What was fascism? (1999)

Book Review from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fascism: Theory and Practice By Dave Renton. Pluto Press.

Fascism was basically an extreme form that nationalism took in Italy and Germany, for reasons specific to the particular history of these capitalist states, in the period between the 20th century’s two world wars.

Fascism originated in Italy in 1919 in Italy when Mussolini set up the fascisti di combattimento, so called after units of the Roman army. Later the word was used in relation to a similar extreme nationalist movement in Germany even though this described itself as “national-socialist” (Nazi) rather than fascist. Both these movements won control of political power more or less constitutionally, in Italy in 1922 and in Germany in 1933, and proceeded to establish a one-party dictatorship with mass organisations to embrigade the population and preaching that all members of the “nation” had a common interest. Fascism/Nazism was implacably opposed to Marxism for its internationalism and its advocacy of the class struggle within nations.

Analysing this new phenomenon, which represented political regression compared with how Marx and Marxists until the first world war had seen things developing (political democracy, then socialism), was a challenge to those who called themselves Marxists. It is how they met this challenge that Renton’s book describes. Well-written and easy-to-read it suffers from the defect that its author is an SWP member who sees Trotsky as a brilliant political thinker. But Trotsky was disqualified from usefully contributing to the debate since, although he wasn’t a racist, he too favoured a one-party dictatorship.

The SWP makes campaigning against the fascist grouplets that exist today one of its top priorities but since fascism is only an extreme development of nationalism they ought also to campaign against nationalism. Only they don’t; they support the so-called “right of nations to self-determination”, a doctrine which accepts the myth that “nations”—and so “aliens”—exist and so provides ideological ammunition to justify “ethnic cleansing” of members of other “nations” living on a “nation’s” territory.

Adam Buick