[lbo-talk] Some Comforting Words from Rosa L.

Marv Gandall marvgand at gmail.com
Tue Feb 7 10:35:39 PST 2012


On 2012-02-07, at 8:02 AM, Wojtek S wrote:


> Somebody: "Well, there's a larger issue here - in the counter-factual
> without an October Revolution and a USSR, there almost certainly would
> not have been a National Socialism either. "
>
> [WS:] It is a really interesting question. The "standard" left-wing
> interpretation holds that fascism was simply a capitalist reaction to
> the "communist threat." While there is some truth to it, I do not
> think it was a decisive factor and there is far more to it than the
> "reaction" story tells us. The growth of fascism in Italy and Germany
> was driven, in a significant part, by the domestic factors -
> especially the availability of paramilitary groups composed of the
> demobilized WW1 soldiers and officers. Their effective mobilization
> by the fascists rather than the communists (as it had been the case in
> Russia) was the key element of the fascist rise to power, especially
> in Italy.


> The other important factors include the Great Depression
> and the fact that the Nazi party offered an innovative economic plan
> (a variation on the Keynesian theme, if you will) to combat it, which
> greatly increased their popular appeal in Germany. In fact, the
> anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevist shrill of the Nazi press subsided
> considerably after 1929 and was replaced by messages offering
> realistic solutions to the economic problems.

Fascism was a mass movement of the right typically supported by the large capitalists and landlords - even with reservations about the loss of political control it implied for them - as a lesser evil than militant trade unions and growing socialist parties. The Russian Revolution coupled with the long interwar economic crisis in Europe awakened genuine fears that the established bourgeois parties were no longer capable of restoring stability and growth and that the result would be socialist revolution and the loss of their property. Their fears were shared by small urban and rural propertyholders and nationalists, including large numbers of angry veterans of WWI and fearful nativists, and the unorganized unemployed. these formed the bulk of the fascist shock troops battling social democratic, Marxist, and anarchist trade unionists and their allies in Spain, Italy, and Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

There is no contradiction between fascism as a capitalist reaction to the "communist threat" and two factors ye - the mobilization of the demobbed soldiers, and the appeal of the "national socialist" program aimed at job creation within the framework of a revived capitalism strengthened by cartelization.

In fact, it is precisely the mobilization of a segment of the masses by the upper bourgeoisie which distinguishes fascism from other forms of purely top-down capitalist repression of the working class, such as the military coup.


> On the other hand, the success of the October Revolution was more of a
> liability than asset to communist parties in Western Europe. For one
> thing, it created an illusion that a revolution can be achieved in a
> similar way in Western Europe - which made Western communist blind to
> other options, so to speak. Of course, Gramsci (and Bordiga) realized
> that trying to emulate the October Revolution in the West was doomed -
> but he did that too late, when he was already in the fascist prison.
> But from that pov, a possible counterfactual without an October
> Revolution is that the Western labor would have developed a different
> than emulating Bolsheviks method of gaining political power - and
> probably a more successful one, judging from the cases of Sweden and
> Norway. In this case, the absence of October Revolution could have
> prevented the rise of National Socialism.

You say "the absence of October Revolution could have prevented the rise of National Socialism". Doesn't this contradict your thesis above that the Communist threat was not a "decisive factor" in the rise of fascism? I of course agree that had there been no Russian Revolution and the conflicting sentiments it provoked in both the working class and bourgeoisie in other countries - hope and militancy in the former, and terror and panic in the latter - the ruling classes in each country would not have been attracted by fascist parties they would not have deemed necessary.

It's only in retrospect that we know that fascism quelled the threat of socialist revolution. Gramsci and other Marxists at the time viewed it as a temporary setback which required tactical adjustments but which would still be followed by a renewed advance towards socialism. Perhaps had they foreseen the future to date, they may have concluded that revolution only provoked capitalist reaction and opted to join the social democrats. Or they might have simply clung to the view that capitalism had only extended its historical life span, but that its inherent propensity to crisis would ultimately exhaust its capacity for recovery. These are still open questions, are they not?

As to Sweden, it did not experience the wasteful and destructive social and economic consequences of two European wars so we are comparing apples and oranges here. In each case, the country retained its full productive capacity and benefited from the immense demand for commodities in a ruined Europe. This was the foundation for providing its small and homogenous population with the most advanced welfare state on the continent.



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