Why Fascism? by Edward Conze and Ellen Wilkinson 1935
This book has been an analysis of Fascism as a disease of capitalism. We have shown why Fascism comes at a particular stage of economic breakdown in any capitalist country. The British Fascists in the autumn of 1934 were under complete eclipse not because of the public reaction to their brutalities at Olympia in the summer, but to the fact that the index figure showed that production was back at the level of 1929. Without pushing the analogy too far, it can be said that owing to the depreciation of sterling, the British Fascists are in a similar position to which the German Fascists were reduced in 1924 by the period of ‘dollar prosperity’. But if economic conditions change in England, the fortunes of Fascism (though not necessarily of the Mosley movement) will change.
That is why it is so important to understand what Fascism really is. Valuable energy can be wasted in fighting a bogy of atrocities and anti-Semitism which is assumed will be brought here from abroad, while in quite different guise other forms of the same thing are growing here. Of course, the vast majority of people are against Fascism in any country where the economic conditions are not calling it into existence in any appreciable strength – just as most people are pacifist between wars. Enthusiastic meetings declaring, purely on an emotional basis, ‘We won’t have Hitlerism here’, are not very far removed in intelligence from the Chicagoans who cheered Mayor Thompson’s assertions that he would never allow King George to rule Chicago. In each case, the likelihood of the event is remote.
When the economic circumstances provide the soil, Fascism comes to a country in a way that fits into the national tradition, as Mussolini came trailing the clouds of glory of Ancient Rome, and Hitler with his appeal to the oldest instincts of the Germanic peoples. When the time is ripe for the development it has been agreed to call Fascism, people who have protested loudly against its manifestations in other countries find in it just what seems to be needed for their own. Fascist cruelty and brutal suppression have aroused immense and justified disgust, but economic facts cannot be fought only by moral indignation, especially when this feeling is mainly directed against accidental manifestations that may not occur in the country of the righteous ones. The movement against Fascism can only be effective where it is based on the strong class interests which will be injured and maimed by Fascist success, and if it is prepared to offer a clear, constructive alternative to meet the crisis in which Fascism grows to strength.
The mass basis, this class interest in the fight against Fascism, can obviously only be supplied by the working classes, for it is the workers who suffer most under the present system, and ultimately under Fascism.
So far the working class, the articulate, industrial workers who can be organised to fight Fascism, have, as we have shown, been fundamentally reformist, concentrating on getting as much as possible out of the present system. The immediate problem of our time, in the short period left before the next capitalist crisis, is to convince a sufficient majority that capitalism as at present organised and controlled cannot give much more without drastic re-planning, and if that is left to the capitalists to do, the re-planning will take the form of organisation for war. Not that individual capitalists, except perhaps the armament-makers, want war, but that is the only way out of the ever-deepening crisis that the system offers.
With the class interest of the workers must be linked the driving force of the rising class of technicians, who have a professional as well as a bread-and-butter interest in the planned state. Everything, therefore, at this moment depends on a very realist propaganda, and very clear aims on the part of those who can direct the great forces of labour. Unfortunately, the new programme of the Labour Party, while appreciating the need for a planned state, sees in this only a gradual extension of their normal policy, and assumes that as a party it will be allowed to make the transition to Socialism gradually by the forms of parliamentary democracy of which it declares itself the guardian. It puts forward reforms under capitalism which can only in fact be paid for out of the profits of imperialism. Inevitably, therefore, at the same time as it calls for peace, it lines up behind the allied governments by a declaration that it will fight unflinchingly a war for collective security, that is, for the maintenance of that imperialist peace which was dictated at Versailles, and which has formed the basis for reformist policy since.
These contradictions are very human. They simply mean, that operating under the present system, the heart of any Socialist politician at work on the job has continually to be at variance with his head. The heart wants the peace and the substantial advantages for the workers that only a planned state can give. At the same time, there appears the necessity to keep going the capitalism that somehow pays the wages meantime. For this they have to pay the ultimate price, which is the willingness to fight a war in defence of the collective guarantee of the imperialist arrangements which are made through the agency of, but more often behind the screen of, the League of Nations.
It seems to us that a psychological mistake is being made. The fear of war is a very real thing in the Western world. Mass psychology is based on fear and hope. The Nazi success has shown how tremendous can be the power evoked by a propaganda based on this formula. Yet in England we see this mass fear of war being used, not to back the drive for a planned state which can remove the causes which help to drag this country into war, but being organised to back moves in a game of diplomatic chess which has less and less basis in reality, and which is largely incomprehensible to the mass of the people.
If there is one lesson more than another that ought to be learned from the successes both of Bolshevism and Fascism, it is that in modern times to carry through any big changes the interest of the ordinary man must be secured. The complicated mind of the Superior Person, who tends to occupy an undue amount of power in any of the older parties of reform, regards as illogical, even confused, the slogans and policies which make the strongest appeal to the man in the street. The Weimar Republic was a professors’ republic. It largely ignored the necessity for winning the masses, securing their awakened interest in what it was doing, securing their interest even at the sacrifice of a certain amount of efficiency, or even of strict logic. The British leaders of labour today, forgetting the tradition of incessant mass propaganda out of which their whole movement was brought to birth, tend to disapprove of hearty, popular movements like the Hunger March which carried the protest against the Unemployment Bill into the villages and alleys. They objected to the ‘Communist inspiration’ of this particular effort, but made no attempt at any other protest than the procedure provided by parliament. Dignified conferences and mass meetings, attended almost exclusively by the converted, cannot stand up against tempestuous, popular movements like Fascism has become in every country where it has achieved power.
The Liberal Party discovered that it could not fight the popular force of labour by being merely well bred, when it lost the impetus of its old radicalism.
‘Revolutionary’ as an adjective applied to politics is an ambiguous term. It can mean civil war, which in Britain can be ruled out of consideration. Equally it can mean radical change. Using the word in this sense, we suggest that a ‘revolutionary Socialist party’ offers the only constructive alternative which is able to generate sufficient steam at a time of crisis to prevent Fascism achieving the popular strength which in other countries has guaranteed its success.
As we have shown in Part III, a reformist policy, far from uniting inconsistent elements by its moderation, splits and isolates the industrial working class. It drives a wedge between employed and unemployed, between industrial workers and technicians, between town and country, and between workers and that working middle class which is bled by taxes and rates to pay for amenities for the workers which it would very much like to share.
We venture to suggest a different approach to the problem. ‘Gradual Socialism’ in the sense in which the reformists use the term means the gradual attaining of the control of the means of production. This we believe to be impossible. Its impossibility has been demonstrated in every country where the workers have been strong enough to try it out seriously as a policy. Fascism itself is the latest weapon against it. To get control of the means of production is the indispensable beginning of Socialism. This has to be made the centre of propaganda and aim. That attained, the Socialist state can be built on a sound basis securing the widest possible cooperation in the new economic order from people who accept the inevitable once the vital question of power has been settled.
To regard the building of Socialism as a process which comes after the taking over of the means of production means that programme and propaganda must be based on the factory, the workshop and the field, on the places where wealth is created. Socialism cannot be presented to the nation as a gift from the Parliamentary Labour Party. It cannot be built down from above, with only the passive consent of the citizens as expressed from time to time by their votes. It must come from the active participation and eagerness and understanding of the masses of the people. This may seem an untidy method. It will certainly produce some surprises in practice. But then the working model in the laboratory is always tidier than the early stages of putting it into production in the factory. Many models have been constructed, many paper specifications have been worked out for the Socialist state. The problem is to get the job into the hands of the workmen. Admirable as is the administrative collectivism of the Post Office and the municipal services these, we suggest, are not steps towards Socialism. They leave the worker with no more control or interest in the job than have the employees of any enlightened capitalist employer.
Mr Arthur Henderson once suggested that the reason for the apathy of the workers to politics, a phenomenon of recent growth in England, was that so much had been done, so many of the reforms which he had advocated in his youth had been won. That is the precise truth – yet though the workers may feel their lot improved in detail, they are as far off as ever from that real Socialism which alone can remove the contradictions of capitalism from which they suffer.
The success of Fascism lies in its capacity to bring the masses into movement. The political party which grows to dislike doing that dies – as the British Liberal Party died. The Labour Party in tending, as it has been doing of late, to avoid the tactics of mass movement, has based its whole future on the dignified appeal to the reason of the intelligent person. So did the Social-Democratic Party of Germany, and the Fascist appeal swept away their voters, including many intelligent ones, by their shock mass tactics. But the Fascists cannot consolidate the power they have won because they cannot deliver the promised goods to the workers, and they have no intention of taking over the means of production. Already in the events which have followed the shootings of 30 June, and the virtual replacement of the mass SA by the Prętorian Guards of the SS and the Reichswehr, power, once the wave has spent itself, is shown in the hands of those who in fact control the basis of power, the means of production.
If the Social-Democrats could have won such power, and there was no reason prior to 1930 why they should not have done so, in 1918 they actually had it, then had they been willing to go on to take over the means of production, Germany today might be in a state of hopeful Socialist reconstruction, a great force for world peace, instead of in the chaos of Fascism, whose only way out of the muddle is war.
The whole purpose of this book is to show that unless the road to Socialism be taken, war and again war is inevitable as the capitalist system struggles to adjust itself to the incessant challenge of its own productivity. The book therefore closes with an appeal. In the last war the young men could say: ‘We did not know. Our elders have done this thing.’ No one will be able to complain that the next war comes unheralded. The whole world stands as if fascinated with horror, as the dreaded danger draws ever nearer. No one, least of all the statesmen busy at disarmament conferences, seems able to stop it.
In this complex situation, no easy panaceas will suffice. The economic condition of the world is out of gear; but to speak of the world situation as an excuse for not tackling the main problem in one’s own country is to capitulate in the face of ruin. Is it impossible to conceive a way between the Communism of the Third International, with its dependence on a foreign power, its over-emphasis on methods that arose out of such very different social conditions; and the reformism that in times of crisis leads inevitably to the fatal policy of the acceptance of the ‘lesser evil’ as an alternative to the tremendous effort involved in bringing the masses into movement to demand and secure the control of the means of production?
The basis for such a new appeal is already present in the great labour and trade-union movement, so strong in its mass, so weak in its present dependence upon capitalist organisation. The question is whether this mass drive towards Socialism can be organised before the coming crisis deepens to such an extent that the workers themselves can be stampeded by some British brand of Fascism into ranging themselves behind reaction, and helping to destroy the organisations they themselves have built on the sacrifices of the past. This is the real choice before us; for Britain cannot remain isolated from the great economic forces that are sweeping the world.