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This is Michael Parenti and welcome to Real History, a series of talks by me on different historical subjects that are relevant for understanding today’s realities. Most people are never exposed to real history. In school we usually don’t read history; [the] history [that] we read [is] history textbooks, and mainstream ones at that which avoid underlying realities and ones that propagate myths, myths that serve the powers that be, myths that some of us find harmful to the truth and to democracy, so this is Real History.

This particular segment is entitled ‘The Functions of Fascism’.

Fascism was a name that was given to the political movement that arose in Italy under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, who ruled that country from 1922 to 1943. Nazism, a similar movement lead by Adolf Hitler, [who] was Germany’s dictator from 1933 to ’45. It’s considered by most observers to be a variant of fascism, as to a lesser degree is the militaristic government that controlled Japan from 1940 to ’45, and the Falangist movement lead by Francisco Franco in Spain, when the fascists there—with the military aid, by the way, of the Italian and Nazi fascists—took over after a protracted civil war.

There are similar fascists or self‐avowed fascist movements but less successful ones arose in Eastern Europe, and in Great Britain, the United States, France, and other West industrial nations—movements. Some of them also came to power. We might recall today when the press is full of news about how Bulgaria, or Romania, or Hungary, or Lithuania, are returning—or Poland—are returning to their—to their democratic roots by overthrowing communism. We might recall that they weren’t democratic before communism came in, they were fascist. In fact, several of those countries, with the exception of Poland, were open allies of the Nazis. They were Nazi, fascist allies.

Now like with a lot of terms, like liberalism, democracy, socialism, communism, no single definition of fascism maybe will satisfy everybody. And with fascism there’s a really special problem, because it’s a beguiling mix of revolutionary‐sounding mass appeals, and reactionary class politics, and the reactionary class politics are the part of fascism that our established historians, our establishment historians, almost never talk about. Hitler’s party, for instance, was called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the NSDAP or ‘Nazis’. It’s a very left‐sounding name, National Socialist German Workers, and it was designed to win broad support among working people, even while the Nazis were destroying working‐class organizations.

In other words, fascism—the original Italian and German variations of fascism—was a political phenomenon that made a revolutionary appeal without making a revolution. It promised to solve the ills of the many while in fact protecting the special interests of the few with violence and terror. And it propagated a new political consciousness, a new order, a new nation, to serve the same old capitalist system.

Let me run down a couple of the major characteristics of the fascist ideology. First, there is a glorification of the leadership cult. The commitment to an absolutist and supreme leader, all‐knowing, all‐guiding, the Führerprinzip, as it’s called, the Führer principle—the leader principle, I should say.

Second, there is a glorification of the nation‐state as an end in itself, as an entity unto itself, an absolute component, to which the individual is subsumed. Everything in the state, everything for the state, nothing outside of the state, that was Mussolini’s dictum, and it was Hitler’s also. In fact, with Hitler, Rudolf Hess once said ‘Adolf Hitler is Germany, German is Adolf Hitler’, therefore combining both the leadership cult and the state cult in one.

Third, there was a glorification of military conquest and jingoism, the glory of—that the state is vitalized by subduing, countering, taking other people, enslaving them, you increase your own power, your own glory. Fourth, there was a the propagation of a folk mysticism; xenophobia and racism. The Nazi slogan was ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’: one people, one state, one leader.

Also, as a—other—other side of the folk mysticism and this blood cult of this special blood, this special legacy, the atavistic wonders of our particular people, was a—a—as I say, a xenophobia, a hatred, and racism, a hatred of other peoples of other nationalities. With the Nazis and most other Eastern European fascists, it was antsemitism. The Jew was seen as the perpetrator of all that was ill in society. The trade unionists? They were Jews. The communists? And so forth and so on. And behind them stood this wicked, alien‐blooded creature who would undermine our state.

Fifth, there was an opposition, both in Italian Fascism and in German Nazism, an opposition to socialism, to communism, to anarchism, and to all left, egalitarian class movements and doctrines, along with opposition to trade unions, opposition to labor parties, opposition to other working‐class political organizations.

Of these various characteristics of Nazism, one, two, three, four are often talked about by established historians and mainstream historians. That last one, though, opposition to labor unions, opposition to working‐class parties, opposition to socialism and such, that one is never talked about by Western writers, especially American writers.

The historians and the political scientists and the journalists who treat the subject of Fascism usually write from a centrist ideological perspective; from the political center of the spectrum. Which means [that] they usually ignore the link between Fascism and capitalism, just as they tend to ignore the entire subject of capitalism itself when there’s something unfavorable to say about it.

Instead, they dwell on the more phantasmic components of Fascist ideology: the nihilistic revolt against Western rationalism and individuality, the irrational appeals to mass submission to a leader and all that, and Fascism was those things but along with its irrational appeals… it had rational functions: it was a rational instrument for class domination and for the preservation of the existing capitalist system.

After World War I, Italy had a parliamentary government that seemed really incapable of solving the country’s economic crises. Profits were declining, banks were failing, unemployment was rising, so to ensure profits the big industrial giants and the big landowners would have to slash wages and raise prices.

The state, in turn, would have to provide the big owners with tariff protections, along with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this, the population would have to be taxed more heavily, their wages rolled back, and social welfare expenditures drastically cut. It sounds like Reaganism? Well, it is. Even more extremely so.

But the government wasn’t totally free to apply these harsh measures. First of all, Italian workers and peasants had their own unions, they had political organizations, they had cooperatives, they had their own publications, and through the use of demonstrations and strikes, boycotts, factory takeovers, occupying farmlands, the forcible occupation of farmlands, they often won some very real concessions in wages and work conditions, unemployment benefits, and they won the right to organize… and even in the face of this worsening economic crisis they were able to mount a troublesome defense of their standard of living. (I mean troublesome for those who own the land, the labor, and the capital, and the money and the banks and the farms and the factories.)

So the only solution, really, was to smash the worker and peasant organizations, in effect destroying all political and civil liberties, including the right to organize, agitate, and propagandize. The state would have to be more authoritarian and more firmly subservient to the interests of capital.

Mussolini and his Blackshirts were around right after World War I, and through—for about three or four years, the big landowners and industrialists used their Fascist goon squads, gave them money and gave them arms, and used them as kind of strikebreakers: antilabor militias. They styled themselves the United Front against Bolshevism.

In 1922, the big capital interests in Italy decided to go for the whole thing. Representatives of the Federation of Industry and the Federation of Agriculture, which was a[n] agribusiness firm, and representatives of the national banking association, they all met together, and they met with Mussolini, and they planned the Fascist March on Rome. Mussolini sat there and planned that with the leading capitalists of Italy. (By the way, this is almost never mentioned in the accounts about the March on Rome.)

These big capitalists contributed 20 million lire toward that undertaking. In the words of Senator Ettore Conti, himself a very loyal representative of the moneyed interests, quote, “Mussolini was the candidate of the plutocracy [that is, of the wealthy], and the business associations.”

A very similar pattern, by the way, of coordination and compliance existed between—in Germany also, less than a decade later. German workers and farm laborers and the period following World War I under the Weimar Republic won some important economic concessions: they won an eight‐hour day, they won unemployment insurance, and they were able to elect shop committees, and they won the right to unionize. And again, during the 1920s, these paramilitary, right‐wing gangs, most notably Hitler’s Brownshirts, stormtroopers, was subsidized by business in a limited way and kept as a kind of reserve army, with Göring called the ‘bodyguard of capitalism’.

And their job, again, was to strike, break, and to harass organized workers and to beat up socialists and communists and such. The nearly total collapse of the German economy, in 1929–30, presented the owning class with a momentous crisis.

They had very big capital investments, and these left them with very high fixed costs that had to be met even as their plans lay idle. Only massive state aid could revive their profits. Wages and social welfare, human service expenditures had to be cut. Union contracts had to be abrogated…in fact, human contracts had to be abrogated too.

Business would need new subsidies and tax exemptions. The crisis in agriculture was—was equally severe and the large landed proprietors, the junker class demanded even higher subsidies, heavier duties in foreign agricultural imports and an end to farm unions. These unions were holding wages up, and when wages were being sustained, you cut into profits.

So by 1930 most of the influential landowners and big industrialists and bankers, especially the industrialists in steel, coal, and mining, had concluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served the interests—served their interests, and no longer could protect their class, and that it was too accommodating to the working class, and to certain sectors of light industry. So they greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, and they propelled the Nazi Party onto the national stage.

By 1930, most of the great industrialists and bankers were underwriting the Nazi Party. And what happened in 1930 with this injection of hundreds of millions of marks, is that Hitler was able to catapult his party onto the national scene. It went from a cult of Brownshirt thugs to a national party mobilized in the election of 1930, [where] the Nazi Party gained a hundred and seven seats in the Reichstag, and Hitler, later on, evoking the memory of what he called the ‘astonishing campaign’, told his listeners to think of, quote, “What it means when a thousand speakers each has a car at his disposal, and can hold in a year a hundred thousand meetings.”

And in 1931 and ’32 the subsidies from the big industrialists continued to grain in ever more abundantly. So the Nazis were projected onto the national stage and they gained an ever larger presence in the Reichstag.

Neither in Italy nor in Germany was revolution really something that was […] in the offing. I mean, it wasn’t a real threat. The left was never strong enough to take state power in either of those countries. So the threat wasn’t really from the left. The bourgeoisie resorted to Fascism less in response to the disturbances in the street, and more in response to the disturbances in their own economic system. The threat wasn’t from the left; the threat was from their own economic system and its contradictions, and the fact that democratic forces had developed enough democratic strength to resist the austerity and the rollback that the capitalists tried to impose to maintain their levels of profit. The sickness that these capitalists tried to vanish was from within, not from without.

[…]

Two, they wanted to embark on an aggressive foreign policy to open new markets for export and investment, thereby gaining a more equal footing with French and English competitors. So the Fascists really became a very valuable ally against the capitalists’ two worst enemies. The capitalists’ two worst enemies are first the workers in their own country, and the capitalists of foreign countries, and the genuineness, by the way, of fascism’s hatred of workers and foreigners was never open to doubt, so they fit in quite snuggly.

Now, I don’t mean to say that all the big industrialists and financiers supported Fascism with equal fervor. Some, like Tyson, were early and enthusiastic backers of Hitler, the aged Emil Kurdoff thanked God that he lived long enough to see the Führer emerge as the savior of Germany. Others contributed money to the Nazis but also to other antisocialist parties on the right.

They backed Hitler only when he promised to be the best hope for their interests. By the way, many of them still remained privately critical of the more extreme expressions of Nazi propaganda, and they were a little uneasy about the antibourgeois rhetoric as sometimes used by some of the fascist plebeian elements.

Some elements in business were not that hot for Fascism. Light industry, which had lower fixed costs, and more stable profits than heavy industry, that was dependent on consumer buying power and such, the light industrialists were not that keen about a more aggressive foreign policy, about heavy subsidies to heavy industry and the like.

But when push came to shove, they may not have been close to the Fascists, but they weren’t about to ally themselves with the proletariat against the business class of which they were a part, and they pretty much sided with the dominant elements, or kept their mouths shut.

There was another element in these two societies that not only tolerated the rise of Fascism, but supported it, and I’m talking about the parliamentary capitalist state itself, not the government or the parliament as such, but the instruments of the state, the instruments that have the legal monopoly on force and violence: the police, the army, the courts, and the like, the secret intelligence agencies and such.

In both Italy and Germany, years before Mussolini and Hitler emerged victorious, these elements—courts, police, the army—showed a real leniency and open collaboration with Fascism, while harshly repressing the left. Mussolini and Hitler could not have come to power without the help of the state machinery, and that state machinery was never really against them.

In Italy, the police collaborated with the Fascists in attacking labor and peasant organizations, they had recruited criminals for the Fascists—action squads, the squad[r]isti as they call[ed them], the squadristi, they promised them immunity from prosecution for past crimes. When applications for gun permits were regularly denied to workers and peasants… police guns and police cars were made available to Mussolini’s goons. Germany, the same kind of thing went on.

Immediately after the war, the military police and the judiciary sided with the rightists to suppress the left: a pattern of collaboration that continued to the day that Hitler took power. In other words, these supposed ‘democracies’, which were equally opposed to totalitarianism of the left and the right, were not equally opposed.

They were opposed to the left, and they were very close and comfy with the right, because the right, while it was out to destroy that ‘democracy’, the right was protecting the interests of property and the existing class structure, and that’s the difference between the left and the right, and that’s why a capitalist state tends to treat the right so much more leniently, and the left so much more harshly.

Let’s look at what the Weimar—what happened by the police and the courts under the Weimar Republic. These are the figures: left‐wing groups were charged with twenty‐two murders. Thirty‐eight people on the left were found guilty for those twenty‐[two] murders, they averaged fifteen years in prison, ten of those thirty‐eight were executed.

Among right‐wing groups: three hundred and fifty four murders. What is that? That’s about fifty times—sixty times more the number of murders. Of these three hundred and fifty four murders… three hundred and twenty‐six were not even prosecuted!

Twenty‐three were discharged—twenty‐three people of the right‐wing groups were discharged despite entering guilty pleas! They pleaded guilty to the murders and they were discharged! Twenty‐four were found guilty in part. Their average term in prison: four months. The number of them executed for the murders: none! So that’s the way the state operated.

Almost all the literature on Fascism and Nazism concentrates on who supported Hitler, who supported Mussolini, who’s behind him, was it this group or that group, and such. ‘Oh, there was a couple millionaires who didn’t like them. Oh, there was some workers who did vote for them. So you can’t really say it’s one class or another.’ Well, I think you could pretty well say which class gave them the money, that gave them the visibility, the organization, and the numbers to some degree.

But there’s something else. Besides talking about who supported Fascism, one thing [that] these historians and political scientists never talk about, is who did Fascism support, when Fascism came into power? Who did the Fascists support? Well, in Italy and Germany, when they came into power, they began implementing the sternest measures to rescue the capitalist economy.

Labor unions were dissolved. Strikes were outlawed. Union contracts were nullified. Prominent union leaders and other labor activists were imprisoned or murdered. Union property was confiscated. Worker publications were banned. Opposition political parties were outlawed, their leaders jailed. Civil liberties were suspended. Fascist‐sponsored “unions” were set up and their function was to speed up production, prevent wildcat strikes, and apply punitive regulations, including fines, dismissals, and imprisonments against workers who agitated or complained of shop conditions.

I mean, even a Nazi labor front newspaper had to admit, quote, “Some shop regulations are reminiscent of penal codes.” Workers no longer had the right to change jobs, they could be shifted from one employment to another regardless of their wishes, they could be conscripted for any work assumed useful to the nation’s economy without guarantee of wages equal to previous earnings.

In both Italy and Germany, the government exercised arbitrary…I mean, compulsory arbitration and regulation of working wages. By the way, any worker contested that would be contesting the laws of the state, and therefore would be declared an enemy of the state, not just in conflict with management, but an enemy of the state.