Why Fascism? by Edward Conze and Ellen Wilkinson 1935
It is not possible to get the Nazi movement into perspective, to see it as Hitler and zealous Storm Troopers see it, if it is simply dismissed as a reactionary force with no Socialist aspirations at all. Any analysis of Fascism in the industrialised countries must take account of the fact that in their own eyes they lead a double fight. The words of the Horst Wessel song...
Against vested powers, Red Front, and massed ranks of reaction
We lead the fight, for freedom and for bread
... are meant to express this fact quite definitely.
The attitude of the reactionary forces and the capitalists in Germany show that they are not, by any means, completely satisfied with the Nazis. While it is impossible not to detect in the accents of certain Socialists an angry refusal to admit that in certain respects the Nazis have ‘muscled-in on their racket’.
The forces of pure reaction have their social basis in the big landowners, the militarists, certain business people, the higher clergy of the Protestant Church and the majority of university teachers. They were represented politically in the German Nationalist Peoples’ Party, which corresponds to a right-wing Tory party. Their military organisations were the Steel Helmets and the Reichswehr.
All these forces had for years encouraged and supported the Nazis. Hugenberg, with his immense press concern, gave them much publicity from 1929 onwards, rather as Lord Rothermere for some months obliged Sir Oswald Mosley in England. That section of the industrial magnates who resented the trade unions gave much money to the Hitler movement, which seemed to them as good a counter-balance to the trade unions as they were likely to get. With the Reichswehr the Nazis had, as we saw, been on excellent terms until 1923. In spite of later frictions, the generals of the Reichswehr naturally approved of the enormous quantity of willing cannon-fodder which Hitler prepared for them in the SA battalions.
The powerful people among these reactionary forces did not think much of Hitler as a political leader. To them he was a confused demagogue, useful as a tool, because he seemed able to beat the Socialists and Communists at their own game – the appeal to the mob. They were confident in the days when this strange new movement was growing rapidly that all Hitler was doing was to divert masses of the people from their drift to the Left. Then they expected to be able to use his movement as a convenient mass weapon for the destruction of organised labour, and as a basis for their own rule. In this comfortable illusion they remained until the events of 1933.
The Nazis Push Out the Reactionaries: For the final stage of their march to power, it was the Reaction which cleared the way. They put Hitler into the saddle for their own purposes. Then it had to be decided who had betrayed whom.
In January 1933, the Nazis were taken as a minority into the government. From the first day they strove for the whole power. The Nazis aimed stroke after stroke on the Reaction. Through the Reichstag fire they gained a majority for themselves alone, by eliminating the Communist deputies. In June, Hugenberg was thrown out of the government, and his party dissolved. One year later Von Papen was humiliated. The Steel Helmets were soon incorporated in the Brown Army, which resulted in continual frictions. The Monarchists felt the heavy hand the following January on the occasion of their celebration of the Kaiser’s birthday. The capitalists alone were able to hit back. The Stock Exchange figures show their lack of confidence. In spite of increasing production the issues of new capital have remained small. [1]
Those who regard Fascism as blank capitalist reaction might ponder over the comment which the Ring, the organ of the influential ‘Herrenklub’, made about the economic policy of the Nazis in August 1934:
The interference with the freedom of business is beginning to counteract the efforts of the state to promote work for the unemployed and the Chancellor’s advocation of personal initiative in business. Embargoes on purchases of raw materials have been followed by interference with manufacturing methods to the regulation and limitation of production and the establishment of compulsory cartels. Scarcely a day passes without some new decree being passed by the Minister of Economic Affairs. These decrees are going deeper and deeper, and at the end of such developments stands the abolition of freedom and its replacement by state regulations – red tape and over-organisation. [2]
This looks very much like capitalists writing to complain about the Socialist tendencies in Fascism.
The Differences Between the Nazis and Reaction: There is a real sociological difference between the National Socialists and those groups, easier to recognise than to define, which can be loosely lumped together under the term Reaction. Reaction in Germany has never been able to get the mass support that, for example, the British Conservative Party has always enjoyed. Even in their best days they never got more than a couple of million votes. A second important difference was that the Steel Helmets were never able to get any hold in the workers’ quarters. They sometimes attempted to march into them, but were never allowed into the workers’ streets. Sometimes, after such a rebuff they would return in perhaps six months’ or two years’ time only to meet the same treatment. The Nazis, in similar circumstances, would come back and back again in every few days – and in many parts of Germany with favourable results. The Nazis wanted to convince the workers. The Reactionaries saw no other method than holding the workers down by force.
The Nazis’ greater success was not simply due to the fact that they were better tacticians, better propagandists than the Steel Helmets, but that their ideas were more attractive to the working masses than those of the Reactionaries. Spengler is the theoretician of German Reaction. To him the people are a ‘vulgar mob who do not seek to improve or alter but to destroy; who hate all the people whose mode of life they feel in their dull fury to be superior to them’. His ideal is a Cæsar who will equate the standard of living of ‘that luxurious animal, the white worker’, to the standard of negroes.
The Nazis have strongly attacked this view in their press. One of the best-known Nazi writers, Johann von Leers, [3] says ‘Spengler’s book [4] is the secret gospel of all those who do not want to pronounce the second part of the name National Socialism’. Hitler in his speech on 30 January 1934 dealt with this same point.
It is obvious that this must be so. For the Nazi, the supreme aim is to wipe out 1918. Above all things then must they avoid a situation such as arose when the German workers simply refused to continue the war. This is not a new experience in German history. When the keen brain of Baron von Stein looked at the events which led to the defeat at Jena by Napoleon, he saw that the Prussian soldiers simply would not fight for their German Junkers against men who had managed to get rid of their own feudal oppressors. Before Prussia could beat Napoleon, some of the fundamental ideas of the French Revolution had to be introduced in a modified form by Stein and Scharnhorst.
Is not the Russian Revolution having an effect on Europe similar to that of the French Revolution? The Nazis deal more severely with Jewish and Marxist ‘agitators’ than Hugenberg might have done, but at the same time they say bluntly that these would have no effect if the workers had no serious grievances against the ruling class. The Nazis do not deny that the class struggle exists. They only deny that it is necessary. [5]
The thing to get clear about the higher ranks of the Nazi leadership is that, on the whole, they are not ‘Bourbon’, and that Hugenberg and his friends are. Both the Nazis and the Reactionaries want war, and plan war. But the heavy Junker – military – magnate coalition want war without even temporary sacrifices from themselves – without even the camouflage of ‘equality of sacrifice’, which alone can secure the willing cooperation of enough of the workers. The Junkers can think only in terms of military dictatorship, of holding the workers down as serfs – as their ancestors have done for generations. Von Leers draws a similar moral from the Young Turks and the Battle of Kirk-Kilisse.
The Nazis know that the frontiers cannot now be closed to Communist propaganda. Too much has been soaked into the working people between the years 1918 and 1932. Though the Nazis are now on top, and the Socialists and Communists are in eclipse, they know they have won that position among the proletariat largely by stealing Marxist thunder, by promising to do the same job better. Not every Communist can be arrested or murdered. Thus the Fascists are willing to make as many or as few concessions to the workers as they think necessary to secure their willing cooperation in the war which is the aim of Fascist policy.
1. 1931: 458 million marks shares issued; 1932: 112 million; 1933: 65 million.
2. Manchester Guardian Weekly, 10 August 1934.
3. Johann von Leers, Spenglers Weltpolitisches System und der Nationalsozialismus (Berlin, 1934).
4. Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision (London, 1934).
5. Thus Leers: ‘We have had not only a class struggle from below but also from above. Not the worker or even his Marxist leadership are the only guilty, but the guilt of the possessing classes and their capitalist leaders who have carried on the struggle as resolutely, and were only cunning enough not to talk so much about it, is at least as great.’