Daniel Guerin was among the first students of fascism as a phenomenon. As David Neiwert ("Rush, Newspeak, & Fascism," p.15) mentions, the first attempts to research fascism were from a Marxist point of view, and Guerin is a confirmed Trotskyist. This makes some of the book disturbing, since Guerin's objection to fascism is not its violent, revolutionary nature, nor its coercive and totalitarian tendencies, but the fact that it is employing them in the wrong direction: against Leninism. Initially, this inclined me to dismiss the book, because I find Leninist polemics very unpleasant to read. However, the book does have a very perceptive and clear analysis of fascism and its ideological pretensions. It uses a lot of fascism's own words to demonstrate the bundle of humbuggery it is, and how fascism is above all a tool of the elites it serves.

Unlike the other analyses of fascism I've undertaken, I'm going to analyze Guerin's worldview. That's because people like Lawrence Britt, Umberto Eco, and David Neiwert don't have extreme ideologies of their own. In contrast, Guerin is a Marxist-Leninist. He is convinced that democratic institutions are purely a bourgeois invention. He reliably interjects his own conviction, that fascism can only be defeated by the most militant possible labor movement. Of course, none of the labor leaders and the leftist political leaders in either Italy or Germany were willing to do this—only a few wildcat militia would, and of course they were not able to overcome the hardened rabble of the fascists, or the police.

The capitalist world is on the brink of implosion, Guerin reasons, and the bourgeoisie has to fight with the strength of desperation. It can remain in power only through the most aggressive and sweeping form of dictatorship. So it recruits and finances fascist mobs, which are totally loyal to it. Eventually, the fascist party, being autocratic, purges its own "left" wing, the anti-capitalist demagogues, and turns into a mere praetorian state. The fact that all of the fascist states—Germany, Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Japan—launched major wars that overwhelmed their nations, is for Guerin incidental. In fact, in the concluding chapter ("Some Illusions to Dispel") he spells out his conviction thus:

Nevertheless, it is not correct to say that fascism means war. Bela Kun not long ago attacked this self-interested lie: "The slogan that fascism, which is one of the political forms of bourgeois rule... means war, is designed... only to free again and always from all responsibility one of the groups of imperialist powers that mask their war preparations under democratic forms and pacifist phrases... The old slogan of Marxist anti-militarism—that of revolutionary struggle against imperialist war—was differently expressed: capitalism means war." War is a product of the capitalist system as a whole.
[Fascism and Big Business, p.286]

Guerin actually criticizes the narrow materialism of his contemporary Communists:

Unlike the "idealists," for whom the profoundest social motive of history is an already existing idea of idea of justice and right... these early socialists thought that the relations of production, the economic relations of men with each other, play a preponderant part in history. But if they stressed the economic base, too often neglected before them, they in no way disdained the juridical, political, religious, artistic, and philosophical "superstructure."

[...]

The degenerated Marxists, however, believe it is very "Marxist" and "materialist" to disdain the human factors. They accumulate the figures, statistics, and percentages; they study with great accuracy the profound causes of social phenomena. But by failing to study with the same care the way in which these causes are reflected in the consciousness of men, and failing to penetrate the soul of man, they miss the living reality of these phenomena.

Hence, being interested only in material factors, they understand absolutely nothing of the way in which the privations suffered by the masses are transmuted into a religious aspiration.
[Ibid., p.75-76; italics in original]

Without a doubt, the socialist movement does not aim to maintain and exploit the mystical tendencies of the masses, but on the contrary, to destroy the material roots of religious sentiment by abolishing the capitalist system, the source of suffering and chaos... But while waiting for success, socialists face a concrete fact that they must take into account: the survival of religious sentiment.
[Ibid., p.75-76]

The other problem is that Guerin never takes his own advice. He constantly describes the ease with which different class fractions of Italian and German society embraced fascism, the ease with which the bourgeoisie recruited thugs to beat up Communists. Guerin rejects the idea that people in a non-communist, democratic society can have any motive for waging warfare besides bourgeois imperialism. (As a Trotskyist, he acknowledges that there never has been a legitimately Communist state for more than a few months). Hence, the passage I cited above in which he declares that democracies will fight fascist regimes for narrowly opportunistic, materialistic reasons. It's difficult to believe that Guerin actually thought the entire invasion of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, the Italian Campaign, and all the rest, were purely in order to sell more Coca-Cola. Much of the economic elite of the Anglo-American world had already established industrial collaboration with the fascist regimes of Europe; had they really been intent on winning an imperialist war with the Continent, it would have been simplicity itself to negotiate a separate peace with the Axis after the conquest of North Africa.

As with so many uni-causal histories, Guerin relies on the reader imagining no alternative course of action for the villains. He might admit that the Western Allies prosecuted the War in Europe so as to avoid looking like moral monsters, but assumes that collaborating with the totalitarian regime in Moscow would never be interpreted as a morally monstrous policy (as it was by many in the West at the time). And the Allies could easily have looked "moral" enough by intensifying their energies in the Pacific, "liberating" the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere with a war waged mainly from the air: a war, I might hasten to add, which thoroughly favored the most reactionary, racist segments of US and British society. If Guerin wants a vivid case of a bourgeois democracy behaving like a fascist dictatorship, he can trumpet the air war against Japan. He could indeed make it the centerpiece of his argument, but if he did, readers would wonder why the Allies spent so much energy fighting the Germans in France, when they could have fulfilled their reactionary instincts by fighting the Japanese in Vietnam.

In reality, there were many motivations in all of the belligerent nations of the War; and indeed, had Guerin made a comparable study of the US-UK motivations for entering the War (or those of France, or Canada), he would have noticed that the paramount power the bourgeoisie allegedly had in those countries was not even remotely the same thing as a monopoly of power such as he alleges. The zeal and idealism of the populations of the democracies was real and decisive; the quest for spiritual redemption trumped completely and repeatedly the plainly-expressed squalor of the "big bourgeoisie."

Again, ignoring his own advice, he revised the book copiously in 1965, without noticing the drastic postwar decline in religion, the huge economic boom accompanying Europe's quitting of empire, the gigantic intensification of "class-collaboration" and trans-European cooperation, the social welfare state, and the general decline of the bourgeoisie. As a Trotskyist, Guerin ought to be disturbed and challenged by this, but he is not. The Communists never took power in Western Europe; yet the fascists were liquidated. Anyone can wave disgustedly at the social welfare systems of 1965-Europe (or 1986-era Sweden, for that matter) and say, "It's grossly inadequate—bourgeois exploitation is alive and well," but the trend towards declining Communist electoral turnouts, the trend towards increasing social welfare spending, the trend towards increased "recruiting" of middle classes from the former proletariat, and the decline of the bourgeoisie in all aspects of public life, were far too marked by 1965 to ignore. Clearly, the social base of Communism had evaporated; there were not remotely enough proletariats in European society to form a class dictatorship, unless they actually undertook class collaboration with corporate staff (i.e., white collar workers in large European subsidiaries of US firms). Since Guerin rejects this (p.74-75) as degenerate, 1945-present can only be described as "an age of waiting." If I disagree so strenuously with Guerin, why write about his book?

Surprising as it might seem, I really liked the book and I'm sorry I couldn't spell out my objections to his worldview in far fewer words. Indeed, the subtlety of my objection to his worldview, not its strenuousness, is the reason I've spent 1,457 words criticizing it. Subsequent installments are going to review his book far more sympathetically, revealing that I actually agree with Guerin's assessment of fascism far more than you might expect.

However, Guerin is totally doctrinaire: only his exact, hair's-breadth tendency can save the world from fascism, and so far he is almost unique in embracing it.

(Part 2)