the recruitment of former soldiers (who were all men) or those who aspired to be soldiers, shaped the demographics of the early fascist parties.

      The largest study of a fascist party at the stage when it existed as a movement, was a report carried out by the PNF in November 1921. This provided basic data on some 151,644 fascists, or around half the party’s then membership. Fewer than 2 per cent of members were women. More than half were military veterans.⁶⁸

      Various lists have been kept of the membership СКАЧАТЬ