Reading notes - Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerin

Conclusion: Some illusions that must be dispelled

....perspective of "popular fronts." Their hucksters cling to the rotten plank of bourgeois "democracy" and turn their infantile smiles towards the "less reactionary" capitalist groups, to save themselves from the "more reactionary." They await salvation from a Giolitti or a Bruening, who will deliver them in the end, bound hand and foot, to a Hitler or a Mussolini. If they have a weakness for suicide, it's their business. But others, who wish to live, have already chosen between fascism and socialism.

....The socialist movement could have, and should have, exorcized it if it could have torn itself out of its paralysis and impotence; if it had outstripped its adversary; if it had beaten fascism out in winning, or at least neutralizing, the impoverished middle classes; and if it had seized power before fascismnot in order to prolong the capitalist system for better or worse (as too many governments brought to power by the working class have done), but to put the financial backers of fascism (the heavy industrialists and the big landowners) out of action: in a word, if they proceeded to the socialization of the key industries and the confiscation of big land-holdings. In conclusion, any antifascism is a frail illusion if it confines itself to defensive measures and does not aim at smashing capitalism itself.

                          *     *     *

....In spite of its verbose demagogy, it has no great designs; it lives from week to week; it aspires to nothing more than to keep a handful of monopolists and big landowners alive through wage cuts, state orders and subsidies, seizure of small savings, and autarky. And in order to prolong the reign of this oligarchy, at the price of a restriction of free enterprise, it hastens the ruin of all other layers of the population-wage earners, consumers, savers, working farmers, artisans, and even industrialists manufacturing consumer goods.

....Rash prophets have announced ten times, a hundred times, the imminent and inevitable crumbling of the fascist dictatorship in Italy or Germany under the blows of the victorious revolution.

....it has not succeeded in suppressing the class struggle, a sociological phenomenon which it is granted to no regime, however perfected, to stamp out.

....It is manifested, for instance, through the demagogy of the plebeians in the "fascisized" or ''gleichgeschaltet" unions, etc., etc.

....In Germany the elections to the factory "confidential councils" have twice (April 1934 and April 1935) constituted a stinging defeat for the regime

....with consummate skill fascism in power follows a policy which, for lack of a better term, I will call "dust in the eyes." This consists of disguising or blurring its real countenance, to some degree, in the eyes of a quite large section of the popular masses.

....massive reabsorption of the unemployed by big and indisputably useful public works....

....the men of wealth who financed fascism and brought it to power were not satisfied with their creation.

....economic policy of fascism, however favorable it may be, is not entirely satisfactory to its former underwriters. Although they eagerly pocket the fabulous profits from armaments orders, they are terrified at the possible consequences of this policy. They are haunted by the thought of a financial catastrophe that would spark a middle-class uprising against them. They also reproach the fascist government for increasing its expenses at an "imprudent" pace. They also fearfully note that the "war economy" regime is constantly imposing more burdensome state regulations on them, that it is forever eating away at sacrosanct "private initiative."

They dare not deprive themselves entirely of the incomparable and irreplaceable means of penetrating into all the cells of society which they have in the fascist mass organizations. Above all, they hesitate to deprive themselves of the services of the "Man of Destiny," for the mystic faith in the Duce or the Fuehrer, though declining, is not yet extinct.

....industrialists are apprehensive lest a radical change in the regime, such as they desire, should cost much bloodshed. They dread a civil war, even a short one, in which "national" forces would oppose one another: they fear nothing so much as what in Germany was called in anticipation, a "new June 30." Therefore the bourgeoisie hesitates.

Stripped of all appearances, all the contradictions which dim its real face, all the secondary aspects which hide its essential character from so many, and all the circumstances peculiar to any one country, fascism is reduced to this: a strong state intended to artificially prolong an economic system based on profit and the private ownership of the means of production. To use Radek's picturesque figure of speech, fascist dictatorship is the iron hoop with which the bourgeoisie tries to patch up the broken barrel of capitalism.

....It merely tries to check, through artificial means, the fall in the profits of a private capitalism which has become parasitic. In spite of its verbose demagogy, it has no great designs; it lives from week to week; it aspires to nothing more than to keep a handful of monopolists and big landowners alive through wage cuts, state orders and subsidies, seizure of small savings, and autarky. And in order to prolong the reign of this oligarchy, at the price of a restriction of free enterprise, it hastens the ruin of all other layers of the population-wage earners, consumers, savers, working farmers, artisans, and even industrialists manufacturing consumer goods.

....It intensifies to the utmost the conflict between the social character of production and the private ownership of the means of production. While it could socialize, without striking a blow, whole sectors of the economy, it respects and shores up private capitalism as far as it can. It does not lead to socialism even by a roundabout road; it is the supreme obstacle to socialism.

....By detaching the economy from the international division of labor, by adapting the "productive forces to the Procrustean bed of the national state," fascism brings, "chaos into world relations."

....At the same time fascism aggravates and brings to their highest degree of tension the contradictions resulting from the uneven development of the capitalist system, and thus hastens the hour of a new division of the world by force of arms-the hour of that "relapse into barbarism" which Rosa Luxemburg foresaw in case the proletariat should be slow to fulfill its class duty and achieve socialism.

....Tomorrow's war will find the satisfied nations, who long ago got their "places in the sun" and divided the planet among themselves through blood and iron, opposing the hungry nations-the late-comers who also demand their share in the feast, if need be through blood and iron. One group is ready to make war to force a new division of the world; the other is ready to make war to prevent this division....

....fascism was rather the specific product of the most advanced form of capitalism, monopolistic heavy industry. However, in these two countries certain special causes accelerated its development; in particular, the fact that after the First World War, these two countries found themselves in the position of "proletarian" nations, vis-a-vis the wealthy countries....

....As for an open fascist dictatorship, however, the bourgeoisie, wiser by the precedents of Italy and Germany, is hesitant to take such a step.

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From: Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerin http://www.pathfinderpress.com/s.nl/it.A/id.702/.f?sc=8&category=110

Reading notes - Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerin

10. Fascism in power: Agricultural policy

....fascism's agricultural policy tends to reconcile what it calls the "interests of agriculture" and the "interests of industry"-in reality those of the big industrialists 339 and big landowners-on the backs of the poor peasants and urban proletariat. It does not protect the small peasantry against capitalism; on the contrary it completes capitalism's invasion of the land.

....In spite of its verbose demagogy, it has no great designs; it lives from week to week; it aspires to nothing more than to keep a handful of monopolists and big landowners alive through wage cuts, state orders and subsidies, seizure of small savings, and autarky. And in order to prolong the reign of this oligarchy, at the price of a restriction of free enterprise, it hastens the ruin of all other layers of the population-wage earners, consumers, savers, working farmers, artisans, and even industrialists manufacturing consumer goods.

....opposes dividing up the land and tries to reassemble large and medium-sized farms at the expense of the small peasantry.

....agricultural laborers are deprived of their independent unions, fixed hours of labor are no longer guaranteed, medieval forms of exploitation are imposed on them, they are excluded from unemployment insurance, and their wages are cut below the subsistence level. The result is that many of them try to escape their wretched condition by pouring into the cities, and the rural districts are depopulated. But access to the centers is severely forbidden them, and they are pitilessly herded back onto the land. Various archaic systems are revived, such as the payment of wages in kind, in order to bind them more securely to the soil.

....gives the big landowners and well-to-do peasants all sorts of favors-tax exemptions, subsidies, debt relief, etc.-which scarcely benefit the little dirt farmer.

....tariffs and prices favors the big landowners and rich farmers almost exclusively at the expense of the small peasants.

....a compromise that safeguards the interests of both the big landowners and the industrialists, but that is paid for by the small peasants.

....To win over the small peasants, the fascist demagogues promised to free them from exploitation by the banks, the big agricultural machinery trusts, the fertilizer trusts and the power trusts; they promised to emancipate them from the big speculators and middlemen with a monopoly on farm products, who buy cheap from the producers and sell dear to the city consumers. But once in power, the fascists do exactly the opposite and aid in every way capitalism's penetration into agriculture.

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From: Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerin http://www.pathfinderpress.com/s.nl/it.A/id.702/.f?sc=8&category=110

Reading notes - Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerin

Chapter 9: Fascism in power: Economic policy

....

When fascism takes power, overflowing with gratitude for big business which financed it, its words and its deeds exhale the purest sort of laisser-faire economic doctrine. It announces its intention of favoring and protecting in every possible way private property and individual initiative. It rejects with horror the idea that the state might meddle in production. But the fascist state stands aside only so long as Messieurs Capitalists request it not to interfere in their private affairs. It imposes on them the lightest possible taxes, the most tenuous sort of control. But it is always ready to come running whenever these gentlemen cannot pull through by themselves. In any such crisis, it is immediately at their service, "socializing" their losses, refloating their enterprises, and keeping them alive with its orders.

....

the course of events soon forces fascism to give its program a serious wrench. Carried away by its eagerness to resurrect big business profits, it finds itself embarked, above all in Germany, on a huge armament program. Fascism speedily gets caught up in a system of wheels within wheels which insensibly conducts it from laisser-faire capitalism to autarky and a wartime economy.

....

fascism is compelled to gradually bureaucratize the economy and is more and more trapped in the contradiction between what it would like to do and what it must do. Groping tortuously forward, it succeeds in maintaining the capitalist system, but only by restricting each individual capitalist's freedom of movement, and by sacrificing the other branches of the economy on the altar of heavy industry. Only the great capitalists continue to draw their profits, while the economy as a whole is paralysed and individuals of every class are ruined or put on short rations.

....

For a moment, fascism, by repairing the profit-making mechanism, seems to banish the illness that capitalism suffers from. But this only aggravates the disease. Charged with saving the system, it ends by plunging it into a worldwide holocaust.

....

Nor is this denouement peculiar to fascism. Every expedient that capitalism has resorted to in other countries has sooner or later led to the same result. Thus the authors of the "New Deal" in the United States temporarily succeeded in restarting the capitalist machine only by arms purchases even more gigantic than those in Germany. With the return of peace, American capitalism could survive only by remaining on a war footing-a nuclear war footing-that imperils the future of the whole planet.

....

It would be a mistake to interpret this state intervention as "socialist" in character. It is brought about not in the interest of the community but in the exclusive interest of the capitalists.

....

generously refloating sinking enterprises. It takes over a block of the stock, but instead of using the opportunity to nationalize these enterprises, it preserves their character as private corporations and leaves the industrialists at their head. Its intervention is only temporary, and it hopes to be able-after it has made the companies solvent by standing all the expense and assuming all the risks-to restore to the private owners the stock it has taken over.

....

In all industrial countries today heavy industry, having become parasitic, survives only thanks to state orders. If there is a difference, it is to be found in the disproportion, much more striking in Italy and Germany than elsewhere, between the national income and the huge expenditures undertaken.

....

State orders are of two sorts: great public works for the sake of prestige, generally yielding no return, and orders and works for "national defense." It is rather difficult to draw a strict line of demarcation between the two sorts of outlay; but as the second is intensified, the first tends to go into the background. Part of the outlay for public works, it is also true, arises out of "national defense," particularly highway and railroad projects.

....

it issues paper and ruins the national currency at the expense of all the people who live on fixed incomes from investments, savings, pensions, government salaries, etc.,-and also the working class, whose wages remain stable or lag far behind the rise in the cost of living.

....

An abundance of paper is issued. But it is not banknotes, but rather commercial paper and short-term bonds.

....

Gradually the hidden inflation produces the same effects as open inflation: the purchasing power of money is lessened. But fascism wants to conceal this depreciation-or at least put off as long as possible the moment of its open appearance-and it wants to preserve as long as possible the artificial value of the currency. It succeeds to a large extent by police terror and by secrecy. But these extraordinary measures are effective only within the national boundaries; they have no effect abroad. Fascism is thus driven to a new expedient: that of placing a wall around the national currency.

....

To forbid the flight of capital is not enough. It is necessary to prohibit all withdrawals of gold not justified by an urgent need for importations. Only the import of materials needed in the manufacture of armaments and not produced domestically can be authorized; other imports are tolerated only if the former have not already exhausted the available foreign exchange.

....

from expedient to expedient-following no preconceived theory but in a purely empirical fashion, perhaps without having foreseen exactly where the road was leading which excessive armaments was forcing it to takefascism arrives at a "war economy" similar to that of the belligerent countries between 1914 and 1918. The only difference between yesterday and today is that the economy of 1914-1918 was a wartime economy in the proper meaning of the word, while the present fascist economy is war economy in peace time.

....

distinguishing characteristic of this economy is the continuous extension of the functions of the state. The state is the supreme director of the whole economy; the state becomes the sole customer of industry; the state drains off all private savings; the state monopolizes foreign trade; the state controls prices; the state freely disposes of labor; the state allots raw materials; the state determines in what sectors of economy new investments are necessary and decides on new manufactures, etc., etc.

....

a few innocent people are still convinced that under a fascist regime the big capitalists have no power over the state, but that, on the contrary, the state rules the capitalists with a rod of iron. Whence comes this persistent illusion? The fascist plebeians have a large share of responsibility for its spread. In fact, they take their wishes for reality, and would have others do so also. Indeed they would like to reverse the roles and use the "war economy" and the "corporations" to subject capitalism to the authoritarian rule of the state-that is to say, to themselves. As masters of the economy, they would possess wealth and power. Also a little verbal demagogy seems useful to allay the discontent of their rank-and-file. But they no more manage in this field than any other to go from words to deeds. The capitalists vigorously defend themselves against these pretensions. Faithful to economic liberalism, they accept the war economy only under the force of circumstances and insist on being in charge of it. They will not stand for the plebeians taking advantage of it to imprison them in an ever more stringent "statism." They fear that the "corporations" or "professional groups" may be diverted from their original aim, strictly limited in space and time, so that they are caught in their own trap. The rulers of the fascist state formally condemn and repudiate all "socializing" tendencies. They draw the line between temporary measures capitalism may resort to and the idle dreams of some who, following a preconceived scheme, would transform this "statism" into a permanent system.

....

industrialists start grumbling not only about the plebeian demagogues but about the man who has done the most for them, who is entirely devoted to them, who would doubtless readily dispense with subjecting them to restrictions were he not himself forced to insure the success of the "four-year plan" at all costs.

....

sections of light industry working for domestic consumption have still more cause for complaint. They pay dearly for the enhanced domination of heavy industry, through higher prices for machinery, fuels, etc. They see their markets constantly growing smaller because of the lessened buying power of the masses. On account of the preference given the importation of products to be used in armaments, they suffer a serious scarcity of raw materials and undergo a severe crisis.

....

As for the middle classes-the very ones whose discontent put fascism in power-they are simply bled white.

....

small manufacturers and independent craftsmen suffer both from a scarcity of raw materials and a lack of markets.

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From: Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerin http://www.pathfinderpress.com/s.nl/it.A/id.702/.f?sc=8&category=110

Reading notes - Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerin

Chapter 7: The real fascist doctrine

....Fascism no longer needs to hide its real face, and in fact it finds it useful to legitimize its rule with a "doctrine." This doctrine, to be sure, was not elaborated for the first time after the conquest of power. Long before that, it could be found in the writings and speeches of the leaders, though submerged in "anti-capitalist" phraseology. Now demagogy retires to the background, yielding the spotlight to ideological justification of the dictatorship. And at last we see clearly that fascist doctrine is an old acquaintance; it is a twin of reactionary philosophy, the philosophy of feudalism, of absolutism.

....This was precisely the philosophy that the bourgeoisie had to combat so bitterly at the dawn of its rule in order to achieve its own liberation. To the pessimistic dogma of the fall of man, the bourgeoisie opposed the idea of unlimited progress; to the "aristocratic principle" and the "Moloch-State," government by the masses and democracy; to brute force, human "rights."

....But the day came when the bourgeoisie perceived "that all the weapons which it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education which it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods which it had created had fallen away from it" -when it understood that "all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress attacked and menaced its class rule .... " Shaken to its foundations by the crisis of capitalism, able to save its threatened profits only by destroying democratic institutions and brutally exterminating the proletarian organizations, the bourgeoisie rejects the ideology that once helped it triumph over absolutism. Indeed, it dresses itself up in the ideology of that self-same absolutism-it denies progress, attacks reason, refuses the masses the right of self-government, tramples on democracy, invokes the "aristocratic principle" and "reasons of State," rehabilitates violence. There is nothing astonishing about finding reactionary thinkers who attacked with hatred the ideas of the French Revolution, democracy and liberalism, suddenly becoming great men. From these "masters of counterrevolution"  fascism borrows its doctrines. "We represent the antithesis ... of all that world of the 'immoral principles' of 1789,"  a reaction against the "movement of the eighteenth-century visionaries and Encyclopedists," exclaim the Italian fascists. And the National Socialists say: "The year 1789 will be erased from history .... " "We wish to destroy the immoral ideology of the French Revolution."

....The bourgeoisie used the idea of progress to batter down the bastilles of absolutism. Antiquity and the Middle Ages lived on the idea of the corruption and decadence of the human race, on the dogma of the fall of man: humanity, come perfect from the hands of God, was through original sin plunged into evil. Man is born wicked and is not perfectible-and similarly his political, economic, and social system. Man must accept it as imposed by God, without discussion and without hope of improvement. To this pessimistic doctrine, so convenient for the justification of tyranny and the legitimization of poverty, the bourgeoisie, eager to be freed, opposed the idea of infinite progress at the beginning of its domination. The golden age is not in the past but before us; humanity is perfectible and is continually rising from poverty to material well-being, from ignorance to knowledge, from barbarism to civilization. The great discoveries of the second half of the eighteenth century, the birth of the machine age and modern industry, gave new confirmation to the idea of progress. The young industrial bourgeoisie was sure the new means of production invented by it were capable of infinitely improving the lot of humanity. From this came the blissful optimism of the Saint-Simonian businessmen like Michel Chevalier.

....But a day comes when the idea of progress is turned against the bourgeoisie. The productive forces, as they develop at a dizzy rate of speed, come into conflict with the social system. Capitalist society ceases to be progressive, and, far from holding out to humanity a prospect of well-being, it offers only poverty and unemployment. Then suddenly the bourgeoisie stops believing in progress. The opponents of progress become its ideological masters.

Another weapon of the conquering bourgeoisie was reason. For revealed knowledge, it substituted the free exercise of intelligence, the supremacy of common sense. But today that weapon is being turned against it. The employment of reason and scientific analysis can no longer serve except to undermine the foundations of its rule and condemn the capitalist system of production; only a resorting to the "irrational" can permit it to prolong its reign. Let man renounce domination of the world and subject himself to it as to a "mystic phenomenon" (the expression is from Edouard Berth, another of Sorel's disciples);  let his intelligence be ready to abdicate before all the instinctive forces and be carried away by any "movement" whatever; let him be ready to follow the first charlatan who comes along, the first maker of miracles or myths; let him be ready to trust, not to reasoned actions but to blind faith in a Duce or a Fuehrer in seeking a way out from his sufferings.

....Once absolutism was conquered, the bourgeoisie instituted the form of government that best corresponded to its historic mission. Free competition, "laisserjaire," and free trade were the very conditions for capitalist expansion. Economic liberalism was extended to political liberalism, to parliamentary democracy. But a day comes when liberty and democracy are incompatible with bourgeois rule. The era of free competition is succeeded by that of monopoly capitalism. We have seen that in order to save their profits, threatened by crisis, the capitalist magnates need the support of the state. They have to substitute for the democratic state the authoritarian state (Chapter 1). Then the bourgeoisie tramples with rage on its old idols, and the reactionary theoreticians of anti-democracy become its ideological masters.

....At the dawn of its rule, the capitalist bourgeoisie demanded that the state call as little attention to its existence as possible, and it victoriously refuted the "barbarous" concept of the Moloch-State. But today, it needs the strong state. Hence it adopts the philosophers of absolutism and takes as its own, Hobbes' State, "a real mortal god"; Hegel's State, which is its own end, and for which the individual is nothing; and Treitschke's State, which "does not need to ask the people to consent but only to obey."

....In the early days of its power, the bourgeoisie denied the legitimacy of violence and the "right of the strongest" as old barbaric notions deriving from the first ages of man upon which feudal and absolutist society still rested. Instead of force, the eighteenth-century philosophers championed human "rights." Relations between men should be no longer settled by force but determined by contracts; Rousseau refuted the "alleged" right of the strongest and declared that "might does not make right."

In fact, with the appearance of "right," the bourgeoisie, once it was the dominant class, ruled by force. But, not needing to display force too openly, it preferred to rule through the fiction of "law." But a time comes when the bourgeoisie can save its threatened profits only by exterminating the proletarian organizations and governing through terror. Then it digs up the old notions of barbaric epochs; it rehabilitates violence and adopts reactionary apologists of violence as its authorities.

These apologists transfer the discoveries of Darwin from the domain of biology to the field of sociology, distorting them in the process.

From: Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerin http://www.pathfinderpress.com/s.nl/it.A/id.702/.f?sc=8&category=110

What could the organized proletariat have done? Reading notes on Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerin

From Chapter 5: Fascist strategy on the march to power

....The German Socialists and Communists similarly refused to believe in the triumph of National Socialism. More than that, they periodically announced its rout. The Socialists uttered shouts of victory on every occasion: in August, 1932, because President Hindenburg refused Hitler's demands; and after the elections of November 6, because the votes for the Nazis showed a falling off. On that date Vorwaerts said: "Ten years ago we predicted the bankruptcy of National Socialism; it is written in black and white in our paper!" 53 And just before Hitler's accession to power, one of their leaders, Schiffrin, wrote: "We no longer perceive anything but the odor of a rotting corpse. Fascism is definitely dead; it will never arise again."

The Communists were scarcely more perspicacious. After the election of September 14, 1930, the Rote Fahne stated: "September 14 was the culminating point of the National Socialist movement in Germany. It will be followed only by weakening and decline." 55 In 1932, Thaelmann was aroused against "opportunistic overestimation of Hitler fascism." 56 In all the Communists' literature of 1932, they speak of nothing but retrogression, decay, break up, and retreat in the fascist camp. After the elections of November 6, we read in the Rote Fahne: "Everywhere S.A.'s are deserting the ranks of Hitlerism and coming over to the Communist flag. They are beginning to repudiate Hitler in his own movement." 57 And on the eve of fascism's taking power, Thaelmann spoke of a "turn of the class forces toward the proletarian revolution."

But what tactics could the organized proletariat have used against fascism on the way to power? Do not forget that fascism won power legally. Workers' militia, indispensable for fighting fascist bands while they played merely the role of "anti-labor militia," would no longer suffice to prevent fascism from gaining seats in parliament, winning public opinion, and entering the government through legal channels. Nor could a simple "general protest strike," even if effective throughout the country, block fascism's road to power-unless the strike was the point of departure for a revolutionary offensive. The Italian reformists tried it; at the end of July, 1922, they called a general strike throughout the peninsula. But they sought only to bring pressure on the government, on parliament and the Crown, to defend "civil liberties and the Constitution." But because the stoppage of work was not accompanied by aggressive action, it was child's play for the fascists to smash the movement. They insured the essential public services with "scabs" and made themselves masters of the streets. Far from blocking their road, this disastrous general strike was a moral victory for them-"the Caporetto* of the working-class movement."

Then what could the organized proletariat have done? Once fascism embarks on the road to power, the labor movement has only one recourse left: outstrip the fascists and win power first. But the proletarian parties did not show themselves to be revolutionary; not for an instant did they dream of conquering power by force. The truth is that on the eve of fascism's victory, in both Italy and Germany, the labor movement was profoundly weakened and demoralized: not only because of unemployment; not only because of repeated defeats that came from want of bold tactics in the daily clashes with fascist bands; but chiefly because the union organizations had been unable to defend the gains won by the working class. In Italy, the Federation of Labor did not know how to resist the wage cuts during the crisis, or to force the employers in the metal industry to observe the law for workers' control. In Germany, the German General Federation of Labor prevented the workers from fighting against Bruening's decree-laws, which cut wages, on the pretext that to defend their livelihood would endanger the Bruening government, and Bruening was "better" than Hitler. This tactic, known as that of the "lesser evil," greatly demoralized the workers.

When fascism embarked on the conquest of power, the labor movement showed itself to be inert and absolutely incapable of outstripping it. In Italy, the Socialists posed as defenders of the established order and crawled at the feet of the rulers of the bourgeois state. They implored the royal carabinieri and the army not to yield power to Mussolini. At the end of July, their leader Turati went to the

King to "remind him that he is the supreme defender of the Constitution."

In Germany, the reformist leaders begged Hindenburg and the Reichswehr to "do their duty" and not hand over power to Hitler. When Papen removed the Socialist government of Prussia on July 20, 1932, they limited themselves to protesting this "violation of the Constitution." They appealed to-the Supreme Court in Leipzig. Ten days before Hitler came to power, the executive committee of the Federation of Labor called on President Hindenburg. The union leaders "clung to faith in the state. They still hoped for help from the President of the Reich." 60 And on January 30, 1933, the day Hitler formed his government, Vorwaerts printed in a special edition: "In the face of a government that threatens a coup d'etat, the Social Democracy stands firm on the ground of the Constitution and legality." As for the Communists, in spite of their revolutionary verbiage, they took refuge behind the excuse that the reformists would do nothing-and so did nothing themselves.

5

Fascism is now in power; its leader has been entrusted by the head of the state with forming a government. But the last word has not been said, because the real adversary, the organized proletariat, is not yet conquered. The workers' parties and the unions still exist and are legal. We shall see how fascism utilizes the machinery of state to complete its victory, exterminate the workers' organizations, and install the dictatorship.

During the preceding period, when fascism was on the way to power, its tactics, as we have seen, were primarily legalistic. Its preparations for insurrection were only a bluff, intended to keep up the morale of its own troops. Now, just the reverse is true. Legalistic tactics are now only a war ruse intended to put the adversary to sleep, a mask under the cover of which fascism is already violating legality and methodically preparing a violent coup....

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Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerin

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Daniel Guerin on Jew-hatred and fascism

....Would it be possible to transmute the anti-capitalism of the masses into still something else? Fascism found in the Jews-under favorable circumstances-a second scapegoat.

Anti-Semitism exists in a latent state in the subconscious of the middle classes. Throughout the entire nineteenth century, the petty bourgeoisie, victim of capitalist development, had a tendency to concentrate its animosity on the Jewish usurer or banker and the little Jewish merchant. Toussenel, the Frenchman, gave his Financial Feudalism the subtitle, "The Jews, kings of the epoch," and wrote: "I advise all makers of revolution to take the banks from the Jews." By exploiting the theme of racism, the fascists were sure to please the middle classes; at the same time it protected its own financial backers from popular anger, and it diverted the anti-capitalism of the masses to the Jews.

In Italy 

In Italy, where the Jews were only a small minority of the population (fifty or sixty thousand out of forty-four million), this demagogy had little chance of success, though fascism did not completely neglect it. The newspaper, Il Tevere, stated after the publication of the Labor Charter that the time of domination by Jewish bankers is now past. 10 The fascist "extremists" readily attributed the economic miscalculations of their regime to the Jewish action of international banking. 11

It was not until July 1938 that Italian fascism, in imitation of its ally Hitler, and to distract attention from its current difficulties, officially added anti-Semitism to its demagogic arsenal.

In Germany

Anti-Semitism found a much more favorable field in Germany. Numerically the Jews constituted only one per cent of the population, but following the war a sudden influx of more than 100,000 Jewish immigrants from Poland, the Ukraine, and Lithuania, revived the "Jewish question." The role played by the Jews in the economic, political, and intellectual life was considerable. There were enough Jews at the head of banks for the identification of high finance with Judaism to be readily accepted by the masses; at the head of the big department and one-price stores there were enough Jews for the anger of the small shopkeepers to be transferred to the Jews. There were enough Jews prominent in Anglo-Saxon finance for its debtor, Germany, to seem to be the slave of "world Jewry," and among the speculators carrying on profitable operations on the Stock Exchange there were enough Jews for the small investors to consider them responsible for their ruin. The Marxist parties also had at their head enough stirring and brilliant Jewish leaders to make it possible to denounce the collusion of capitalism and Marxism, and to represent Jewish bankers and Jewish workers as working hand in hand for universal domination by the Jewish race, according to the plan revealed by the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion-a legend already invented in the nineteenth century. Finally and most important, there were enough Jews belonging to the middle classes and the liberal professions-enough small Jewish shopkeepers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, writers and artists, hated by their "Aryan" rivals-to make it possible when the time came to unleash popular fury against them, and thereby protect not only the "Aryan" industrial magnates and bankers but even the big Jewish financiers! 12

National Socialism's trick is to transmute the anticapitalism of its followers into anti-Semitism. "Socialism," Goebbels wrote, "can be achieved only in opposition to the Jews, and it is because we want socialism that we are anti-Semitic." 13

Subsequently the sorcerer's apprentice, as in Goethe's famous ballad, became a prisoner of the evil spirits which he had invoked. Besieged by a fearsome coalition of great powers which he caused to unite against him, face to face with the dilemma "to be or not to be," his delirious imagination saw in the Jews, by the very fact that he persecuted them, not only a scapegoat, but a servant of the Devil: at home invincible adversaries, and abroad directors of a global encirclement. He imagined they were some foreign body that he must "kill or be killed by."

In the madness of a persecutor himself persecuted, he massacred an entire people, like Herod not even sparing the infants who, though innocent, were threatening because they might perpetuate this race of bogeymen. The slaughter was heaviest in Eastern Europe with its heavy Jewish population; the German conquest made this area the eastern rampart of the Third Reich. Thus anti-Semitism, which began as a racial prejudice exploited as a demagogic trick, ended in the most abominable genocide of all time.

Although fascism arouses the popular masses especially against the "international plutocracy" and the Jews, it cannot avoid-without unmasking itself-an attack on its own big bourgeoisie. However, the fascist declamations against the big bourgeoisie, if examined closely, are in no way socialist.

The middle classes' opposition to the big bourgeoisie differs sharply from that of the working class. The middle classes do not desire the elimination of the big bourgeoisie as a class. On the contrary, they would like to become big bourgeois themselves. When fascism proclaims itself anti-bourgeois, and when it denounces the "degeneration" of the big bourgeoisie, it has no intention of attacking the existing social order; rather, it wants to rejuvenate that order by injecting fresh blood, plebeian blood. Thus it flatters the middle classes, while at the same time diverting the masses from the class struggle and proletarian socialism.

In Italy

Gorgolini sneers when he describes this "bourgeoisie inhibited by the timidity which frequently attacks those who are too refined and made sluggish by digestive difficulties." 14 Lanzillo, at the time of the occupation of the factories, also ridiculed the "humiliated, clumsy, rotten, and corrupting bourgeoisie." 15 But here the cloven hoof appears. To restore to the big bourgeoisie "some of its energy," 16 new talents must come on the scene: "The dynamic law of social history," declares a motion voted on October 5, 1924, by a fascist "trade union" congress, "consists less in an irreconcilable struggle between the classes ... than a struggle of ability, that is to say, the struggle led by professionally skilled groups who are acquiring the ability to assume the functions of management, against groups who are losing their ability to fulfill these functions of command .... " To translate this gibberish into clear language: the big bourgeoisie must gradually give way to the "competent" -that is, to the fascist plebeians.

In Germany

The Nazis make the big bourgeois their whipping boy. Hitler has not enough epithets at his command with which to flay the big bourgeoisie. He denounces its "proverbial cowardice," its "senility," its "intellectual rottenness," its "cretinism." But later his real meaning appears: it is necessary, he writes, "to take care that the cultivated classes are continually renewed by an influx of fresh blood coming from the lower classes." 17 August Winnig devotes an entire book to the theme that the mission of the popular masses is to rejuvenate an aged social order and regenerate an exhausted ruling class: "The raw material that is the proletariat has the vocation of creating its own new values, its own ideas, and introducing these forces into the old community, not in order to destroy it, but to rejuvenate it." 18

Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerin

http://www.pathfinderpress.com/s.nl/c.ACCT136348/sc.8/category.110/.f

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