Why Fascism? by Edward Conze and Ellen Wilkinson 1935
The gibe thrown at Socialists by their opponents everywhere is that they are the friends of every country but their own. Reaction, whatever the variety, regards itself as the patriotic force in the nation and assumes the national flag as a party badge. The Socialists, with their general feelings of kinship with workers facing much the same problems as themselves, are inclined to let the Conservatives appropriate the enormous propaganda value that the appeal to nationalism gives in any country. The Fascists have seized this advantage to the full and emphasise the intense national character of their own movement, and exaggerate and distort the internationalism of the Socialists and Communists. In Germany the movement has been called ‘National Socialism’ to get the best of both words, thereby causing considerable confusion, for the word nationalism can have a number of quite different meanings.
The Internationalism of the Fascists: The Fascists who so proudly declare their freedom from the infection of internationalism are as international as they are national. There is a strong solidarity between the members of the Fascist International. They feel to a great extent responsible for each other’s actions and defend each other in their press. Rome is the Moscow of the Fascists, and Fascism has shown itself to be a valuable article of Italian export. In the room of Hitler is a bust of Mussolini. In the rooms of the British Blackshirts there are pictures of Hitler and Mussolini, presumably on the ancient principle of: ‘Look on these and do your best.’ As the Communists argue that the success of Communism in the USSR should inspire Britons to introduce Communism in Britain, so the British Fascists use the successes of other Fascist movements as propaganda, and as Sir Oswald Mosley discovered after the June shootings, suffer from the effects of their less meritorious efforts.
These so-passionately national Fascists imitate everything from abroad. The coloured shirts, the Roman greeting, the military forms. The song-sheet of an English Fascist meeting consists largely of translations from German and Italian Fascist songs sung to the same tunes. The ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ and ‘Giovinezza’ have become the inspirational songs of British Fascism. The agitational methods are entirely un-English. The concentration of supporters at vast expense from distant towns is a German idea, itself borrowed in turn from the punitive expeditions of the Italian Fascists into Socialist areas. The typical Mosley meeting has a strangely foreign air, with its solemn parade of flags in a blaze of light and the concentration of all attention on the leader.
Policies are borrowed in the same wholesale fashion. The Nazis took over the Dopolavoro, and the ‘campaign against grousers’. If ever people look abroad for standards and for inspiration for their actions it is the Fascists. They deliberately encourage this feeling of solidarity among their members. They arrange tours to Italy and Germany. When in South Tyrol a Fascist monument was erected; SA Storm Troops joined in the celebrations of the victory of Italian Fascism over the German population in Bolzano.
Mosley is proud of being taken seriously by Benito Mussolini and is photographed with him. Groups of Italian and German Fascists come to England. Enthusiastic articles appear about Italy in the British Blackshirt. We quote from one of them in Number 4:
After such an experience, mean would be the spirit which did not salute with admiration the Fascism of Italy and the genius of its leader, Benito Mussolini, the origin and the inspiration of World Fascism... We are united with them by indissoluble bonds of friendship, in universal Fascism, the greatest creed which Western civilisation has yet given to the world.
It would be difficult for a Communist to say anything more international than that.
The Fascist International has even World Congresses, but they avoid the publicity given to the congresses of the Socialist and Communist Internationals. There are no published reports. It is very difficult to find out anything of what went on in the congress at Rome in 1933. It cannot be denied that this Fascist International has proved more successful in action than the Communist International and far more dangerous to individual liberty. But as yet no speeches are made about the menace of the Fascist International.
The Nationalism of the Socialists: In its more exact sense, nationalism means the right of each nation to have its own culture and administration. The Socialists recognise that there is a value in national tradition, and that each nation has a right to the national tradition that it inherited. The Russian Communists have been careful to guarantee the cultural rights of the nations which together compose the Federation of Republics which has taken the place of the Russian Empire.
True, Marx said: ‘The workers have no fatherland’, but the German Marxists carefully interpreted that as a statement by Marx of the deplorable fact that the workers thus lacked something which they ought to have. Lenin wrote in an article: ‘The nation has a value which must be conserved.’ The Young Communist League in Germany sold this as a pamphlet by thousands to counteract the effect of the remark of Marx. Trotsky, the intellectual, is the ardent advocate of world revolution. Stalin, the peasant, builds his whole policy on the basis of ‘Socialism in Russia first’.
There is a difference in the form nationalism takes among old as distinct from young nations. Old nations, nations whose nationhood has not been disputed for many generations, have the tribal spirit fully matured. They can take it calmly. In younger nations which are not so sure of themselves they are much more passionate about it. Even now the Germans are not yet a nation as the British understand it. They still think of themselves as Bavarians or Rhinelanders, resentful of the position that Berlin has assumed as the capital. It has needed some such mass hysteria as the Nazis have been able to work up, to give to Germany this sense of being a nation. Whether a Münchener is any happier or better for feeling German rather than Bavarian is beside the argument. Socialists prefer a milder variety of such nationalism. Their cause in its propagandist stage is completely helpless against such frantic national pride as in prewar Austria or oppressed Ireland. The Fascists prefer the violent variety, not from nationalist, but from imperialist considerations.
It is a distortion of the words ‘nationalism’ or ‘patriotism’ to identify them with hatred and contempt and suppression of foreign nations. This is ‘imperialism’, but reaction always tries to cloak this with the term nationalism. It is possible to regard nationhood as having value in itself, and not as a barrier to social intercourse and trade.
Socialists do ultimately want to introduce Socialism into the whole world, as the Fascists desire that the entire world shall be Fascist. ‘Forward to World Fascism’, is the slogan of The Blackshirt, the Fascist weekly. But as a matter of history, the only concrete success towards a Socialist country is in Russia, where, after a period of talk about the World Revolution, they set themselves the task, by the Five-Year Plan, of building up Socialism in their own country first. If the German Communists had learned this lesson they would probably not now be exiles. Their dependence on Russia was no small part of the cause of their trouble.
British Socialists cannot help Japanese Socialists to get Socialism. To be effective they must concentrate on the tasks in their own country first. Only when they have achieved this can they begin to help to build real peace in Europe. They can only do their share towards organising a European Federation after the capitalism which must always prevent such a development has been destroyed.
The Internationalism of the Socialists: Some Socialists, however, urge that the English worker has more in common with the Indian worker than with the English capitalist. The workers in the highly organised countries have an obvious interest in raising the Asiatic workers to their level, because low wages in Asia are dangerous to their own standards. But on the other hand, the European worker has an interest in cheap raw materials, whose cheapness is based on low wages. This creates a conflict which tends to be ignored in Socialist circles.
Any feeling of a common interest as workers against the capitalists in all countries is felt only by a minority of the workers. There are only a few cases on record of international actions that actually have had a definite effect. During the coal dispute in Britain in 1926, German and American miners sent funds; but they continued to work. The Nazis made considerable propaganda against the workers of Red Ruhr that they benefited considerably as miners from that strike. The international solidarity of the workers was weaker than the joint exploitation of the situation by the national capitalists of England and Germany against the English workers locked out. In situations of even greater seriousness as in 1914, not even funds or messages of goodwill were sent. The working masses of each country willingly joined with their own capitalists against the workers and capitalists of other countries... but the solidarity of capital was not broken by the war, as the unscathed mines of Briey bear witness. The only case we can quote where effective action on behalf of the workers of another nation was undertaken by a European working class was the refusal of the British workers in 1920 to allow a man or a ship or a gun to be sent against Russia.
The international feeling there is in the Socialist movement is limited to the active 10 per cent, who because they have these feelings of solidarity with the workers abroad are rather apt to assume that they are shared by the workers as a whole. Consequently international cooperation is limited to the by-products of the class war. The active 10 per cent are vigilant. They form ‘Hands off China’, or ‘Hands off Russia’, or ‘Help for Victims of German Fascism’ committees which do excellent work, generally with the disapproval and even active hostility of the official labour and trades-union movement. The Communists are usually the prime movers in such committees... not out of sheer desire to annoy the labour movement, as some leaders assume, nor even as nets to lure unsuspecting victims into the ‘sinister net of the Communist Party’, but because their own connections with the Russian Communists give them nearly as strong an international feeling as the Fascists have, which is much stronger than that of the average Socialist. In the cases of Sacco – Vanzetti, the Meerut prisoners, the Reichstag prisoners, the Scottsboro negro boys, these ad hoc committees have done very valuable work in rousing public opinion, and in annoying whichever governments were concerned in the particular piece of tyranny. The international organisation of moral indignation has produced most of the successes of the Communist parties outside Russia. In all other sectors they have only failures to show. That this happens with such unfailing regularity cannot be entirely dismissed as bad luck.
Actions of solidarity between responsible labour and trade-union leaders cannot, of course, be carried through in the same way as the ad hoc committees are free to do. The British trade unions raised considerable sums for the last election the Social-Democratic Party was able to fight. A sum of about £10,000 was offered, but the German leaders felt that they must decline it, as they would then be under suspicion of ‘getting funds from abroad’, a consideration which never seems to have troubled the ‘anti-international’ leaders of the Fascists. This sum was later used for relief of the Social-Democratic Party exiles from Germany. Money was raised by the Trades Union Congress for the Austrian workers before the Dollfuss putsch against them, and gratefully accepted by them, as was the considerable sum of about £34,000 raised afterwards for relief of the victims.
The International Federation of Trade Unions cooperated in getting funds out of the Fascist countries and safely guarding it. Unfortunately both German and Austrian leaders were so intimidated by the Fascists that the great bulk of this money had to be returned to these countries. In the early days the Trades Union Congress and Labour Party called for a boycott against German goods, but as this was made a ‘consumers’ boycott’ and not one by the unions concerned in handling German goods, it could not be very effective.
There have been occasions when the workers have shown themselves willing not to load munitions – for example, the war in China – but where the leaders of the unions have refused to sanction this. In the one case when they have joined in the protest, as in the case of the Russian expedition in 1920, it has been immediately effective. The fact is not forgotten by the army authorities. The large additions to army transport which followed this action were planned so as to make a threat of this kind less effective in future. The army is now largely independent of railway transport.
Difficulties always arise in the trade unions about these solidarity strikes because the brunt of the burden must fall on the transport unions, who, as the Left-wing leader of the Locomotive Enginemen and Firemen has frequently said, ‘are asked to hold the baby every time’. The resolution for a general strike against war was passed at the Hastings Conference of the Labour Party in 1933, by the votes of many of the biggest unions. But when those same unions meet, not as political but as industrial entities in the Trades Union Congress the same year, grave doubts arise and the matter is referred back for report and enquiry.
The political internationals show a set of unexceptionable internationally-minded resolutions, without any backing in effective action. The First International can be ruled out, as it only represented a few people and was largely a myth. The Second International was limited to the imperialist countries. It was not, and is not now, a world-wide International. It was not able to organise cooperative action, and claimed no discipline over its constituent bodies, except in matters of conference routine. They have never been able to resist the national conflicts of their own capitalists. In 1914, in spite of all the resolutions about war, the Second International was suspended, and long after 1918, when many of the capitalist statesmen had buried the hatchet, the congresses still quarrelled about war guilt and reparations. Not till the congress at Marseilles in 1925 did Müller and Vandervelde stage a public reconciliation, amid much emotion. In big decisions, in which the international interest did not coincide with some important national interest, the Second International has simply not existed.
The Third International is mainly an International of the colonial and half-colonial countries, and the Communist parties in the imperialist countries. No other Socialists belong to it, nor judging by the treatment of the British Independent Labour Party are groups other than Communists welcome. Few movements have received such passionate and disinterested devotion from groups of workers in other countries as has the Communist International, but a cool examination of its actions since the years of its early enthusiasm – since in fact the Russians realised that they were not going to be helped by a World Revolution, but had to tackle the job of building Socialism as a national movement – shows the Third International to have been used almost entirely in the national interests of Russia.
The Nationalism of the Fascists: Rossoni, the Italian syndicalist, turned Fascist because he said that he had found that the low status and wages of the Italian workers in America was due to the fact that Italy was a weak and neglected nation. ‘We have begun to understand’, he said in 1923, ‘that the fate of the Italian worker is indissolubly bound up with that of the Italian nation.’ Hitler has made similar remarks.
National Socialism believes that other, to them inferior, nations must be used to raise the standard of the worker of the National Socialist state. The specific aims of this type of nationalism is to unite the workers, first with their home capitalists by stressing the unity between them, second, to unite them for imperialist expansion.
The Fascist policy is one of economic nationalism – the closed market, the self-sufficing unit. But immediately they are involved in a dilemma. They want to shut their doors, but they have also to open them to others in order to get rid of the surplus product which cannot find a market at home. Even a monopolistic trust backed by the state has its surplus products which have to be exported because the Fascists cannot develop their home market to absorb them, without destroying the profit basis of their home capitalists on whom they depend. This is the fallacy in the Mosley argument.
Economic nationalism desires the home market for the home capitalist, and to secure the economic independence of the country in time of war. But this war is not avoided by economic autarchy. The closing of the frontiers is in itself a preparation for war, for it compels nations with a smaller heritage to attempt to get the frontiers opened by war.
The particular kind of nationalism of Fascism is thus a result of their alliance with their own capitalists, and their preservation of the profit system. But it is possible to envisage a National Socialism which was completely different in its motives and its character.