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The Essence of Fascism — The Organised Expression of Social Decay
Fascism, developing since little over a decade, has no long past behind it, and in all probability—from the very nature of its reactionary role, from its violent inner contradictions, and from the whole character of its desperate attempt to throw up a darn against the advancing social revolution—is likely to have no long future before it. Fascism is likely to be remembered only as an episode in the long-drawn class-war advancing to the final victory of the Socialist revolution.
But if Fascism were able to have the opportunity to continue over a longer period, were able to maintain its power and to dominate, as it dreams, a whole epoch of social history, then it is evident from the whole foregoing analysis what its historical role would be, and what kind of society it would produce.
Fascism claims to bring “rejuvenation” to the existing declining society, to represent the principle of “new birth” and “new life” in place of the existing decay, to represent the principle of organisation and order in place of the existing capitalist anarchy.
The exact contrary is the case. Because the roots of the existing decay and anarchy lie in the capitalist class ownership of the means of production, the on ly new life and new birth can come from the victory of the proletariat and the socialist reorganisation of society. This has been demonstrated on a world historic scale by the Soviet Union, where alone triumphant advance in every sphere of human activity and culture confronts the increasing decay and barbarism of the capitalist world, equally in the Fascist and in the non-Fascist countries.
What Fascism organises and carries forward is in reality nothing other than the process of increasing decay and barbarism of the capitalist world in the culminating stage of the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary and chauvinist elements of finance capital.
Fascism endeavours violently to suppress and overcome the ever-growing contradictions of capitalist society. As Goering stated in a speech to the Pomeranian Landbund on March 17, 1933:
The regime of national concentration will with iron fist bring the opposing interests of the different strata of society into that harmony which is so essential to the prosperity of the German people.
Forcible (“iron fist”) suppression of the “opposing interests of the different strata of society” into “harmony,” that is to say, in short, “iron-fist harmony>”—that is the essence of Fascism.
But what does this involve? For in fact just the contradictions and consequent conflicts are the mainspring and driving force of social development in class-society, that is to say, until society becomes a true collective by the liquidation of classes. Until then, the path of class-conflict is the path of social development. To attempt on the one band to maintain the contradictions unresolved, and on the other to suppress forcibly their expression, would mean, if successful, that society would cease to develop and would pass, on the most favourable hypothesis, to a Byzantine or Old-Chinese hieratic ossification. But such a society requires in fact an entirely different economy from capitalism. In reality, the driving force of the laws of finance capital, which govern Fascism, leads necessarily to an entirely different outcome, to an intensification of all contradictions, both internal and external, to the point of explosion.
Just by its attempt to suppress forcibly, in place of resolving, the contradictions of modern society, Fascism reveals most profoundly its reactionary role.
First, Fascism seeks to suppress the class struggle, not by the abolition of classes, but by the violent permanent subjection of the exploited class to the exploiters and crushing of all resistance. This means, even if it could be successful, a condition of permanent inner war within society, with consequent extreme waste of social forces and increasing destruction of all possibility of collective achievement. Its stabilisation would mean the replacement of liberal capitalism by a caste or statutory servile system. As the nineteenth-century liberal capitalist system of formal “free contract” increasingly disappears under modern conditions of large-scale industry, its breakdown raises ever more sharply the two alternatives: either Socialism, or the common ownership of the means of production and common obligation of all citizens to labour and sharing of the fruits; or the Servile State (State Capitalism), that is, the statutory compulsion and regulation of the labour of the wage-earning class for the profit of the property-owning class under a general framework of State control, with the abolition of the right to strike. The Fascist State represents the second alternative, that is, the Servile State.
Second, Fascism seeks to suppress the contradictions of capitalist economy brought about by the advance of technique and the development of mass-production and productive power. As before, it seeks, not to resolve the contradictions in the higher form of socialisation of the already social forms of production, but to overcome them within the limits of the fettering capitalist relations. This can only mean in practice, however, either to endeavour to restrict artificially the productive forces, throttling down production to fixed limits suitable to monopolist capital, checking new development and clamping on state bureaucratic control for the purposes of this limitation; or in the final analysis, since such limitation is finally incompatible with the requirements of the expansion of capital, to move to the only alternative and endeavour to blast by violence a way out from the impasse, that is, to endeavour by war to secure a new division of the world and an enlarged outlet for the one particular finance-capitalist bloc at the expense of its rivals.
Third, and in consequence of the above, Fascism necessarily leads to war on an extending scale. Fascism already enormously carries forward the process of shattering the basis of international economy and of the international division of labour built up in the previous period, and moves instead to the line of organisation of closed-in “isolationist” economic blocs, the line of so-called “national self-sufficiency” or “autarchy,” which is in fact only the preparation for intensified war for the world market. This openly retrograde line means the cutting down of international trade and communications, the raising of the costs of production, the lowering of the standard of living, and the increasing “Balkanisation” of the capitalist world. In its final working out the intensified economic war necessarily leads to open armed struggle. War becomes the open avowed and glorified aim of every Fascist society.
Fascism reveals itself more and more in every aspect of its policy as organisation and mobilisation of the entire economy, political structure and population as a whole, for war. This sharply expresses the profoundly reactionary role of Fascism, which in this way directs its main organisation, even where it appears to carry forward the highest organisation and technical development, for destruction, objectively hastening forward the decline and decay of capitalism. Just this demonstrates the significance of the role of Fascism as the typical system of organisation of capitalism in extreme decay, seeking to overcome the decay and contradictions by intensified organisation and strengthening of the capitalist dictatorship, but in fact only able to lead by its very organisation to intensified contradictions, war, and the acceleration of capitalist decay.
Thus Fascism, so far from representing a counter-force to the process of decay of existing capitalist society, is in reality the sharpest expression and an accelerating factor of the whole process of capitalist decay, of increasing destruction and the drive to barbarism. This is the reality of the “alternative” which Fascism offers to Socialism.
The sense of the decline of civilisation, the overpowering atmosphere of pessimism, even though accompanied by formal expressions of hope of revival through Fascism, overwhelmingly dominates all Fascist expression, and betrays its innermost essence.
We have no belief in programmes or plans, in saints or apostles. Above all, we have no belief in happiness, in salvation or in the promised land.
(Mussolini, Popolo d’Italia, January 1, 1922.)
Fascism denies the materialist conception of happiness as a possibility.
(Mussolini, The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism.)
In the gloom of to-day and the darkness of to-morrow the only faith that remains to us individualists destined to die is the at present absurd but ever-consoling religion of anarchy.
(Popolo d’Italia, April 6, 1920.)
Hopeless we may be, yet we have the hope of doomed men.
(Blackshirt, September 16–22, 1933.)
Fully aware of the decline of cultures and civilisations before us, we still demand the right of every proud warrior—to fight for a cause though that cause seem lost.
(Fascist Week, January 12–18, 1934.)
“But it is not a lost cause.” Such is the hasty addition appended, without attempt at grounds other than a mystic faith, to the last quotation, to save appearances and justify the Fascist fight. But the addition rather confirms than changes the basic outlook revealed. The basic tone and outlook remains that of a dying civilisation fighting against odds to continue defiantly in the face of all the evidence of the doom of history proclaimed against it.
Characteristic of this whole outlook is the dominating influence of Spengler on Fascism. The favourite, the most quoted and the dominating philosopher and teacher of the Fascist “theorists” remains Spengler, the shallow journalistic-smatterer philosopher of the inevitability of decline and of the collapse of civilisation, even though his conclusions are so downright black and hopeless in their pessimism that they are compelled formally to deny them, while accepting his premises. The recent official book of British Fascism (Drennan, B.U.F.: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism) fills its pages with endless excerpts from Spengler, declaring:
Spengler’s interpretation of world history is a colossal monument to the European mind…. His interpretation of past history remains valid, and constitutes a base from which modern man may begin to interpret his own present and to modify his own future.
What is the teaching of this “colossal” prophet? He writes:
Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice. We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on the last position, without hope, without rescue…. The honourable end is the one thing that cannot be taken from a man.
What is the comment of The Fascist Week on this commonplace maudlin posturing of all dying civilisations?
His words are a magnificent example of dauntless nobility in the face of inevitable annihilation.
(Fascist Week, January 12–18, 1934.)
The Fascist organ thereafter endeavours to plead that perhaps man may be “in some ways free of natural laws” and thus escape the doom. But even the final conclusion of the Fascist organ runs:
For those who make the choice, the very least of their destinies will be an honourable end.
In the same way the official book on Mosley and British Fascism, already quoted, glories in the breakdown of civilisation and the return to the primitive:
The powers of the blood, unbroken bodily forces, resume their ancient lordship (p. 198).
Out of the night of history, old shadows are appearing which menace their complacency…. Sir Herbert Samuel, a Liberal of singular perspicacity, believes that Europe is returning to the conditions of the twelfth century. Professor Laski wails against these new men who have “no inhibitions.” …
The figure of the leader… comes out into the stark day—in the grim serenity of Mussolini, in the harsh force of Hitler. And behind them stride the eternal condottieri—the gallant, vivid Balbo, the ruthless Goering (pp. 42–3).
(Drennan, B.U.F.: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism.)
With this typical glorification of the “condottieri,” of the return of the brigand Balbo and the gorilla Goering, of the law of the jungle, we may leave the Fascists to their Neronian pleasures, until such time as the strong hand of the proletarian dictatorship shall end their blood-orgies and establish civilised order and progress throughout the world. What speaks here through the mouth of the Fascists is nothing but the typical decadent parasitic glorification of blood and the cave-man (already visible in its first signs in the invalids Nietzsche, Carlyle and other sick types, or later represented in the Ethel M. Dells and Hemingways of literature). Fascism in its ideology is nothing but the continuation of fin-de-siècle decadence into its necessary outcome in blood-lust and barbarism. All this is only the death-rattle of the dying bourgeois civilisation.
Against all this pessimism, decline, decay and filth, tragic destinies, self-heroisings, idolisation of death, returns to the primitive, mysticism, spiritualism and corruption, the revolutionary proletarian movement of Communism, of Marxism, the heir of the future, proclaims its unshakable certainty and confidence in life, in science, in the power of science, in the possibility of happiness, proclaims its unconquerable optimism for the whole future of humanity, and in this sign, armed with the weapons of scientific understanding, of dialectical materialism, of Marxism, will conquer and sweep from the earth the dregs of disease and decay which find their expression in Fascism.
The experience of both Italian Fascism and German Fascism, as also of the military Fascism of Japan, has overwhelmingly demonstrated that Fascism drives towards war.
Italian Fascism, after concentrating its entire organisation and economy on preparation for war, led the way as the first of the European powers to open large-scale war in the new period since the world crisis by its attack on Ethiopia in 1935. The open and cynical character of this aggression on a people technically backward and deprived of arms by the action of the imperialist powers, and the no less contemptuous disregard of all the professions of the Kellogg Pact and of the League of Nations Covenant, aroused universal awakening to the true character of Fascism as the instigator of war. The Ethiopian adventure of the Italian Fascists was declared by their friend and admirer, Churchill, to be a “deadly trap.” But in fact this whole policy, the growing crisis of their economy, as well as the inner weakening of the regime, could find no other outcome. The advance of Italian Fascism to war was continuously predicted by Mussolini, and even dated by him for 1935, in his speeches as far back as 1927. In this respect, and in this respect alone, the event has fully borne out the proposals of Fascism.
The experience of German Fascism, though shorter, is of even more far-reaching significance. In the case of German Fascism it is manifest to all observers, and it is unnecessary to recapitulate the detailed evidence (given, for example, with ample documentation in Dorothy Woodman’s Hitler Rearms), that the entire organisation, not only of technique and economy, but of the whole life of the people, has been directed to war on a scale that has never before been equalled. Behind Hitler stands the General Staff. The estimate, given currency by Churchill in 1935, that the expenditure of Germany on war-preparation has attained the colossal figure of £800 millions annually, a sum exceeding the total figure of the British budget, reveals not only the extreme degree which this process has reached, but also the extreme instability of its whole basis and the impossibility of continuing this process for any prolonged period without reaching the final outcome in war.
These tendencies of extreme and heavy rearmament and of the increasing mobilisation of the whole population and economy for war, are not confined to the Fascist countries. In greater or less degree they are common to all the imperialist countries. But they are carried to an extreme point without parallel elsewhere in the Fascist countries. The Fascist dictatorship provides the means for this enormous compulsory mobilisation and regimentation in a way that arouses the envy of the statesmen of the parliamentary democratic countries.
Where, however, does this process lead? It is manifest that there can be here no question of stability. On the contrary, the artificial stimulus to economic life through this process of rearmament, which leads to the illusory picture of a short-term revival through Fascism, compels a constant acceleration and a continually greater economic instability. On the one side, the pyramid of long-term and short-term debt for unproductive expenditure rises steadily higher. On the other side, the sacrifices and privations imposed on the population, both through the myriad forms of heavy taxation to meet the rising demands of state expenditure, and through the restrictions and cutting off of normal foreign sources of supply, as well as the limitation of home sources of supply for the purpose of war needs and war stocks, lead to a situation in which the population is reduced to the level of extreme wartime conditions and virtual blockade already before the outbreak of war.
Thus a situation is reached which received its most typical expression in respect of Japan, when the Times Tokyo correspondent had occasion to declare that if the war industries were for a moment interrupted, the whole economic structure would collapse. Such an artificial position belongs to the conditions of war-time but not of peace-time. It is obvious that such a process as is going forward in Germany cannot long continue in conditions of peace. It must inevitably in a relatively short period of time lead to its outcome in war, as the only alternative to its own inner collapse. This becomes more and more evidently the whole direction of German policy, just as Italian policy has already reached this outcome. But the gamble of war in fact eventually sharpens all the contradictions and inner weakness of the whole regime. The process of capitalist decay reaches its most extreme and violent expression in Fascism.