Letter: What is fascism? (1989)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

Can you please supply a fascist's definition of the term "fascist? I have heard it used perjoratively and as an insult in this country by young people, but when I asked them what it meant they were not able to give a clear explanation.

Ted Hicks, 

Christchurch, New Zealand.

Reply:

Don't worry, it’s the same in this country too, but there are not many people around these days who would call themselves fascists. Originally, the term (derived from an Italian word meaning bundle and organised band) referred to the followers of Mussolini, who was dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1945. Mussolini denounced parliamentary democracy and liberal individualism and preached the need for a strong state ruled by a single political party ("a party which governs a nation in an absolute and total way", as he put it) and the subordination of the individual to the state ("the individual only exists in so far as he is part of the state and remains subordinated to the necessities of the state").

Mussolini had his admirers and imitators in other countries. Mosley in Britain called his party the British Union of Fascists and the term came to be used generally of those holding similar anti-democratic political views, including Hitler and the Nazis. In short, fascism was a dangerous and openly anti-democratic, anti-working class doctrine. Someone who favours a one-party, totalitarian dictatorship is perhaps the best definition that can be given of a fascist.

The word was devalued when used as a general term of abuse applied to all their opponents by supporters of the Stalin regime in state capitalist Russia which, being itself a one-party totalitarian dictatorship, was badly placed to pose as 'anti-fascist". In fact the Stalin regime came to be labelled by some of its opponents, not entirely inaccurately, as “red fascist".

Nowadays, fascist is used of anyone holding racist views or exhibiting authoritarian attitudes, even though most such people would reject being so described. As we said, nobody's a fascist now!

Editors

Letter: The S.P.G.B. and Fascism (1936)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Editor.

Dear Sir,

Assuming Sir Oswald Mosley and his supporters (a fantastic assumption I admit) were to attempt to take political power by force, thus emulating Mussolini, Franco, etc., what would be the attitude of the S.P.G.B. in such a case.

Would the S.P.G.B. remain neutral, as you maintain that the S.P.G.B. has no concern in capitalistic affairs or would the S.P.G.B. take up arms in defence of the Government and democracy ?

                                                                                                                 Yours faithfully,

T. S.

Reply.

Our correspondent must forgive us if we are unwilling to say exactly what the S.P.G.B. would do in a hypothetical case which he himself describes as “a fantastic assumption.”

We can, however, clear the air somewhat by dealing with some actual events, which will help to bring the fantastic assumption nearer to earth.

Mussolini did not take power by force. That is one of the myths created by him, and believed by his more stupid admirers at home and abroad. The Government which was in office at the time, a democratic, constitutional Government, together with the King of Italy, wanted Mussolini in office, and arrangements to this end were all made before the farcical “March on Rome,” which Mussolini made in a sleeping-car, accompanied by nothing more forcible than his customary bowler hat and a silk topper. (See “Mussolini’s Italy,” by H. Finer, Gollancz, 1935, p. 157.) His first Cabinet included a number of non-Fascists, and Parliament in November, 1922, voted him the emergency powers, which he used for his further actions.

Outside Parliament the Fascists were a rapidly growing force, skilfully exploiting the workers’ dissatisfaction with the discredited Trade Unions and so-called Socialist Party to win over the workers to their side.

Now let us put our correspondent’s question in a real background.

“Would the S.P.G.B. take up arms in defence of a capitalist Government such as that existing in Italy before Mussolini was made Premier?”

In the first place, that Government expressly declined to use arms against Mussolini, as it was already very busy using them against workers and workers' organisations.

In the second place, large numbers, perhaps a majority of Italian workers, were pro-Fascist.

The answer, therefore, is that the S.P.G.B. now, as always, considers it utterly useless for a minority to take up arms against the capitalist State plus the masses of workers who, in their ignorance, support capitalism and oppose Socialism. The only policy deserving of support is that of gaining control of the State machinery, including the armed forces.

If Mosley is able to rally enough working class support to make him a political force in this country the ruling class may take him into the Cabinet, as Mussolini was taken in. In those circumstances in England, as in Italy, the working class (including the members of the S.P.G.B.) will have to pay for the blindness which causes workers to support capitalism. Neither the S.P.G.B. nor any other minority could prevent those consequences by armed force or by any other method.

The only thing to do is to carry on, in whatever way it is possible, Socialist propaganda, in order to win the workers away from Mosleyism and from every other brand of capitalist-reformism, including Labourism, Liberalism, Popular Frontism, etc.

To talk of armed resistance in those circumstances would be as fantastic as it would have been for the S.P.G.B.—itself repudiated and opposed by the great mass of the workers—to have taken up arms against the decision to prolong the life of Parliament, and thus avoid a General Election during the war.

Editorial Committee

Misreading fascism (2018)

Book Review from the April 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Fighting Fascism’. By Clara Zetkin, (edited by Mike Taber and John Riddell. Haymarket, £10.99)

This booklet reproduces two main writings of Zetkin on fascism: her report and resolution presented at the Third Enlarged Plenum of the Communist International’s Executive Committee in June 1923, and her speech to the German Reichstag in 1932.

Clara Zetkin was an iconic left-wing German Marxist and close friend of Rosa Luxemburg who opted for the political line taken by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, becoming a champion of the Third International. She stayed on the side of the Third International although not without some regrets, even during the rise and ‘splendour’ of Stalinism.

In order to appreciate the historical and political relevance of Zetkin’s analysis, the reader should consider that this came less than one year after the report (Rapporto sul Fascismo) presented by the then leader of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) Amadeo Bordiga. His report at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International came a few days after Mussolini had come to power. The fascists’ Marcia su Roma had taken placed while the Italian delegates were away at that congress. This is not a negligible detail if we consider that eight days after Bordiga’s Report on Fascism the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party sent a letter to the Italian delegation, signed by Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek and Bukharin to impose the fusion between the PCd’I and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), from which the PCd’I had split only a little less than two years earlier. Bordiga was a tenacious opponent of the reunification imposed by the International in the name of the ‘united front’. This tactic and the interpretation and attitude toward fascism were very much interlinked. So in June 1923, while Bordiga was in jail, and the change of guard at the leadership of the Italian Party – its Bolshevisation – was coming about, an adjusted interpretation of fascism would strengthen and justify the new direction. This re-interpretation was in fact Zetkin’s report and resolution.

To be fair, Zetkin’s interpretation of fascism, and Italian fascism in particular, is in many respects truthful and in line with Bordiga’s report. However, her version is studded with assumptions and convictions that served the political plan of discrediting Bordiga’s ‘infantile’ position (e.g. of no compromises with social-democrats and Massimalists), and winning the new leadership under Antonio Gramsci over to the united front story. For Zetkin ‘Fascism arrives . . . as punishment because the proletariat has not carried and driven forward the revolution’ and that ‘Fascism [is] an expression of decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy . . . bourgeois state’s dissolution’. ‘The weaknesses of the Communist Party [of Italy] also played a role here . . . policy error in viewing fascism solely as a military phenomenon and overlooking its ideological and political side’.  According to Zetkin’s view, the violent struggle against fascism would allow the proletariat to ‘grow conscious, stronger, and more purposeful’. Thus, ‘To the masses! . . . but maintaining Communist Ideology . . .  Meet violence with violence’.

Fascism did not arrive as a punishment because the workers and their leaders shied away from revolution. As already pointed out by Bordiga in his report, fascism was adopted by the industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie to violently physically repress the workers who occupied factories and fields in the turmoil following WWI. Looking a bit closer, one can see that fascism was in fact generated by the bourgeoisie itself. Money for Mussolini’s journal and the creation of his pseudo-anti-parliamentary-pro-worker patriotic movement (Fasci Italiani di Combattimento) came mainly from the Italian bourgeoisie.

Nor was fascism an expression of capitalist economic disintegration. Italy was thrown into the First World War completely unprepared, by a secret pact involving the king, Vittorio Emanuele III, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Sidney Sonnino and Prime Minister Antonio Salandra, representing the interest of industrial bourgeoisie hoping for easy spoils. By 1922 the country had already covered 79 billion lira of war costs without borrowing anything from other countries. 

When reading Bordiga’s report it is also clear that the Italian Party did not see fascism as a mere military phenomenon.

1919 was in fact a bad year for fascism still stuck with patriotic demagogy. At the end of the war the liberals had some difficulty in keeping control over the army generals. This was evident when the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, from whom Mussolini later stole completely his style and propaganda, managed to get several generals on his side to occupy the Italian-speaking city of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia), which according to the secret negotiations between Sonnino and the Entente was to go to Yugoslavia.

The old fox Giovanni Giolitti also thought he could use Mussolini’s fascists to get rid of the D’Annunzio movement, which was destabilising the army’s hierarchy, and to reduce the spread of working class organisations in particular in rural areas. He was looking for a political entity to go into coalition with. At the end of 1920, with government backing, the fascist ‘punitive expeditions’ started to terrorise the rural north of Italy. At the election of 1921 the fascists finally entered into parliament. They were not enough to serve Giolitti’s plans, who now had PSI and Popolari (Catholics) against him.

Thus, Mussolini’s fascists gained strength when the agrarian bourgeoisie, mainly of Emilia, Lombardy and Tuscany first, and the industrial bourgeoisie of big industrial cities such as Turin and Milan, saw in the fascists’ aversion towards working class organisations a viable anti-working-class weapon, even more effective than the Guardia Regia that up to then had violently repressed any insurrection. The advantage of using para-military fascist squadrons was that they could physically eliminate the leaders of the working class institutions, like the Mafia was doing in Sicily. The demobilisation of the army helped the fascists to recruit veterans who no longer fitted into society. Nevertheless, as we just mentioned, the fascist violence in the country as well as in the urban areas had always been tolerated if not facilitated by the police forces.

When Mussolini took power in 1922, against Giolitti’s calculations, the king did not enforce the state of siege ordered by the then Prime Minister, and permitted this. Hardly a coup d’etat when the Head of State gives his blessing.

Contrary to Zetkin’s, Zinoviev’s and other Third Internationalists’ expectations, Italy was not ready to conduct a successful working class revolution, ‘like in Russia’. This was acknowledged in Bordiga’s report. Instead of being an ‘expression of decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy’ fascism was an authoritarian adaptation of the political representation of capital’s interests.

The risk in adopting Zetkin’s view is to accept the false notion that fighting exclusively against fascism would automatically result in an emancipation of the working class. The danger today is that the ‘fight against fascism’ becomes a fight only against Trumpism, just because his bombastic ego may resemble Mussolini’s. Or that the victory against ISIS (a typical paramilitary ideological movement) is seen as a liberation of the working class in the Middle East from capitalism. The fight against fascism must not become a ‘moral question’. It is a class struggle question just as much as a fight against any other form of representation of capital’s interest is a class struggle question.

Cesco

The Present Condition of Italy (1935)

From the September 1935 issue of the Socialist Standard

 This article, which we publish for the information of readers interested in the attitude of Italian workers towards their rulers, is taken from the Indian Labour Journal, July 28th, where it appeared under the title, “Through Italy." It was supplied by the International Transport Workers' Federation and was written by a former resident in Italy who recently had the opportunity of making a tour of investigation. For reasons of space it has been necessary to shorten the article. While offering it for information, we do not share the writer's point of view on all points.—Editorial Committee

Grotesque as it may sound, Italy is at present a Fascist state in which there are no longer any Fascists. This is the astounding result of the observations I have made during a tour of several weeks through the entire country, a tour which enabled me to come into touch with all classes of the population and to learn what their disposition was. Clear distinctions must be made between appearances and reality. As far as appearances go, the Fascist spirit is still trumps. Fascist uniforms and badges are still being worn, and the Roman salute is given. But I have found that people who are outwardly out-and-out Fascists confess, in confidential chats, to being the most downright anti-Fascists. That this is not due to a concatenation of coincidences but represents the general situation is shown by a saying now current in Italy, which runs as follows:

Three Italians together—three Fascists; two Italians together—two friends; one Italian alone— one anti-Fascist!

The estrangement from Fascism is equally marked in all classes of the population. Workers are anti- Fascists, the farmers are anti-Fascists, the middle-class people are anti-Fascists, the capitalists are anti-Fascists. Some are so because, besides taking away their liberty, Fascism has also robbed them of their scanty livings, others because they tremble to observe that Fascism is steering more and more towards an economic disaster. Those basing their judgment on appearances alone and not getting into closer touch with the people, will have no inkling of such a disposition of the people in Italy. Again and again tourists in Italy have recounted to me in the most enthusiastic terms the great and far-reaching changes that have taken place under Mussolini. Fascism, according to them, has extracted Italy from its former position of backwardness, and raised it within hardly thirteen years to the level of the big European industrial states. In proof of this they point to the up-to-date arterial roads met with all over the country, one of which actually leads up Mount Etna to a height of 2,000 metres; to the work of modernisation, the signs of which are to be seen in any of the larger towns; to the progress of traffic facilities, etc., etc.; not forgetting, of course, the construction of new towns like Littoria and Sabauda, which announce their existence to the tourist from afar, being bathed in seas of light such as are elsewhere only to be met with in a metropolis.

Those are all incontrovertible facts. Those visiting Italy to-day, and remembering the state of the country ten or twenty years back, got the impression that a fresh state on a gigantic scale has been made in the direction of progress. But this impression rapidly fades on deviating even a few kilometres from the main roads of the tourist traffic in Italy. There the order of the day is not construction but dilapidation. The houses and alleys are dirtier than ever before. Nowhere is a new building, or even so much as a scaffolding, to be seen. The people are badly dressed and badly nourished. The tourist witnesses a scene of indescribable squalor. In Messina, for example, slums dating from the time of the earthquake are to be seen, generating pestilential smells. Usually—at least in the south—electric light extends no farther than a few kilometres from the towns, and even the railway stations have to carry on with oil lamps for illumination. In many cases drinking water has to be conveyed in big tank trains to places where there are no springs, not to mention water mains. Sicily, once the granary of Rome, is even now still withered and dried up in summer over two-thirds of its area, because Fascism, too, has failed to provide the necessary irrigation works, the construction of luxurious, and consequently uneconomic, arterial roads evidently seeming to Fascism to be of greater moment and thus more urgent.

It will be readily understood that the Italian country people are not exactly rapturous about the arterial roads. They are shrewd enough to know not only that they only swallow up the money needed for the construction of irrigation works and the better maintenance of their own roads, but also that their own increasing poverty is somehow connected with the luxury constructions of Mussolini. The country people, they say, must fare worse, so that the townspeople may fare all the more luxuriously.

Campaign against Abyssinia

What distinguishes Italy nowadays very markedly from what it was in former times is the dominance of the uniform in street scenes. Many towns give the tourist at once the impression of just having wandered into a big barrack. It is as if the entire Italian nation had exchanged the mandoline for the rifle and as if Mussolini cherished ambitions—besides those of being a maker of roads and builder of cities—to make Italy the Prussia of the Mediterranean.

In the south, uniforms are much more plentiful than in the north. Anyone travelling from Messina to Milan might get the idea that he was travelling, through two different countries, one at war, the other at peace. Militia especially are rarely to be seen in the streets of northern towns. In Milan I could go about for hours in the busiest parts of the town without coming across a single militia uniform. Fascist badges are also less plentiful in the north, while the Roman salute is conspicuous only by its absence.

These distinctions are not confined to appearances, either. The people of the north have not managed to get up any real enthusiasm for Fascism. They consider it as a fruit of the south and, above all, a costly one.

That antipathy to Fascism is stronger and less covert in the north, could be inferred from the short-livedness of the Fascist placards. Stuck up overnight they were torn up by the next day, in the hub of the town as well as on the outskirts. I was told that this has been quite a common occurrence for a long time past. Typical Fascist papers, too, are read in the north to a much less degree than in the south. Mussolini’s Popolo d'Italia, which is published at Milan, was indeed vociferously hawked about the streets, but hardly any were being sold.

Is this land of uniforms also indeed a militarised land? This question interested me keenly. During a long stay in the country previously I had come to regard the Italians as a peace-loving people, to whom militarism and war were abhorrent. It was just when more than two decades back I stood for the first time in the square fronting the cathedral of Milan, that I found myself surrounded by crowds of people taking part in a mass demonstration against the Lybian war. Had Mussolini succeeded in so completely reversing the character of a nation as to cause it now to greet a similar enterprise with jubilation?

In order to satisfy myself on this point I have taken great pains, making observations throughout the country as to how the nation is reacting to the Abyssinian conflict. And I have discovered no trace of any such enthusiasm as the Italian newspapers would like to make out as existing, for the sake of opinion abroad and even at home. The attitude of the people is one of earnest reticence, and in intimate chats I was able to elicit surprising opinions, lending a somewhat sinister aspect to the present state of affairs in Italy. A former Communist, now to all appearances a strict Fascist, explained to me that Mussolini’s assault on Abysinia was the most palpable proof that he was at the end of his resources. It had not been forgotten in Italy, he said, that former regimes had always begun an African campaign when they got into difficulties; and Mussolini was pursuing the same method. He should not be restrained, however, in this enterprise, but rather urged on. On the rock-bound plains of Abyssinia grew no laurels for him to pluck. He would merely be running his head against that rocky wall as so many others had done before him, not least the Italians.

In uttering these sentiments the Communist was only voicing the thoughts of many an Italian as to Mussolini’s Abyssinian venture. Similar expectations were expressed by the Italians in most of the conversations I had with them, and simple workers more than once remarked: “We need the guns to put an end to the famine.’’ And when, with feigned astonishment, I inquired whether by “famine” they really meant Fascism, the answer was in the affirmative every time.

A Hunger-Stricken Land

It made a great impression on me that the workers had hardly let themselves be infected by Fascism at all. Of one accord, north and south, they reject it; and this observation of mine has frequently been confirmed by remarks I have heard in bourgeois circles. This contrasts markedly with Hitler’s national socialism which, by means of the so-called “Battle of Labour,” has succeeded in sweeping a considerable portion of the workers off their feet.

I seek the explanation in the fact Mussolini had no such hard and unfortunately effective predecessors in wage-cutting as Hitler had later in Brüning and Von Papen. He had to make the cuts himself and consequently to unmask himself before the workers from the very outset. Besides this, the severe unemployment prevailing in Italy to-day first came into the country under Fascism, so that Mussolini was not able, either, to lay the blame for it on to his predecessors in the Government; nor could he make “Marxism” the scapegoat, for its organisations had never obtained representation in the Government. The relief work provided by Mussolini in the shape of the construction of arterial roads, harbour works, public buildings, etc., did not succeed in making the desired impression on the Italian workers, who, in contrast to the Germans, are not satisfied merely with working, but want to make a living by it, too. And Fascism has failed to enable them to do so. The thirteen years of Mussolini’s dictatorship have proved to the workers to be thirteen years of continual robbery of their wages and thus of their subsistence.

The most deplorable conditions in this respect I have come across in the south. Here the average daily wages amount to a mere seven lire, equivalent to about 2s. 4d. Only in quite exceptional cases is this level exceeded in the south. A wage of twelve lire is regarded there as quite a big income. In Central Italy and, above all, in the north, the level is, generally speaking, higher, and would be, for the broad masses in the region of 18 lire. Skilled tradesmen may occasionally be found earning more, in exceptional cases perhaps as much as 30 lire, but this is exceptional indeed. The elite of the manual and brain workers is considered to be the civil servants, whose monthly incomes vary for the most part from 400 to 700 lire. All the figures given represent gross earnings which, in practice, suffer considerable reductions in the shape of compulsory contributions to Fascist organisations, etc.

But it should by no means be inferred that this low level of wages carries with it a correspondingly low level of prices. Italy is rather to be classed among the dear countries than among the cheap ones.

Another rock menacing Mussolini is his increasing isolation in the midst of the Italian people. It has already led to a fundamental alteration in the character of the Fascist dictatorship. Able, formerly, to rely on the support of certain sections of the bourgeoisie, it has now no other backing than that provided by the Fascist militia. For the alienation of the bourgeoisie from Fascism has been accompanied by an increasing loss of hold on the regular forces, the officers of which practically reflect the opinions and ideas in vogue among the bourgeoisie. The higher officers’ circles were never particularly attached to Fascism. The generals had compounded with it because they were in need of its services, and because they had their orders from the King. Now the old discrepancies have cropped up again, and on the part of the officers, at any rate, little effort is made to conceal them from the public. Yet Mussolini need have no immediate fears on this score. A military dictatorship would be compromised in Italy to-day just as much as the present dictatorship of the militia is, and at all events the fall of Mussolini would, to the masses of the workers, be the signal for a storm such as no military sabres could hope to arrest. This is indeed the sole reason why the bourgeoisie find it expedient to fold their hands and let things take their natural course. Fearing the consequences of Mussolini’s policy as they do, they fear even more the unknown things that may lurk behind Fascism to emerge when it has fallen.

Nor need Mussolini fear as yet the hostility of the agricultural and industrial workers. Their limbs are paralysed by the terror of dictatorship, and they lack, too, the organisational connections and political conceptions needful to enable them to carry out a really menacing movement against the dictatorial system.

More important to my mind at present, therefore, appears the rock which may loom up in Mussolini’s path in the shape of his own militia. It is no uncommon thing for the good understanding between dictators and their militia to be of short duration. We have a bloody case in point in the events of June 30th, 1934. Such St. Bartholomew’s Eves among friends Mussolini has not been obliged to exhibit to the world, only because, being a better student of history than Hitler, he had thoroughly purged his militia long before the fabled “March on Rome,” and thenceforward subjected it to continual siftings. Only just during the last few weeks he seems to have resumed his activities in this direction, for the dispatchment of strong contingents of militia to Africa is generally attributed to difficulties that Mussolini has experienced out of the ranks of his own troops. Everything points to the fact that this time he is carrying out the most drastic purge that ever the Fascist militia in Italy have experienced. But cauterise the existing sores as he may, the virus, uneliminated, is sure to break out again in fresh places, and the more evident the isolation of his dictatorship becomes to the public, the more and the worse these sores will grow.

I have not been in sufficiently close touch with the internal affairs of the Fascist militia to be able to determine with any degree of exactitude the extent and the reasons of the conflicts that have arisen within its ranks. But the looming shapes of these rocks are becoming more and more clearly outlined. Will Mussolini be able to steer clear of these, too? Just now it rather seems as if he will run straight on to them at headlong speed, if he does not run up against the financial or the Abyssinian rocks first.

Angelica Balabanoff: To Bolshevism and back (2018)

Angelica Balabanoff

From the August 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

 Anželika Isaakovna Balabanova was born in Černigov, now Černihiv in Ukraine in August, probably around 1868. Her family was wealthy and she had a privileged upbringing. Yet, she soon realised that she did not fit in that type of high-class society and broke with her family, moving to Brussels to attend the Université Nouvelle. There she met leading figures in and around the Second International, such as Élisée Reclus, Émile Vandervelde, and Georgi Plekhanov. 

 In Leipzig, where she moved for a short while, she met Rosa Luxemburg who became her role model for the years to come. Then she moved to Berlin where she attended economics lectures and met various high-level SPD members such as Clara Zetkin and August Bebel. She heard about an Italian professor of philosophy, Antonio Labriola, who was quite well known amongst SPD students; so she decided to move to Rome where she attended Labriola’s lectures and met PSI founders Filippo Turati, Claudio Treves, and Turati’s partner, fellow Jewish Ukrainian, Anna Kuliscioff.

Mussolini

She became a member of the PSI in 1900. The Party asked her to move to Lausanne to educate the Italian immigrants to socialism. Here she met Benito Mussolini. She describes her first encounter with him in her book Traitor: Benito Mussolini and his ‘Conquest' of power. He was destitute. He could not work because he was ‘ill’. ‘I’m good at nothing, not even to earn a piece of bread’, the future Duce told her. He was implicitly asking her help to translate a Kautsky pamphlet from German, in which he was a beginner, to earn some money. Out of pity he was invited here and there to give speeches at socialist conferences for a few francs. As we all know, he turned out to be an effective as well as a bombastic speaker. 

 In Switzerland she also founded Su Compagne (Come on Women Comrades) and she met the Menshevik leaders Martov and Axelrod. She joined in the League of Academic Marxists led by Chicherin, and she met Trotsky in Vienna in 1906. Balabanoff probably met Lenin for the first time in Berne. In 1907, she represented the Russian Academic Students at the 5th Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Party in London. The same year she also participated in her first meeting of the Second International in Stuttgart. Here she mainly contributed as a translator, and met Karl Liebknecht.

 Together with Giacinto Serrati, future leader of the PSI, she helped Mussolini to leave Switzerland and find a good job in Trieste, a job that he was not able to keep for very long. She gave an interesting account of the day when Mussolini was elected as director of the local magazine Lotta di Classe (Class Struggle). The editor wanted to give up this position and offered it to Mussolini who he thought must be a good socialist considering his father’s politics (he had named his son after a Mexican revolutionary), and because he had no work commitments. The start of Mussolini‘s political fortune is often identified with the role he played at the 1912 Party Congress, when he proposed the motion to expel certain high-level reformists from the Party. Balabanoff tends to minimise his role. According to her, he was of course for their expulsion, but he was nominated to propose the motion to expel them only because he was pushed by the comrades of his region and because of the lack of other volunteers. 

 The victory of the intransigents in the leadership of the PSI pushed reformist Claudio Treves to resign from editing the party organ Avanti! Also in this case Mussolini was offered the job because of the lack of others without work and family commitments. When he was offered this post he was hesitant, and accepted only on condition that Balabanoff joined him. Balabanoff gives an account of Mussolini as being prone to corruption. She broke with him before his betrayal, because of his opportunistic and selfish behavior. Some believed that Balabanoff and Mussolini had a romantic relationship. This does not concern us, but what is sure is that Mussolini’s himself at the peak of his power admitted that without Balabanoff’s help he would have remained nobody. 

Zimmerwald

At the outbreak of WWI in July 1914 she was called urgently to Brussels for a special meeting of the International. She proposed mass strikes against the war, while Viktor Adler and Jules Guesde were against the idea; she was backed only by the Labourists Keir Hardie and John Bruce Glasier. In August she met Plekhanov in Geneva who hoped to see the Italian party push for Italy’s intervention on the British-French-Russian side. In Italy, by now on the verge of intervention, it was hard to be a foreigner. When the German SPD member Albert Südekum visited Italy to push the PSI to convince the masses to intervene on the German-Austrian side, she was attacked as pro-German, although she reminded the crowd that she had been expelled by Austria in 1909 and by Germany earlier in 1914.

 Balabanoff moved to Switzerland. In December 1914 she moved to Berne where she was instrumental in organising the conference of anti-war Social Democrats in Zimmerwald which took place in September 1915. She became a member of the executive bureau composed of the Swiss Social Democrat Grimm, the Italian Maximalist Lazzari and Rakovsky as secretary. The Zimmerwald manifesto, drafted by Trotsky, was the result of the clash of the moderates against Lenin’s Left fraction. The topics discussed at Zimmerwald were the peace action by the proletariat, the position with regards to the Second International, and the transformation of the war into a revolutionary civil war. The moderate view prevailed, thus Zimmerwald stood mainly for peace. It did not officially break with the Second International and did not propose to transform the war into a civil war

Bolshevik

Balabanoff lived in Zurich until the outbreak of the Russian revolution in February 1917. As did other revolutionaries, she left Switzerland to reach Russia on a special train, travelling with Martov, Axelrod and Lunacharsky. She became disillusioned with the February revolution and began to lean toward the Bolsheviks. In this period she saw Trotsky very often. She signed a resolution together with Trotsky, Kamenev and Riazanov for an outright boycott of the Russian Provisional Government. 

She travelled to Stockholm to organise the 3rd conference of the Zimmerwald movement, which took place in September 1917. By now the moderate block was poorly represented and Lenin’s left prevailed. After the 1917 October revolution Lenin asked her to stay in Stockholm to propagate from there news about Russia, providing her with plenty of money to do this. On two occasions the Anti-Bolshevik League tried to assassinate her. In the end she tried to return to Moscow in September 1918, because Lenin had been severely injured by Fanny Kaplan’s attempted assassination. But because of the fighting between White and Red armies at the Finnish border she had to go back to Stockholm. She eventually managed to enter Russia in October. She met Lenin who was still recovering in his country house. 

 She was soon on the go again. In Zurich she was accused of carrying 100 million francs to finance the revolution in Italy. She was expelled from Switzerland, while Italy asked for her extradition to put her in jail there. She, together with other Bolsheviks, was transported to Germany where the November 1918 Revolution was taking place. However, with the victory of the SPD, they were sent to Russia. While in Berlin she was the guest of Adolph Joffe, the Bolshevik ambassador in Germany. She met some members of the Independent Social Democratic Party to convince them to follow the Bolsheviks, with no success.

When the new International, the Comintern, was established Lenin nominated Zinoviev as President and Balabanoff as secretary. Lenin needed her for her international networking. But she found herself doing mere administrative work for the Comintern. She was sent to Ukraine as commissioner of foreign affairs, but in 1920 the Bolsheviks had to flee Ukraine and she returned to Moscow. She had quite some friction with Zinoviev who tried to get rid of her in many ways. 

 In June of that year a delegation from the PSI arrived in Moscow led by Serrati, now its leader. The 2nd Congress of the Comintern was taking place at the same time, at which Lenin laid down the conditions for parties to join; for the Italians this would mean expelling open reformists like Turati. Serrati was against this and Balabanoff leant towards his position. When Lenin asked her to write something against Serrati she refused, telling him ‘I agree more with him than with you’.

 Balabanoff reported another episode of Lenin’s despotism, at the 9th Congress of the Russian Communist Party in 1921. Alexandra Kollontai, a People's Commissar, had criticised the Party for allowing very little autonomy to workers’ organisations; this was enough for Lenin to destroy her publicly. At the beginning of 1921 the peasants rose up against requisitions; many were executed. Kronstadt rose up against Bolshevik rule, leading to the bloody suppression of the local Soviet. These were the last straws that made her decide to leave Russia. Yet she needed Lenin’s permit to do so. 

 While Balabanoff was waiting to leave Russia Clara Zetkin arrived there. Zetkin stayed with her. According to Balabanoff’s account Zetkin seemed quite sensitive to and quite liked the Bolsheviks’ adulations. Zetkin tried to convince Balabanoff to remain in Russia. Balabanoff refused to be a translator at the 3rd Congress of the Comintern in June 1921. In December 1921 she was eventually allowed to leave Russia. From this point on she was an open anti-Bolshevik, though she was officially expelled from the RCP only in 1924. 

Anti-Bolshevik

Lenin had asked her not to leave. She responded that she did not agree with the Bolsheviks’ despotic and demagogic methods. Years later when Trotsky was a refugee in Mexico she wrote to express her sympathy and she reminded him that the same methods of denigration used against him had been used by him against others. He answered: let’s not mention the past; those were different times; let’s not ruin our friendship.

 Balabanoff had seen the Bolsheviks from close quarters and was convinced that without Lenin there would have been no Stalin. She explained that Lenin’s regime and the apparatus he had created allowed creatures like Stalin to develop, with no inhibitions, no brakes; in fact, the climate created by the regime fertilised this and encouraged the immoral tendency of the future dictator.

 After leaving Russia, she stayed in Sweden and then she moved to Austria where Social Democrats like Otto Bauer were in power. Here she wrote for Arbeiter-Zeitung. In 1927 she moved to Paris, called there by the PSI in exile. She moved there, against her inclination, because the PSI lacked an old guard, Serrati having passed to the Communists shortly before his death; Lazzari had also died. At the Congress in January 1928 she was elected secretary of the Party and editor of Avanti! The party also decided to enter an anti-fascist coalition. She was against the United Front because of her anti-bolshevism and did not want to work with reformists or communists. Later, Trotsky wanted her to join his 4th International but she was not interested. 

 In November 1935 she obtained a visa to move to the US, where she got close to the rightwing Social Democrat, Gaetano Salvemini. In 1938 her autobiography My Life as a Rebel was published. In 1941 the Maximalist faction of the PSI ceased to exist and with it the legendary Avanti!

 In 1947 she returned to Italy. Balabanoff was used by Saragat to promote his Workers' Socialist Party of Italy (PSLI), a reformist party which was claiming at that time to continue the legacy of Turati’s 1892 PSI. She was in it because of her anti-bolshevism, but also because she believed that the PSLI was ideologically closer to the Italian reformists of the early 1900s. In 1955 she was invited to the Congress of the ‘Socialist International’ in Vienna where she was acclaimed as a living legend. She spent most of 1957 in Austria and Switzerland. She got close to Golda Meir and was pro-Israel. Finally, in 1960 she settled permanently in Rome. She died on 25 November 1965.

 Balabanoff was the archetype of the revolutionary maximalist Social Democrat. Her Marxism was rather idealistic and lived as a faith. She saw herself as a missionary. Her mission was to convert workers to Marxism. With this in mind, one can understand why she took to heart Mussolini’s case, helping this idle anarcho-syndicalist to become a respected socialist, how she gave in to Lenin’s Bolshevism to pursue the maximal revolutionary goal, and how, at the same time, she defended the integrity of the Second International by means of Zimmerwald. Later in life, she stood for early 20th century Marxist reformism. 

Balabanoff had the merit of exposing from first-hand experience Mussolini (Traitor), and above all Lenin and Bolshevism (Impressions of Lenin) in a period when it was not popular or even allowed. These two works are worth reading and why she is worth remembering.

Cesco

50 Years Ago: The Rise and Fall of Mussolini (1993)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

One myth about Mussolini, still held by many who denounce him, is that he was the creator of modern Italy, the inspired and dynamic leader who moulded events to his will and took power by a brilliant and forcible “march on Rome" in October 1922. Mr. Bernard Shaw is an outstanding believer in the "great man" myth. If it were true that the great man could so mould events to his will, why the undignified and craven exit from power? Mussolini’s path to power was not through any bold and godlike masterstroke, but through the connivance and desire of those who had control of the political machine in Italy in 1922. Is it not related how General Badoglio offered at the time to "scatter this Blackshirt rabble with a whiff of grapeshot", only to be ordered by the King of Italy to let the rabble take office? 

[From article in Socialist Standard, August 1943.]

"We are all Socialists Now" (1933)

From the December 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is more than 40 years since the late Sir William Harcourt made his jocular remark in the House of Commons, a remark which Sir John Simon repeated the other day. During that 40 years the political scene appears at first glance to have been changed almost out of recognition. The old issues in the forefront of party controversies have given place to new ones. The names of parties have changed. At that time there was no Labour Party and no National Government. Labour Governments were hardly dreamed of. The world had not yet been made safe for Fascism by a war to defend democracy. For every person who then called himself a Socialist, there must be a hundred now; and those who would seriously admit being prepared to support what they regard as Socialistic and semi-Socialistic measures must have been multiplied a thousandfold.

Yet when we look below the surface what kind of foundation do we discover for all this talk ? Much as we would have liked to say otherwise, we cannot escape the admission that there is all but no foundation at all. When the Morning Post, in an unusually discerning editorial (“Is Capitalism Dying?” November 16th), chides Mussolini for his statement that capitalism is tottering, the Morning Post is right and Mussolini is wrong.

As the Morning Post justly points out, Laissez-faire, the early unregulated period of capitalism, has been largely done away with, but the surface changes of the past 100 years “have left intact the essential foundations of capitalism as generally understood, which are the private ownership of the means of production and distribution, and private, initiative in economic enterprise.”

When, therefore, Harcourt and Simon, Hitler and Henderson claim that they are Socialists, we reply that they are nothing of the kind.

They are not all Socialists now. Sir William Harcourt’s death duties were not Socialism or Socialistic. Sir John Simon is not a Socialist. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald is not and never was a Socialist. Nor is Henderson. Nor are the parties represented by these men. Our institutions are not Socialistic. The Post Office is not Socialism. Nor are the municipal trams and water works and gas works. Nor is Mr. Herbert Morrison’s London Passenger Transport Board, in spite of his description of it as the typical modern form of Socialisation. We live in a capitalistic world, capitalistic through and through.

Lest it be said that we are avoiding the real issue, the alleged building up of Socialism in Russia, let us examine that claim also.

We are told by enthusiasts for everything Russian that a new non-capitalist world is there coming to birth. That never before and in no other place could be found such a multiplicity of successful State enterprises, such rapid social progress raising millions of people from a lower to a higher stage of development.

To all of which the answer is that it is not true. That industrial progress is being made in Russia is not disputed, but that progress is not unique or original, and it is not Socialism or directly in the path towards Socialism.

Let us make a rapid world tour in order to test the Russian claims by comparison with other countries. Russia has State enterprises of one kind or another. Is this original? England has State posts, telegraphs and telephones,, financed by huge interest-bearing loans just like the Russian State enterprises. Probably the majority of countries have either State railways and State ports and telegraphs or both. Australia has experimented at length in a large variety of State enterprises, including State shipping, State railways, State clothing factories, State banks, State woollen mills, State batteries. Prussia has had State iron mines, potash and salt mines. Many countries have had State forests, including Czarist Russia, which also had State coal mines.

At the present moment the Canton Government is setting up State factories for cottons and woollens, and the Government of the Dutch East Indies is also intending to go into cotton manufacture. Roosevelt is trying to encourage municipal enterprise of many kinds in U.S.A.

Has Russia been able to show a great increase in the amount of industrial production during recent years? So have Turkey, Latvia, India, and half a dozen countries in Europe and the East. Has this growth in Russia taken place under the control and with the direct encouragement of the State?—so it has in many other countries. Long before the war, India complained that Japanese exporters were able to undersell in India owing to the help and encouragement given by the Japanese Government to industry. Japan tried out the idea of State factories as a means of speeding up industrial development many years before the Bolsheviks thought of it. Thus in 1912 the British Consular Report (No. 5161, annual series) reported that the Japanese Government steel works had an output of 180,000 tons, “but with their new extensions they will soon be in a position to produce some 300,000 tons.” (See “The State in Business,” Emil Davies, p. 60.)

Between 1908 and 1918 the number of industrial establishments in Japan showed the startling increase of about 96.6 per cent (See Encyclopaedia Britannica, 12th edition, vol. xxxi, p. 644). Thus in 10 years the number of factories had been doubled.

It is interesting to notice, however, that although the Japanese Government led the way by means of State factories and State encouragement of industry, when private factories had found how to fend for themselves the State factories were allowed to go. Thus between 1908 and 1918 the number of Government factories fell from 196 to 161. (They employed over 150,000 men and women in 1918.)

Has Russia got rid of a monarch and established a dictatorship? So have Turkey, Poland, Germany, and Austria.

Did Russia break up the big estates and hand over the land to the peasants ? So have territories which were formerly Russian, and are now independent (e.g., Latvia), and also neighbouring countries in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Has Russia seen great social changes? So has Turkey. Turkish industry has made considerable strides in the past 10 years, and further development of industry is planned, partly under Government auspices (textiles, for example). In a period of a few years, 2,200 new factories have been built, and 1,200 miles of railways.

Turkish women, like their Russian neighbours, are now entering more and more into all kinds of public activities. They are now allowed to vote in village elections and to become town councillors, magistrates, doctors, civil servants, etc.

One great change carried out in Turkey has been the abolition of the Arabic alphabet and the use in its place of a latinised alphabet more suited to the needs of commerce.

The upshot of all this is that the changes brought about in Russia are not Socialistic, but part of the general development of the backward nations towards industrialisation and commercialism. With the changes at the base, the social superstructure, religion, political systems, the law and social conventions have also changed in greater or less degree.

The world has changed and is changing, but not yet towards Socialism. “We are all Capitalist now” is becoming day by day a more accurate description of the social system from Moscow to Buenos Aires, and from pole to pole.

The Fascist nations are, of course, no exception. Mussolini claims that his plans of a "corporative State ” are not State capitalism, but something new and different, but the claim is no better founded than the claims of Hitler and Stalin, that they are introducing Socialism., The chief thing to observe about Mussolini is that his “corporative State” is still entirely on paper. After 11 years, the “man of action,” who was put into office on the slogan of clearing out the mere talkers, now writes in the Morning Post (November 6th) soft-peddling on action like any other politician who racks his brains for new excuses for doing nothing to give to his impatient supporters. He has discovered that “Fascism has amply demonstrated that, in economic matters, it is necessary to act by degrees. .. . . Many situations have ripened and many minds have opened themselves to the new necessities.” .

After 11 years of dictatorial power, the “man of action" tells us we must "act by degrees"— and the action, the formation of the guilds, has for all practical purposes not yet begun.

The "man of action" turns out to be a Fabian, an apostle of gradualism.

No, we are not all Socialists now. The number of Socialists is still very very small, and the essential problem still remains before us. State capitalism, municipal enterprise, public utility corporations, "corporative guilds," and all the rest of the forms of capitalism have got to be cleared away before Socialism becomes a reality.

Edgar Hardcastle

Mussolini’s “Corporative State” Jest (1935)

Editorial from the April 1935 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the propaganda stunts of the Fascists all over the world is their promise to replace “political” control by “corporative” control, i.e., that the ultimate control of industry and all economic affairs should be handed over to a body representing employers and workers in industry, transport, etc. Parliament and the present State power in Italy were to be replaced by a Corporative Legislature. Mussolini has been in undisputed power now for 14 years, and he has carried out his pledge to the very last word, or rather, to the last word but one. He has established his Council of Corporations and has created his 22 corporations, representing different industries. He has given them—-on paper—wide powers, but he has discreetly provided that they may do nothing whatever without the consent of Parliament and of himself as head of the State. Read the following account by the Rome correspondent of the Observer (November 18th, 1934): —

   We must remember that the law of 1930, instituting the Council of Corporations, is still in being. It established that the Council, and, therefore, the corporations of to-day cannot pass legislative measures regarding those subjects which have been regulated already by laws passed in Parliament. This prudent reservation avoids confusion, and also shows how successive developments will come about.
  The Council of Corporations, on the other hand, has the right to form any regulations referring to collective and economic relations which have not passed through Parliament, and these are fully valid so long as they bear the signature of Mussolini. This limitation is the only one to be withdrawn so as to arrive at a complete Corporative Parliament.

From this we perceive that the Council can do everything on paper, and nothing important in fact. Not only must they not infringe Parliamentary statutes, but their own acts are invalid without Mussolini’s signature; and he is himself President of every one of the 22 corporations!

Where Mussolini Learned Brutality (1935)

From the November 1935 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are told that public opinion all over the world is shocked at the brutality of the Italian air force in bombing defenceless native villages. It is necessary to remember that this charge is not one which can be levelled only at Mussolini. Many governments have shown themselves prepared to use methods of equal brutality— among them the British Government in its destructive bombing of hostile tribes on the frontiers of India. Although the justification put forward by the British authorities is that this bombing is required to defend Indian interests, the Indian members of the Legislative Assembly recently passed by 67 votes to 44 a motion of protest against “the bombing of innocent women and children in trans-frontier villages by the Royal Air Force.” (Manchester Guardian, October 17th.)

What such bombing means was disclosed by the late Lord Thomson, Secretary of State for Air in the Labour Government of 1924, speaking at a meeting of the Central Asian Society on November 21st, 1924 about bombing in Transjordan.

   After briefly tracing the route followed in his tour. Lord Thomson brought home to his audience the efficacy of bombing by describing the manner in which the recent Wahabi invasion of the Transjordan was crushed. The British forces consisted solely of aeroplanes sent out at the shortest possible notice, backed by armoured cars. The effect of our air attack was availing. Some 700 of the tribesmen were killed and the rest, seized with panic, fled into the desert, where hundreds more must have perished from thirst. Unless some such punishment as swift and terrible as this had been inflicted, the task of restoring order would have been long drawn-out, and in the end more costly in lives and money, while the results would not have been so lasting.
   Lord Thomson went on to say that it might be true that oil was the key of the Arabian riddle, though he considered that wheat-production, for some years at least, held greater possibilities. The primary necessity, however, was security. The country could best be opened up by making the process a gradual one. By using it as a link in the chain of Imperial communications, this would be achieved.

(Times, November 22nd. 1924.)

Mr. Shaw and the Dictators (1948)

From the July 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

After Mr. G. B. Shaw’s article in the Daily Herald on 13th May and the attack on him by Mr. Michael Foot in the Tribune, Shaw wrote to the Tribune on 28th May and again on 11th June. Some of his points deserve comment. He admits his support of the dictators in the following terms:

   “I may remind Mr. Foot that we all very properly stood by Hitler and Mussolini until they went wrong, exactly as we stood by Ramsay MacDonald. The first years of a dictator are always to his credit. Power corrupts, but not in five minutes.” (Tribune, 28/5/48.)

The last sentence raises a nice point. The other dictator, Stalin, has been in power for nearly a quarter of a century and must therefore have had time to be corrupted by power but Shaw has not withdrawn his approval as far as we know. In the later letter (11/6/48) Shaw tells us why the early years of a dictator are good. He tells us that Hitler put an end to unemployment and tore up the Versailles Treaty, and Mussolini drained the Pontine Marshes, started rebuilding Rome and made a Concordat with the Pope. It is, of course, the silliest of arguments for it justifies support of every kind of government, past present and future. They have all claimed credit for other peoples’ work and lent their names to monumental projects and the making or breaking of Treaties. Are we to give blind support to Roosevelt for the Tennessee Valley Scheme, to Napoleon and to those who destroyed him, to the Pharoahs under whom the Nile waters were used for irrigation and the Pyramids built, to all the rulers of the slave and feudal and capitalist regimes? Incidentally, if the tearing up of the Versailles Treaty shows how good dictators are, what about Stalin’s part in the agreements for the plunder of the defeated at the end of the second world war. Does Shaw now execrate him for lunacies worse than Versailles, and get ready to hail the new German dictator who will tear it all up?

Shaw is angry with Mr. Foot for reminding him that Mussolini had Matteoti assassinated, and says that he (Shaw) was not a party to it. If the Labourites are in the absurd position of deluding themselves with the notion how nice capitalism would be if only it were freed from the evils that necessarily accompany it, Mr. Shaw is in the same silly position about dictators. He says in effect, how nice dictators would be if only they didn’t do the brutal things to their opponents that all dictators have to do.

Of course, when it is a question of flooring Mr. Foot, Shaw is on an easy thing. Arguing for industrial conscription (”compulsory civil service ”) he asks Mr. Foot what a Labour Government has to offer to make the workers work, in place of the whip of starvation. What he ignores is the fact that we still have capitalism, and as Socialists have always said, you can’t have an exploiting system without some bludgeon to drive the exploited to work. But what has this to do with Socialism?

Mr. Shaw gives his own version of events when he. tells us that “the careers of Mussolini and Hitler were produced solely by the disgust and disillusion of the proletariat with party parliaments . . . ” This is a gross misinterpretation, What made the workers disillusioned in Germany was not Parliament as such but the inability of the Social Democrats, alone and in coalition, to make capitalism function in the interests of the working class; but every Socialist knows that this is always impossible. If Mr. Shaw had added Lenin and Stalin to his list of dictators his argument would have exposed itself, for the Russians never had any experience of parliament and therefore could not be disillusioned with it.

On Shaw’s general argument that Parliament is too slow and faulty, and dictators speedy and efficient, do any of his dictators give proof? Hitler and Stalin were just as helpless as any Parliamentary government to prevent capitalism engulfing their countries in war. If dictatorship is swift why is it that 30 years after Lenin said that they must immediately introduce virtual equality of wages from top to bottom, we find Russia not only not doing so but producing greater and greater inequality between the privileged rich and the poverty-stricken masses? If dictatorship is sure and efficient how comes it that Russia, after spending years developing co-education, ease of divorce, and legalised abortion, then discovers its “errors” and sets about reversing all those trends in greater or less degree?

Mr. Shaw's defence of capitalism run by dictators is as weak as his opponents’ defence of capitalism run by Labour Governments.

P. S.

50 Years Ago: Should We Leave Politics to the "Intelligent Minority"? (1990)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Shaw has given us another weapon with which to attack him. He now ridicules the ignorant masses who fell for Hitler and Mussolini, but has he forgotten that he has named himself among their great admirers7 Who was it who said only 18 months ago that he thought them “two highly capable revolutionary and proletarian leaders"? In saying that Mr. Shaw placed himself among the self-deluding masses who, he says, are not capable of engaging in politics.

In actual fact the working class, with all their costly errors, have not shown themselves worse than the intellectual thousand. In many respects they have shown themselves superior. It is Hitler's highly-educated university professors and others who have swallowed whole the Nazi nonsense about superior and inferior races, and it is their British counterparts who gave support to a class doctrine equally nonsensical. When Dr Ley, one of Hitler s key-men, says that “an inferior race needs less space, less food and less culture than a superior race", few people in this country would defend it as a proposition (though some are willing to apply it elsewhere in the Empire), but how many of the intellectual thousand will be prepared to repudiate the corresponding class doctrine? Mr. Shaw may pass the test, but will even Mr. Wells? And even if he does how many other comfortably placed intellectuals will reject and oppose the capitalist practice which divides the population into a "superior'' class which gets more space, better housing, more food and better quality food, and more culture than the "inferior" class?

(From an editorial "Democracy and Understanding", Socialist Standard, March 1940.)

50 Years Ago: Super-Capitalist Russia (1990)

The 50 Years Ago column from the July 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are others whose inaccurate use of terms is due to indifference rather than ignorance: they change their terms to suit their policy. Thus, during the past few years, as policy has changed the same persons have been able to describe Russia as Socialist and as Capitalist (the Express newspaper is a case in point): others have looked round Europe and have been able to discern democracy in this or that country where earlier and later they could see only dictatorship. Hitler and Mussolini have been much to the fore in this verbal juggling. Both have claimed at times to be upholders of revolution and at others to be guardians of tradition. Both have pretended in some places and at some times that they stand for Socialism and working-class interests against Capitalism and the "pluto-democracies". Hitler, after years of hostility to Bolshevism, chose last year to discover close affinities between the Nazi and Bolshevist systems. Mussolini, likewise, while building warships for the Russians, declared that Fascism is a bulwark against Bolshevist encroachments on Christian civilisation. On the other hand, he has at times denounced Bolshevism, not for being anti-Capitalist, but for being "State super-Capitalism carried to its most ferocious expression" (The Times. November 2. 1936).

(From an article "Terms and Terminological Inexactitudes", Socialist Standard, July 1940.)

Fascism and the State (1927)

Editorial from the December 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

When we urge the supreme importance of the working class capturing Parliament, with the administrative departments and local councils which it controls, we are often met with the argument that the Fascists came to power in defiance of the then constitutionally elected Italian Government. Even if this were true it would still not necessarily follow that the overthrow of capitalism could be achieved, or could best be achieved by methods which succeeded well enough in a quite opposite object, i.e., the strengthening of the capitalist state in the interests of a section of the ruling class.

But, as we have pointed out before, the Fascist seizure of power took place not in defiance of, but with the approval and active assistance of, the democratically elected Italian Government. But for that active assistance Mussolini and his followers would have been helpless. Then, as before and since, the possession of the State machinery proved to be the deciding factor.

Our view has received interesting confirmation from three sources—the Italian Communist, Bordiga; Professor Salvemini, a Liberal; and Modigliani, of the Italian Socialist Party.

Bordiga says (Labour Magazine, February and March, 1923):

  After the Nitti, Giolitti, and Bonomi Governments, we had the Facta Cabinet. This type of Government was intended to cover up the complete liberty of action of Fascism in its expansion over the whole country. During the strike in August, 1922, several conflicts took place between the workers and the Fascisti, who were openly aided by the Government. One can quote the example of Bari. During a whole week of fighting, the Fascisti in full force were unable to defeat the Bari workers, who had retired to the working-class quarters of the city, and defended themselves by armed force. The Fascisti were forced to retreat, leaving several of their number on the field. But what aid the Facta Government do? During the night they surrounded the old town with thousands of soldiers and hundreds of carabineers of the Royal Guard. In the harbour a torpedo boat trained its guns on the workers. Armoured cars and guns were brought up. The workers were taken by surprise during their sleep, the Proletarian leaders were arrested, and the Labour headquarters were occupied. This was the same throughout the country. Wherever Fascism had been beaten back by the workers the power of the State intervened; workers who resisted were shot down; workers who were guilty of nothing but self-defence were arrested and sentenced; while the magistrates systematically acquitted the Fascisti, who were generally known to have committed innumerable crimes. Thus the State was the main factor in the development of Fascism.

Professor Salvemini gives similar testimony (Manchester Guardian, October 19th, 1927):—

  Mussolini was assisted in the civil war (1921- 1922) by the money of the banks, the big industrialists and landowners. His Black-shirts were equipped with rifles, bombs, machine guns and motor lorries by the military authorities, and assured of impunity by the police and the magistracy; while their adversaries were disarmed and severely punished if they attempted resistance.

And lastly Modigliani tells us (Daily Herald, October 27th, 1927):—

  It was by their (the Italian Cabinet's) contrivance and with the help of military forces of the State that Mussolini and his gangs were able not only to administer Castor Oil, but to murder and burn for two years. And it is in that way that they finally reached the point of the march on Rome, in face of which the King openly and personally sided with the anti-Labour onslaught.

Here and There: When Mussolini Would Not Fight (1939)

The Here and There column from the February 1939 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Mussolini Would Not Fight.
During the past ten years or so The Socialist Standard has more than once had to debunk the idea, popular with Communists and the daily Press, that Mussolini established the Italian dictatorship in defiance of the State and its armed forces, and with the aid of a few thousand Blackshirt hoodlums. Frank Owen, editor of the Daily Express, in an article, “The March on Rome” (Evening Standard, January 13th, 1939), supports our view and reproduces a statement by Mussolini which has a bearing on the question. Frank Owen refers to the events of 1919, when Italy was demanding the Austro-Hungarian port of Fiume from the Allies, who were then dividing up the spoils of victory. D’Annunzio, the Italian poet and Fascist colleague of Mussolini, led a Fascist march on the port to demand of its Italian military commander, who held it for the Allied Powers, its surrender to Italy. Owen tells us that Mussolini sat tight and, when accused of deserting D'Annunzio, snapped : —

“Revolution will be accomplished with the Army, not against it: with arms, not without them: with trained forces, not with undisciplined mobs called together in the streets."

Which opinion he remembered and acted upon in connection with the miscalled “March on Rome" in 1922.

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“What’s Up in Palestine?”
The November issue of Fact is a booklet of ninety pages, crammed with the sort of information which the Socialist looks for when attempting to get behind the appearance of world events. It is called “What's up in Palestine?” and is written by Michael Greenberg. The author analyses the historical, social and industrial background of the conflict between the Arab and Jewish nationalisms and brings clarity to it.

The interest of the British Government in the Palestine Mandate needs very little explaining. Palestine is on the British Empire sea route to India and is therefore of strategical importance, particularly since the political independence of Egypt. An oil pipe-line, which fuels the British Navy, also runs through Palestine. Whatever settlement is the outcome of the present disturbance, it is not likely that British dominance will suffer.

The origin of the present conflict goes back to the setting up of a National Home for the Jews under the protection of the British Government.

After early difficulties, out of which many observers prophesied the failure of. the experiment, Palestine became the scene of a thriving Jewish capitalist industrialism. Between 1919/1938, £80,000,000 of Jewish capital poured in with 300,000 skilled immigrants. The result was intense capitalist agriculture where formerly peasant farming prevailed. The effect was something like the Industrial Revolution through which the Western capitalist countries had passed. Peasant farming began to break up. When it remained it had to enter into cut-throat competition with the efficient and up-to-date Jewish capitalism, which meant a lower standard of living for the peasantry. Former peasant proprietors became landless labourers. At one time there were 200,000 of these dispossessed peasants employed as labourers on public works and by large Jewish firms.

Not unnaturally, the anti-capitalist sentiment of the Arabs takes an anti-Jewish form, and is canalised into support, for Arab nationalism. It may take the Arab worker some years to realise that his real enemy is capitalism in general, and not only the Jewish capitalist in particular. At the moment, another factor complicates the struggle. Thousands of Arab workers, accustomed to a very low standard, enter the labour market in competition with the Jewish workers, and threaten to depress the latter's relatively higher standard of living.

Fact, at sixpence a copy, is usually a sound investment. The November issue is worth that amount many times.

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Morals and Football Pools.
It used to be argued that to close the public houses would provoke “revolution." Somewhat exaggerated, perhaps, but nevertheless expressive of the fact that pubs did (before so many other diversions came to engage the worker's interest) provide a means of offsetting the drabness of the worker's working and social life, and of keeping his mind away from political problems. One of the later diversions are the football pools, concerning which the Daily Telegraph recently featured much correspondence from readers, both for and against them. The letter from the managing director of Goodsway Tates, Ltd., claimed for the pools what, in the past, has been claimed by the pubs, politicians and churches. He says (Daily Telegraph, December 10th, 1938): —

  “They have certainly brought interest into many drab lives, and from a political point of view have done much good in keeping the minds of the populace occupied during depressing times and combating Communism than any other factor.”

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The Swastika over the Andes.
The current issue of the American journal, The Reader's Digest, contains an article called “The Coming Struggle for Latin America,” which is a condensation of the book of the same name by Carleton Beals. It deals with the penetration of German trade into the countries which make up South America. The extent of the penetration may be judged by the fact that there are one hundred thousand Germans in the Argentine alone. Most of them are there in connection with the interests of German trade. The industries they pursue are hardware, agriculture and electrical machinery, printing, chemical, motor cars and dyes. In Mexico, Chile and Brazil, Germans own the textile factories. In Chile, German munition factories have been established. Throughout the whole continent German capitalists are getting control of copper mines, nickel mines, oil and iron-ore producing land.

In 1933/1936, German trade with Central South America increased by 500 per cent. The imports of munitions from America into Nicaragua were displaced in favour of munitions from Germany and Italy. And recently, Mexico entered into an agreement with Germany to exchange oil for industrial machinery on barter basis. Evidence of a similar penetration by Japanese trading interests is also given.

German, Italian and Japanese influence in South America goes still further afield than trade. Immigrants, workers and trading agents are trained to propagate the doctrines of Nazism and Fascism, to understand the traditions and customs of South Americans, to perpetuate the idea that English and American capitalism is decadent. In this they are assisted by the fact that most of the American States are under dictatorships. That American capitalism is perturbed by these developments is evidenced by President Roosevelt's calling of the Lima Conference for the professed object of exploring the possibility of the mutual defence of the American States from attack, and his violent attacks on Nazism and Fascism. 

The Manchester Guardian, at the time of this conference, stated that the town of Lima was bedecked with thousands of Swastika and Fascist flags, but with only two American flags, one of which flew over the American embassy.

The expansion and development of German, Italian and Japanese capitalism has resulted in a weakening of the world influence of British and American capitalism, and is a threat to their interest s in the world's markets.

It is that clash of interests which is the material basis for the apparent clash between the so-called ideologies of Fascism and Democracy.

Harry Waite

Freedom of Opinion (1940)

From the December 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

On November 18th Mussolini made a speech to the Italian Fascist Party in which he claimed that the Italian war bulletins were truthful and fair statements of Italian as well as British war losses.

Commenting on this speech in its editorial for November 19th, the Daily Express compares the position of the Press in this country with its position in Italy and Germany and Russia, quite rightly pointing out how impossible it is for any criticism of the Government to obtain publicity in the latter three countries.

We know quite well that the dictatorships owe much of their success to lies and the suppression of opinion, but how do we stand here in that respect? The Daily Express says: —

   The difference between Axis truth and British truth is this—that in Britain we still retain means of proving whether a statement is true or not. Our free Press and unfettered Parliament have a real part in our war effort.

Is this statement in strict accordance with the facts? Of course it isn’t. The Press is only free to criticise up to a certain very limited point. If it says anything that can be construed into an impeding of the war effort it does so at the risk of prosecution under very definite and plainly-worded war measures, and this whether the criticism be based on truth or falsehood. It is also within the power of the Government to suppress any newspaper or periodical it considers a hindrance to the successful carrying on of the war, as it has already demonstrated in particular instances.

Free opinion fares no better as the action taken by, for example, certain local councils in penalising employees who are conscientious objectors, has frequently made dear. And this has "occurred in instances where the tribunals appointed by the Government to examine the cases have, by their findings, expressed themselves as satisfied with the sincerity of the people concerned.

Now, either the Daily Express is playing, on a minor scale, the same tune as Mussolini, or, like the ostrich, it is burying its head in the sand.

In its issue of November 20th the Daily Express published an article on the Indian labour leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, by Edward Thompson, in which that writer argues that Nehru is not even a pacifist but is favourable to the British war attitude and would support it if India were invited to participate with Britain as a “comrade.” Yet Nehru has been sent to four years' rigorous imprisonment for “making speeches tending to obstruct India’s war effort.”

In the Stop Press News column of the same issue of the Daily Express as the one containing the article on Nehru, there is an extract from a speech by Mr. Herbert Morrison, who, referring to Mr. Kennedy, the American Ambassador, said: —

   I was delighted to learn of his repudiation of authenticity of interview. . . . He had seen this country clinging, even in the midst of a life and death struggle, to essentials of its historic practice of free speech and free writing.

A curious comment on this is a statement made in an article by Edward Hutton in the "World Review” for November. Here is what he wrote:—

  “The appointment of Mr. Herbert Morrison has given much satisfaction. He is, after all, a much more sympathetic figure than the pompous Anderson, who was the worst type of character to be Home Secretary during a time when it is obviously necessary temporarily to curtail the liberty of the people.”

On this point it is worth while recalling the words of a writer of nearly a hundred years ago— P. E. Dove. In his “Theory of Human Progression,” published in 1859, Dove put the position in a nutshell when he wrote: —

    Freedom of speech, and of public speech, and in any number of speakers and auditors, is one of the first essentials of true liberty. Wherever it is not enjoyed, liberty is a shadow and tyranny is a substance.

However, it may be conceded that if the conditions stated by Dove were allowed to exist it would be impossible for any government to prosecute war successfully.

Of course, what the Daily Express really means when it speaks of "our free Press” is that, providing one is in favour of carrying on the war one may criticise the conduct of those appointed to do this work, again providing that such criticism is not prejudicial to its successful prosecution. And there are many pitfalls into which the well-intentioned may fall, as the Daily Express has had occasion to show in its columns in more than one instance.

This strikes us as a very provisional kind of freedom of the Press.

Gilmac.