Why Fascism? by Edward Conze and Ellen Wilkinson 1935
During the last 15 years, a new middle class that has been developing since the beginning of this century has acquired a quite new and unexpected political importance. In several European countries the battle between Socialism and capitalism has been decided by the middle classes, and for the time being against Socialism. It is a widespread opinion among Socialists, with the exception of the English Fabian Society which exists to make a special appeal to them, that the middle classes, by their whole outlook on life, will always be on the side of the capitalists, and hostile to the workers. As we have shown earlier in this book, in those countries which are now Fascist, the Socialists insisted on doing everything in their power to drive the middle classes into conflict with the working-class movement, and to make them the main support of the Fascist movement. In England, also, the appeal of Fascism is mainly to middle-class youth.
Hitler’s rise to power, helped so largely by this class, has induced the Socialists in the Western countries to pay some attention to this phenomenon. GDH Cole’s book, What Marx Really Meant, is, in the main, a discussion of the new situation created by the new importance of the middle class. In Belgium, the Plan du Travail of Henri de Man, which is carefully framed to bring in the middle class, was, in December 1933, approved by the Belgian Labour Party Congress by a majority of 563,457, with 8500 abstentions.
On whether the middle classes necessarily and inevitably choose Fascism instead of Socialism, if they have only the choice between the two, may depend the future history of this century. But is their choice inevitable?
Who Are the Middle Classes? A definition is necessary before the question can even be discussed, for the term ‘middle class’ can be used so vaguely as to be meaningless. Yet it is almost impossible to give other than a negative definition. The worst confusion arises if income is taken as the deciding factor. The middle classes are ‘middle’, because they come between the manual workers and the owners of the means of production. Income, as such, has little to do with the classification, for a middle-class clerk may have less wages than, say, a blast furnace man, or more money than the owner of means of production in the shape of a small factory. He still remains middle class as between the two.
It is easier to enumerate the different groups which can be said to belong to the middle classes, and this brings us really nearer to the problem. The technicians, the clerks and white-collar workers, the professional classes, the small shopkeepers, and, finally, the farmers. The peasant farmers, though of less importance in England, have become a decisive factor of historical development in Russia, Germany, Austria and Italy. In three of these countries they have prevented the workers getting power, and have helped to crush their organisations. In the USSR they are the chief difficulty in the way of the proletarian dictatorship.
The middle classes in any country are not an homogeneous mass. The groups and layers among them are many. But, as Cole has pointed out, there is a broad distinction between the old middle class and the new. The older middle class consists of small-scale producers, craftsmen and peasants who survive into the capitalism period. The new middle class are a product of the recent developments of capitalism, particularly since about the 1890s.
The growing complexity of the productive process, the increase in importance of the distributive trades, made necessary a large staff of technicians, of clerks, of administrators. The extension of elementary education demanded many teachers. The development of medicine, public health and hygiene swelled the ranks of the physicians. The development of the imperialist exploitation of colonial areas has increased the number of small rentiers living on unearned income, or on pensions. At the same time, this exploitation made possible the success of the trade-union struggle for higher wages, which raised a section of the organised working class to a level of income at least equal to that of the lower strata of the middle classes.
The New Middle Class: Marx knew only the old middle class. He saw it being ground between the two powerful and rising forces of the new capitalism and the organised workers, and assumed that it was doomed to disappear. He underrated the power of resistance of even the middle classes he knew to the competition of large-scale enterprise. He could know little of the new middle class which was actually linked up with the new processes of production and rose with it, for this development came mostly after his day. He thus overrated the chances of the workers to get power. Marx cannot be blamed for not foreseeing a development for which he had little data, but it is less easy to understand why orthodox Marxists still remain unwilling to bring their theories up-to-date in this respect.
At different ends of the scale, the middle classes tend to shade into the classes above and below them. It is difficult, for example, to draw any hard and fast line between technicians and clerks, and the proletariat. Proletarians, workers in the narrower sense, are those people who sell on the free market their only property, their labour, in return for wages. But so do clerks, except that they get a salary instead of wages, a distinction which usually carries with it certain privileges, such as an annual holiday, and at least a week’s notice. But fundamentally they are in the same position as the workers in that their access to the means of production is only through the capitalists. Economically they may be equal to the workers. Socially they feel themselves to be different. They spend their income differently. To keep their jobs they have to spend a greater part of their income in keeping up appearances. Formerly they had greater security than that of the manual worker, but that has almost gone. Yet their standards of values remain different from those of the workers.
The relations between the old and the new middle class are anything but settled. To some degree they are antagonistic. In other ways these interests feel a certain solidarity. The older middle class is threatened by the development of capitalist concentration. The newer middle class was brought into existence by this newer capitalism and lives on it. Cole considers that the harmony is produced by ‘intimate family connections and a similar social status’. Similar habits of mind, induced by the strong desire of the lower middle classes to imitate the higher strata, habits carefully cultivated by a press whose advertising appeal is almost exclusively to the middle classes, all help to give at least the appearance of harmony to the really very conflicting interests of the different sections of the middle classes, particularly in a highly industrialised country like England.
Whether there are factors which definitely prevent the middle classes being drawn into the Socialist movement in any considerable number is a question of more than academic interest now, both to workers and to the capitalists.
One of the factors which has acted powerfully so far is the snobbery that exists in the middle classes against the workers, a feeling which is reciprocated by many manual workers. In fact, between them, the organised workers and the upper classes have made the term ‘middle class’ almost one of contempt. In every country, though less perhaps in France than in any, the workers and the middle classes know little of each other, and the strata that are nearest together economically are usually the most hostile socially. The existence of these largely psychological barriers has proved of the greatest assistance to the employers when they want to use one section against the other.
While recognising this elementary fact in the social struggle, organised workers and Socialists have generally assumed it to be practically inevitable. Some Socialist theoreticians seem to delight in widening the breach. Allen Hutt, in an otherwise excellent study, The Condition of the Working Classes in Britain (p 232), says politely:
The middle-class man presents in caricature the traditional ‘national’ characteristics of capitalist Britain; he sums up in himself the narrow, pettifogging outlook, the respectability, the cant, humbug and hypocrisy, the insularity and chauvinism, the combination of practical energy with disgraceful intellectual indolence.
Yet Mr Hutt is a member, a very obvious member, of the middle classes without exhibiting any of these vices! But he could hardly blame a middle-class man who read this assumed description of himself and his fellows for presuming that they were not desired as allies by the working-class movement.
To secure allies among the middle classes is the only way in which the organised workers can avoid that isolation from the rest of the population which has brought success to Fascism in Italy and Germany, and which would have prevented the proletarian success in Russia if Lenin had not realised the danger, and satisfied his biggest middle class, the peasants, in time to bring them in on the side of the proletariat.
The first strategical problem which the working class have to solve before they can hope to attain real power is to isolate the capitalists from their working-class [1] support, so far as this is possible; so far, that is, as they are unable to fulfil the functions which justify their existence. Obviously a considerable step towards minimising the disturbance consequent on the change-over from a capitalist to a planned Socialist industry would be taken if the technicians and actual administrative staffs could be won over to the workers’ side.
The usual Labour attitude to such suggestions is the very real fear that if the middle classes came into the ranks in any numbers, they would drive the Labour Party more to the Right and strengthen its tendencies towards a purely reformist policy. But if, for the moment, emotions about the working class can be put on one side, and the facts looked at calmly, who are the people who demand a reformist policy – that is, a policy which aims at raising the price of labour, at securing the largest possible share of the national income for the workers, while at the same time maintaining and stabilising the capitalist system as such?
In all capitalist countries the trade unions are the basis of a reformist policy, and nowhere more so than in Germany, where the trade-union leaders made no attempt to disguise the fact either to themselves or to their members. Any active trade-union official knows how difficult it is to get the mass of his members, apart from a politically-conscious minority, to take an interest in anything else than reformist policies which appeal to their immediate needs. It is obvious that this must be so, yet the trade unions do not consist of middle-class people.
Planning and the Technicians: Revolutions, whether in thought or deed, are only made by rising classes. To that there has been no exception in history. A declining class can only fight for a restoration. In attempting to keep prewar conditions, such as the old lines of craft demarcation, and the old forms of organisation, the trade unions are fighting a battle which, necessary as it is under present capitalist conditions, is bound to be a losing fight if regarded as an end in itself. The men of the new machines, the organisers and technicians, are the rising class, the new middle class, and are therefore essential to the revolution, the new industrial revolution, whose primary object is the social control and ownership of the machine.
This rising class can be won for a planned state, if they can be induced to see that only under such a Socialist control can their machines work full time and their organising ability be given full scope. A reformist Socialism, far from winning the middle classes by its ‘moderation’, only strengthens the antagonism between the manual workers and the middle classes. Reformist Socialism is based on the idea of the ‘share-out’. Since, in fact, it leaves capitalist production untouched, it tries to give more to the workers by high local rates and high taxation, which fall hardest on the middle level of income, because it is easier for the rich to avoid it. Thus the workers get a little more, not because more is produced, but because it is taken from other sections of the population, particularly the middle class. In Germany, the collaboration between the trade unions and capitalists after 1918 was carried through largely at the expense of the middle classes. They took their revenge by backing Hitler, and smashing the workers’ organisations.
The technical and administrative staffs are far from being the obedient servants of capitalism as many workers imagine. The worker feels the weight of the capitalist exploitation. The technician sees the inefficiency of the system, the deliberate waste of the best products of his brain and skill in the interest of profit and a price policy.
Recently a chain of American newspapers, one of them with nearly the longest life of any on the American continent, had to close down suddenly, not because of lack of circulation, but because they had been used as the basis of a financial pyramid which crashed. The highly-paid technical and administrative staffs whose work had largely built up the concern – the financier was a newcomer only interested in the papers as financial backing for his other schemes – had to see their fine work smashed, through no fault of their own. When men like these are attracted to Fascism, it is because of the Fascist propaganda against finance-capital, against Wall Street and the City of London. Why then is it assumed that it is the anti-capitalist propaganda of the Socialists which drives them away and prevents them making common cause with the workers?
Not only the technical middle classes, but even the professional men have always had a certain enthusiasm for ‘Socialism’ when expressed as monetary reform, with a strong hostility to banking capital. To them this means Socialism without a serious disturbance of the existing social relationships. The middle-class desire is for security and stability. In this it differs from the capitalists who live by taking risks. Its fear is of being de-classed, of losing its social status and of having its incomes reduced to working-class standards. Soviet Russia is, to the middle-class mind, an awful warning of what their class as a class can expect from a dictatorship of the proletariat, at the same time as its vast industrial audacity attracts the professional admiration of the technician.
Now it seems to us to be a question worthy of consideration by the working-class organisations as to what price has to be paid or can be paid for the support of the middle class in order to short-circuit Fascism and secure a planned state with the elimination of private control of the means of production, by which alone consuming power can be adjusted to productive capacity.
The capitalists have shown their willingness to bid high for the support of the technical middle class (at the expense of the rentiers) whenever it becomes seriously afraid of the menace of the organised workers. The interesting question then arises whether the Socialists will agree to be bidders at that auction. Put thus bluntly, the answer of the Socialists, even of the Right, would probably be an indignant ‘No’. The Communists, despite their theory of the hegemony of the proletariat, could hardly be so definite. As has been said, Lenin was willing to pay the price which the predominant section of his middle class, the peasants, demanded. At a subsequent moment of crisis he gave the further bribe of the New Economic Policy. Lenin realised that the important thing was to get power – to end the power of the big landowner and big capitalist.
However unpalatable the fact may be to the doctrinaire, it nevertheless is the fact that the workers are on the defensive everywhere except in the one country where they were prepared to make a very substantial concession to the middle class, and a good deal of the subsequent troubles in that country since Lenin died are due to the attempt to go back on that bargain.
What are the concessions that, say in England, might break down the resistance of the technical middle classes to a Socialist planned state? The three things that concern them in this country are their status, their habits of living, and their income – whatever the order in which the individual may place them – and security.
The question of status raises difficulties of two kinds. As regards social status – the assumed right of the middle class to have privileges that are denied to the working class, the better education, the reservation to itself of the more interesting and less exhausting work as a matter of caste, not of ability, all, in short, that is implied in the snobbery that has grown round the term ‘public-school man’ – could not survive in a Socialist state.
It is rather interesting to notice that even Hitler took some steps towards breaking down the barriers of snobbery, as when he quartered 20 proletarian Storm Troopers on an aristocratic University Students’ Corps, and made the middle classes march with the workers in the First of May celebrations. And it is doubtful to what extent the worthwhile middle class would want this Golders Greenery to continue, especially at such a time of excitement as would be inevitable to a period of actual change-over to Socialism. Only the BBC at such a moment would insist on the wearing of the Old School tie.
But status in production is a different matter. Here the keener and more efficient the technician, the more he will resent being subordinated – not to workers as workers, but to people put to supervise his work, who, however pure their political doctrines, simply do not understand the job. After ‘liquidating’ their own technicians, the Soviet Union has had to pay high salaries to foreign experts, and agreed that they must be in control of the technical processes, while the social side of the factory was placed in the hands of the workers in it. The Socialist bargain could offer greater scope and greater freedom to the technician than the competitive system.
Income is a simpler matter, as questions of LSD always are compared to matters of principle. The Russians started with the ideal of equality of income. They found that it did not work in practice – that the average person continued to work best under the incentive of gain. They now seem to be working out a method which, if it succeeds, will be as much a revolution in ideas as the October Revolution was in government. They have separated social consideration from level of income. The leading Communist officials get a fixed low salary. Their power and social importance depends not on their standard of life, which is Spartan, but on their function in the state. The old Prussian bureaucracy had something of the same idea – low salaries but high official and social status. When this principle is established, then it is possible to pay the middle-class technician his price until a new generation educated on different principles is ready to take over. It is cheaper and better in the long run to satisfy the native technician than later have to pay fancy prices for imported ones.
Habits of living would also fall into perspective when the problem is frankly faced as a bargain with a necessary class. To quarter workers from the slums in great houses may be a socially necessary gesture when the state is abolishing the power of the Great Ones, and must symbolise that fact. But quartering families with young children in the modest flats and houses of technically necessary men is hardly worth the sacrifice of their efficiency.
The question of moderate incomes from investments cannot be ignored. ‘Your savings in danger’ has too often proved a cry able to stampede sections of the working as well as the middle classes. But does Fascism offer security to the small investor? This usual assumption is pathetically far from the truth. The small investor has been callously sacrificed by the Hitler regime in the interest of the big industrialists, and his interest has been cut as much from political motives as business reasons.
When the British Fascist leaders are met with the objection that their proposals for an autocratic empire would mean losses to thousands of investors who had invested in the Argentine Railways and similar enterprises, they replied that though regrettable this is inevitable. To suggest that modern capitalism offers any real security to the small investor would cause a smile even in capitalist circles.
There appears no insuperable objection why the interest on industrial loans should not continue to be paid by a Socialist state to small investors, at any rate during the transition period. Again to quote Soviet Russia, which went to the fullest lengths of repudiating old debts, it has found it quite possible to pay interest on loans made by its own nationals as well as by foreigners.
The one thing about which there could be no compromise, which in no case could be allowed, is the possibility of the reinvestment of such dividends in productive enterprises. Otherwise the whole trouble of the maladjustment of consuming to producing power would begin again. The rentier who wanted to buy out-of-season strawberries with his dividend would be no danger to a planned state. The man who wanted to buy machinery with it, except for his own amusement, would have to be regarded as Public Enemy Number One.
In quiet times the middle classes only prevent labour coming to power. In times of distress and crisis, at the edge of breakdown, they can become, and on the Continent have become, active and powerful enemies of the working-class movements. It is in the expectation of these times that Mosley says that he is building his organisation. It can be laughed at in times of comparative stability. In a crisis it might prove the channel in which the discontented middle classes could rush, sweeping away in their wrath the organised forces of the working class, themselves demoralised by the crisis. This is what has happened everywhere but Russia so far.
That these crises will come, in ever-narrowing cycles, in ever-deepening severity, is a mere fact of observation in capitalist conditions. That human society cannot continue in this muddle and insecurity is becoming increasingly plain. Both Fascists and Socialists are thinking in terms of power. The strength of Fascism so far has been that ‘willing the end’ it has shown itself coolly realistic in ‘planning the means’. The Socialist tends too much to believe that human nature is what he hopes it will become. It is said frequently that Socialism cannot come because ‘you cannot change human nature’. Human nature, in practice, has shown itself the most adaptable of material. The problem before the Socialist is to take account of all the conditions under which human nature is operating before, by Socialist planning, the conditions, and therefore the human nature, can be changed.
1. This should surely read ‘middle-class’ – MIA.