Fascism was born as the bitter enemy of socialism and communism in Mussolini’s Italy. His new movement was comprised of interventionists who advocated Italy’s entry into World War I. Syndicalist subversives of the radical left joined Mussolini as early as 1915 in the clamor for war. But the leaders of Italian Socialism maligned him and his followers as Marxist renegades. The orthodox Marxists envisioning global unity of the proletariat opposed the fascist interventionists-nationalists. This deviation from Marxist orthodoxy rendered these nationalists as bourgeois right-wingers. Those staying true to the internationalist-proletariat orthodoxy are designated as left-wing. The final insult for Italian Marxists was the fascists March on Rome, Oct. 28, 1922 followed by the King declaring Mussolini prime minister the next day.
The Marxist unity of the world’s workers was affirmed at the Congress of 2nd International in Basil in November 1912. The Congress solemnly declared: “workers consider a crime to shoot each other for the increase of profits of capitalists, dynasties’ ambitions or for the glory of secret diplomacy agreements.” This unanimously adopted manifesto called the proletariat to gather all efforts to avert a bloody war, but it failed. As World War I began, they defended the imperialist policies of their own bourgeois governments. In the early days of WWI, August 1914, Mussolini claimed the Second International of socialists had failed in the face of the crisis. European Marxists had opted to defend their respective bourgeois nations against the bourgeois of other nations. The socialists of the International were bereft of a uniform and specifically doctrinal response. By and large, each nation’s socialist political organization tended to support its respective government. None of the major socialist organizations chose to martyr their own country on the altar of Marxist principle. Lenin attempted to contrive his own version of Marxism, touting Russia’s nationalism as true, because they created a revolutionary class. The Russian proletariat, he propagandized, could take national pride in the fact that they, not the Germans or the French, would lead the international revolution. Just as Marx decided the revolutionary baton had passed over time from the French and British to German workers, Lenin decided that revolutionary responsibilities in the current imperialist era had transferred from the German to Russian workers. Lenin insisted that the imminent world revolution required for its success the most advanced theory, the one supplied by the party he led, the Bolsheviks. Lenin argued that all socialist parties of Europe had shamelessly betrayed the revolution
The ideological basis of the totalitarian Soviet Union called “Marxism-Leninism” was actually a fascist ideology that began only two months after Mussolini’s fascist Italy. On Oct. 29, 1922, the Italian king appointed Mussolini prime minister. The Soviet Union was created on Dec. 29, 1922.
By 1914 Mussolini had risen to the leadership of the Italian Socialist Party, which would be designated as left-wing, though he was the leader of its radical intransigent wing, perhaps properly labeled “right”. Lenin had followed the intraparty struggle on the Italian peninsula and welcomed Mussolini’s movement to its leadership role. Mussolinism shared many of the doctrinal properties of Leninism. The Italian leader favored Lenin’s elitism in his work, “What is to be Done”. Mussolini and Lenin both felt that a minority of intransigent revolutionaries bore the special responsibility of informing the masses of their historic obligations and inspiring them to their discharge. World War I was midwife to the emergence of both Leninism and Fascism. Mussolini read Marx but disagreed with the claim capitalism had exhausted its potential. He also took issue with Marx’s bourgeoisie and proletariat classes, found it presumptious to understand the psychology of entire classes. The heterogenous nature of these classes renders stereotypical definitions problematic. Individual members of any given class have their own unique set of motives. Social revolution grows out of an act of faith, not a mental scheme or simple calculation. Marxism as theory was neither necessary nor sufficient to make social and political revolution.
The socialist movement had been historically antimilitarist and internationalist and therefore opposed workers serving as cannon fodder for the bourgeois governments at war, this was especially true since the Triple Alliance comprised two empires while the Triple Entente gathered France and Britain into an alliance with Russia. Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto had stated that “the working class has no country” and exclaimed “Proletarians of all countries unite.” Massive majorities voted in favor of resolutions for the Second International to call upon the international working class to resist war if it were declared.
Nevertheless, within hours of the declarations of war almost all the socialist parties of the combatant states announced their support for the war. The only exceptions were the socialist parties of the Balkans and the British Labour Party. To Vladimir Lenin’s surprise, even the Social Democratic Party of Germany voted in favor of war credits. The assassination of French Socialist Jean Jaurès on 31 July 1914 killed the last hope of peace by removing one of the few leaders who possessed enough influence on the international socialist movement to prevent it from segmenting itself along national lines and supporting governments of national unity.
Socialist parties in neutral countries mostly supported neutrality rather than total opposition to the war. On the other hand, during the 1915 Zimmerwald Conference Lenin organized opposition to the imperialist war into a movement that became known as the Zimmerwald Left and published the pamphlet Socialism and War in which he called all socialists who collaborated with their national governments social chauvinists, i.e. socialists in word, but chauvinists in deed. The Zimmerwald Left produced no practical advice for how to initiate socialist revolt.
The International divided into a revolutionary left and a reformist right, with a center group wavering between those poles. Lenin condemned much of the center as social pacifists for several reasons, including their voting for war credits despite opposing the war. Lenin’s term social pacifist aimed in particular at Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the Independent Labour Party in Britain, who opposed the war on grounds of pacificism, but did not actively resist it.
Discredited by its passivity towards world events, the Second International dissolved in the middle of the war in 1916. In 1917, Lenin published the April Theses which openly supported a revolutionary defeatism, i.e. the Bolsheviks pronounced themselves in favor of the defeat of Russia which would permit them to move directly to the stage of a revolutionary insurrection.
Lenin touted the Russians’ nationalism as true, because they created a revolutionary class. The Russian proletariat could take national pride in the fact that they, and not the Germans or the French, would lead the international revolution. Just as Marx had decided that the revolutionary baton had passed, in the course of time, from French and British to German workers, Lenin decided that in the imperialist epoch, revolutionary responsibilities had been transferred from the German to Russian workers. Lenin insisted the that the imminent world revolution required for its success the most advanced theory to be supplied by Bolshevism alone.
The Third or Communist International (Comintern), emerged from the three-way split in the socialist Second International over the issue of World War I. A majority of socialist parties, comprising the International’s “right” wing, chose to support the war efforts of their respective national governments against enemies that they saw as far more hostile to socialist aims. The “centre” faction of the International decried the nationalism of the right and sought the reunification of the Second International under the banner of world peace. The “left” group, led by Vladimir Lenin, rejected both nationalism and pacifism, urging instead a socialist drive to transform the war of nations into a transnational class war. In 1915 Lenin proposed the creation of a new International to promote “civil war, not civil peace” through propaganda directed at soldiers and workers. Two years later Lenin led the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia and in 1919 he called the first congress of the Comintern, in Moscow, specifically to undermine ongoing centrist efforts to revive the Second International. Only 19 delegations and a few non-Russian communists who happened to be in Moscow attended this first congress; but the second, meeting in Moscow in 1920, was attended by delegates from 37 countries. There Lenin established the Twenty-one Points, the conditions of admission to the Communist International. These prerequisites for Comintern membership required all parties to model their structure on disciplined lines in conformity with the Soviet pattern and to expel moderate socialists and pacifists.
The traditional binary classification of political ideology has Marxism on the left and fascism on the right. This is not by accident of course and due to historical events that created a consensus narrative that persists to this day, although a considerable number of scholars don’t accept this and have their interpretations, some of whom I studied for this blog post. Marxism did not measure up to its assertions and predictions about capitalism, even while Marx was alive, as other socialist movements, such as the socialist democratic party in Germany, the implementation of the first welfare state by Otto von Bismarck, along with other reformist movements, like Fabianism in Britain, came along to give more rights to workers and deal with tyranny of industrial capitalists. Along with the growth of capitalism, there was a simultaneous growth of nationalism in the late 1800’s which nourished fascist ideology until it came to political fruition under the regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and others.
The early ideological seeds of fascism as an ideology were widespread in the 19th century long before the actual 20th century political manifestations of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco occurred. I discuss some of these proto-fascist thinkers in an introductory blog post on fascism back in April 2018–http://bohemiantangents.com/?p=778.
Simply put, fascism is the political movement that grew out of the influence of nationalism, prominent in the 19th century into the 20th, and as a reaction to and/or revision of Marxist thought. The German anthropologist and proto-fascist Ludwig Woltmann theorized that technological innovation, the basis of historical materialism, was the result of human creativity and talent which was differentially distributed among extant human races. By combining Darwinism with Marxism Woltmann transformed Marx’s economic determinism into bio-economic. He saw evidence that the races displayed unmistakable differences in heritable intellectual and creative gifts. He noted Marx’s letters to Engels: “The Spaniards are indeed degenerate” along with harsher condemnations of Mexicans. Engels opined that the American expansion into the West “served the interests of civilization” since the “lazy Mexicans… did not know what to do with it”. The energetic Yankees, on the other hand, opened the entire region to trade and industry. Engels viewed the highly developed industrial nations as destined to bind “tiny crippled powerless nations together in a great Empire”. Marx and Engels believed there were peoples who never have a history of their own and were destined to be forced into the first stages of civilization through a foreign yoke, due to lacking vitality. Marx said the Chinese were afflicted with hereditary stupidity. Engels deemed the Slavs of eastern and southeastern Europe as ethnic trash. These opinions of some races superior to others were consistent with the Social Darwinism of that era, which was integral to nationalism, particularly that of imperialist nations whose colonies had “inferior” races worthy of “civilizing”.
Woltmann believed Nordics, tall, long-headed, narrow-faced, depigmented Europeans to be humankind’s most creative racial community, the race most responsible for economic and cultural revolution. He undertook “empirical studies” to measure Germanic or Nordic genetic potential to be found among the minorities of France and Renaissance Italy, and correlated that with their respective creativity. In his “anthropological theory of history” he found the Aryan race, Nordic in features and talent, has been responsible for virtually all the world’s cultures. His expanded Aryan reach included India, Persia, Hellas (Greek empire of Alexander the Great), the Italian peninsula, Gaul, as well as northern, eastern, and southeastern Europe. Woltmann’s heterodox Marxism included human and social evolution. The social dynamics of historical materialism were overlayed with the technological inventions of superior races. Though inspired by Marxism, this new revisionism was so altered to be justifiably called Marxist “heresy”. Woltmann claimed that if the secular process of which all Marxists spoke was a function of the intellectual and creative talents of a racial minority of human beings, then the security, sustenance, and fostering of that race became a moral imperative of the highest order.
The concepts of both fascism and communism are subject to much confusion and actually closely related, far more similar than the left-right bipolarity suggests. Throughout the 20th century both fascism and Marxist-Leninist communism were committed to the creation of ” a new revolutionary order”, having nothing to do with “the old rotten, decadent preceding regime”. Fascism, like communism, advocated the achievement of a new revolutionary order, a new society, and, even a new man. Both fascism and Marxist-Leninist systems have demonstrated an abiding distrust of electoral and parliamentary representation. Both required that individuals and groups of individuals to submit to the authority of the hegemonic state, and that this would be the hierarchical non-representative state, in pursuit of a great national destiny. All the attributes of totalitarianism had antecedents in Lenin’s Russia: an official, all-embracing ideology, a single party headed by a leader, and dominating the state; police terror, the ruling party’s control of the means of communication and the armed forces, as well as central command of the economy.
The Marxist unity of the world’s workers was affirmed at the Congress of 2nd International in Basil in November 1912. The Congress solemnly declared: “workers consider a crime to shoot each other for the increase of profits of capitalists, dynasties’ ambitions or for the glory of secret diplomacy agreements.” This unanimously adopted manifesto called the proletariat to gather all efforts to avert a bloody war, but it failed. As World War I began, they defended the imperialist policies of their own bourgeois governments. In the early days of WWI, August 1914, Mussolini claimed the Second International of socialists had failed in the face of the crisis. European Marxists had opted to defend their respective bourgeois nations against the bourgeois of other nations. The socialists of the International were bereft of a uniform and specifically doctrinal response. By and large, each nation’s socialist political organization tended to support its respective government. None of the major socialist organizations chose to martyr their own country on the altar of Marxist principle.
The Italian Socialist Party had self-described Marxists who became the first official fascists. By 1914 Mussolini had risen to the leadership of the Italian Socialist Party, but he was also the leader of its radical intransigent wing. Lenin had followed the intraparty struggle on the Italian peninsula and welcomed Mussolini’s movement to its leadership role. Mussolinism shared many of the doctrinal properties of Leninism as Mussolini favored Lenin’s elitism in “What is to be done?”. Inspired by Sorel and the syndicalists, Mussolini, like Lenin, spoke candidly of the “struggles within human society” as “being and have always been a struggle of minorities”. Mussolini and Lenin shared the view that a minority of intransigent revolutionaries bore the special responsibility of informing the masses of their historic obligations and inspiring them to their discharge. The First World War was midwife to the loathsome appearance of both Leninism and Fascism.
Mussolini held that the Marxists of the late 19th century, having read Das Kapital, conceived of capitalism as having exhausted its potential, while other socialists believed industrial capitalism completed its historic trajectory. He felt it had not yet exhausted its potential transformations. Reality, so to speak, was far more subtle than any doctrine, including Marx’s. Mussolini took issue with Marx’s bourgeosie and proletariat classes, found it presumptuous to to understand the psychology of entire classes. The heterogeneous nature of these classes renders stereotypical definitions problematic and individual members of any given class have their own unique set of motives. Social revolution grows out of an act of faith, not a mental scheme or simple calculation. Marxism as theory was neither necessary nor sufficient to make social and political revolution.
On March 23, 1919, Mussolini founded the first of a planned network of Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, Italian Combat Leagues in Milan, Italy, to keep the spirit of the Great War’s trenches alive. The fledgling movement’s mission was to give rise to a militant vanguard dedicated to the total transformation of Italy in the spirit of extreme self-sacrificial patriotism of veterans, especially the army’s elite assault troops, the Arditi, who had survived the horrific conditions of trench warfare in the mountains long enough to witness the Entente victory. Within weeks the new force in Italian politics was being called ‘Fascism‘, the connotations of the Roman symbol of state authority, the Fasces, came later, and by 1922, a new generic term, ‘fascism’, entered the political lexicon. Mussolini’s successful bid for state power was the October 22, 1922 March on Rome.
Left-wing Italian intellectuals saw the Fascists as a repressive reactionary movement, including violence against the working-class movement mass strikes, factory occupations, and establishment of factory councils. In April 1920, Turin metal-workers at Fiat plants went on strike demanding recognition for their factory councils, a demand that the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and General Confederation of Labor (CGL) did not support. The revolutionary socialist movement peaked in August-September 1920 when armed metal workers in Milan and Turin occupied their factories in response to a lockout by their employers. About 500,000 workers occupied factories in socialist revolt. The PSI and CGL were passive, but the industrial crisis forced employers and the fascist movement to react, as there were massive layoffs and wage cuts. The “Red Two Years” (Biennio Roso) were the conflict the revolutionary left and militant nationalists. The left-right polarity arose as the leftist Bolshevik sympathizers battled the right-wing Fascists. At the specific time in history, Bolsheviks were known as leftist internationalists vs. the militant right-wing fascist nationalists. In 1922, Italian socialist Giovanni Zibordi published Critica socialista del fascismo which described the Fascist assault on the left as a counter-revolution of the big bourgeoisie against the “red revolution”, where the middle classes revolted against the socialist (Marxist) regime. Zibordi defined fascism reductively as “a socio-political movement of the big bourgeoisie”. The Soviet interpretation, which was stated in the 1922 and 1924 international meetings, the Cominterns, declared that the West’s entire liberal democratic system was devoted to maintaining capitalism and de facto in collusion with fascism because Mussolini acted as a democratic head of a liberal parliamentary state between 1922 and 1925 before becoming dictator of Fascist Italy.
Lenin attempted to contrive his own version of Marxism, known as Marxism-Leninism, touting Russia’s nationalism as true, because they created a revolutionary class. The Russian proletariat, he propagandized, could take national pride in the fact that they, not the Germans or the French, would lead the international revolution. Just as Marx decided the revolutionary baton had passed over time from the French and British to German workers, Lenin decided that revolutionary responsibilities in the current imperialist era had transferred from the German to Russian workers. Lenin insisted that the imminent world revolution required for its success the most advanced theory, the one supplied by the party he led, the Bolsheviks. Lenin argued that all socialist parties of Europe had shamelessly betrayed the revolution.
After Vladimir Lenin died, so did the notion of inciting revolutions outside of the Soviet Union. His successor, Josef Stalin, created “socialism in one country”, essentially a Bolshevik variant of fascism, in which he ceased attacks on the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy. The bureaucratic bourgeoisie was transferred as a strategic functional elite into the “socialist system” with wages sometimes 20 twenty times greater than that of simple working man. Notions of referendum and recall were totally abandoned; a parody on universal suffrage (voting rights) was introduced with all effective control passing not only out of the hands of the people, but out of the hands of the Communist Party itself into the “exceptional leader” and “universal genius”, Josef Stalin. Labor unions and associations of peasants ceased to advocate for working class interests and became agencies of Communist Party tyrannical control. Once Trotsky was defeated, the socialism-in-one-country employed nationalist strategies in mobilizing the masses. By 1934, the Red Army was no longer swearing allegiance to the “international proletariat”, but to the “Socialist Fatherland”. At the same time, the Soviet Union was regularly called “Our Great Fatherland”, as the kinship to Hitler’s fascist Deutsches Vaterland became manifest. By 1936 references to the Soviet Union population were to the “working people” rather than to the Marxist classes of proletariat and bourgeoisie, signaling an effort by the Communist Party to produce a single-minded nationalist community, also in harmony with fascist regimes elsewhere. Faithfulness to the Soviet Fatherland became a core Stalinist virtue in his domineering state machinery, hierarchically organized and bureaucratically controlled, analogous to that of a fascist state.
By the mid 1930’s it was clear that both the Soviet and Fascist states exercised political and juridicial dominion over all classes, strata, and organized interests. Internationalism was the “moral” pretext for economic imperialism. Either that, or it served as the last refuge of timid souls. Fascists perceived very little substance in the internationalism of Marxism-Leninism. There was absolutely no evidence that proletarian masses identified themselves with any expression of internationalism. World War I demonstrated that human beings identified anticipatory judgments advanced years before by the Italian National Syndicalists and the heretical Marxists among the Fascists. The so-called proletarian revolution as manifested in the incipient Soviet Union bore little or no resemblance to the works of traditional Marxism. The nonregime Marxists in Europe, including those “defecting” into Fascism, had been correct about the Soviet Union’s state and party-dominant system being totally unrecognizable to Marx or Engels. Stalinism had no traces of the left-wing frenetic anti-nationalism, anti-statism, and anti-militarism of the early days when socialism was the mortal enemy of right-wing nationalism. Stalinism had dialectically thrown overboard the principles in whose name the Bolshevik revolution had been undertaken. Marxist-Leninist principles had been transformed into their opposites, that is to say, the ideas contained within Mussolini’s Fascism. Fascist theoreticians noted that the Soviet society’s organization with the inculcation of military obedience, self-sacrifice and heroism, totalitarian regulation of public life, party-dominant hierarchical stratification, all under the dominance of the inerrant state, corresponded in form to the requirements of Fascist doctrine.
In sum, reformist socialism succeeded where revolutionary socialism preached by Marx did not. A democratic welfare state was created in Bismarck’s Germany without a revolution while the “Communist” revolution in Russia implemented by the Bolshevik coup in Oct. 1917 resulted in an ultimately fascist totalitarian state. Marxism had degraded by that time into the rhetoric of tyrants seeking public support for totalitarian rule. The role of aiding workers and peasants having democratic forms of governance existed in stark contrast to the totalitarian regimes called “socialist” or “communist”.
SOURCES:
Fascists by Michael Mann
Fascism, Totalitarianism, and Political Religion by Emilio Gentile
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/01/how-italian-fascists-succeeded-in-taking-over-italy.html
https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/5258-Basel-Manifesto-(1912)-and-the-traitors-communism
https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Basel+Manifesto+of+1912
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_International
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Democratic_Party_of_Germany
