FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
THE ESSENCE OF FASCISM-THE ORGANISATION 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. The society of a
"stabilised Fascism"-if such a contradiction in terms
can be imagined, if, that is, for the sake of analysis
we try to imagine the possibility of such a society and
ignore for the moment the inner dialectics of break-up
and revolutionary upsurge which would make such a
stabilisation impossiblewould be a society of organised
decay. The essence of Fascism is the endeavour 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 Œdifferent
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 243 244 FASCISM AND
SOCIAL REVOLUTION
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 modern capitalism. And to this outcome the deepest
inner tendencies of Fascism--despite the fact that it is
to-day used in practice as the instrument of
finance-capital-would, if given free play, increasingly
develop. Just by its attempt to suppress forcibly, in
place of resolving, the contradictions of modern
society, Fascism reveals most profoundly its reactionary
role. For by this it strangles social development.
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 wageearning 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 and
conflicts 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
THE ESSENCE OF FASCISM--ORGANISATION OF SOCIAL DECAY
245
already social forms of production, but to suppress
them by artificially restricting the productive forces,
throttling down production to fixed limits suitable to
monopolist capital, preventing new development, clamping
on state bureaucratic control, and even, inextreme
cases, artificially maintaining obsolete smallproduction
forms, restricting machine-production and encouraging
hand-labour (see Chapter 111, sections 1 and 2 for
examples of this process). The reactionary, stagnating
tendencies of monopoly capitalism receive their extreme
expression in Fascism. Third, Fascism seeks to suppress
the contradictions of international capitalist
development, that is, the contradictions between the
single unified world market and international
specialisation of production, on the one hand, and the
competing monopolist groups and state complexes, on the
other, by forcibly shattering the basis of international
economy and organising the retreat towards the limited
closed-in isolationist economic basis-the line of
so-called "national self-sufficiency" or "autarchy."
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. Where would this whole line-if we
continue for the purpose of our analysis to ignore the
dialectics of struggle and development which would make
its realisation impossible, and imagine a successful and
increasing straight-line realisation of the tendencies
of Fascism-lead the modern capitalist world in the
twentieth century? It is evident that this line would be
a line of increasing stagnation and decay leading more
and more away from the complex inter- dependent modern
forms towards more primitive forms, and finally to
barbarism. The first stage of this process of the
working out of Fascism would be the stage of an
elaborately bureaucratic and nonprogressive state
capitalism-the bureaucratic regulation and restriction
of the entire economy, while still maintaining
capitalist forms. But while the capitalist forms would
still be maintained, and surplus-value would continue to
be extracted, the old free play of capitalist production
and circulation could no longer be permitted.
Accumulation and expansion would have to be strictly
controlled, since the normal
246 FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
working of the capitalist process would otherwise
rapidly burst the bonds of the attempted regulation and
harmony. The capitalist class would tend to become a
permanently fixed class or caste, with no room for new
accessions to its ranks. The attempt would develop, by
means of control of investments and similar measures, to
stabilise on a basis approximating to simple
reproduction of capital, and to avoid or minimise the
inherent disturbances of expanded reproduction. This
would mean a static non-progressive tendency, with
regulated quotas of production, prices, levels of wages
and profits. New inventions would be strictly regulated
and checked, as is to-day widely recommended. Science
and education would be discouraged, save so far as is
indispensable for military purposes. This stagnating,
non-progressive parasitic character of monopoly
capitalism has already been observed since the beginning
of the imperialist era. Lenin, in his analysis of
imperialism as the "Decay of Capitalism," sharply brings
out this tendency: Like all monopoly, this capitalist
monopoly infallibly gives rise to a tendency to
stagnation and decay. In proportion as the monopoly
prices become fixed, even though it be temporarily, so
the stimulus to all progress tends to disappear; and so
also arises the economic possibility of slowing down
technical progress.
(Lenin, Imperialism, Ch. 8.)
The post-war development of capitalism in the two
decades since this was written, and especially the
development of state capitalism and of Fascism, has
enormously carried forward this process. The
"petrifaction" of modern capitalist industry under an
"anonymous industrial bureaucracy" has been noted as an
increasing tendency by the German economic historian,
Schmalenbach: There is no longer a certain assurance
that capable, competent men will make good. I am
certainly not so sentimental as to believe that in the
old private industry a capable man was assured of
advancement under all circumstances. Nevertheless, it is
quite clear that in the new type of fettered industry
the assurance is considerably less. In these vast
monopoly concerns the successful man is much more firmly
seated in the saddle than he ever could formerly be
under the system of private industry. Under free
competition he had to earn his position continually. . .
. The chiefs of industry, at one time very vigorous
leaders in the
THE ESSENCE OF FASCISM --- ORGANISATION OF SOCIAL
DECAY 247
period of struggle and growth, are petrifying to
Heads of Departments, to Chiefs of Industrial Boards,
and, as industry turns from the vertical to the
horizontal, they change from creative minds to managers
of capital and price officials. But this is only the
beginning of the process. This tendency to petrifaction,
to a static non-progressive condition, which is the
underlying tendency of all the dreams of "Planned
Capitalism," is only the first stage. For in fact the
nonprogressive tendency inevitably works itself out in a
tendency to a decline, to a descent towards a lower
technical and economic level. The next stage, the first
signs of which can already be discerned, becomes the
gradual break-up of the large combinations, the break-up
of large-scale organisation, the reversion to more
limited economic units. In place of the
internationalisation. of economy develops the localised
"selfsufficient economic unit." In place of the
international specialisation of production develops
scattered production on a smaller scale for each unit,
and the consequent decline of massproduction. The most
advanced large-production plants, with their heavy
overhead running costs and needs of an enormous
worldwide market, begin to be found "uneconomic" in
contrast to relatively more backward smaller plants. So
begins the downward movement (if the proletariat does
not conquer, if the advance to the necessary next stage
of the world socialist order is not achieved), from the
high-water mark of capitalist technique in the first
quarter of the twentieth century to lower and more
primitive forms. Such is the economic basis of the
"decline to the Dark Ages," which all can see
ideologically expressed in Fascism. Scott Nearing in his
pamphlet on "Fascism" has given a vivid imaginative
picture of this process. He writes: The search for a
self-sufficient economic unit will lead the Fascists, as
it led those of their predecessors who helped to
liquidate the Roman Empire, to a splitting up of economy
units until they reach the village, the manor and the
local market town. Village economy is almost
self-sufficient. . . . Short of this level, however,
there is no unit which can pretend to economic
self-sufficiency. The search for an area in which
economic self-sufficiency is workable leads straight
back to such forms of village economy as can be found
to-day in portions of Central Europe, India and China.
Autarchy implies the abandonment of national
specialisation in production. . . . Mass-production will
be drastically restricted.
248 FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
The abandonment of national specialisation will go
hand in hand with the decline of international trade. In
proportion as each community becomes self-sufficient, it
will cease to trade with its neighbours. Nation will
cease to trade with nation; district with district;
village with village, until a stage is reached like that
of the Middle Ages, at which the trade of the world can
be carried on the backs of camels, pack-horses and human
beings, or in a few small merchant vessels. Each
village, manor, market town, trader and merchant will be
compelled to provide for his own self-defence and
protect his own property. Localism and individualism
will have once again replaced the efforts at social
co-ordination. . . . Automatic machinery will be
abandoned with the abandonment of mass-production. The
village will rely on hand-agriculture and hand- crafts.
Railroads will disappear. Roads will be tracks through
the mud. Automobiles will vanish. Bridges will be
destroyed in the course of the constantly recurring wars
and military expeditions and forays. Pack animals
defended by private guards will ford the streams and
make their way single-file over narrow winding tracks.
If this picture seems fantastic to a modern American or
European, let him compare Roman imperial economy in 50
A.D. with the economy of the same territory in 650 A.D.
Mass wage-labour will disappear with the disappearance
of specialised mass-production. The modern proletariat
will be eliminated by war, disease, famine and the
flight back to the land, quite as effectively as the
proletariat and the slave masses of Imperial Rome were
eliminated by the same means. . . . The standard of
living will be reduced to that of the villagers in
present-day Mexico, China, Austria or Rumania, except
that the villagers will no longer be able to secure the
many trinkets, tools and utensils that now come to them
from the centres of specialised industrial production.
Each year they will sow their crops; will wait for the
rain, and when the rain fails them, will die like flies
of the resultant famine. Each year they will reap their
harvests; hide them away from roaming bands of brigands
and unemployed soldiers; huddle about their meagre
fires, and use their spare time in making and repairing
household tools and utensils. (Scott Nearing, Fascism,
PP. 48-51
This picture is an imaginative picture of a
hypothetical process- deliberately leaving out of
account the dialectics of the proletarian class struggle
which will defeat its realisation. But -it is
essentially a correct picture of what would happen if
the innermost tendencies of Fascist economics and
politics were worked out to their final conclusion. It
is essentially a correct picture of the only final
alternative to the socialist revolution.
THE ESSENCE OF FASCISM-ORGANISATION OF SOCIAL DECAY
249
Those who hesitate at the issue of the socialist
revolution will do well to ponder closely this
inevitable final alternative which they are thereby
choosing. 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.:
250 FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION
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, january12-i8,1934.)
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 dayin 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
THE ESSENCE OF FASCISM--ORGANISATION OF SOCIAL DECAY
2 51
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-
siecle decadence into its necessary outcome in
blood-lust and barbarism. All this is only the
deathrattle 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.