-Caveat Lector-
FASCISM: A FALSE REVOLUTION
by Michael Parenti
Fascism is a false revolution. It makes a revolutionary
appeal without making an actual revolution. It propagates the
widely proclaimed New Order while serving the same old monied
interests.
Before World War I, Benito Mussolini was a socialist, but
the minute the wealthy classes in Italy offered him financial
support and power, he didn't hesitate to switch sides. (We know
about people who switch sides, don't we?) And with the huge sums
he got from wealthy interests, Mussolini was able to project
himself onto the national scene as the leader of a movement
that specialized in attacking unions, peasant farm cooperatives,
socialists, communists, and anarchists. After World War I, to
maintain profit levels, the large industrialists and big land
owners had to slash wages and raise prices. The state, in turn,
had to provide the big owners with massive subsidies and tax
exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populists
had to be taxed more heavily, and social welfare expenditures
drastically cut. (Does all of this sound familiar?) But the
government wasn't completely free to apply harsh measures because
many Italian workers and peasants had their own unions and fairly
strong political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes,
boycotts, factory takeovers, they won substantial concessions in
wages and work conditions and the right to organize and were able
to defend their standard of living. To roll back that standard of
living and to get the economic changes that the plutocrats and
tycoons wanted, the ruling interests had to abolish the
democratic rights that helped workers and peasants defend that
standard. The solution was to smash their organizations and
their political liberties. The leaders of industry, along with
top bankers and agribusiness associations, met with Mussolini to
plan and finance the so-called "Fascist Revolution." Within two
years after seizing state power, Mussolini had shut down all
opposition newspapers and crushed the socialist, liberal,
Catholic, democratic, and republican parties, which together had
commanded about 80% of the vote.
In Germany, there was a very similar pattern of complicity
between fascists and capitalists. German workers and farm
laborers had won the eight-hour day, unemployment insurance, the
right to unionize. They had built very powerful political
organizations, but heavy industry and big finance were in a state
of near total collapse. Business wanted to cut wages and get
tax-cuts and massive state subsidies to revive profit levels. The
German tycoons greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, and
the Nazi party was propelled onto the national stage.
Who did Mussolini and Hitler support once they seized state
power? In both countries a strikingly similar agenda was pursued.
Labor unions and strikes were outlawed, union property and
publications were confiscated, farm cooperatives were handed over
to rich private owners, big agribusiness farming was heavily
subsidized. In both Germany and Italy the already modest wages of
the workers were cut drastically; in Germany, from 25-40%; in
Italy, 50%. In both countries the minimum wage laws, overtime
pay, and factory safety regulations were abolished or turned into
dead letters. Taxes were increased for the general populace, but
lowered or eliminated for the rich and big business. Inheritance
taxes for the wealthy were greatly reduced or abolished. Both
Mussolini and Hitler showed their gratitude to their business
patrons by handing over to them publicly owned and perfectly
solvent steel mills, power plants, banks, steamship companies
("privatization," it's called here). Both regimes dipped heavily
into the public treasury to refloat or subsidize heavy industry
(corporate welfarism). Both states guaranteed a return on the
capital invested by giant corporations and assumed most of the
risks and losses on investment. (Sounds like S&Ls, doesn't it?)
As in all reactionary regimes, public capital was raided by
private capital. As a result, in Italy during the 1930s the
economy was gripped by recession, a staggering public debt, and
widespread corruption, but industrial profits rose, and the
armaments factories busily rolled out the weapons. In Germany,
unemployment was eased somewhat because of the massive arms
program and the arms spending. But generally, poverty increased.
But from 1935-1943, the net income of German corporate leaders
rose 46%. In both countries, the conditions of labor deteriorated
greatly: speed-ups, dismissals, imprisonment for workers who
complained about unsafe or inhumane work conditions, longer
hours for less wages.
Much of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational
symbols. In fascism, these irrational, atavistic appeals go back
to the mythical roots of the people: for Mussolini, back to the
grandeur that was Rome; for Hitler, the ancient volk. Then
there's the cult of the leader: Il Duce, the Fuehrer. With
leader worship and state worship came the glorification of
militarism, war, and conquest -- basically conservative symbols
to get people distracted from their own immediate
political/economic class-interests and get them galvanized into
war, the conquest, militarism.
Fascist doctrines stress one people, one state, one leader.
The people are no longer to be concerned with class divisions,
but must see themselves as part of a harmonious, authoritarian
whole, a view that supports the socioeconomic status quo. In
contrast, a left agenda advocates a sharpened awareness of
class injustice and class struggle, the articulation of popular
demands and the self-generated participation of popular forces.
Fascism, especially the Nazi version, had an explicit
commitment to racism. Human attributes are said to be inherited
through blood. Genetics and biology are said to justify the
existing class structure (just as our academic racists today are
doing with their bell curve theories and their warmed over
eugenics clap-trap.)
Fascism also supports sexual inequality and homophobia. The
oppression of gays was criminal and homicidal; the oppression of
women was traditionally patriarchal. "Women's greatest calling is
to tend to the needs of her husband and children, producing as
many [children] as she can for the state."
In Nazi Germany, racism and anti-Semitism were used to
rechannel some legitimate grievances to irrelevant enemies
(scapegoating). Many middle-class Germans knew they were
victimized by powerful economic forces, but they were too
bound up in the conventional social order to adopt a
revolutionary course, so they went in a fascist direction and
started voting for the Nazi parties.
Anti-Semitic propaganda was very emotive and irrational, but
cleverly crafted to appeal to certain groups. Workers and
peasants were told, "It's the Jewish capitalists, the Jewish
usurers, who are doing this." The middle class was told, "It's
the Jewish trade union leaders and the Jewish communists who are
doing this." The superpatriots were told, "The Jew is the enemy
alien, an internationalist." This is the rational use of
irrational symbols and arguments.
What distinguished fascism from ordinary right-wing
autocracies was the way it attempted to cultivate a revolutionary
aura and give the impression of being a mass movement. Fascism
offers a beguiling mix of revolutionary sounding mass-appeals and
reactionary class politics. The Nazi party's full name was the
National Socialist German Workers Party. Both the Italian
fascists and the Nazis consciously tried to imitate the left:
youth organizations, mass mobilizations, rallies, parades,
banners, symbols, slogans, uniforms. And I think for this
reason, too, many mainstream writers treat fascism and communism
as totalitarian twins. But most workers and peasants could tell
the difference. Industrialists and bankers could tell the
difference. And certainly the communists and the fascists could
tell the difference.
Western capitalist states have tolerated and cooperated with
fascism. After World War II, the Western capitalist allies did
little to eradicate fascism from Italy or Germany except for the
Nuremburg trials, but the police, the courts, the military,
security agencies, the bureaucracy have remained largely
staffed by those who had served the former Nazi regimes, or their
ideological recruits, and that remains true to this day. How do
you murder six million Jews, a half million Gypsies, several
million Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and others, and thousands of
homosexuals, and get away with it? The only way you get away with
it is that the very people who are supposed to look into these
crimes were themselves complicit.
What happened to the U.S. businesses that collaborated with
fascism? Corporations like DuPont, Ford, General Motors, ITT,
owned factories in these enemy countries that produced fuel,
tanks, and planes that wreaked havoc on Allied forces during
World War II. After the war, instead of being prosecuted for
treason, ITT collected $27 million from the U.S. government for
war damages inflicted on its German plants by Allied bombings.
General Motors collected $33 million. Since the war, U.S.
leaders have done their part in keeping Italian fascism alive,
giving millions of dollars to right-wing organizations and
neo-fascist organizations in Italy.
A coalition of neo-fascist and separatist groups headed by
media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi won the 1994 elections in Italy.
Their platform: a single tax rate for rich and poor alike, school
vouchers, a stripping away of the welfare state, the introduction
of private retirement accounts, and, of course, the privatization
of just about everything.
The Italian neo-fascists are learning from the American
reactionaries how to achieve fascism's goals under democratic
forms with democratic facades -- use an upbeat, Reaganesque
optimism; convince people that government is the enemy
(especially its social democracy aspects); strengthen the
repressive capacities of the state; instigate resentments against
the newly arrived immigrants; and preach the imaginary virtues of
the free market.
The political center is always described as a kind of
moderate place between the extremes of left and right. A closer
reading of history should tell us that the center is more
inclined to make common cause with the right against the left,
because the center and the right share a commitment to corporate
capitalism and the free market mythology. In the United States
consider how gently, for generations, the murderous, lynching
night riders, the Ku Klux Klan was treated by federal authorities
in this country. Compare that to the way the Black Panthers were
treated. Consider how the right is investigated, compared to the
left. When the Center for Cuban Studies in New York was bombed by
a right-wing Cuban group, which boasted, admitted, they did the
act, the FBI didn't have a clue, couldn't find them.
Far from being moderates, as they're always labeled, people
in the political center are quite capable of the most immoderate
and extremist acts imaginable. It was the Democratic party who
gave us the loyalty purges of the late 1940s. It was the
Democratic party that gave us Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Vietnam.
It wasn't the John Birch Society that tried to bomb Indochina
into the Stone Age. It wasn't the American Nazi Party that
perfected napalm. Napalm was developed at Harvard. It wasn't the
Nazis who put thalidomide in the defoliants used throughout
Indochina. And today, it's not the skinheads or the Klan or the
militia that maintains the death squads and other homicidal
operations throughout so much of the Third World. It's the best
and the brightest of the political center, with plenty of help
from the right wing. The way the mainstream shades off into the
fascist right can be seen quite clearly in the Republican Party.
The GOP agenda today is really not much different from the kind
pushed by Mussolini and Hitler; it's fascism without the
swastika, it's fascism in a pinstriped suit. First, break the
labor unions, depress wages, impose a rightist ideological
monopoly over the media.
The rest of the GOP agenda is to eliminate cultural
dissidents and the arts, attack the rights of women and gays,
abolish taxes for the big corporations and the rich, eliminate
government regulations designed for worker and consumer safety
and environmental protection, privatize and plunder public lands
and enterprises, wipe out public services -- and cloak this whole
reactionary agenda in a kind of a revolutionary sound. Newt
Gingrich talks about the GOP "revolution." Some revolution! It's
the same old reactionary class agenda. And today in the United
States, some middle class Americans, like the middle class
Germans of yore, beset by real economic difficulties, turn their
anger toward irrelevant or imaginary foes: the immigrants, the
Jews, the poor, the welfare mothers, people of color, feminists,
gays, atheists, and others.
Growing numbers of us have lost our skepticism that "it
could never happen here," because it IS happening here. We are
facing the Nazi-like Omnibus Counter-Terrorism Bill of 1995,
which in effect suspends all Constitutional rights for anyone
designated by the President as a terrorist, and anyone giving aid
to those labeled terrorists. If you give money to an
organization, it might go to their radical wing and you can be
labeled a terrorist.
Something else explains the speed-up of reactionism in
America today. For years the United States leaders and political
and economic elites saw themselves in mortal combat with
communism for the allegiance of peoples at home and abroad. They
argued that U.S. workers enjoyed a higher standard of living
than their counterparts who lived under communism. That was
always a theme. "Our workers earn more, our workers live better
than anybody under communism, so stick with capitalism."
Competition with an anti-capitalist system sets limits on how far
to mistreat the working populace. Long before the collapse of
communism they tried to break unions, they tried to depress
wages, but now they're dropping all pretenses at capitalism with
a human face.
The potential threat of workers getting radicalized wasn't
the only restraining factor. It was also the working class's
ability to fight back, to win democratic victories, the 8-hour
day, Social Security and various benefits. When the communist
nations were overthrown in Eastern Europe, a very interesting
querulous and irate note began to appear in some of the
conservative publications. It went like this: "Eastern Europe is
now moving toward a total free market, so why must we here in the
United States still have to tolerate these collectivistic,
liberal regulations and restraints that are put upon us? Now is
the time to sock it to the public. There's no reason why masses
of people in this country should have a middle class living
standard. It's time these people lower their expectations, work
harder, and be satisfied with less."
With the collapse of communism, there's been a shift in
policy toward the Third World too. "You're not going to turn to
Moscow now, Moscow's in our pocket." So they're hitting them
hard. The IMF, the World Bank, GATT, NAFTA, are undermining the
sovereignty of Third World nations, plundering their markets,
drastically cutting non-military foreign aid, and in some cases
directly invading them and destroying the government that had any
reformist tendencies or was maintaining economic development.
U.S. leaders are making war against economic nationalism in
countries like India, Brazil, Mexico, Iraq, Panama, South Korea,
Taiwan and so forth.
A lot of people on the left still don't get it -- that these
guys are playing for keeps, that they are going after you, that
they are not going to leave any little bit for you. There's only
one thing that the ruling circles throughout history have ever
wanted -- all the wealth, the treasures, and the profitable
returns; all the choice lands and forests and game and herds and
harvests and mineral deposits and precious metals of the earth;
all the productive facilities and gainful inventiveness and
technologies; all the control positions of the state and other
major institutions; all public supports and subsidies, privileges
and immunities; all the protections of the law and none of its
constraints; all of the services and comforts and luxuries and
advantages of civil society with none of the taxes and none of
the costs. Every ruling class in history has wanted only this --
all the rewards and none of the burdens.
The danger of fascism comes not from skinheads or the
militia or the Christian right fanatics. It comes from the
ongoing practices of the National Security State and its various
enforcement agencies; it comes from the boardrooms of corporate
America. But before we pronounce ourselves doomed, keep in mind
that at the present time, there are people who are demonstrating
and getting arrested and raising hell to protect the environment
and the forests; there are others who are doing the same at
nuclear submarine bases; there are people who are demonstrating
for justice and against racism in the judicial system as the
national protests for Mumia Abul-Jamal show. There are people
protesting against nuclear testing in the South Pacific, against
Medicare cuts and family assistance cuts, against the suppression
of the homeless, against the anti-immigration laws, and for
affirmative action. There are large majorities in this country
who even support welfare, if you don't call it welfare, if you
say "Should government help the poor, should government do more
for the poor?"
We have to get a lot angrier and a lot more determined. They
want everything, and everything is at stake. Many people are
getting angry; our job is to see that they direct their anger at
the real perpetrators of their misery, and not against the very
people who want to make common cause with them.
When the power of capital is increasingly untrammeled, all
of us are put at risk: the environment, the sacred forests, the
beautiful and mysterious creatures of the sea, the ordinary
people who, with their strength and brains and inventiveness
create community and give to life so much that's worthy of our
respect. The real burden to society is not the poor, but the
corporate rich. We simply can no longer afford them.
Conservatives complain whenever we fight back; they say
we're engaging in "class war." Well, I believe it is class war,
but I also have another name for it. When people unite against
the abuses of wealth and privilege, when they activate themselves
and militantly attack the hypocrisies and lies of the powers that
be, when they fight back and become the active agents of their
own destiny, when they withdraw their empowering responses and
refuse to toe that line, I call that DEMOCRACY. Their first
loyalty is to the dollar; our first loyalty is to democracy and
to the well-being of our society and our Mother Earth.
NCY Feb Mar 1996
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