Fascism. David Renton

Conversely, where fascism is defeated, the other forms of oppression on which it thrives can also be weakened.⁴

      The anti-fascist wager is not a distinctively Marxist position; all sorts of people have held it. But the first time in history that any significant group came to adopt it was in the mid-1920s, when the Marxists discussed in this book began to campaign against the threat of fascism outside Italy. This approach recognised the potential of Mussolini to inspire imitators including in Germany.

      At the time these clear-sighted warnings were first made, Hitler himself was a mere regional politician. Any electoral success he had enjoyed had been modest, and he faced a series of competitors in a space between fascism and conservatism, several of whom were better funded, had easier access to the media and their own means to employ paramilitary violence against their rivals. To say that fascism, despite all Hitler’s weaknesses, was the most threatening opponent facing the German left was to make a prediction about how fascism would grow and what it would do in power. It is worth listening to the people who grasped that risk, at a time when almost everyone else on the right and centre of European politics disagreed with them. In writing this book, I trust that their approach will be of interest to others facing the different right of our own times.

      This is the second edition of this book.⁵ The original spoke in some detail about the revival of fascism after 1945 but I have cut that material almost entirely from this edition. The reason I have removed it was not because I am blithe to the danger of fascism’s re-emergence but because I have long been preoccupied with it. There are countless examples of journalists and contemporary historians taking a strong and understandable dislike to political figures in the present day, reinterpreting fascism to mean whatever processes they reject in the present and then hunting for echoes of them in the past. But the contemporary right is in many ways unlike fascism. The temptation is there to define fascism in terms of some secondary characteristic, emphasising perhaps not so much Mussolini’s actual killing of his opponents but maybe his willingness to taunt them and threaten them with violence; or Hitler’s support, say, for tariffs and economic protection as opposed to global institutions of free trade.⁶ The risk is of chasing after some passing feature we dislike in the present and thereby softening our shared understanding of fascism, making the past fuzzier, blurred and less exact.

      Once you have a definition of fascism then the extent of the analogy between different generations of reactionary mass politics legitimately arises, and this is something which I have explored in another recent book, The New Authoritarians,⁷ to which this study stands as a companion. But the analogy must be considered in relation to something of a fixed and definite meaning, which has been drawn up in order to be as accurate as possible to what happened 80 years ago rather than to keep up with the changing demands of the present.

      This book is an exploration of the Marxist theory of fascism, which is treated as if it was a single analysis of that politics. And yet it should be acknowledged that there has not been just one Marxist theory, but at least three. The first, which I have described as the left theory of fascism, has tended to explain fascism as a form of counter-revolution acting in the interests of capital. The more stridently this interpretation has been advanced, the less concerned its adherents have been to examine what was specific about fascist counter-revolution. The Italian and German Communist Parties described fascism as one form of counter-revolution among many, and in doing so they disarmed their supporters, leading them away from organising with a single-minded focus against the fascists.

      The second, or right theory of fascism, by contrast, could only see the mass, radical character of the fascist movement. The Marxists who argued for this interpretation treated fascism as something radical, exotic, outside and threatening to capital. They called for alliances with anyone at all, with centrist and even right-wing politicians. In this way, the Italian and German Socialist Parties in the 1920s, and subsequently the world’s Communist Parties after 1934, allowed their anti-fascism to be moderate and irresolute, militant only in undermining the mass movements around them, which they disarmed both metaphorically and literally in the face of fascist advance.

      This book also explores the third, or dialectical theory of fascism. That theory treated fascism as both a reactionary ideology and also a mass movement, as a politics which could grow incredibly fast and do untold damage but was also vulnerable when faced with popular challengers which confronted it and could offer its supporters a more persuasive means of effecting transformative change. This book argues that this third theory reached a more accurate appreciation of fascism, not just than other Marxists but than anyone else in the interwar years.

      1

      Interwar Fascism

      The theme of this book is that the approach developed by the opponents of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler on the Marxist left provides a compelling set of answers to a series of questions which continue to divide historians of fascism. Subsequent chapters explain the Marxist theorists of the 1930s and summarise what they argued. In this chapter, I set out some of the places where today’s historians disagree with each other in their accounts of the two fascist regimes.

       Fascism: A Single Tradition?

      Even before Mussolini became prime minister of Italy on 29 October 1922, there were people outside Italy who wanted to copy his movement. In summer 1925, Mussolini was said to be considering the launch of a fascist international, which would combine up to 40 foreign parties ‘that call themselves fascist or are declared to be such’. Among groups considered for this alliance were the British Fascisti, founded on 6 May 1923 by former wartime ambulance driver Rotha Lintorn-Orman during a moment of epiphany as she dug the weeds in her Somerset vegetable garden. British fascism’s dependence on the Italian model could be seen in the name of the new party and the location of its headquarters on Great Russell Street, shared with the London offices of Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF). That sense of indebtedness to a foreign originator did not end with the decline of the British Fascisti after 1926. Between 1933 and 1935, Lintorn-Orman’s eventual successor, the double-turncoat former-Conservative former-Labour politician Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists accepted nearly a quarter of a million pounds in donations from Mussolini’s government.¹

      For the interwar Marxists, fascism was a single form of politics which was replicated in country after country. So, in November 1920, Antonio Gramsci, a young Italian supporter of the Russian Revolution and of the workers’ movement in Turin,² characterised fascism as ‘an international phenomenon … the illegal aspect of capitalist violence … a universal development’.³ In June 1923, in a speech to the Executive Committee of the Communist International veteran German socialist feminist Clara Zetkin called for a struggle against fascism to be waged in Germany, Hungary and the United States, arguing that fascism was already a global phenomenon, ‘a question of survival for every ordinary worker’.⁴

      Yet for many years after 1922, people rejected this idea of the international and unitary nature of fascism. On the centre and the right of politics, there was a reluctance to treat fascism as more than a transitory phenomenon, or to acknowledge that fascism was a single force. ‘The only people who seem to have perceived fascism as an international one (and a dangerous one) were the far Left’, writes the historian of the British right, Richard Griffiths. ‘Marxists’, notes the biographer of Hitler, Ian Kershaw, produced ‘the first serious attempt to explain fascism in theoretical terms’.⁵ Roger Griffin, the most influential theorist behind today’s ‘New Consensus’ theory of fascism, concurs: ‘Initially … “fascism” referred specifically to Mussolini’s new movement, and it was left-wing Italian intellectuals, convinced of its repressive and reactionary nature as a violent assault on the working-class movement, who made the first attempt to interpret it as a more substantive and general political phenomenon.’⁶

      Many at the centre and on the right of politics refused to see fascism in this way. They had all sorts of reasons, both bad and good, for their reluctance. They saw the Communists as the dynamic force in global politics and hoped to entice some of the fascists into an anti-Communist alliance.