The idea of priests and leaders representing the spirit or general will of the people is modern to the extent that it dethrones traditional religion. But the impulse to endow certain classes of people or individual rulers with religious authority is very ancient and may even be hardwired into human nature. Louis XIV’s (probably fictional) declaration “L’etat, c’est moi” summarized the idea that the ruler and the state were one. The revolutionaries’ accomplishment was to preserve this doctrine while displacing the source of legitimacy from God to the people, the nation, or simply to the idea of progress. Napoleon, the revolutionary general, seized control of France with just such a writ. He was a secular dictator committed to furthering the revolutionary liberation of the peoples of Europe. His victories against the Austro-Hungarian Empire prompted the captive nations of the Hapsburgs to greet him as “the great liberator.” He beat back the authority of the Catholic Church, crowning himself Holy Roman Emperor and ordering his troops to use cathedrals to stable their horses. Napoleon’s troops carried with them the Rousseauian bacillus of divinized nationalism.
Thus tumbles both the glorious myth of the left and the central indictment of the right: that the French Revolution was a wellspring of rationalism. In fact it was no such thing. The Revolution was a romantic spiritual revolt, an attempt to replace the Christian God with a Jacobin one. Invocations to Reason were thinly veiled appeals to a new personalized God of the Revolution. Robespierre despised atheism and atheists as signs of the moral decay of monarchy, believing instead in an “Eternal Being who intimately affects the destinies of nations and who seems to me personally to watch over the French Revolution in a very special way” For the Revolution to be successful Robespierre had to force the people to recognize this God who spoke through him and the general will-Only in this way could Robespierre realize the dream that would later transfix Nazis, communists, and progressives alike: the creation of “New Men.” “I am convinced.” he proclaimed in a typical statement, “of the necessity of bringing about a complete regeneration, and, if I may express myself so, of creating a new people.” (To this end, he pushed through a law requiring that children be taken from their parents and indoctrinated in boarding schools.) The action-priests of the Revolution, wrote Toequeville, “had a fanatical faith in their vocation—that of transforming the social system, root and branch, and regenerating the whole human race.” He later recognized that the French Revolution had become a “religious revival” and the ideology that spewed from it a “species of religion” which “like Islam [has] overrun the whole world with apostles, militants, and martyrs.”
Fascism is indebted to the French Revolution in other ways as well. Robespierre appreciated, as did Sorel and his heirs, that violence was a linchpin that kept the masses committed to the ideals of the Revolution: “If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs.” “For the first time in history,” writes the historian Marisa Linton, “terror became an official government policy, with the stated aim to use violence in order to achieve a higher political goal.” The irony seemed lost on the Bolsheviks—self-proclaimed descendants of the French Revolution—who defined fascism, rather than their own system, as an “openly terroristic dictatorship “
The utility of terror was multifaceted, but among its chief benefits was its tendency to maintain a permanent sense of crisis. Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency. Across the West, this was the most glorious boon of World War I.
WAR: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
Both Mussolini and Lenin are reported to have had the exact same response to the news of the war. “The Socialist International is dead.” And they were right. Across Europe (and later America) socialist and other left-leaning parties voted for war, turning their backs on doctrines of international solidarity and the dogma that this was a war for capitalism and imperialism. After a reflexive two-month period of following this party line, Mussolini started moving into what was known as the interventionist camp. In October 1914 he penned an editorial in Avanti! explaining his new pro-war stance in terms that mixed Marxism, pragmatism, and adventurism. A party “which wishes to live in history’ and, in so far as it is allowed, to make history, cannot submit, at the penalty of suicide to a line which is dependent on an unarguable dogma or eternal law, separate from the iron necessity [of change].” He quoted Marx’s admonition that “whoever develops a set program for the future is a reactionary.” Living up to the letter of the party, he declared, would destroy its spirit.
David Ramsay Steele suggests that Mussolini’s switch in favor of war “was as scandalous as though, 50 years later, [Che] Guevara had announced that he was off to Vietnam, to help defend the South against North Vietnamese aggression.” It’s a good line, but it obscures the fact that socialists throughout Europe and America were rallying to the cause of war, largely because that’s where the masses wanted to go. The most shocking example came when the socialists in the German parliament voted in favor of granting credits to fund the war. Even in the United States the vast majority of socialists and progressives supported American intervention with a bloodlust that would embarrass their heirs today—if their heirs actually took the time to learn the history of their own movement.
This is a vital point because, while it is most certainly true that World War I gave birth to Fascism, it also gave birth to anti-Fascist propaganda. From the moment Mussolini declared himself in favor of the war, Italian Socialists smeared him for his heresy. “Chi paga?” became the central question of the anti-Mussolini whisper campaign. “Who’s paying him?” He was accused of taking money from arms makers, and it was hinted darkly that he was on France’s payroll. There’s no evidence for any of this. From the beginning, fascism was dubbed as right-wing not because it necessarily was right-wing but because the communist left thought this was the best way to punish apostasy (and. even if it was right-wing in some long forgotten doctrinal sense, fascism was still right-wing socialism). It has ever been thus. After all, if support for the war made one objectively right-wing, then Mother Jones was a rabid right-winger, too. This should be a familiar dynamic today, as support for the war in Iraq is all it takes to be a “right-winger” in many circles, Mussolini on occasion acknowledged that fascism was perceived as a movement of the “right,” but he never failed to make it clear that his inspiration and spiritual home was the socialist left. “You hate me today because you love me still,” he told Italian Socialists. “Whatever happens, you won’t lose me. Twelve years of my life in the party ought to be sufficient guarantee of my socialist faith. Socialism is in my blood.” Mussolini resigned his editorship of Avanti! but he could never resign his love of the cause. “You think you can turn me out. but you will find I shall come back again. I am and shall remain a socialist and my convictions will never change! They are bred into my very bones.”
Nevertheless, Mussolini was forced to quit the party organization. He joined up with a group of pro-war radicals called the Fascio Autonomo d’Azione Rivoluzionaria and quickly became their leader. Again, Mussolini had not moved to the right. His arguments for entering the war were made entirely in the context of the left and mirrored to no small extent the liberal and leftist arguments of American interventionists such as Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, and Walter Lippmann. The war, he and his fellow apostates insisted, was against the reactionary Germans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a war to liberate foreign peoples from the yoke of imperial ism and advance the cause of socialist revolution in Italy
, a true “proletarian nation.”
Mussolini founded a new newspaper, II Popolo dltalia. The name itself—The People of Italy—is instructive because it illustrates the subtle change in Mussolini’s thinking and the first key distinction between socialism and fascism. Socialism was predicated on the Marxist view that “workers” as a class were more bound by common interests than any other criteria. Implicit in the slogan “Workers of the work! unite!” was the idea that class was more important than race, nationality, religion, language, culture, or any other “opiate” of the masses. It had become clear to Mussolini that not only was this manifestly not so but it made little sense to pretend otherwise. If Sorel had taught that Marxism was a series of useful myths rather than scientific fact, why not utilize more useful myths if they’re available? “I saw that internationalism was crumbling,” Mussolini later admitted. It was “utterly foolish” to believe that class consciousness could ever trump the call of nation and culture. “The sentiment of nationality exists and cannot be denied.” What was then called socialism was really just a kind of socialism: international socialism. Mussolini was interested in creating a new socialism, a socialism in one state, a national socialism, which had the added benefit of being achievable. The old Socialist Party stood in the way of this effort, and thus it was “necessary,” Mussolini wrote in // Popolo, “to assassinate the Party in order to save Socialism.” In another issue he implored, “Proletarians, come into the streets and piazzas with us and cry: ‘Down with the corrupt mercantile policy of the Italian bourgeoisie’...Long live the war of liberation of the peoples!”
In 1915 Mussolini was called up for service. He fought well, receiving shrapnel in his leg. The war tended to accelerate his thinking. The soldiers had fought as Italians, not as “workers.” Their sacrifice was not for the class struggle but for the Italian struggle. He began to formulate the idea—known as trincerocrazm—that veterans deserved to run the country because they had sacrificed more and had the discipline to improve Italy’s plight (echoes of this conviction can be found in the “chicken hawk” epithet today). “Socialism of the trenches” seemed so much more plausible than socialism of the factory floor, for Mussolini had in effect seen it. On March 23, 1919, Mussolini and a handful of others founded the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan, aiming to form a popular front of pro-war leftists, from socialist veterans groups to Futurist, anarchist, nationalist, and syndicalist intellectuals. Some highlights from their program:
* Lowering the minimum voting age to eighteen, the minimum age for representatives to twenty-five, and universal suffrage, including for women.
* “The abolition of the Senate and the creation of a national technical council on intellectual and manual labor, industry, commerce and culture.”
* End of the draft.
* Repeal of titles of nobility.
* “A foreign policy aimed at expanding Italy’s will and powder in opposition to all foreign imperialisms;”
* The prompt enactment of a state law sanctioning a legal work day of eight actual hours of work for all workers.
* A minimum wage.
* The creation of various government bodies run by workers’ representatives.
* Reform of the old-age and pension system and the establishment of age limits for hazardous work.
* Forcing landowners to cultivate their lands or have them expropriated and given to veterans and farmers’ cooperatives.
* The obligation of the state to build “rigidly secular” schools for the raising of “the proletariat’s moral and cultural condition.”
* “A large progressive tax on capital that would amount to a one-time partial expropriation of all riches.”
* “The seizure of all goods belonging to religious congregations and the abolition of episcopal revenues.”
* The “review” of all military contracts and the “sequestration of 85% of all war profits.”
* The nationalization of all arms and explosives industries.
Ah, yes. Those anti-elitist, stock-market-abolishing, child-labor-ending, public-health-promoting, wealth-confiscating, draft-ending, secularist right-wingers!
In November the newly named and explicitly left-wing Fascists ran a slate of candidates in the national elections. They got trounced at the hands of the Socialists. Most historians claim this is what taught Mussolini to move to the “right.” Robert O. Paxton writes that Mussolini realized “there was no space in Italian politics for a party that was both nationalist and Left.”
This, I think, distorts the picture. Mussolini did not move fascism from left to right; he moved it from socialist to populist. An unwieldy phenomenon, populism had never been known as a conservative or right-wing orientation before, and it is only because so many were determined to label fascism right-wing that populism under Mussolini was redefined as such. After all, the notion that political power is and should be vested in the people was a classical liberal position. Populism was a more radical version of this position. It’s still a “power to the people” ideology, but it is skeptical of the parliamentary machinery of conventional liberalism (e.g., checks and balances). In the United States the populists—always a force on the left in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—pushed for such reforms as direct elections of senators and the nationalization of industry and banking. Direct democracy and nationalization were two of the main planks of the Fascist agenda. Mussolini also stopped calling // Popolo d* Italia a “socialist daily” in favor of a “producers’ daily.”
An emphasis on “producers” had everywhere been the hallmark of populist economics and politics. The key distinction for “producerism,” as many called it, was between those who created wealth with their own hands and those who merely profited from it. William Jennings Bryan, for example, was keen on distinguishing the good and decent “people” from “the idle holders of idle capital.” The populists sought to expand the scope of government in order to smash the “economic royalists” and help the little guy. This was Mussolini’s approach in a nutshell (much as it is that of left-wing icons of today, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez). Fascist slogans included “The land to him who works it!” and “To every peasant the entire fruit of his sacred labor!” Mussolini still employed warmed-over Marxist theory when convenient—as many populists did—to explain his new fondness for the small landowner. Italy was still a “proletarian nation,” he explained, and so needed to develop economically before it could achieve socialism, even if that meant making a pragmatic nod to capitalist expediency in the form of trade. Lenin had made the identical adjustment under his New Economic Policy in 1921, in which peasants were encouraged to grow more food for their own use and profit.
None of this is to say that Mussolini was a deeply consistent ideologue or political theorist. As a pragmatist, he was constantly willing to throw off dogma, theory, and alliances whenever convenient. In the few years immediately following the formation of the Fasci di Combattimento, Mussolini’s main governing themes were expediency and opportunism. This was, after all, the age of “experimentation.” FDR would later preach a similar gospel, holding that he had no fixed agenda other than to put Americans to work and launch a program of “bold experimentation.” “We do not distrust the future,” FDR declared. “The people...have not failed. In their need they have...asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In that spirit I take it.” Likewise, the Fasci di Combattimento, Mussolini wrote in May 1920, “do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.” And much as Roosevelt would later, Mussolini asked the Italian people to trust him now and worry about an actual program down the road. Shortly before he became prime minister, he famously responded to those who wanted specifics from him: “The democrats of // Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of // Mondo. And the sooner the better.”
From 1919 to 1922, when Mussolini led the March on Rome and became prime minister, his first objective was power an
d combat. Make no mistake: many Fascists were skull crackers, leg breakers, and all-purpose thugs, particularly among the OVRA, the secret police of the Fascist state modeled after Lenin’s secret police, hence the nickname “Cheha” The casualties from the Fascist-initiated “civil war” hover around two thousand, with 35 percent of the dead confirmed leftists and 15 percent Fascists. This may sound like a lot or a little depending on your perspective, but it is worth keeping in mind that more Italians died during this period from traditional Italian Mafia wars. It’s also worth noting that many Fascists were actually impressive, respectable men who earned not only the cooperation of the police but the sympathy of both judges and the common man. In a national contest between two broad factions, the Italian people—workers, peasants, small-business men, and professionals, as well as the well-to-do and wealthy—chose the Fascists over avowed international socialists and communists.
Mussolini’s style was remarkably similar to Yasir Arafat’s (though Arafat was undoubtedly far more murderous). He played the political game of claiming to seek peaceful accords and alliances while straining to contain the more violent elements within his movement. His hands were tied, he’d claim, when squads of Fascist Blackshirts broke the bones of his opponents. Again like Lenin—and Arafat—Mussolini practiced a philosophy of “the worse the better.” He celebrated the violence committed by socialists because it gave him the opportunity to commit more violence in retribution. A brawler who’d been in countless fist and knife lights, Mussolini saw physical violence as a redemptive and natural corollary to intellectual combat (in this he was a lot like Teddy Roosevelt). There’s no need to defend Mussolini against the charge that he was a practitioner of organized political violence, as some of his more friendly biographers have tried to do. It’s easier to concede the points of both defenders and critics. Yes, the socialists and communists he was fighting were often just as bad as the Fascists. And on other occasions the Fascists were much worse. At the end of the day, however, the salient fact was that in a nation torn by economic and social chaos as well as political bitterness in the wake of the Versailles Treaty, Mussolini’s message and tactics triumphed. Moreover, his success had less to do with ideology and violence than with populist emotional appeals. Mussolini promised to restore two things in short supply: pride and order.
LIBERAL FASCISM: The Secret History of the AMERICAN LEFT from MUSSOLINI to the POLITICS OF MEANING Page 6
