Edward Conze and Ellen Wilkinson 1935

Introduction

The English think that democracy can be deduced from the first chapter of Genesis. Whatever their class or political creed, the vast majority of British people accept parliamentary democracy as the best system of government which the human mind has evolved so far. They have assumed, as a matter of course, that every nation would adopt the same system as soon as that nation became really civilised. Persons who question the Divine Right of Parliament are classed as cranks, along with the people who still drink to ‘The King over the Water’, and place flowers on the statue of King Charles the Martyr on appropriate occasions.

To the average Briton, therefore, to fight for democracy in the first World War seemed the natural thing to do. No single cause has contributed more to the general postwar disillusion in this country than the slow dawning on the British mind that whatever the war was fought for, it was not democracy. Great stretches of Europe which seemed to have attained democracy have gone back... not even to Bismarck or the Hapsburgs, but to forms of government that seem to parallel the tyrannies of the Renaissance. For this tendency, the word ‘Fascism’ has been invented. Like the term ‘Bolshevism’, it seems likely to become a portmanteau word, useful to include every sort of thing the speaker happens to dislike.

For those to whom Fascism appears to be the seizure of power by a gang of toughs, no further explanation is necessary. Nothing remains except to be sorry for the victims and to wish that the war for democracy had turned out better for them. But the queer thing that cannot be overlooked is that these tyrannies, particularly in Italy and Germany, seem to have won the enthusiastic support of a large mass, probably the majority, of their populations. The inference is, therefore, that these supporters value something higher than the right to take part in politics and to express themselves freely about their government.

The Englishman who visits these countries and whose acquaintance there need not be confined only to the waiters and the educated classes who know some English, but who is able to go a little below the surface of tourist life, finds that while personal liberty is drastically curtailed, there is a tacit consent to this that cannot be entirely explained away by terrorism.

Democrats have to ask if these peoples have got anything in return worth the democracy they have renounced, or are they only to be regarded as suitable objects for pious prayers that their eyes may be opened? The answer depends to a great extent on the attitude to life of the questioner. To people who are intensely interested in politics (using the word in its widest sense), not to be allowed to take part in political life, to see the affairs of Church and State reduced to the unrealities of one-party government, may be the ultimate tragedy. Life under such a regime becomes insupportable. Exile or even prison seems preferable. Yet it is probably true in most countries that the vast majority of the people would be willing to let anyone do the governing, provided that they could earn a reasonable living under whatever system resulted. If the whole history of mankind is seen as the struggle to get that livelihood which is the foundation of every normal life, then its ability to secure this for the people it governs will be the condition of the present existence and future extension of Fascism, as it has been of every other form of government.

It is part of the thesis of this book that democracy and Fascism are not forms of government in vacuo. They have to fit in with the conditions of industrial and agricultural production existing in the periods and the countries in which they flourish. If the form of government is too much at variance with the necessities of production in its country, then it must break up and disappear, just as feudalism as a system of government broke and ended.

In the past, economic and political conditions have changed slowly. Their interactions have been spread over long periods. But in modern times the tempo of industrial change has accelerated rapidly. Forms of government and social conditions have not been able to keep the pace. Consequently, in our day, there is the excessive strain caused by the immense productive capacity of highly-mechanised industry and scientific agriculture, needing less and less human labour as it rationalises production, pressing on a society which has been built up on the low level of consuming power allowed to the masses.

There are still those who say that a vital fact like this, with its consequent dislocation of social relationships, and its mass unemployment, has nothing to do with politics, except in so far as the government must take measures to suppress discontent. To people who hold this view, civilisation must appear to stagger from one inexplicable crisis to another. Wars come because a telegram has not been delivered, or a Minister could not make up his mind at some critical moment. Masses give up liberties for which their fathers have struggled because of the persuasive eloquence or magnetic personality of some leader. It is because of such assumptions that so much army and foreign office gossip, so many chroniques scandaleuses have been accepted as serious history.

To get Fascism into perspective, to see it not as a series of miracles dependent on the appearance of a Hitler or a Mussolini, but as a result of the economic, political and social reactions of the period, three attitudes to it should be ruled out from the beginning. The first, prevalent chiefly in Britain and the USA, concentrates attention on parts of the problem, losing sight of the whole. There are those who see only the Jewish question, but this is not a necessary part of Fascism. The Italian Fascists are not anti-Semitic. Jews in Italy hold high positions even in the General Staff and the Ministry for Education. Mussolini’s finance minister Jung is a Jew. Except for Hitler’s personal complex and a small though influential section of the Nazi Party, anti-Semitism, even in Germany, is not of major importance. The Jewish question is forced to the front of public interest when Jews are needed as scapegoats to canalise discontent into channels harmless to the government... a habit in Germany long before Fascism was heard of. This is not to minimise the terrible sufferings of the Jews under Fascist rule. The beating and torture of individuals, the deliberate exclusion from employment, the ruin of small businesses, the discrimination against Jewish children in schools, form a record of seemingly meaningless cruelty... but this cannot be understood unless the problem of Fascism is looked at as a whole.

In the same way the cruelties and atrocities of the Fascists to their opponents generally must not be allowed to obscure the more fundamental issues. Public attention is continually startled by sadistic horrors, the evidence for which is unassailable. Men and women do not manufacture for propaganda purposes the wounds which Nazi victims have brought out of their prisons, nor the mutilations which the family of Deputy Stelling found on his dead body when it was returned to them in a sack. The atrocities of the Italian prisons and the Lipari Islands, of the women’s prisons at Trani and Perugia, sicken the imagination of an age which the biggest war in history has taught not to be squeamish. In this book we speak little of these things, not because we do not attach importance to the brutal treatment to which our friends in Germany and other Fascist countries are subjected. We know that a regime condemns itself which resorts to the medieval torture of defenceless prisoners. But for the purpose of a study of Fascism, the importance of these horrors is not that they happened in Germany and Italy, but why they happen everywhere as an invariable accompaniment to Fascist power.

Out of the moral indignation caused by such cruelty a second cause of confusion arises. Fascism is painted so uniformly black by its opponents that those who do not live in Fascist countries simply cannot understand how people can tolerate such a regime, still less why masses, even of working people, should appear to support it. It is therefore assumed that those elements in Fascism which attract the masses are mere bluff, clever propaganda to which the dupes awake too late. Theories of this kind, which are produced even by Marxists, come perilously near to the Great Man theory, according to which the credulous masses are mere wax in the hands of clever and unscrupulous manipulators. Our only hope for the future is the fact that they are not; that these Leaders, who seem at critical moments to ride the storm and direct the whirlwinds, are themselves no more than light conspicuous corks, showing in which way the deep hidden tides of human feeling are flowing.

But the most popular explanation of Fascism, and one that causes as much confusion as any of the others, is the ‘gangster theory’, according to which Fascism is simply an extension to a whole state of the methods of Mr Al Capone. Power has been seized by a well-armed gang without any policy other than their own profit and aggrandisement. They stagger from blunder to crime like drunken criminals. Only keeping their power by well-organised terrorism and spying, and by the smashing of the whole apparatus by which criticism is expressed and organised. This theory has the merit of simplicity. Colour is given to it by the more theatrical activities of the Nazi leaders, from the firing of the Reichstag to the shootings of 30 June. But it does not explain the mass enthusiasm for Hitler. As Sir Oswald Mosley said at an Albert Hall meeting: ‘Hitler could not frog-march all those Germans to vote for him.’ Even if the vote be explained by terrorism, it would need a mass of terrorists to produce a result of the size of the plebiscite on leaving the League of Nations. Al Capone had only a Prætorian Guard. If Hitler’s power rested on such a narrow basis, what would be simpler than for his wealthy enemies... and the Jews can supply these in plenty... to buy machine guns to match his. The problem seems to be whether sufficient people could be found anxious to use them.

It is the purpose of this book to show that while Fascism has all these features of the gang, the dictatorship, the sadistic tyranny, these are only part of the whole picture, that Fascism is not an accident, but is the inevitable product of a specific set of circumstances. Fascism has only triumphed when other ways of getting out of the mess of the postwar world have been tried. Just as the first World War was a way of trying to solve the contradictions of prewar capitalism, so the second World War will be the way forced by Fascism to get out of the mess in which already the Fascist countries are involved.

Only by understanding the conditions that inevitably produce Fascism in a country can the correct method be evolved for avoiding it in one’s own, presuming, that is, that the people are prepared to pay the price for avoiding it. For as we shall show in detail, these expedients, war and Fascism, are attempts to avoid the challenge of a planned economy. The breakdown of individualism, the collapse into chaos of that economic system on which the whole liberal outlook on life was based, is the dominating factor in our period. No propaganda, no spread of ideas with which any policeman can deal, but the relentless pressure of the products of the machine has smashed the foundations of laissez-faire. Mankind, solidly set on the land, can exist through any political chaos. That has been proved over and over again. But the Machine Age must be planned. The complicated machine that civilisation has become cannot be left to the blind forces of nature, or the anarchy of uncontrolled competition.

The issue to be decided, that probably will be fought out during this century, is the question of who is to control the planning of the Machine Age, and in whose interest is it to be planned? Is the machine to serve the profit of the privileged, or the needs of the mass? Is it to be run for private gain, or in the public interest? That, faced with the choice between Fascism and Socialism, a whole continent may be induced to choose Fascism is a fact that the liberal mind may find harder to understand than the Socialist. For Fascism also claims to stand for planning, but along the lines of least resistance, least psychological disturbance, and with the least dislocation of accepted prejudices and social relationships. But can Fascism do what it claims? Can it in fact close the gap between purchasing power and productive power, which, inevitable under a private profit system, is causing mass discontent on a scale that is threatening the basis of capitalist society?

Our contention is that Fascism is the attempt of finance-capital to meet the situation, to increase consumption and canalise mass discontent by planning the entire economic, political and cultural activities of society for war-preparation, with the enthusiastic cooperation of a large part of the population.

The immediate reaction of many readers will be: ‘No one wants war, least of all the Fascists, for however boastfully they talk, they dare not arm the masses they have suppressed.’ Of course, no responsible leader of Fascism wants war for its own sake. He hopes that the desired results may be secured by threats. That is human, but it does not affect our main thesis that Fascism in power has to base its policy on preparation for war, because it has no other way out of the dilemmas with which it is faced. This is not to suggest that Fascism is anything unique in the world. There are precedents, ancient and many, for the policy of keeping the masses quiet, and even ready for war, by concessions to be paid for out of plunder of foreign countries. That was the principle behind the successful policy of Julius Cæsar. This form of Cæsarism, revived in modern times by the Napoleons I and III, by Bismarck and Disraeli, differ from the arid reaction of mere ‘restorationism’ – of Bourbons and Romanoffs and Hapsburgs – as much as Hitler differs from the ex-Kaiser – a fact underlined by the contemptuous treatment of the Crown Prince by the Nazi leaders.

It is no accident therefore that Fascism has developed in those countries where imperialism has either lost its colonial basis, as in Germany, or is struggling in vain to obtain a sufficient one, as in Italy. Fascism will tend to become a danger in Britain in the degree in which her hold on her Empire weakens and thus narrows the economic basis of the present prosperous population.

The importance and the prospects of Fascism in England cannot be judged by the way in which the British Union of Fascists and its present leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, may fail to stand the strain of a ‘boom period’, with the index of production rising. Internal dissensions may smash the Mosley organisation, or its sources of supply may run dry. But the diffusion of Fascist ideas is independent of the relationships between the BUF and its subscribers. In this book we discuss the ideas behind Fascism. These will occur and recur in many shapes during the present period of history. Already ideas of the Corporate State find approval not only among energetic Conservative MPs, but even among certain trade-union leaders. Fascism presents one of the alternative solutions to capitalism in collapse. In some form or another, these ideas will persist and find adherents as long as our present civilisation stumbles from crisis to crisis.

It is perhaps desirable to say a word about the arrangement of this book. In Part I we give some account of how Fascism has achieved power, but only the salient facts, for the detailed history has been done excellently for Italy by Ignazio Silone, whose book, Der Faschismus, ought soon to be translated into English. Conrad Heiden’s History of National Socialism, now available in English, gives the full story to the autumn of 1933. In Part II we examine in detail the contradictory elements from which the curiously complex structure that is Fascism has been and is being built, and we give some account of the actual achievements of Fascism in power, knowledge of which we have not found to be widespread in this country. Part III is an argument as to how the challenge of Fascism can be met, an alternative way out of the chaos of the capitalist world. By this method, the same facts have sometimes to be looked at from different angles, but after careful thought this has seemed the best way to obtain as complete a picture as is possible of the modern scene in the making.

We should like to make the following acknowledgments, among others, of gratitude for help received – which of course does not commit those mentioned to any agreement with the views expressed by the authors. For discussions and information on particular points, we have to thank the Right Honourable Herbert Morrison, Mr William Mellor, Dr Robert Forgan of the British Union of Fascists, Miss Susan Lawrence, Professor Catlin, Mr Gerald Barry, Mr JPM Millar, the General Secretary of the National Council of Labour Colleges, Mr Milne Bailey of the Trade Unions Congress Research Department, Mr VH Williams, General Secretary of the Labour Research Department, and Mr Kenneth Lindsay, MP, General Secretary of PEP. For the loan of documents, otherwise unobtainable, we thank Mr Nicholson, editor of Planning, the British Union of Fascists, Mr W Münzenberg, and Mr E Edwards, General Secretary of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain.

Ellen Wilkinson and Edward Conze