Rise of the working class
Source: Labor College Review
First published: 1988
Transcription, mark-up: Steve Painter
The rise of fascism reversed suddenly the idea that human history was an inevitable progress. It was all the more shocking because it involved the direct brutality of physical violence against individuals. For millions of people, historical and individual fate became identical. Not only were social classes defeated but survival for entire human groups became problematical.
A scientific understanding of fascism is clearly a prerequisite to successfully combat it. Nor is our understanding merely a reflective exercise, for the dominant theory of investigation will have the effect of bolstering the self-confidence of particular social classes, while at the same time reducing their political and moral vulnerability to attacks from hostile social classes.
Fascism was able to develop successfully because its real nature was not understood and because the dominant theory was either false or incomplete.
Fascism in Germany Spain and Italy was not the work of any blind forces of fate inaccessible to action by people and social classes, but rather a product of economic, political and ideological relations between the social classes of capitalist society. These can be analysed and understood.
It follows therefore that such analysis and understanding would have aided the fight against fascism.
But theory alone is not enough, To get results, understanding must grip the masses. The bureaucracies that ruled the mass working class organisations stood in the way of the masses developing an adequate theory of fascism and a workable strategy that could have developed from this.
For their mistakes the bureaucrats suffered annihilation, but humanity paid an even higher price. World War II left 60 million people dead.
While study of the national form that fascism took is relevant, it must be undertaken within a framework that has first determined whether the fascist dictatorship tended to maintain or destroy, consolidate or undermine the social institutions of private property in the means of production and the subordination of workers who were forced to sell their labour power under the domination of capital.
It is true that fragments of pre-capitalist guild and semi-feudal ideologies of earlier times are present in the ideology of fascism and in the mass psychology of the declassed petty bourgeoisie that is the social base of fascist mass movements.
But to proceed from this to suggest, as some do, that the character of fascism is the “aggressiveness rooted in human nature” says nothing, for such aggression is expressed in countless historical movements. Rather, fascism imposes on any such aggressiveness a particular social, political and military form that never existed before. Accordingly, fascism is a product of imperialist monopoly capitalism. All attempts to interpret fascism in primarily psychological terms suffers from this fundamental weakness.
Even less satisfactory is the view that sees fascism in terms of the characteristics of particular people or races or of a particular historical past. How does one, for example, square the German military tradition with the complete absence of such a tradition in Italy? If the hatred of Jews is a primary feature of fascism, why were the Jews in Italy largely left alone by Mussolini?
Again, Italy was industrially a relatively backward country whereas Germany was the most highly industrialised country in Europe. As secondary features and causes, these features undoubtedly played a role in conferring on fascism a specific national character corresponding to the historical particularity of monopoly capitalism and of the petty bourgeoisie in each country. Fascism is a universal phenomenon that has roots in all imperialist lands and can again strike roots. Attempts at explanation that emphasise this or that national peculiarity are wholly inadequate.
The superiority of the Marxist method is its ability to integrate contradictory elements, which reflect a contradictory social reality. Adherence to Marxism doesn’t guarantee a successful analysis but it does make such an analysis possible.
Trotsky’s analysis of fascism can broken into six elements, which must be understood in connection with each other.
Firstly, the rise of fascism is an expression of a severe social crisis of capitalism. A crisis of overproduction like the 1929-33 crisis that goes beyond a temporary fluctuations of fortunes and goes to the relationship by which profit is realised. That is when capital cannot continue in the competitive world market with the given level of wages, labour productivity and access to raw materials and markets. The function that fascism performs in this situation is to suddenly and violently change the conditions of the production and realisation of profit to the advantage of the decisive groups of monopoly capital.
From 1924 to 1929 big business subsidised the fascist bands just enough to keep them from disappearing. They were not immediately required, and would be kept in reserve for a later date. When the crisis of world capitalism struck with full force in 1929 the bourgeoisie began to turn more and more to extra-parliamentary fascist gangs. But in both its infancy and until late in the piece, it was the heavy industrialists alone who subsidised and egged on the fascist movement, whereas light industry or the finished goods industry were never enthusiastic about the fascists, and initially were hostile to them.
This was for several reasons.
Firstly the organic composition of capital invested in heavy industry is much higher than in light industry. That is, the ratio of capital invested in plant and raw materials to wages is much higher. This means that the range of profitability realised from the surplus value created by the workers is more limited, and strikes leading to loss of production means losses mounting into millions. If the economic crisis sharpens, capitalists in this sector are unable to cut their fixed costs and therefore can only reduce their wages bill.
The light industrialists, with their lower capital-to-wages ratio were less vulnerable to short strikes. Furthermore, the fact that they produced goods principally for consumption made them fear that a savage cut in the wages bill would have a disastrous effect on the purchasing power of the masses. They therefore preferred industrial peace, whereas heavy industry wanted to pursue the class struggle until the workers and their organisations were crushed. For this to be achieved, a strong dictatorial state was required — a development that light industry feared.
Whatever the difference in strategy, the commitment of fascism to capitalism can be seen in the growth of corporate wealth from profits of 6.6 billion marks from all industrial and commercial enterprises in 1933 to 15.5 billion marks in 1938. Further, by destroying the organised workers movement Hitler achiever a wage freeze that the likes of Simon Crean and Bob Hawke can only dream of. Wages for the whole period of the Reich were below the pre-crisis level even though there was a severe labour shortage.
Furthermore, the share of capital (interest and profits) rose from 17.4 per cent of the national income in 1932, to 25.2 per cent in 1937 and 26.6 per cent in 1938. However, the number of corporations sharing these profits declined. Fascism not only did not break down the development of monopoly capitalism, it established near-ideal conditions for its further growth and development and assisted it further by direct state investment.
Secondly, in the epoch of imperialism state power is an important tool in the struggle for world markets. Where the workers movement has gone through a long historical development, the bourgeoisie exercises its political rule most advantageously through the bourgeois parliament (“parliamentary democracy”) which can reduce social antagonisms by granting certain social reforms. Such reforms are granted usually by Social Democratic governments that are able thereby to confine working class aspirations within the framework of capitalist society. The bourgeoisie desires Social Democratic only for so long as they retain a mass following in the working class and can perform this role.
The bourgeois parliamentary system also allows an important section of the bourgeoisie to participate directly in the exercise of political power through the bourgeois parties, newspapers , universities, employers’ associations, local and state governments, and the financial and industrial hierarchy.
Far from being the only form of bourgeois rule, the parliamentary form depends upon the maintenance of a highly unstable equilibrium of social forces.
When the bourgeoisie is unable to offer further minor concessions and feels compelled to attack working class wages and conditions in order to maintain a falling rate of profit, and the Social Democrats can no longer contain working class resistance, the bourgeoisie will try to establish a higher form of centralisation of the state’s executive power, even to the stage that direct political rule by the bourgeoisie is excluded. This is the function of fascism, which it has only been able perform by an extensive political expropriation of the bourgeoisie from government.
Thirdly, because of the numerical predominance of wage workers it is nearly impossible for this violent centralisation of power to take place, much less the liquidation of most of the gains of the workers movement, including of course the mass organisations of the working class, to be achieved within the framework of bourgeois parliamentary rule.
Neither a military dictatorship nor a pure police state can for any length of time demoralise a class with millions of members, nor can these forms prevent for long the simple class struggles that are produced by market conditions.
To be able to achieve its ends the bourgeoisie needs a movement that can win masses of people to its side, that can wear down, isolate and demoralise the most aware parts of the working class by mass terror and street warfare, and that being done, can after seizure of power totally crush the mass workers’ organisations.
The mass fascist bands then supervise and control the conscious wage workers. They can also ideologically influence the more backward workers, particularly white-collar workers.
Fourthly, such a mass movement can only arise on the basis of the petty bourgeoisie, a class situated between the working class and the bourgeoisie.
The workers see their enemies in the plant, but the small trader, the shopkeeper and small farmer see themselves as the victim of both big business and the unions. Their grievances are not against a definite enemy but generalised and negative. They are therefore open to demagogy that uses radical and often anti-capitalist rhetoric. If the petty bourgeois is hard hit by inflation, bankruptcy of small firms, mass unemployment of university graduates and young workers thrown out of work (in 1932 a third of the unemployed were younger than 24).
If technicians and the higher salaried employers are falling into despair, a typically petty bourgeois movement with its ideological reminiscences and psychological resentment will arise. It will combine extreme nationalism, verbal anti-capitalist rhetoric directed not against private property as such but against particular forms of capitalism that affect them directly, such as moneylenders, banks and department stores.
These intermediate social layers easily fall into a scapegoat mentality, and in Germany the Jews became the target, even though they were an assimilated minority making up 1 per cent of the population. After World War I, refugees from the Baltic areas added fuel to the preoccupation of Hitler and the fascist gangs. Add to this an intense hatred of the organised workers’ movement, many of whose leaders were of Jewish background.
Once this movement begins physical attacks on the workers’ movement, a fascist movement is born. Once it has reached a certain level on its own it needs the financial and political support of important sections of monopoly capitalism (particularly the decisive heavy industry) if it is to carry through the seizure of power.
Fifthly, before the fascist dictatorship can fulfill its role and seize power, the workers’ movement must be ground down and beaten back. This is only possible if, prior to the seizure of power, the scales have been tipped decisively in favour of the fascist bands and against the working class. The bourgeoisie, to quote Trotsky, “likes fascism as little as a man with aching molars likes to have his teeth pulled” because the option of fascism creates all-or-nothing politics. If the fascists succeed in smashing the organised workers’ movement, it will succeed, but if the workers’ movement seizes the initiative and strikes back, it can defeat not only fascism but the capitalist system that spawns it.
At first the fascists organised only the most desperate parts of the petty bourgeoisie, while the petty bourgeois masses and the unorganised wage workers, the umemployed, the young workers wavered back and forth between the two camps. They will follow the side that shows the greatest boldness and decisiveness.
If the working class is unable to resolve this structural crisis of capitalism in its own interest, that is if it does seize the chance of victory because it is split misled or demoralised, fascism will triumph.
Sixthly, if fascism succeeds “like a battering ram in smashing the workers’ movement”, it has served its purpose so far as monopoly capitalism is concerned. Its mass movement is bureaucratised and largely absorbed into the state apparatus. The most extreme sections of the plebian petty bourgeoisie present an obstacle to this assimilation and in Germany they were ruthlessly eliminated in the “night of the long knives”, 1934. With them the verbal anti-capitalism is finally buried.
The centralised state apparatus becomes more independent of the party ranks and the all-or-nothing politics of fascism are carried over from the socio-political sphere into the financial sphere; it encourages permanent inflation and finally allows no alternative but foreign military adventure. This produces a worsening in the economic situation and in the political position of the petty bourgeoisie, a pronounced acceleration in the concentration of capital and the proletarianisation of the middle classes.
We see that the class character of the fascist dictatorship does not correspond to the fascist mass movement. The dictatorship represents the interests of monopoly capitalism not those of the petty bourgeoisie. This, of necessity, shrinks the active mass base of fascism and the greatly reduced fascist bands lose their independence and become appendages of the police. Fascism is transformed back into a particular kind of Bonapartism: dictatorship without the mass petty bourgeois base that distinguishes fascism.
Ernest Mandel’s introduction to The struggle against fascism in Germany, a Trotsky collection
Fascism, what it is and how to fight it, Leon Trotsky