Roger Griffin
Fascism and Revolution
The Marxist and liberal denial of fascism’s revolutionary credentials
‘Nazism makes out it is subversive. The most terrible white terror against people and socialism the world has ever seen takes on a socialist disguise. To this end its propaganda must develop a revolutionary façade with trappings of the Paris Commune.' Even today there are many for whom this pronouncement, made by the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch in 1933, the year in which Adolf Hitler came to power, still rings true. ‘Real’ revolutions, they assume, do not just replace one socio-political, economic, or technological system by another, but in doing so enable humanity (or at least one part of it) to pass from a lower to a higher stage of development. The right, however, even at its most radical, is widely seen as wanting to put a stop to such progress by creating a modern state whose real purpose is to preserve the traditional class system and its values, or even put the clock back by invoking the ancient qualities of the race as the basis of contemporary society.
Assumptions of this kind have meant that fascism’s own claims to be a revolutionary force have been widely rejected by its opponents. Marxists, for example, are committed to the belief that the capitalist world order will eventually be overthrown and give way to one in which systemic inhumanity and exploitation will finally cease. They are thus predisposed to assume that anything which tends to postpone the advent of socialism is ‘reactionary', whilst the radical transformation of society in an anti-socialist direction pursued by fascism makes it ‘counter-revolutionary'. By the same logic, fascist talk of a rejuvenated national community in which class conflicts will dissolve is axiomatically treated by Marxists as an elaborate exercise in ‘false consciousness’, or using ideas and values which conceal the true intentions. Inter-war fascism was the product of a crisis of capitalism, threatened from within by the breakdown of the financial, social, and political structures which maintained it, and from without by revolutionary socialism.
This pincer movement, so Marxists believe, caused it to drop its liberal disguise which made it appear rational and humanistic, and resort to an openly authoritarian, terroristic form of state government. Fascism was either directly generated by bourgeois elements or cynically manipulated by them to defend the capitalist state, often with the direct collaboration of residual feudal forces such as the Church and aristocracy. Its main ploy was to pretend to destroy the system so that it could divert the subversive energies of the masses into serving a belligerently nationalistic state which, despite claiming to restore dignity to the working class, in the long run could only increase its exploitation and suffering. In short, it simulated revolution for reactionary ends. True to this position the British activist Robert Palm Dutt, writing in the same year as Ernst Bloch, told his fellow Marxists that in order to preserve capitalism the ideologues of the ‘Fascist Counter-Revolution’ had to pretend to be enemies of capitalism: ‘To prevent the working-class revolution, they are compelled to stage their masquerade revolution, and even dub it a "socialist revolution"’.
A bias which in some respects is even more insidious, because less easily detectable, is displayed by many ‘liberal' academics. They have no qualms about using such terms as ‘the American Revolution’, ‘the French Revolution’, or even ‘the 1848 Revolutions’ (all of which in the short term failed in their objectives). They even concede the Russian Revolution to have been revolutionary, since, however misconceived Lenin’s vision of the ideal society, he at least set out to replace ‘backward’ tsarist Russia with a recognizably ‘modern’ industrialized state. Yet most liberals have been unable to accept that fascism was revolutionary because they do not recognize the existence of a fascist ideology, and see it as reducible to little more than a leadership cult, extreme nationalism, and organized brutality. Thus for Roger Scruton, the author of A Political Dictionary (1982), interwar fascism was ‘an amalgam of disparate conceptions, often ill-understood, often bizarre’: it had ‘the form of an ideology without the content’. Another reaction is to treat it as the throw-back to an age of barbarism, as when Hugh Trevor-Roper dismissed Nazi ideology as ‘bestial Nordic nonsense’. Even when non-Marxist historians have recognized the modernizing, revolutionary thrust of fascism it, they have sometimes felt the need to qualify it by adopting a phrase which is deliberately paradoxical, such as ‘a revolution of nihilism', ‘modernist anti-modernism', or ‘reactionary modernism'.
This chapter flies in the face of such ‘common sense’ by arguing that even if the radical right in general is ‘reactionary’, at least in its fascist manifestations it does indeed function as a revolutionary ideology. Or to quote the American academic Eugen Weber’s thoughtful essay on this topic: ‘fascism, too easily defined as counter-revolutionary, is not a counter-revolution, but a rival revolution: rival of [the communist one] which claimed to be the only one entitled to the label...For the fascists, communism is not subversion attacking the established order, it is a competitor for the foundation of power.’ Before a case can be made for this approach, however, it is necessary to clarify what we mean by two key words both of whose meaning is strongly contested by ‘experts’: ‘revolution’ and ‘fascism’.
‘Revolution’ and ‘fascism’ as ideal types
If the terms ‘revolution' and ‘fascism' are both conceptually fuzzy and value-laden, then any discussion of their relationship risks being so subjective as to become pointless. The solution to such dilemmas, which are a recurrent feature of the human sciences, is to create an artificially tidy definition known in the social sciences as an ‘ideal type'. An ideal type has the same sort of relationship to the empirical reality being defined as a stylized underground railway (subway) map has to the actual network of rails and stations it displays. It does not tell you about the characteristics of any one phenomenon, but singles out the things which all manifestations of one type of phenomenon have in common.
‘Revolution' can be used as an ideal type to refer to ‘a fundamental (structural) change which, while manifesting itself in a particular sphere of human activity, has radically innovative consequences for a wide nexus of social and psychological realities associated with it'. This means that, as long as the break with the past is sufficiently radical, a set of events may be revolutionary without necessarily furthering the Marxist or liberal scheme of historical progress. As for our working definition of fascism, a ready-made, off-the-shelf ideal type can be brought into service without resorting to a piece of conceptual do-it-your-self. In the course of the 1990s there was a growing consensus outside the Marxist camp that fascism is a form (or genus) of modern, mass politics which draws its ideological cohesion and mobilizing force from the vision of imminent national rebirth. In other words, for fascists a period of perceived national decline and decadence is giving way to an era of renewal in a post-liberal new order.
Approached from this angle, fascism is an essentially revolutionary form of ultra-nationalism (i.e. a highly chauvinistic and overtly anti-liberal nationalism). It is characterized by a populist dimension which involves mobilizing the masses to provide authentic (and not simply engineered and manipulated) support from below for the drastic actions taken by the self-appointed new elite from above to save the nation from what it perceives as terminal decline. This suggests that we should not dismiss simply as empty rhetoric, or ‘mindless Latin nonsense’, a speech made by Mussolini on the eve of the March on Rome which brought him to power:
We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality. It is a reality in the sense that it is a stimulus, is hope, is faith, is courage. Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, that we subordinate everything else.
For us the nation is not just territory, but something spiritual. There are States which have had immense territories and which have left no trace in human history. It is not just a question of size, because there have been minute, microscopic States in history which have bequeathed memorable, immortal specimens of art and philosophy. The greatness of the nation is the totality of all these qualities, of all these conditions. A nation is great when it translates into reality the force of its spirit
What makes this statement symptomatic not merely of Italian Fascism but of fascism in general (‘generic fascism’) is that it relates directly to the fact that the Fascist state attempted to mobilize the people as a whole through mass organizations, a constant stream of propaganda, and elaborate political ritual to enlist them emotionally in the epic transformation of their country into a dynamic, modern, productive military power. Moreover, even if it had to be seen as collaborating with traditional ruling elites, the civil service, the monarchy, the armed forces, and the Catholic Church, it did so in a spirit far removed from that of conservative reaction: in a revolutionary spirit, in fact. The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, which opened in Milan in 1932 and was seen by nearly four million visitors, was designed not as a publicity stunt, but to create a dramatic sense for the visitor who walked through the rooms that with the advent of Fascism Italy and all its inhabitants had literally entered a new historical era.
Further implications of the ideal types
Another consequence to be drawn from the ideal types we have used is that, when seeking to establish which inter-war movements or regimes were fascist, our attention should focus not on external features, such as the leader cult, anti-socialism, aggressive foreign policy, or militarism, which can be displayed by many radical right formations. Instead the central criterion used is the core ideology and the policies adopted to turn it into reality, and whether they had a thrust that was ultimately reactionary in that it wanted to restore the social structures and values of the past, or rivalled communism in being innovative and revolutionary in wanting a new type of society. Inter-war fascism did not want to retain a traditional social structure in a modernized form, let alone literally return to a premodern idyll. Nor did it merely pay lip-service to the notion of mass-mobilization. Rather, even if it was forced to secure the collusion of conservative forces on tactical grounds to ease the transition from the old society, it aspired to create a new type of state, one based on the energies which flowed from a rejuvenated national community bound together by patriotic fervour.
If a number of other inter-war movements other than Italian Fascism can also be classified as fascist it is because, while the peculiar historical circumstances in which each one arose made it unique, they all shared a structurally identical myth of national renewal through mass-mobilization and proposed radical policies to achieve it. They included Nazism, Falangism, the British Union of Fascists, the Romanian Iron Guard, and Brazilian Integral Action. However, other movements often associated with fascism, such as the Irish Blue Shirts and the Rexists of inter-war Belgium, can be seen on closer inspection to have lacked the innovative radicalism or anti-traditionalism implicit in the rebirth myth needed to qualify as fascist.
Moreover, a number of authoritarian regimes often lumped together with Fascist Italy turn out on closer inspection to have pursued no radical plan to create a new ruling elite, but exercised power on behalf of conservative forces despite the fascist facade they created by adopting the external trappings of fascism (leader cult, mass rallies, shirted youth movements etc.). These ‘parafascist' regimes include Franco's Spain (1939-1975), Dollfuss' and Schuschnigg’s Austria (1933-8), Antonescu’s Romania (1940-44), and Pétain's Vichy France (1940-2). These were indeed ‘counter-revolutionary’, and tried to absorb, marginalize or eliminate not just communism, but ‘real’ fascism as well as a revolutionary threat to their ascendancy. In Spain, for example, Franco, whose basic concern was to crush the Republican forces and restore the power of landed elites, the Monarchy, and the Church, was careful to absorb the genuinely fascist Falange to give his regime an aura of dynamism and appeal to the young it would otherwise have lacked. In Romania, King Carol II first tried to crush the country’s extremely violent fascist movement, the Iron Guard, but its popularity led him to change tack and bring some of its leaders into government. After his abdication he was succeeded by General Antonescu who pretended to be prepared to share power with the Iron Guard, but then seized the first opportunity to liquidate it by force. These episodes reveal the fundamental antagonism between conservatism and fascism however much practical considerations force them into partnership.
A third implication which follows from our ideal types is that only two inter-war right-wing regimes were actually revolutionary and hence fascist: Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. It is important to stress, however, that while they share an identical core myth of national rebirth, profound differences divide the concrete ways in the circumstances which brought them to power and the ways in which this myth was manifested. For one thing, the situations which allowed Fascism and Nazism to complete the transition from movement to regime were very different. Italy was extremely poorly integrated socially and economically underdeveloped compared to Germany. Moreover, it was the extreme socio-political chaos of the immediate post-war years which enabled Mussolini to threaten to carry out a putsch with his Blackshirts in October 1922 (the March on Rome) and so persuade King Emanuel III to make him head of a coalition government. To implement the revolution in the Italian state and society he intended he had to wait until January 1925 after another state crisis provoked by the Fascist murder of the socialist deputy Matteotti had given him the chance to establish an authoritarian regime. Hitler’s attempted putsch of November 1923 failed miserably, and it was the shattering impact of the world Depression on Germany’s economic, political, and social life that contributed to the paralysis of the state which enabled his party to win mass support at the polls. The depth of the crisis also convinced leading politicians to use Nazism to strengthen their own position, culminating in his appointment as Chancellor in January 1933.
However, there are striking parallels between the success of the two fascisms in entering the citadel of state power. As in the case of every major political revolution in Western history, the immediate context for their success was a deep-seated crisis in the ‘old’ order. In both cases the leaders were sufficiently resourceful to take advantage of the structural flaws in a parliamentary system which had shallow roots in the national tradition and which was widely discredited, where the traditional ‘conservative’ right was too weak and divided to provide an effective alternative, and where revolutionary socialism was powerful enough to cause genuine alarm while remaining a marginalized force. Furthermore, in both countries elements in the liberal and conservative establishment chose to make crucial concessions to fascism on the mistaken assumption that they could ‘tame’ it and dispense with its help once stability had returned to political and economic life.
In terms of actual world-view and specific policies as well vast differences separate Fascism and Nazism, just as the personalities of Mussolini and Hitler were in many respects poles apart. Yet such contrasts merely emphasize how the same ideological myth of national renewal can assume highly diverse surface manifestations. Moreover, there was much in common in the institutional changes the two regimes made to the state apparatus and in the social engineering they undertook to revitalize the ‘national community’.
The mythic core of the fascist revolution
If what we are suggesting is true, and fascism should be approached as revolutionary form of nationalism, why, then, does the term ‘fascist' for most people now have purely negative connotations of totalitarianism, destructiveness, nihilism, and inhumanity? First, it should be noted that this has not always been the case. Until Italian Fascism started forging an ever closer relationship with Nazi Germany, it was a common view in Europe and the USA that Mussolini had performed wonders for his country. A popular American love-song of the 1930s went ‘You’re the tops, you’re the great Houdini. You’re the tops, you’re like Mussolini!’
The creation of the ‘Axis’ between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in 1936, the brutal involvement of both countries on the side of Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and the fact that Italy was allied to the Third Reich when it started the Second World War, and thus became linked to the unimaginable scale of atrocities committed by the Third Reich permanently changed the image, not just of Italian Fascism, but fascism in general.
The fact that the fascist revolution eventually came to be synonymous for most with war and calculated inhumanity is no coincidence. Rather it is implicit in the fascist vision of national rebirth itself, which is compounded of not one, but two myths which when combined can unleash enormous destructive power. The first is the concept of the nation as an organic entity, personified as the hero of an epic story which passes through moments of glory and shame, of power and weakness. An example of this myth is provided by the Italian Nationalist Association which merged with Fascism in 1923:
The fundamental thesis of Nationalism, which places the Nationalist doctrine in a special relationship with respect to all other political doctrines, is that the various societies existing on the earth are true organisms endowed with a life which far transcends that of individuals and which is sustained for centuries and millennia. Thus the Italian nation does not only contain the 36 million Italians alive now, but all the hundreds of thousands of millions of Italians who will live in future centuries, and who are conceived as components of a single whole. In this conception each generation and every individual within a generation is but a transient and infinitesimal part of the nation, and is the cell of the national organism. Just as cells are born, live and die, while the organism remains the same, so individuals are born, live and die while the nation continues to live out its millennial existence.
As can be seen from this passage, the central metaphors of ultra-nationalism are vitalistic. They frequently fuse the physical realm of biology, territory, and matter with the metaphysical ones of spirit, heroism, and will: the recurrent fascist images of ‘blood' and ‘race' combine both these dimensions. Fascist nationalism is a world of mythic imaginings where the claims of History, destiny, and providence embodied in the nation over the individual are total, and where empathy with all human beings irrespective of their race and value to society are seen as symptoms of the spiritual decadence to be overcome. It is a world where utopian longings for renewal revolve around polarized opposites: health/sickness; our nation/the enemy; man/woman.
If ultra-nationalism is male chauvinist in its imagining of man: man the warrior, man the hero, man the creator; it is equally so in its fantasizing of woman: woman the nurturer, woman the companion, woman the procreator. Compassion and doubt are weaknesses to be overcome. Hardness and certainty virtues to foster. Under the Nazis the words ‘brutal' and ‘fanatical' actually acquired positive connotations. The nation, as the sum of all its fascistized individuals, must behave like a warrior-male. It must be disciplined, proud, courageous, well-equipped and trained, ready to fight, bent on conquest, and supplied with the human means to do this by the reproductive and caring qualities of woman.
And what of the second component myth of fascism: rebirth? The myth of rebirth or ‘palingenesis’ belongs to a far more ancient metaphorical universe than ‘nation'. It evokes the experience of decay and death as presaging a new life, a new creation. Within the palingenetic imagination destruction is a prelude to regeneration, the death of the purest is transformed into a meaningful sacrifice by becoming part of the epic phase of history which is unfolding. Once a theory of genetic or racial purity enters this vision of future greatness it becomes logical to winnow the grain and destroy the chaff destroyed so that only the wheat is left. Or as one Nazi ideologue put it as early as 1925:
No pity is to be shown to those who occupy the lower categories of the inferior groups: cripples, epileptics, the blind, the insane, deaf and dumb, children born in sanatoria for alcoholics or in care, orphans, criminals, whores, the sexual disturbed etc. Everything done for them not only means taking resources away from more deserving causes, but counteracts the breeding selection process...This bottom category means destruction and death. Weighed and found wanting. Trees which do not bear fruit should be cut down and thrown into the fire.
The totalitarian nature of the fascist revolution
Fascism emerges when ultra-nationalism becomes fused with the myth of rebirth as a response to a society in distress, thus creating an ideology whose central vision is the purging of the old society of its decadence and the rejuvenation of the nation in a new order inhabited by a new type of human being, the fascist ‘new man’. Some idea of the scope of this utopian vision can be sensed in the following declaration by Robert Ley, the head of the Nazi organization, the German Workers’ Front, taken from a speech he made in 1938
There is one thing we must understand if we are to comprehend the greatness of this time: we are not dealing with a new state system, or a new economic system. We are not dealing with anything external like the building up of the army, or the economy, - it comes down to the renewal of man, the individual man. Human beings are undergoing a transformation.
Do you believe that an idea has ever achieved this ever before? The renewal of human beings manifests itself in the fact that this idea is actually able to transform the most intimate aspects of human lives. National Socialism has the power to free the German people, the individual German, from the damage inflicted on him which has been preventing him from performing his task. That is its ultimate, its greatest achievement.
To carry out the ‘renewal of man’ in a nationalist spirit involved in practice the coordination of all aspects of social, economic, political, cultural, and mental life within an authoritarian state. The elimination of liberal freedoms and socialist internationalism was thus for fascists part of a healing process. This is why the Fascists boasted about having turned Italy into a ‘totalitarian' society and ‘the total state’ was an equally positive term for the Nazis. The negative connotations which these terms have acquired for political scientists when they consider the fascist (and communist) bids to retool society stem from the horrendous human costs of their ‘totalizing' efforts. Any revolutionary myth which leads to the attempt to eradicate the pluralism of modern society in pursuit of the utopia of a ‘totally' coordinated society must inevitably lead to a perverse travesty of that utopia. What results is a dystopia (or ‘bad’ utopia) in which the destruction and inhumanity instituted by the state are justified by reference to the ultimate goals which it is seeking to realize: the creation of a new type of state inhabited by a new type of man.
However, the totalitarian implications of fascism’s attempt to realize its utopia depend on the particular characteristics of each movement. This is demonstrated by the fact that Fascist Italy was much less authoritarian than Nazi Germany. Before it came to power Fascism, which, unlike the Nazi Party, had never developed a mass electoral following, was such a fragile force that Mussolini was forced to compromise his radicalism extensively. He had few scruples in doing so because he was prepared to chop and change particular declared beliefs to meet the demands of the moment as long as he could pursue his ultimate objective of leading the process of Italy’s transformation.
Moreover, the alienation from the state and weak socialization of most Italians meant that the Fascist ideals of heroism and blind faith in the leader could not be grafted easily onto the existing political culture. This meant that huge concessions had to be made to conservative forces and that any radical transformation of Italian social life was out of the question. Furthermore, the country's technological and material resources were poor compared to those of developed nations north of the Alps, so that the build up of the armed forces was slow and territorial ambitions had to be restrained: the main outlet for Italy’s imperialist ambitions before the Second World War was Ethiopia, a feudal African state without a modern army. Nor was Fascism more destructive or inhumane in its subjugation of Ethiopia than some nineteenth-century ‘liberal' powers had been (e.g. Belgium) in bringing their colonies to heel.
It would also be wrong to assume that Fascism developed a terror apparatus on anything like the scale of Nazism. The main enemies identified by the regime’s ideology before the passing of anti-Semitic race laws in 1938 were stridently anti-Fascist liberals and communists, who with few exceptions were either sent into internal exile in the rural South or imprisoned without recourse to torture or executions. In fact, until Fascism became embroiled in Hitler's schemes for a new European order, it presided over less social violence than had occurred during the near civil war conditions which prevailed in liberal Italy between 1919 and 1921, and which allowed Mussolini’s Blackshirts to become a major political force. In cultural matters, too, Fascism did little to censure artistic creativity or impose a particular style (though it kept a tight reign on the content of news reporting in the press, radio, and cinema). Instead, it ensured that it was seen as the patron of all cultural production, whatever the style or content, just as it used propaganda to associate itself with all Italy’s technological and sporting achievements whatever the politics of the inventor or athletes responsible.
The Third Reich was an altogether different proposition. Its leaders were generally ruthless in pursuit of their interpretation of Nazi ideals. Its paramilitary formations numbered hundreds of thousands of ‘fanatical' followers prepared to be ‘brutal' for the good of the nation. It had at its disposal a highly modernized country of immense industrial and technological resources and, compared to Italy, and an educated, socialized population. Its version of ultra-nationalism pursued the goal of racial health and hygiene based on a blend of a spurious science of ‘eugenics’ which identified as enemies to the purity of the national community whole categories of human beings from Jews (4-6 million killed), and gypsies (over 750,000 killed) to homosexuals and the physically and mentally disabled, most of whom eventually fell victim to a programme of systematic extermination: over 320,000 ethnic Germans were sterilized and as many as 150,000 murdered in order to improve the racial health of the ‘national community’. This is not to mention the many millions of Polish and Russian prisoners of war and civilians who were enslaved or killed as embodiments of racial inferiority.
Meanwhile Nazism’s crusade against spiritual decadence ultimately extended beyond the persecution of ideological enemies such as Communists, Free Masons, and radical Christians such as Jehovah Witnesses, to the attempted destruction of all forms of art held to be subverting ‘German values’ and dismissed as ‘Cultural Bolshevism’. By this was meant all literature and painting which did not directly evoke Nazi ideology in an immediately recognizable way . As a result Germany witnessed the wholesale elimination of what is known to art historians as ‘modernism’, along with experimental music, and the products of ‘racially inferior’ cultures. This led to the banning of all art, literature and music by Jews, as well as the outlawing of jazz (because it was identified with Negroes). So popular was swing-jazz, however, that the directors of Nazi propaganda commissioned versions to be made of American hits sung with lyrics specially written to foster racial hatred and ridicule the enemy.
Nazi foreign policy also was vastly more ambitious and destructive than Italy’s. It involved incorporating vast areas of Europe within an empire based on racial principles and the wholesale exploitation of its human, material, and cultural resources for the exclusive benefit of the Greater Germany. No wonder Nazism's bid to realize its fantasies of a new order led to war, inhumanity, mass slavery, mass murder, and attempted genocide on an unprecedented scale using all the material and logistical resources of the modern state.
The fascist ‘permanent revolution’
The radical destructiveness implicit in the Nazi utopia was compounded by features intrinsic to fascist ideology as a whole. All revolutions are by definition destructive, and prepared, even if only in the ‘transitional period', to prioritize one segment of humanity over all others which are holding back ‘progress'. The liberal revolution necessitates the destruction of a feudal or communist ‘ancien regime'. The communist revolution in theory requires the destruction of bourgeois capitalism, and in practice has led to mass murder and terror on a vast scale in many of its national variants, e.g. in Russia under Stalin, in China under Mao Tse-Tung, or in Cambodia under Pol-Pot. Even the Velvet Revolutions of 1989 in Poland and Czechoslovakia destroyed a Soviet colonial system which had brought to many ordinary citizens some measure of stability, material security, and social peace all of which were quickly eradicated by the wild capitalism which ensued.
Where the fascist revolution differs significantly from liberal (bourgeois) and Marxist ones is that in theory these, though carried out locally, aimed to establish bridge-heads in the territorial battle against the ‘old order' in a process which would one day bring benefits to humanity on a global scale. One of these benefits was to be international peace. Certainly there was talk in the inter-war period of a ‘universal' fascism and a number of attempts at forging international linkages with like-minded movements, linkages which post-1945 fascism has continued to cultivate and which have become truly global in the 1990s with the advent of the Internet. Moreover, both the Fascists and the Nazis saw themselves as saving, not just their nation from decadence, but ‘civilization' as a whole. Nevertheless, the main focus of fascism has always been the ‘home' nation, not ‘humanity', and its revolution in that sense is a highly sectional one. It was Italians whom Fascists wanted to revitalize by reawakening in them the heroic qualities of the Ancient Romans, while the Nazis resorted to the most extreme measures imaginable in order to weld all healthy ethnic Germans into a unified national community, or Volksgemeinschaft.
Another important difference lies in the fact that, unlike the liberal or Marxist, the fascist cannot envisage a ‘steady state' of society which has reached a point of social equilibrium and calm. To a fascist stasis means, not a welcome stability, but stagnation, entropy, and death. Fascism is thus driven to perpetuate the dynamism of the revolutionary moment that brought it to power, to create the conditions of ‘permanent revolution'. A radical, eugenically fixated fascist regime such as the one which the Nazis actually installed (and others such as the Romanian Iron Guard or contemporary American neo-Nazis have only been able to dream of establishing) is forced by its own logic to preside over a constant process of creation and destruction: the establishment of the ‘new state' must be accompanied by destroying or coordinating the old system.
For the fascist revolutionary, then, destruction of enemies is thus neither nihilistic nor inhuman, but an integral aspect of a permanent revolution. The principle which logically follows from the mythic premises of his world view is one of destroying to build, or what one fascist thinker has called ‘creative nihilism'. The fascist transforms or (in the case of Nazism) surgically removes the ‘unhealthy' elements of the nation so that it can be regenerated, prunes the national tree of its dead branches and excess foliage so that it can grow better, preserves at least his segment of humanity from the ravages of decadence and the threat of being ‘swamped' by ‘inferior' cultures and races so that civilization can be saved.
Fascism as a temporal revolution
The palingenetic logic of death and rebirth which underlies the fascist revolution is not rational. It is ritual. No matter how modern the bureaucratic, logistical, and technological dimensions of the Holocaust, the psychological drive behind it was steeped in the ritual of purification and sacrifice: the impure had to be destroyed so that the nation might be rejuvenated, the pure had to be prepared to die so that Germany might live. The ritual dimension of fascism expresses itself most clearly in the central role played in both the Fascist and Nazi regimes by political liturgy, their ‘religious' style of politics.
In practice liberal and communist regimes have had constant recourse to the political liturgy (e.g. the American primaries filled with coloured balloons or the vast Soviet May Day parades in Red Square, but inter-war fascism consciously made such rituals central to its concept of revolution. The ‘oceanic assemblies' staged by Fascism whenever Mussolini spoke in public, the torchlight parades and mass rallies held at Nazi party congresses, the saturation of public space with the symbols of the regime (the fasces, the swastika), as well as the crucial role played by the leader cult, the urge to create monumental architecture, and the constant recourse to rhetoric and spectacle in both regimes were too conspicuous not to be noticed by commentators at the time. Thus the French Ambassador to Germany witnessed the extraordinary impact which the 1937 Nuremberg Rally had on the crowds, commenting:
The atmosphere of general enthusiasm into which the old city has been plunged is amazing and quite indescribable: the peculiar frenzy which has gripped hundreds of thousands of men and women, the romantic excitement and mystic ecstasy which has overtaken them like a holy rapture. An effect is produced which many find irresistible. They return home seduced and taken in, ready to serve the cause, with no idea of the dangerous reality which is concealed beneath the deceptive pomp of the huge processions and parades.
While modern society may have lost its unifying beliefs and rituals, there is every indication that the human beings living in it still have not become totally secularized. In particular they tend to feel deeply threatened when familiar social systems break down, not only because of the material insecurity and hardship which face them. At this point they can be gripped by what one major expert in comparative religion has called ‘the terror of history'. In such circumstances a new ideology, a new political, social or religious movement can offer a new framework to their lives which provides a diagnosis of the cause of the chaos, and restores a sense of effectiveness, belonging, and future.
According to this line of analysis the acute social and political instability which affected Italy in the years immediately following the First World War and the collapse of Germany’s Weimar Republic after 1929 created conditions in which the ritual style of politics used by both Fascism and Nazism generated a sense of enthusiasm which no conventional party could inspire in its followers, and went on to play a crucial role in the regimes which they formed in creating a sense of collective euphoria and belonging. Fascism operated as a substitute religion. What converted millions to this religion was not their reason, but rather the subjective sensation of being lifted of out a chaotic, distressing period of history into a new era imbued with a sense of harmony and destiny.
The irrational, mythic component so central to fascism should not be confused with anti-modernity. The apparent obsession which both regimes had with the past (the Roman Empire in the case of Fascism and the Aryan and Germanic past in the case of Nazism) stems from the desire, not to regress to the past, but to reawaken the eternal qualities of the race. Fascism was thus not anti-modern: it attempted to create an alternative modernity. Neither was it anti-capitalist in the sense of being in principle opposed to private property and privately owned business. However, contrary to what Marxists assume, fascists were radically opposed to the individualist and materialist spirit or ethos of capitalism, especially international capitalism. They wanted to replace it by a pervasive sense of loyalty to the nation which would imbue people’s lives with a spiritual quality which they held was lacking in a consumerist society.
Fascism’s objective revolution
The stress I have placed on the subjective dimension of the Fascist revolution should not, however, detract attention from the changes which both regimes sought to bring about in external reality. For example, while neither the Fascist nor Nazi state wanted to abolish capitalist economics and private property, they had no scruples about involving themselves with the economy on a scale unprecedented in any liberal state except in wartime, whether through the corporative system as in Italy, or through cartelization and huge state industries as in Germany. In the build-up to the Second World War both regimes also pursued the goal of self-sufficiency (autarky), the Nazis to the point of creating a vast European empire whose material and human resources (i.e. foreign workers and concentration camp inmates by the million) were ruthlessly exploited for the good of the Third Reich. When large industrial firms such as Krupp, Daimler Benz, or IG Farben made high-tech products with slave labour it was hardly business as usual for capitalism.
Both regimes also indulged in a massive programme of social engineering which involved creating mass organizations for every social grouping, retooling the educational system, symbolically appropriating all aspects of leisure, sport, culture, and technology, whether by associating them with the genius of the new state (as in Italy) or through enforced coordination and social control (as in Germany). The goal common to both regimes, however, was to create a thoroughly fascistized cultural habitat in which a new type of human being, the fascist ‘new man' (and woman), would spontaneously emerge, instinctively and joyfully prepared to devote all their talents, idealism, and energy to the cause of the nation. Vast public works such as the building of motor-ways and (in Italy) the draining of marshes, the Nazi plans to rebuild the centre of Berlin on a monumental scale and rename the city ‘Germania’, the radical overhaul of the educational system to mass-produce Fascist or Nazi values: these were hardly symptoms of a purely ‘subjective' revolution. It was the sheer scale on which both regimes were prepared to mobilize the nation’s human and physical resources to pursue their territorial claims on Europe, and the horrifying extent to which the Nazis carried out their scheme to create a racially pure and healthy Third Reich which is the most eloquent testimony to the revolutionary dynamic of fascism.
Fascism was not just a revolution of values, an attempt to make a clean break with the liberal, humanist, and eventually Christian traditions, but a concerted effort to deploy the unprecedented capacity of the modern state for social engineering to bring about a fundamental transformation in the way society was going to be run and every one of its inhabitants was going to live. It took a masive effort by the British, the Americans and the Russians to create a military machine sufficiently powerful to prevent the Nazis from turning even more of their utopian fantasies into grim realities.
Conclusion
Within the conceptual framework that we constructed at the outset, fascism has revealed itself to be a radical form of ‘revolution from the right' with a highly specific ideological dynamic. Not only did the two inter-war regimes based on it self-consciously attempt to create an alternative modernity which harnessed the power of a supercharged nationalism, but they deliberately operated with a ritual style of politics aimed at providing a new sense of collective belonging and meaning for populations disoriented by a profound social crisis. They aimed to produce a new type of human being, a new type of state, a new era.
This interpretation of fascism may conflict with conventional wisdom on the subject, but it is fully consistent with the conclusions which G. L. Mosse, one of the world’s foremost specialists on Nazism, has drawn after more than four decades of studying the dynamics of fascism. When, in 1997, he reviewed the progress which scholars have made in understanding fascism since the war he commented that the idea of:
fascism as a revolution has been one of the most difficult of all the so-called revisionist theses to accept, for fascism has usually been characterized as reactionary and backward looking. Whether we accept or deny its origins in the French Revolution, fascism wanted to create new men. This was intended as a cultural and social, but not an economic revolution.
Mosse went on to ascribe this blind spot to the ‘amazing' extent to which models of revolution based on Marxism and on the liberalism of the French Revolution still dominate academic thinking. Once such prejudices are overcome, it becomes obvious that, though the following passage taken from a speech by Goebbels is by its nature a piece of propaganda, it is simultaneously the expression of a deep conviction: the conviction that under Hitler Germans (those deemed ‘capable of community', that is) were living through a revolutionary new era.
The revolution we have carried out is a total one. It has embraced all areas of public life and transformed them from below. It has completely changed and recast the relationship of people to each other, to the state, and to life itself. The revolution was in fact the break-through of a fresh world-view, which had fought for power in opposition fourteen years to provide the basis for the German people to develop a new relationship with the state. What has been happening since 30 January is only the visible expression of this revolutionary process. The revolution did not begin here. It was only carried through to its final conclusion. At bottom it is the struggle for existence of a people which, left to its old forms of cultural life and played out values, was otherwise due to collapse.[...]
The German people, once the most fragmented in the world, atomized into its component parts and hence condemned to impotence as a world power, and ever since 1918 lacking the arms, and, what is worse, the will to assert its rights before other nations, has risen up in a unique demonstration of its sense of national strength.
Bibliography
Alexander de Grand, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The ‘Fascist’ Style of Rule, (Routledge, London, 1995).
Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of the State in Fascist Italy, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1996)
Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (Routledge, London, 1993)
Roger Griffin, Fascism (OUP, Oxford, 1995)
Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-45, (UCL, London, 1995).
Eugen Weber, ‘Revolution? Counter-revolution? What revolution’, in Walter Laqueur (ed.), Fascism: A Reader’s Guide, (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976).
Notes
. Ernst Bloch, ‘Inventory of a Revolutionary Façade', The Heritage of our Time (Polity, Cambridge, 1991), p. 64.
. R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, (Martin Lawrence, London, 1933), p. 225.
. Hermann Rauschning, Germany's Revolution of Destruction, (Heinemann, London, 1939): the title of the US edition was The Revolution of Nihilism (Alliance Books, 1939). 4.. Robert Soucy, ‘Drieu la Rochelle and the Modernist Anti-modernism in French Fascism', Modern Language Notes, Vols. 95, No. 4, 1980.
. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism (Cambridge University Press, London, 1984).
. Eugen Weber, ‘Revolution? Counter-revolution? What revolution’, in Walter Laqueur (ed.), Fascism: A Reader’s Guide, (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 509. Weber’s essay is a telling critique of the unscientific assumptions behind the Marxist concept of revolution and counter-revolution. . For further elaboration of the concept ideal type see Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, (Routledge, 1993), pp.8-12.
. For a fuller account of this definition see Griffin, International Fascism, (Arnold, London, 1998), p. 14. For independent corroboration that such a consensus exists see Stanley Payne, ‘Review Article. Historical Fascism and the Radical Right’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2000), pp. 109-11.
. Benito Mussolini, Il discorso di Napoli, [The Naples speech], 24 October 1922, Il Popolo d'Italia, No. 255, 25 October, 1922 Omnia Opera di Benito Mussolini (op.cit.), XVIII, 453-58, in Roger Griffin, Fascism, (Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 43-4.
. For a penetrating analysis of the psychological effect which the Exhibition was designed to have on those attending it see Jeffrey Schnapp, ‘Epic demonstrations: Fascist Modernity and the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution’ in Richard Golsan (ed.), Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, (University Press of New Hampshire, 1992). Such events were part of an elaborate bid to ‘sacralize’ the state, so that the entire Fascist regime and its leader became the object of a substitute religion: see Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of the State in Fascist Italy, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1996). The Nazis made parallel efforts to create a cult of the Third Reich and its leader on the basis of a ritual and theatrical style of politics, and did so with even greater intensity and success.
. See Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, op.cit., ch. 5 for an overview of inter-war European authoritarianism in the light of these distinctions.
. It should be noted that a number of major scholars operate ideal types of fascism which preclude Nazism from being considered a manifestation of generic fascism, e.g. Zeev Sternhell, Renzo de Felice, James Gregor.
. A convincing account of these common denominators has been given by Alexander de Grand in his Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The ‘Fascist’ Style of Rule, (Routledge, London, 1995).
. Associazione Nazionalista Italiana, Il nazionalismo (ANI, Rome, 1920), 6-9, 14-5. Quoted in Griffin, Fascism, op.cit., pp. 37-8.
. For the misogynist (women-hating) dimension of fascism see Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1989: 2 vols).
. Ernst von Salomon, `Zucht'. Eine Forderung zum Programm [Breeding. A demand in relation to the Party programme], internal Party memorandum, Christmas 1925, NSDAP Hauptarchiv, (Hoover Institution Microfilm Collection), Reel, 44, Folder 896, 1-11. Quoted in Griffin, Fascism, op.cit., pp.
. Robert Ley, Wiedergeburt aus der Freude [Rebirth from joy], Soldaten der Arbeit [Soldiers of Work], (Zentralverlag der NSDAP/Franz Eher, Munich, 1942: 1st ed. 1938), 89-96. Quoted in Griffin, Fascism, op.cit., pp. 142-3.
. See Griffin, Fascism, op.cit., pp. 52-3.
. See ibid., pp. 138-9.
. See Marla Stone, ‘The State as Patron', in Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff, Fascist Visions (Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1997), pp. 205-238.
. Though Stalinism may have been responsible for more deaths than Nazism, it should be remembered that the Third Reich's machinery of death, persecution, enslavement, and terror was operated in direct fulfilment of Nazi promises, while Stalinism was a betrayal of Marxist-Leninist utopianism. For the ‘modernity' of the Third Reich’s atrocities see Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, (Polity, Cambridge, 1989)
. See Griffin, Fascism, op.cit., pp. 351-4.
. Quoted in Guido Knopp, Hitler. Eine Bilanz, (Siedler, Berlin, 1995), pp. 82-3.
. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of Eternal Return, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1971; first ed. 1949).
. G. L. Mosse, `Renzo de Felice e il revisionismo storico', Nuova Antologia, (April-June, 1998), Vol. 133, p. 182.
. i.e. 30 January 1933, when Hitler became Reich Chancellor.
. Die deutsche Kultur vor neuen Aufgaben [The new tasks of German culture], Signale der neuen Zeit [Signals of the new age] (Zentralverlag der NSDAP/Franz Eher, Munich, 1939), 323-36. Reproduced in Griffin, Fascism, op.cit., p. 134.