Abstract
In 1933, a fateful year in the history of fascism as a historical reality, the German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch published the essay ‘Inventory of a Revolutionary Façade’, a scathing attack on the revolutionary pretentions of Nazism he found so obscene. He declared that ‘the enemy is not content with torturing and killing workers. He not only wants to smash the Red Front, but also strips the jewellery off the supposed corpse.’ So, ‘the burning of the Reichstag alone is not sufficient, the populace must also believe that Nero is the early Christian in person. Thus hell mocked right from the beginning with a grotesque mask of salvation.’ Bloch was in no doubt that Nazism was erecting ‘a revolutionary façade with trappings of the Paris Commune’. It was a ‘false siren song’, ‘an illusion’, ‘a deception’, a ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ who had stolen from the Communists only the ‘emblems’ of revolution: ‘the colour red’, ‘the procession’ and the ‘dangerous songs’, ‘the forest of flags’. 1
Given the persistence in Marxist circles of such preconceptions about fascism in general and Nazism in particular, it was with some trepidation that Roger Griffin, the hallmark of whose research is his insistence on the revolutionary, ‘palingenetic’ dimension of fascism, gave a paper on Marxist theories of fascism to a somewhat special conference held on fascism in Leeds in November 2003. No ‘normal’ academic occasion, it united left-wing historians and anti-fascist activists in celebrating seven decades of the victorious struggle of the British working class against fascism’s reactionary alliance with capitalism. It was a lions’ den, and Griffin emerged somewhat mauled. But it was when his subsequent chapter for the book that grew out of the conference, British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State, 2 was rejected as displaying a defective understanding of Marxist positions, thus underlining the considerable problems of achieving a fruitful scholarly dialogue between Marxists and non-Marxists, that the acorn was formed which grew into the seedling represented by this present special issue of EJPT.
Daunted but unbowed from his two unsuccessful skirmishes even with well-disposed Marxist academics, Griffin was goaded into exploring more rigorously the possibilities of some sort of rapprochement on the basis of some major Marxist theorists whose positions seemed to allow for significant concessions on fascism’s autonomy (even if only ‘relative’) from capitalism, and its bid to create a new (and hence revolutionary) temporality distinct from the one pursued by liberal democracy. In particular, he was attracted, however ingenuously, by Benjamin’s notion of the infiltration of mythic, Messianic time into the continuum of history in the ‘moment of danger’ to produce an explosive charge of left-wing revolutionary energies, a model which also seemed eminently applicable to fascism during the inter-war crisis. He was drawn by Gramsci’s concession, made from the sobering vantage point of a state prison while trying to make sense of Mussolini’s success in defying objective material conditions and establishing his movement’s hegemony, of the relative autonomy of ideology and of the populist revolutionary dynamic of Fascism, albeit ‘passive’ and incapable of fully breaking free from the gravity exerted by capitalism.
Griffin was no less excited to find in a Marxist (or post-Marxist) theorist of the standing of Ernesto Laclau the portrait of communism and fascism as two competing populist ideologies which tapped deep into the existential needs of their followers at a time of acute crisis of the status quo, imparting them both with genuinely trans-class revolutionary impetus. 3 Finally, the highly sophisticated analysis of the ‘politics of time’ by Marxist philosopher and cultural historian Peter Osborne 4 added abundant grist to his mill by recognizing in fascism a form of ‘political modernism’ which pursued an alternative temporality to capitalism and communism, even though Osborne did not explain in his book why this made it ‘counter-revolutionary’ rather than simply ‘revolutionary’ in its own right.
The result of these daring intellectual forays behind the lines was the speculative essay ‘Exploding the Continuum of History: A Non-Marxist’s Marxist Model of Fascism’s Revolutionary Dynamics’, published in a collection of Griffin’s essays on fascism in 2008. 5 This was an explicit appeal, simultaneously provocative and conciliatory, for dialogue between two well-entrenched camps of theory about the nature of fascism which seemed to have long since abandoned any bid – or desire – to reconcile their conflicting interpretations. It took the form of locating theoretical building blocks of a ‘sound’ Marxist approach to fascism extractable – perhaps under duress – from the four theoreticians mentioned, to produce a compound Marxist interpretation compatible with the increasing recognition of its revolutionary and ultimately anti-capitalist dynamics among non-Marxist scholars (what Griffin had called ‘the new consensus’).
The essay posed the question whether, without renouncing fundamental Marxist articles of faith on the unique moral defensibility and legitimacy (at least on paper, since the historical experience of communist regimes is quite another matter) of a Marxist revolution against the capitalist system, it was possible from within the Marxist tradition, broadly understood, to recognize at the heart of Italian Fascism and/or Nazism and related movements a genuinely revolutionary impulse. Marxists were urged to acknowledge that politics and culture were treated as primary loci of transformation and regeneration within the fascists’ mindset, so that the overthrow of capitalism and the imposition of egalitarianism could never be the rationale for their seizure of state power. Nevertheless, in its various permutations all fascisms aspired to harness the forces of ultranationalism in order to create an alternative modernity – a radical alternative to i) liberal capitalism, ii) communism/Soviet communism and iii) military or semi-dictatorial authoritarianism; one which did not preclude strategic alliances with traditional power centres and elites (the bourgeoisie, industry, the military, conservative nationalists, the Church, the monarchy, capitalism) where expedient. By ‘alternative modernity’ is meant a new type of state that could be taken as more appropriate to the needs (cultural, technical, social, existential, etc.) of the modern world (technology/urbanization/mass society) than the other three models.
In other words, Griffin’s essay invited Marxists at least to reconsider whether they could find it within their understanding of history to recognize that the Fascist and Nazi regimes, and the movements that most closely sought to emulate them, cannot be dismissed as merely backward-looking and reactionary, because even their racism and/or militarism, even their way of treating workers, women, homosexuals, etc., were bound up with serious projects of social engineering in an attempt to mobilize/re-educate the masses and weld them into a reborn, dynamic and intrinsically modern national community. Rather than viewing fascism as dismissible as a ‘revolutionary façade’, a vicious wolf in the clothes of Little Red Riding Hood, a mere ‘counter-revolution’ designed to smash socialism and preserve capitalism masquerading as a national socialism, a progressive rupture with the capitalist system, ‘Exploding the Continuum of History’ asked whether the fascist projects could be understood differently, even by those convinced that Marxism represents the only morally defensible revolution of the modern age. Could they be persuaded to use their own analytical paradigm to see in the assaults on state power of inter-war fascisms the first stage in the project to ‘regenerate’ society by creating a new type of national character and harnessing the power of the state to secure a new, powerful place for the reborn nation on the stage of history, thereby saving western civilization from decadence and collapse in the process? In this case, surely, fascism could be seen as revolutionary in its own terms, no matter how repugnant its ethos and achievements.
It was perhaps symptomatic of the sclerotic state of mutual incomprehension between the two ‘sides’ that it was not a Marxist, but another academic convinced that fascism’s revolutionary credentials were no mere forgery, who first answered the call. David D. Roberts, like Griffin a non-Marxist, generally ‘liberal’ student of fascism, had occasion to read an earlier version of Griffin's essay, which he found stimulating, challenging and particularly worthwhile in its effort to engage Marxists in the light of new thinking about fascism. Indeed, he immediately began to envision the scope for some sort of forum engaging a range of Marxist-leaning and non-Marxist scholars on the issues Griffin raised. Like Griffin and others, Roberts had argued elsewhere that fascism is best understood not as some ‘revolt against modernity’ but as a revolutionary effort to create an alternative modernity. This was not remotely to claim that the fascist revolution was ultimately successful, let alone desirable. Within the orbit of his own research into totalitarianism, Roberts, too, had explored the implications of such new thinking about fascism for our understanding of modern revolution and the relationship between fascism, on the one hand, and Marxism and Soviet communism, on the other.
To Roberts, the wider discussion Griffin was seeking to promote seemed to promise at least the possibility of a deeper understanding of these issues, so central to our understanding of the ongoing dangers and possibilities of modern politics. At the same time, Roberts found appropriate Griffin's charge that insofar as Marxists still tend to deny that fascism was less than genuinely revolutionary, they do so on the basis of an a priori privileging of the Marxist revolutionary project. Griffin seemed on target in asking whether we have the criteria to distinguish between pseudo and genuine revolution – criteria that do not reduce to mere personal value judgements about which is desirable. What, Roberts wondered, would Marxist-leaning scholars make of Griffin's challenge – and invitation? What, if anything, could they accept in the new thinking about fascism? How would they respond to Griffin's provocative suggestion that both the Marxian revolution in principle and the Soviet revolution in practice might be conflated with the fascist revolution around the notion of palingenetic myth? Insofar as Marxist and non-Marxist students of fascism continued to disagree, wherein did the disagreements lie, and what scope was there for reducing the area of disagreement through dialogue? But even as he welcomed Griffin's overture and the possibility of a wider discussion, Roberts found Griffin’s way of framing the issues limited in ways he felt might enable Marxists to sidestep central aspects of the new thinking about fascism – including some that seemed most to challenge Marxist categories but also to offer the most fruitful scope for dialogue. So Roberts sought to question Griffin, and to recast the challenge to some extent, in an essay published in these pages in April 2010. 6
Roberts claimed that Griffin's way of framing the issues was ultimately too bound up with his particular agenda, reflecting his particular way of conceiving fascism as revolutionary, based on palingenetic myth. To be sure, Griffin's definition has been widely influential as a way of characterizing the content of the fascist revolution, so much so that he himself claimed a few years before that a ‘new consensus’, around ‘the primacy of culture’, had emerged in fascist studies. But though this claim was plausible up to a point, there remained – and remains –considerable disagreement, even among those taking fascism as revolutionary, over the nature, sources and implications of its revolutionary content. 7 As far as Roberts was concerned, even those who agreed on the primacy of culture were too quick to fasten upon ritual, spectacle and merely emotional satisfactions. And though Griffin, in featuring the ambiguous term ‘myth’, convincingly insisted on its futural as opposed to nostalgic or backward-looking thrust, the emphasis on palingenesis, culture and myth seemed to give the Marxists too wide an opening to deny the revolutionary credentials of fascism.
So, in responding to Griffin, Roberts ventured to suggest the basis for a more differentiated understanding of the rationale for the fascist claim to be spearheading, as Marxism could not, a revolutionary departure appropriate to contemporary challenges and possibilities. In seeking openings within the Marxist tradition, Griffin had fastened upon Ernesto Laclau, among others, and Roberts, too, found Laclau's innovative Marxist understanding of fascism especially promising. But Roberts also found the scope for a deeper reading – and questioning – of Laclau, which seemed to suggest some of what the more differentiated understanding might entail. More particularly, Roberts sought to probe the implications of what Laclau judged to be the failure of the working class, as a result of its ‘immaturity’, to spearhead the national populist revolution that would have been possible under the circumstances of both Italy and Germany after the First World War. Indeed, as Laclau saw it, the working class, with its ‘ultra-leftist’ perspective, had not only failed to offer the appropriate leadership but had threatened an inappropriate revolution at the same time. Partly by pushing beyond Laclau, Roberts claimed, we could better understand the sense in which fascism was, in Peter Osborne's terms, a ‘counter-revolution’, intended not merely to preserve the status quo in the face of Marxist revolution, but to produce an alternative, stemming from a sense that Marxism was outmoded and that the fascists themselves were uniquely equipped to initiate the necessary systematic alternative to the modern liberal mainstream.
To Roberts, Griffin seemed too prone to reduce the fuel of fascism to modern anomie and alienation without considering sufficiently the basis of the fascist case against that mainstream, including parliamentary government, especially in its actual performance in Italy and Germany. 8 Although he concurred with Griffin's notion that fascism was about purging decadence, Roberts charged that Griffin, given his accent on psychological needs, was too prone to use ‘decadence’ to reduce discontents to the same level. As an example, Roberts noted that to suggest, as the creators of Italian fascism did, that Italy’s capitalist bourgeoisie was not robust but ‘decadent’, or that the parliamentary system fed on and bred such ‘decadence’, could not be understood as a response to modern anomie. From within Griffin's framework it seemed as if the fascists were the ‘losers’ after all. Unlike normal people (good liberal democrats), they were unable to adjust in a healthy way to the particular pressures of modernity. To Roberts, the fascists might better be seen as those most energized by the sense of seeing beyond the complacent liberal mainstream to new modes of history-making action.
In asking about the commonality of the fascist revolution with the Marxist revolution in principle and the communist revolution in fact, Griffin accented a certain mode of historical consciousness that seemed to warrant a totalitarian direction. And up to a point, Roberts found Griffin on the right track; he agreed that a new sense of history was at issue and, in light of that sense, a new conception of the scope and the requirements for human agency. And it seemed precisely on this level that we might grasp the commonality of the fascist and the Marxist – or at least the communist – revolutions. But Roberts charged that Griffin, in his eagerness to feature palingenesis as the common element, was too quick to fasten upon certain aspects of Walter Benjamin's thinking about revolution and temporality – ‘chips of Messianic time’, ‘exploding the continuum of history’ – while paying insufficient attention to the historical consciousness in classic Marxism and, especially, to the changes in historical consciousness occasioned by the revision of Marxism around the turn of the century. That revision had brought to the forefront both Sorel, with his emphasis on the role of myth, and Lenin, with his emphasis on the role of a revolutionary vanguard defined by its consciousness and will. Considering fascism in that light might suggest commonalities with Leninism but also differentiation from original Marxism. Roberts also pointed to tensions in Griffin's way of invoking the notoriously problematic term ‘historicism’, as used by both Benjamin and Karl Popper, and in relating it to totalitarianism. Roberts had already argued elsewhere that the key to the commonality to be addressed was indeed ‘totalitarianism’ – if recast to suggest a new mode of collective action appropriate to the new historical sense, as opposed to a mere system of rule or means of ‘total domination’. But Griffin's way of bringing together palingenesis, totalitarianism and historicism seemed to blur the issues and thus to deflect from what Marxist and non-Marxist scholars most needed to discuss regarding the commonality of fascist and Marxist and/or communist revolutions.
Put simply, then, Roberts sought to go beyond Griffin to suggest that, through a somewhat different way of conceiving fascism as revolutionary, and of understanding fascist-communist convergence, those involved in the new thinking about fascism could challenge Marxist-leaning scholars more deeply – but also suggest the basis for a more fruitful mode of dialogue.
Once it had been published, Roberts sent his article to Griffin, who accepted some, but by no means all, of the criticisms and suggestions offered. After bantering back and forth a bit, the two of us quickly agreed that what might prove especially fruitful, as a next step, would be to draw Marxist-leaning scholars, and others interested in the interface between fascism and Marxism, into a wider discussion over the revolutionary nature of fascism and the criteria of modern revolution in light of fascism. Thus we proposed a special issue on this topic to the editors of this journal.
In approaching potential contributors, we simply asked that they read and take into account our two essays to provide a common focus. We made it clear that we, as co-editors, would impose no ‘party line’ or conceptual straitjacket, nor was there any expectation that we would all end up fully coming together. The goal was simply to reassess Marxist and non-Marxist views in tandem, in light of the new thinking. On that basis, we might find some new areas of agreement even as we also better understood whatever might still divide us. Though we were likely still to disagree in certain respects, we could hope that our collective effort might deepen our overall understanding of fascism, its interface with Marxism and communism, and the nature of modern revolution.
As co-editors we succeeded, as we had hoped, in lining up a variety of left-leaning contributors, some closely affiliated with the Marxist tradition, others social democratic but in no sense Marxist. In addition, we sought variety in national backgrounds, and we are pleased to present here contributions by two scholars from Italy and one from Germany, as well as representations from both Britain and the United States. In addition, we have succeeded in involving scholars at various stages of their careers.
As we had also hoped, our six contributors have responded to our earlier essays in quite diverse ways, but ways that the two of us have found at once illuminating and challenging. Dave Renton, Daniel Woodley and Joseph Yannielli all write at least partly from within the Marxist tradition, and each usefully repairs to Marxist categories to assess the revolutionary credentials of fascism. Denying that fascism can be considered revolutionary, Woodley and Renton appeal to definitions, though Woodley goes further in seeking to show why change fuelled by the sort of palingenetic myth central to Griffin's characterization of fascism cannot be genuinely revolutionary. Yannielli is more willing to take fascism as revolutionary – but revolutionary as a way of dealing with global capitalism as it was playing out in the aftermath of the First World War. At the same time, he adds a distinctive angle from his perspective as a student of slavery, segregation and race relations in the American South. Partly as a result, his conception of the actual role of fascism ends up converging with Woodley's in instructive ways, as each associates fascism especially with naked, quasi-Darwinian competitive struggle on the international level.
Richard Saage, a German social democrat in the tradition of reformist Marxism, appeals more directly than the previous three to the theory–practice distinction, arguing that whereas fascism in both Germany and Italy included some genuinely revolutionary and anti-capitalist elements, they were marginalized as fascism in practice proved neither revolutionary nor genuinely modernizing. And this was at least partly because fascism remained so beholden to its conservative alliance partners. Still, Saage by the end finds openings for dialogue over the meaning of those aspects of fascism that seem to transcend capitalism and bourgeois society more generally.
Though decidedly leftist in their different ways, Danilo Breschi and Luciano Pellicani are non-Marxists whose perspectives on fascism prove to differ considerably from those of the other four. Focusing on Italy, Breschi grants that fascism included a current that was genuinely revolutionary, even if it sought radical change not in the socioeconomic system, but in political and institutional relationships and in modes of collective action. But, carrying to extremes certain idiosyncratic aspects of the Italian Risorgimento tradition, the revolutionary current proved fragmented and tended towards a deleterious activism. In the last analysis it was neither desirable nor successful. Though Pellicani's angle is very different from Breschi's, it more obviously contrasts with Renton, Woodley and Yannielli, all of whom end up suggesting that fascism served capitalism in some sense. For Pellicani, fascism was fundamentally anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois – but in that sense must be viewed as anti-modern, and not remotely as a quest for an alternative modernity.
In responding to the six contributions in our respective concluding articles, the two of us proceeded entirely independently, partly because we recognized that even as ‘liberal’, non-Marxist and revisionist students of fascism, we continued to disagree over certain particulars. Though together we two get the last word here, it surely goes without saying that we are not claiming the last word overall. We simply offer our provisional conclusions concerning what each of us has taken from this round of debate. Our greatest hope is that this special issue will occasion further and ongoing discussion about these central topics from both Marxist and non-Marxist students of fascism.