Fascism is not borne solely from the desire and subsidies of the capitalist magnates... Doubtless, in the beginning, when they are still playing merely the role of "anti-labor militia," the fascist bands recruit many adventurers with the mentality of mercenaries. But as fascism orientates itself toward the conquest of power, and becomes a great mass movement, the motoves that bring thousands of human beings to it become more complex... The capitalist magnates could never, in spite of all their gold, have "set marching" such human forces if the masses had not previously been in a state of discontent.
[Guerin, Fascism and Big Business p.23, 1934]

The Middle Classes and Fascism

The backbone of the fascist troops was the urban "middle class."¹ With this sentence, Guerin succinctly summarizes his class analysis of fascism. Later, he declares (p.120), "Do not forget that fascism won power legally." He puts forward these orthodox Leninist analyses of the rise of fascism, but he can only mean this in the sense that, once the middle classes are won over to fascism, then fascism has won mastery over the state. Oddly, the main countervailing evidence to his conclusions that I have is offered by Guerin himself: his excellent, detailed account of the fascist strategy for political conquest.

At first, the fascist gangs have the character of anti-labor militia entrusted by the capitalist magnates and country landlords with the mission of harassing the organized proletariat and destroying its power of resistance (Chapter I). If the manner of using these bands varies somewhat from one country to another, the tactics are basically the same: military and aggressive. Fascism confronts the power of numbers with "audacious minorities," and the amorphous and generally unarmed working masses with disciplined, well-armed squadrons.

In Italy

Immediately after the war there was a veritable flowering of anti-labor leagues in Italy: Mussolini's Combat Fasci, the Anti-Bolshevik League, Fasci for Social Education, Umus, Italy Redeemed, etc. At the same time, the members of the Arditi, the war volunteer corps, on being demobilized, formed a militant association of 20,000 members, which became the shock troops for the various anti-labor leagues and had headquarters in the principal cities. ² Almost everywhere peaceful processions of workers, parading through the streets with women and children, were unexpectedly attacked by the Arditi in groups of twenty or thirty, armed with daggers and hand grenades. For instance, in Milan, on April 15, 1919, when an impressive parade, formed after a socialist meeting, had nearly reached the center of the city, a little troop of young men rushed into the crowd, and the paraders, surprised by the attack, stopped, hesitated and retreated. On the afternoon of the same day, another band sacked the offices of the paper Avanti. On December 1, 1919, when the new Chamber opened its session, the Socialist deputies were attacked and beaten as they left the parliament building. In July 1920, the Rome edition of Avanti in its turn suffered the attack of the young desperados. Soon the Arditi and other anti-labor leagues merged with Mussolini's fasci. During the same year, 1920, a colonel was sent out by the War Ministry as a sort of "military expert in civil war." After traveling through Italy and finishing his investigation, he made a report which contained, writes Rossi, "a detailed plan for an anti-socialist offensive." ³ But, for this task the 25,000 mercenaries it had been decided to recruit to insure internal order would not suffice:

There must be added an idealistic [sic] militia organized by the most expert, courageous, strong, and aggressive among us. This militia must be capable both of military resistance and political action. Local actions, with the view to subduing the insolence of the most subversive centers, will be an excellent school for our militia and will at the same time serve to demoralize and crush the enemy…

Already he was christening these "actions" "local punitive expeditions." The militia to be formed should have strict military organization and tactics [the colonel wrote]. Only thus would they get the better of the enemy forces, "heterogeneous mobs," badly armed, passive, and incapable of planned and coordinated action.

There was nothing more for Mussolini to do but put the good advice of the colonel into effect. We know that in the autumn of 1920, after the blow dealt by the occupation of the factories, the subsidies of the industrialists and agrarians flowed into his coffers. From then on he could buy arms, pay his young recruits and the ex-officers who enrolled. "Revolutionary action squadrons" were formed. They first tried their hand in the country, where the workers could be more easily crushed because of their isolation. The offensive began with a provocation in Bologna, the center of Emilia's "Red Leagues." The municipal elections there in November 1920, had brought a victory for the Socialist Party. On November 21, while the Municipal Council was in session, the Black Shirts attacked the town hall, and a reactionary municipal councilman, Pietro Giordani, who was a lawyer and war veteran, was killed. Who fired the shot, nobody knew, but his corpse served as a springboard for the reaction. The Bologna affair, according to one of Mussolini's own apologists, "opened the great fascist era... The law of brutal retaliation, atavistic and savage, reigned in the peninsula. It was the will of the fascists." "A year and a half later, the body of a woman who had been murdered and cut to pieces was found in Bologna. The assassin was arrested and recognized as the same man the police had arrested at the door of the municipal council chamber the day the lawyer Giordani was killed. Since he was a fascist gunman and a police informer, he was immediately released. Everything pointed to his guilt. ...Nobody in Bologna doubts that he was the murderer of the municipal councilman, or that he acted on orders." ⁴

[...]

An important fact is that the fascist squadrons had at their disposal, even in this period, not only the subsidies of their financial backers but the material and moral support of the repressive forces of the state: police, carabinieri, and army. The police recruited for the squadrons, urging outlaws to enroll in them and promising them all sorts of benefits and immunity.
[Fascism and Big Business, Guerin, p.102-103]

[Hitler's] tactics, like those of the Black Shirts, were essentially aggressive: a handful of daring men, ready for anything, would burst into a crowd of workers and, thanks to their cohesion and swift and brutal action, emerge masters of the field. "It happened more than once," Hitler recalls, "that a hand- ful of our comrades held out heroically against enormous masses of Reds who shouted and fought with their fists. It is true that these fifteen or twenty men could have been over- come in the end but their opponents realized that before that, at least two or three times as many of their own partisans would have had their heads broken. ...And how our boys went into the fight! Like a swarm of wasps, they rushed upon the disturbers... without worrying about the enemy's numerical superiority, even if it was overwhelming, and without fear of being wounded or shedding their blood." ⁶

It was about this time that the Munich Chief of Police, Pöhner, when the existence of "veritable organizations of political assassination" was pointed out to him, replied: "Yes, yes, but too few! "⁷

At the meeting in the Hofbraeuhaus on November 4, 1921, the Ordnertruppe surpassed itself. Before the meeting began, Hitler got his m-en together, made them stand at attention, and informed them that they should not leave the room except as corpses. "My men rushed into the attack like wolves. They hurled themselves on their adversaries in packs of eight or ten and began to drive them out of the hall by showering them with blows. The hubbub lasted twenty minutes. By this time, our adversaries, of whom there were perhaps seven or eight hundred, had most of them been thrown out of the hall and driven down the stairs by my men, of whom there were less than fifty. ...That evening we really learned many things." ⁸ The lesson was, in fact, to be useful. In October, 1922, Hitler, accompanied by eight hundred Nazis, went to a congress at Coburg. As they left the station, they were greeted by a huge crowd of workers, who shouted "Assassins! Bandits! Criminals!" and began to throw stones. But the Nazis, faithful to their aggressive tactic, launched an attack. "Then our patience," Hitler relates, "was at an end, and blows fell like hail on all sides. A quarter of an hour later, nothing red dared show the end of its nose in the streets." ⁹
[Fascism and Big Business, Guerin, p.107]

There was not a violent military coup in any of the fascist states except Japan (and that one was thwarted, leading to a "compromise" between the Army and the Diet to essentially end the latter's role in governing). However, a succession of violent confrontations by hired lumpenproletariat and military/police personnel, or, in the case of Japan, the militarization of the entire society in order to maintain the urban economy, long preceded the final fascist closure. The ascent of the fascists all the way up the flight of stairs, so to speak, was a ratchet of terror: the fascists targetted outliers of the left and clutched their old strongholds of power, until eventually, when they were able to try their chances in an open election, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: no one was around to seriously challenge them, having been thrashed into a pulp.¹⁰

Guerin's chapter on the middle classes as the bulwark of fascism swiftly retreats from his robust assertion. They are wedged between the two fundamental classes of society (p.46), heterogenous and vulnerable. They are constantly being squeezed between the ephemeral character of their jobs (e.g., as middle managers as opposed to bricklayers or carpenters), and the costs of maintaing their class identity (housing prices). In postwar Europe, their lot was quite often materially worse than that of the proletariat, and they were more deeply humiliated, since the middle classes tend to police each other. However, according to Guerin (and here, he is very perceptive) the real ambition of the anry middle classes is reactionary: they do not want a progressive transformation of the economy into something more free or efficient, but rather, an end to the competition that constantly endangers them. Earlier I mentioned their jobs are ephemeral; the large numbers of the middle class come from the tradition of rising from the factory floor up into a managerial position, without necessarily completing a college degree. But corporations are constantly pruning their middle managers, throwing them out onto the job market without certification as managers, or with precisely the traditional outlook and techniques that top managers wish to rid themselves of. College grads, attempting to translate liberal arts degrees into relevant jobs, are liable to wind up being digital proletariats themselves; in the USA, many "failed" or displaced middle class workers look at multilevel networking as the only existing updraft capable of carrying them to higher ground. They must become petit-bourgeois and "unleash the power of residual income."

According to Guerin, the middle classes are desperate to escape the constant downdraft of proletarianization. The pressures are immense; and socialism, if such a movement exists, only offers the conclusion of proletarianization. The middle classes identify the nation with their standing in it, their property, and most importantly, their hope of eventually abolishing competition for place. The conscious proletariat is scornful of nationalism. Even if not "conscious," the national emblems cherished by the proletariat are not likely to be the same ones cherished by the middle class. In Europe, quote frequently the proletariats were Roman Catholic, while the middle classes were Protestant. In the USA, this class coding of religion has regional variations; where I grew up, the lower income strata were either Roman Catholic-Hispanic, or else, Charismatic-Evangelical. This might lead to a distinction between patriotic totems, with the mainstream Calvinist denominations of Southern California trumpeting US nationalism, while the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Church of God in Christ harbored a deep suspicion of such displays

The main bloc of the middle class that Guerin believes instigated fascism was the rural middle-class, the small farmer. In Europe, agriculture survived as a family-based enterprise far longer than in the USA, and the peasants remained a far larger share of the population than in the USA. Moreover, the moment that large proletarian movements appeared, they burned their bridges with the peasants in Western Euope by promising to socialize agriculture; this, of course, was a violent affront to the peasant, whose eternal goal is th ownership of land. In Japan, likewise, the peasant was vehemently anti-capitalist but desperate to own land. So the militarist movements of 1920's-era Japan looked much like attempts by the countryside to reverse the colonial-style rule of the cities over the countryside, and to "purify" the decadent life of the big urban centers.

However, a crucial point remains: Guerin's thesis, that the middle classes are a bulwark of fascist power, has perceptive elements, but applies at best to extreme crises; in such crises, as where unemployment in the middle classes is huge and a great preponderance feel the eminent likelihood of being reduced to proletariats. Even then, as middle classes utterly lack the solidarity of other classes (even when we are speaking of peasnts), they are unable to resist the will of the lumpen-bourgeois alliance, and at worst, only intermittently supplement it.

(Part 4)

[Fascism] |[Totalitarianism] | [Communism]

Incidentally, I have to recommend a movie for those interested in this aspect of European history: The Blue Angel (starring Marlene Dietrich); in German, this is Professor Unratt ("Professor Garbage"). This movie is readily available in most public libraries and allows a vivid encounter with class politics at a decidedly personal level. At the risk of spoiling the plot, the title is pretty much the story: Prof. Ratt ("counsellor"), a burned-out gymnasium professor falls in love with a far-younger cabaret singer, marries her in a mental aberration, and turns into "Unratt" (garbage); tied by unemployment and disgrace to the cabaret, he becomes a clown.

2 Silone, Der Fascismus, 1934 [cited in Guerin; unfortunately, Guerin never cites page numbers]

3 Gorgolini, Le Fascisme, 1921 [cited in Guerin]

5 Silone, op. cit. [cited in Guerin]

6 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925 [cited in Guerin]

7 Heiden, Historei du national-socialisme, 1934 [French translation cited in Guerin]

8 Hitler op. cit. [cited in Guerin]

9 Ibid. [cited in Guerin]

10 Information on the role of the Kōdō and Tōsei factions of the Japanese military comes from several sources. Among the most important was Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (Herbert P. Bix, 2000), whose description of the factions is highly nuanced and alive to the historical and cultural conditions of Japan. The primary departure for Bix seems to be the emphasis on the theological-cum-constitutional dispute over the divinity of the emperor, a dispute very similar in character to the 4th century christological disputes. The Kōdō-ha wanted to emphasize that the emperor was "very god," i.e., wholly and indeed a god, and hence, that unto which the welfare and flourishing of the Japanese kokutai sprang. In contrast, the Tōsei-ha were primarily bureaucratic.