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Making Sense of Fascism: Marxist and Early Liberal Approaches

The quest for a definition

The attempt to arrive at a satisfactory definition of fascism has been likened to the mystical quest for the Holy Grail (Blinkhorn 2000: 5), to the prospector’s devotion to ‘unearthing a final pure lode’ of lexical gold (Bosworth 2009: 5) and, even more dispiritingly, to ‘searching for a black cat in a dark and possibly empty room’ (Whittam 1995: 1). This chapter surveys one of the two main routes now followed by the intrepid trekkers who, undeterred by such doubting Thomases, have embarked on this expedition ever since, in March 1919, Mussolini founded the first of a planned network of Fasci italiani di combattimento (Italian Combat Leagues) in Italy’s most dynamic city, Milan, to keep the spirit of the trenches alive.

The Fascist programme, announced to a small audience gathered in a meeting room of the Industrial Alliance headquarters in Piazza San Sepolcro, made it clear that the fledgling movement’s mission was to give rise to a militant vanguard dedicated to the total transformation of Italy in the spirit of combattentismo, the 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.

The first route, towards making sense of this new concept, which can be traced back to the earliest days of Fascism, is made up of Marxist approaches, all of which, though they can be extremely nuanced and original in detail, assume fascism to be inextricably related to the anti-socialist reaction of the bourgeoisie, financial elites, big business and global capitalism. Such links are so axiomatic for the revolutionary left that Max Horkheimer, a leading member of the Frankfurt School of Marxism, famously warned in his essay ‘The Jews and Europe’, published in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1939, that ‘Whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism’ (quoted in Kellner 1989: 67).

In addition, this chapter will consider briefly another category of responses to the problem of defining fascism, one which is far too disparate and unproductive to be thought of as a ‘tradition’ or a ‘school’: that of academic ‘liberals’ (a generic term for a very broad church of non-Marxist researchers and professional academics) who, for almost seven decades, offered highly idiosyncratic and often incoherent interpretations and paradigms which defy neat classification under various subheadings (for a sustained attempt at categorization, see Hagtvet and Kühnl 1980). Not surprisingly, these proved of limited value for meeting the pragmatic interpretive and definitional needs of practising historians and political scientists who were researching extreme right-wing phenomena in the modern age.

The Marxist school: Fascism as the vanguard of capitalist reaction

We have seen that, unlike most political concepts, the origins of the term ‘fascism’ can be traced symbolically to a particular time and place, namely 23 March 1919 in Milan. It is worth noting that the new Fasci formed a direct successor of the League of Revolutionary Action (Fascio d’Azione Rivoluzionaria), which Mussolini had set up in 1914 as a pressure group to help whip up popular support for Italy’s involvement in the First World War on the side of the Triple Entente. Its members went on to play a prominent role in the ‘interventionist’ movement, where they were soon being referred to as ‘Fascisti’. From the outset, then, ‘Fascist’ had dynamic, modernizing, revolutionary connotations for its supporters, not reactionary or conservative ones.

Initially, though, ‘fascism’ referred specifically to Mussolini’s new movement, and it was left-wing Italian intellectuals, convinced of its repressive and reactionary nature as a violent assault on the working-class movement, who made the first attempt to interpret it as a more substantive and general political phenomenon. The context of their concern to understand its nature as a new factor in Italy’s, and possibly modern, political life was revolutionary socialism’s defeat in the biennio rosso (1919–20), the ‘red two years’ when tensions between the revolutionary left and militant nationalists reached boiling point in parts of Central and Northern Italy. The resulting conflict with the local Fasci that had sprung up to defeat ‘Bolshevism’ and militant socialism occurred against the background of profound economic, political and social chaos that afflicted several parts of the country, especially in rural areas, following the end of the war. In 1922, the Italian reformist socialist Giovanni Zibordi published his Critica socialista del fascismo, which initially identified three radical components at work in the Fascist assault on the left: a counter-revolution of the ‘big’ or haute bourgeoisie against the ‘red’ revolution; a revolution by the middle classes against the liberal regime; and a (para)military revolution against the state. But Zibordi’s conclusion shed such nuances when he went on to define fascism reductively as ‘a socio-political movement of the big bourgeoisie, or at least a movement that it has successfully used and exploited’ (Beetham 1983: 88–96).

This class analysis set the tone for the vast outpouring of socialist, and especially Marxist, analyses of fascism that continue to this day, all of which assume the axiomatically capitalist nature of fascism, whether (at the very most) counter-revolutionary and partially autonomous or (at the very least) arch-reactionary and controlled by the bourgeoisie. It also presciently expressed uncertainty about whether the capitalist classes directly created fascism as a weapon against revolutionary socialism (the ‘agent’ theory) or appropriated it to this end after it had come into being independently (the ‘Bonapartist’ theory). Rather than modify their dualistic theory (inherited from the writings of Marx and Engels) of socialism’s revolutionary war against a single antagonist or arch-enemy, capitalism, Marxists have generally denied that in the interwar period they were suddenly faced by a rival revolutionary and, at bottom, anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois force (see Pellicani 2012) which pursued an alternative totalizing vision to Bolshevism, namely that of a new form of modern society based not on radical socialism but on radical nationalism.

Given the confidence of Zibordi’s prediction of the ephemeral nature of fascism, Mussolini’s successful bid for state power in ‘the March on Rome’ of October 1922 threw European communists and radical socialists of many persuasions into disarray over the significance of the unexpected turn of events. This was reflected in the Fourth Congress of the Soviet-dominated Communist International (the ‘Comintern’), which was held in Petrograd and Moscow in November and December 1922, just as the future duce began his premiership. Grigory Zinoviev’s reaction was incoherent, dismissing Fascism as ‘a farce’ that would soon be consigned to history yet, at the same time, anticipating similar events would take place in Central Europe. Amadeo Bordiga predicted that, now it had gained power to the extent that Mussolini was head of state, Fascism would be generally ‘liberal and democratic’, with the occasional violent episode. Antonio Gramsci was less sanguine, warning that Italy’s Fascists, because of Mussolini’s backing by the black-shirted squads (squadristi), had ‘held in their hands the entire foundation of the state’ even before taking office. Meanwhile, Karl Radek called Mussolini’s appointment as prime minister ‘the greatest defeat that socialism and communism have suffered’ since 1917 (Riddell 2012: 106; see also Riddell 2014).

The agent theory

Despite the contradictory individual reactions, the foundation stones of the orthodox Soviet interpretation of generic fascism had been laid in the Final Resolution of the 1922 Congress. This concluded that its function was to act as capitalism’s direct agent of class repression and the force through which the bourgeoisie conducted its offensive against the proletariat, its paramilitary soldiers serving as the ‘White Guards’ of counter-revolution. At the same time, it sought to gain a working-class following through the use of ‘social demagogy’. But, armed with Marxism-Leninism, socialists could see clearly that ‘the reckless promotion of fascist organization [was] the last card in the bourgeoisie’s hand’ and demonstrated that bourgeois rule was now ‘possible only in the form of an undisguised dictatorship over the proletariat’. Certainly, this pseudo-revolutionary solution to liberal government’s impotence to repress the rise of the working-class movement was likely to be resorted to...