Revolutionarist movement of the petty bourgeoisie that acts as the spearhead of the counterrevolution and whose historical mission is the destruction of the fabric of class organizations inherited from the Second International, replacing them with the forced regimentation of the workers in state capitalism through trade unions and institutions derived from or integrated into the political apparatus of the state.
Origin of fascism
Fascism arises in Italy in the nationalist atmosphere clamoring for participation in the First World War in order to "complete" Italian reunification, that is, the territorial program of the bourgeois revolution.
It dates back to 1914-15, that is, to the period preceding Italy's entry into the world war; the groups that called for this intervention and that, from the political point of view, were made up of representatives of various tendencies, constituted the first manifestation of fascism. There was a right-wing group with Salandra, that is, the big industrialists interested in the war who, before calling for intervention on the side of the Entente, had advocated war against it. There were also, on the other hand, bourgeois tendencies of the left: the Italian radicals, that is, the left democrats and the republicans, traditional supporters of the liberation of Trento and Trieste. In third place there were some elements of the proletarian movement, revolutionary syndicalists and anarchists. To these groups also belonged (it is, by the way, an individual case but one of particular importance) the leader of the left wing of the Socialist Party, editor of "Avanti": Mussolini.
Amadeo Bordiga. Report on fascism. Fourth Congress of the Communist International.
These "leftist" tendencies are the ones that will coalesce around d'Annunzio, Rossoni and Mussolini into a revolutionarism of the petty bourgeoisie. Like all petty-bourgeois revolutionarism up to then, it will be above all nationalist and popular (=interclassist).
But in 1919-20 there are two elements that mark a change of historical epoch and that will give it its specific form as fascism: the workers' revolution and the integration of the trade unions into state capitalism.
What gives fascism the opportunity to become the hope of the big bourgeoisie will be the hesitations and weaknesses of the revolutionary movement in Italy. After the inability of the socialist party to lead the mass movements of the workers, the factory occupations and the movements of the rural proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie turns en masse and the bourgeoisie sees the opportunity to use it as a battering ram against the ongoing revolution.
The proletariat was disoriented and demoralized. As soon as it saw victory slipping away, its state of mind underwent a profound transformation. It can be said that in 1919 and in the first half of 1920 the Italian bourgeoisie had in a certain way resigned itself to witnessing the victory of the revolution. The middle class and the petty bourgeoisie tended to play a passive role, in tow not of the big bourgeoisie but of the proletariat, which they believed to be on the threshold of victory. This state of mind subsequently changed radically. Instead of witnessing the victory of the proletariat, one saw the bourgeoisie successfully organize its defense. When the middle class realized that the Socialist Party was not capable of taking the lead, it gradually lost confidence in the possibilities of the proletariat and turned towards the opposite class. It is at this moment that the capitalist and bourgeois offensive began. It essentially took advantage of the new state of mind in which the middle class found itself. Thanks to its extremely heterogeneous composition, fascism represented the solution to the problem of mobilizing the middle classes in favor of the capitalist offensive.
Amadeo Bordiga. Report on fascism. Fourth Congress of the Communist International.
Despite the inevitable ideological incongruities of a movement of this kind, fascism is not only a nationalist and revolutionarist ideology that mobilizes a frustrated petty bourgeoisie against the proletariat. It builds a specific, socializing form of state capitalism around the trade unions: the corporate state.
First arising in Italy in 1920, with an ideological conception based on Sorel's theories of violence and its systematic application, it took from the syndicalist nuclei that supported it (Rossoni) the corporative conception of the State, and from the nationalist camp, the State itself as a supra-temporal and individual entity. (Everything in the State; nothing against the State; nothing outside the State, Mussolini). The Fascist Party represents and embodies the State; the Grand Council, run by the party, is the central institution of government, and the trade unions the instrument of connection between the people and the State. (Although such trade unions perform no function other than peacefully subjecting the proletariat to the bosses.) Originally it presented itself as socialist, to the point that in 1919 it upheld a program of that kind, supporting the peasant demands for the socialization of the land and supporting the occupation of the factories in Lombardy, so that it seemed it would end up as a socialist faction. Relying on the discontent of the rural and petty-bourgeois masses, of the ex-servicemen and of the liberal professionals, who saw themselves threatened with replacement, and replaced, by those who had not gone to war, agitating a socializing program and taking advantage above all of the failure of the occupation of the factories and of the general strike of the proletariat due to the treachery of the reformists, and abundantly subsidized by capitalism, it came to power, where it swept away all the organizations of the working class and even all bourgeois opposition, likewise abjuring its original anti-capitalist demagogy.
From all this it can be seen that it is not only a phenomenon of capitalist reaction but, to a certain degree, a new political method of capitalism, whose analysis and understanding are of the utmost importance to the proletariat. Today it constitutes a special state power, which has abolished all democratic forms, replacing them with the rule of a militarized and bureaucratic party that keeps the whole population in a state of absolute oppression.
Antonio Gallo. On the September movement, 1932
The rise of Nazism in Germany
In Germany the crash of '29 translates into a spectacular rise of the Nazi party in the 1930 elections. The Comintern makes a show of triumphalism, ignoring the results and interpreting the KPD's results as a victory. Trotsky responds as soon as he has the results, proposing to "evaluate the parliamentary victory of the communist party in the light of the revolutionary tasks".
The result, obviously, is not triumphalist but alarming... and at its root lies the more than justified inability of the German proletariat to trust the KPD. An inability that alienates the petty bourgeoisie from the party of revolutionary hope (communism), throwing it into the arms of the party of counterrevolutionary despair (fascism).
The gigantic growth of National Socialism reflects two essential facts: a profound social crisis, which tears the petty-bourgeois masses from their equilibrium, and the absence of a revolutionary party which, from this moment on, plays in the eyes of the masses the role of recognized revolutionary leader. If the communist party is the party of revolutionary hope, fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counterrevolutionary despair. When revolutionary hope takes hold of the whole mass of the proletariat, the latter inevitably draws behind it, along the road of revolution, important and ever wider layers of the petty bourgeoisie. In this domain, however, the elections offer precisely the opposite picture: counterrevolutionary despair has taken hold of the petty-bourgeois mass with such force that it has drawn important layers of the proletariat behind it.
What explanation can there be for this? In the past we have seen an abrupt strengthening of fascism (Italy, Germany), victorious or at least threatening, after a revolutionary situation exhausted or squandered, at the end of a revolutionary crisis in the course of which the proletarian vanguard had shown its inability to place itself at the head of the nation, to transform the fate of all classes, including that of the petty bourgeoisie. It is precisely this that gave Italian fascism its enormous strength. But today, in Germany, it is not a question of the end of a revolutionary crisis, but of its approach. The leading officials of the party, optimists by profession, draw the conclusion that fascism, having arrived "too late", is condemned to a rapid and inevitable defeat (Die Rote Fahne). These people do not want to learn anything. Fascism arrives "too late" if we refer to past revolutionary crises. But it appears "too early" -at dawn- in relation to the new revolutionary crisis. That it has been able to occupy such a strong starting position on the eve of a revolutionary period, and not at its end, is not a weakness of fascism, but a weakness of communism. The petty bourgeoisie, consequently, has no need of new disappointments regarding the inability of the communist party to improve its lot; it bases itself on past experience, it remembers the elections of 1923, the capricious leaps of the ultra-left course of Maslow-Thälmann, the opportunist impotence of the same Thälmann, the bluster of the "third period", etc. Finally, and this is the essential point, its mistrust of the proletarian revolution is nourished by the mistrust that millions of social-democratic workers feel towards the communist party. The petty bourgeoisie, even though events have thrown it completely out of its conservative routine, can only take the side of the social revolution if the latter has the sympathy of the majority of the workers. This very important condition is lacking precisely in Germany, and not by chance.
Leon Trotsky, "The Turn in the Communist International and the Situation in Germany", 26 September 1930.
But fascism, in its German version too, is not only the expression of a counterrevolution riding on the back of petty-bourgeois revolutionarism. It has a clear objective: to destroy the base that makes the continuity of the class movement possible.
Between democracy and fascism there are no "class differences". This must mean, obviously, that both democracy and fascism have a bourgeois character. We did not wait until January 1932 to guess that. But the ruling class does not live in a sealed vessel. It maintains definite relations with the other classes. In the "democratic" regime of developed capitalist society, the bourgeoisie leans first of all on the working class tamed by the reformists. It is in England that this system finds its most finished expression, under Labour governments as well as under Conservative ones. In the fascist regime, at least in its first stage, capital leans on the petty bourgeoisie to destroy the organizations of the proletariat. Italy, for example! Is there a difference in the "class content" of the two regimes? If the question is posed only with regard to the ruling class, there is no difference. But if one takes the situation and the reciprocal relations of all classes from the standpoint of the proletariat, the difference is very great.
In the course of many decades, the workers have built up within the bourgeois democracy, by utilizing it, by fighting against it, their strongholds, their bases, their nuclei of proletarian democracy: the trade unions, the parties, the educational clubs, the sports organizations, the cooperatives, etc. The proletariat can come to power not within the formal framework of bourgeois democracy, but by the revolutionary road: this is proven by theory as well as by experience. But it is precisely for this revolutionary road that the proletariat needs bases of support of proletarian democracy within the bourgeois state. The work of the Second International came down to the creation of such bases of support, in the period when it still played a progressive role.
The main and only function of fascism is to destroy all the bastions of proletarian democracy down to their very foundations. Does this have a "class significance" for the proletariat or not? Let the great theoreticians ponder this problem. Having described the regime as bourgeois -which is indisputable- Hirsch, like his masters, forgets one detail: the place of the proletariat in that regime. They replace the historical process with a sterile sociological abstraction. But the class struggle takes place on the ground of history and not in the stratosphere of sociology. The starting point of the struggle against fascism is not the abstraction of the democratic state, but the living organizations of the proletariat, in which all its experience is concentrated and which prepare the future.
"What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat". Leon Trotsky. January 1932
This will be the achievement and the historical legacy that fascism will leave, hand in hand with Stalinism, the political expression of the Russian counterrevolution. And not only in the countries that had lived through revolutions and mass class movements (Russia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain...).
Fascism in Spain and Argentina
The Spanish bourgeoisie, which in the 1920s was strongly living out its fusion with the landowning oligarchy and the bureaucracy distilled by it, laying the foundations of the first Spanish state capitalism, was surely the first to realize the usefulness of the new ideology for breaking a workers' movement that had already put it on the ropes in the "Bolshevik Triennium" and that, for all its weaknesses, it could not consider defeated, quite the contrary. The dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera, raised up by the Catalan bourgeoisie, which regarded him as a hero after his time in Barcelona, will try to copy the party and union structures of Italian fascism. The experiment, openly tutored by the two pillars of the "gloomy Spanish reaction" (the army and the Catholic Church), will not succeed in turning the petty bourgeoisie into a shock force for the state. The political expression of the Spanish petty bourgeoisie, left republicanism, was still too weak and faint-hearted, after a century of state battering, to produce a credible radicalization, even less so at the hands of priests and generals. The dictatorship will only find attentive partners in socialist trade unionism. Even today, the statue of Largo Caballero still welcomes visitors to the "Nuevos Ministerios" built by Primo according to the standards -architectural and bureaucratic- of Italian fascist rationalism.
The dictatorship prolonged its life for seven years. Not because it had effective national support, apart from the officers' messes, the sacristies, the circles of the nobility and the big bourgeoisie, but because it coincided with the best world financial period after the war of 1914-1918. This allowed it to win over the big bourgeoisie, neutralize the petty bourgeoisie and secure the accommodation of the strongest workers' organization in Spain, the Socialist Party. It has already been shown under another heading to what extent the latter served as a crutch to the dictatorship, providing it with councillors of State and national assemblymen. But the monarchy was doomed. In the depths of the masses enormous energies were accumulating. The dictatorship had postponed, not prevented, the opening of the revolutionary period.
G. Munis. Jalones de derrota, promesa de victoria, 1947
Francoism as a political movement represented, in its relationship with the inane Spanish fascist grouplets, an updating of the same model as Primo's dictatorship. The insurgent army gave the Falangists and National Syndicalists free rein as death squads and recruiters of the petty bourgeoisie without ceding them the slightest space in the direction of the war. They were ornament and animal violence, a façade useful to the military for showing alignment with the Axis powers, and political commissars of the state. After the war, they were encouraged to organize a defeated and massacred proletariat, they were handed the unions and housing, they were given room in ideological "elaboration" -not without first being forced to merge with the last feudalizing party in Europe, Carlism- and they were always subjected to the counterweight of the most rancid clericalism and the barracks-style militarization of the state. Francoism had taken from fascism its make-up and rhetoric, its gunmen and cadres, but it never let itself be guided by petty-bourgeois "revolutionarism". The Spanish fascist was nothing but a civilian henchman of an authoritarian military regime, with strong roots in the most reactionary component of the Spanish state bourgeoisie, a bloodthirsty and opportunistic hanger-on. That is why its drift in the sixties and seventies, when the regime began to "modernize", led it back to "social democracy" (Ridruejo) or to the clerical far right (the "bunker"), but not to syndicalism or to leftist guerrillaism, as was happening with its Argentine equivalents at the same time.
In Argentina, the relationship of the bourgeoisie with fascism followed a different course. The 1930 coup d'état and the subsequent dictatorship of Uriburu exposed a fracture within the Argentine bourgeoisie:
The civilian, democratic sector judged it expedient to get rid of radicalism and go no further. The fascist sector, a minority, but bolder and more determined by virtue of the force at its disposal, judged the opposite. And the subsequent unfolding of the coup d'état is entirely shaped by this difference, which was to end with the triumph of the democratic sector.
Antonio Gallo. On the September movement, 1932
A fracture that will determine all of Argentine politics until the military coup of 1943, from within which Perón will emerge, finally raised up in 1945 by the trade unions after serving as Secretary of Labor and Welfare. Perón will not try to dress up a military dictatorship to the taste of the big agrarian bourgeoisie with fascist elements; instead he will confront it, giving free rein to the "revolutionarist" element of petty-bourgeois nationalism and, above all, to the statist aspiration of the trade union structure, turning class conciliation (the "social justice" that gives the movement its name) and the rhetoric of national liberation into the basis of a state whose primary objective is no longer counterrevolution (which had triumphed globally) but the affirmation of a state capitalism -five-year plans and planning utopia included- with its own imperialist interests.
It was this rupture, a continuation of the aspirations of the original fascism, that made the Peronism of the seventies, in its far-right drift, the matrix of a revolutionarist bourgeois left ("Montoneros") that would feed the "national and popular left" of Kirchnerism in the 2000s and the now famous "populism" of Laclau and Mouffe championed by the European "populist left".