From: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" <rosserjb-AT-jmu.edu>
Subject: Re: How fascism began
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 14:06:05 -0400 ()


     Another strand that fed into fascism was the 
"corporate state" idea that originated in Roman Catholic 
teachings dating from the 1890s that claimed that there 
could be harmony between the state and the capitalists and 
workers, with the state playing the coordinating and 
harmonizing role.  This was directly adopted by Mussolini 
and later became the official doctrine of the Nazis, as 
well, although in practice this "harmonization" amounted to 
suppression of working class interests.
Barkley Rosser
On Thu, 17 Oct 1996 21:03:55 -0400 (EDT) Louis R Godena 
<louisgodena-AT-ids.net> wrote:


> 
> 
> Until recently there has been a widespread reluctance to concede that
> fascism was anything but an aberration in European history,  a temporary
> response to the great economic and political crisis of the post-1918 period.
> Along with this goes reluctance,  one finds little willingness to consider
> the possibility that fascism might actually be an integral part of the
> history of European culture,  or that its theoretical edifice forms a fairly
> coherent,  logical totality.  The more accepted explanations of fascism have
> tended to focus on external events and circumstances like the First World
> War,  economic destabilization,  political collapse,  or middle-class fears
> of socialism and Communism.     They overlook the fact that fascism was a
> cultural phenomenon before it was a political force and that its ideology
> had crystallized at least a decade before Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922.
> 
> Now a number of new works have appeared which sharply the question the old
> view that fascism was devoid of any intellectual substance,  or was merely a
> reflection of other movements which relied on well-constructed ideologies.    
> 
> According to Zeev Sternhell--perhaps the most forceful advocate of the view
> which stresses that fascism was a direct outgrowth of a European
> intellectual evolution at the end of the last century--not one new idea was
> added was added to fascist ideology after 1918 (Zeev Sternhell with Mario
> Sznajder and Maia Asheri, *The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From cultural
> rebellion to political revolution (Princeton, NJ,  1994: Princeton
> University Press).    A coherent fascist fusion of nationalism and
> syndicalism had already emerged by 1912 at the latest,  in both France and
> Italy,  which drew on a comprehensive cultural revolt against the
> universalist nationalism of the late eighteenth century.    This
> intellectual synthesis was based on a wide-ranging assault on the dominant
> political culture of the age.     It repudiated liberal individualism,
> humanism and Marxism,  philosophies based on natural rights,
> utilitarianism or hedonism as well as rejecting the presumptions of
> parliamentary democracy.    It was resolutely anti-positivist,
> irrationalist and anti-intellectual,  and oriented toward a philosophy of
> action.     
> 
> Above all,  the roots of fascist ideology stemmed from an anti-materialist
> revision of Marxism which began in France with the seminal figure of Georges
> Sorel,  and reached its apogee in Italy on the eve of the First World War.
> The emphasis now is not on what fascism owed to the nationalist mystique but
> its borrowings from a Marxist revolutionary tradition stripped of its
> materialist and rationalist content.     To be sure,  one cannot deny that
> the new kind of "tribal",  "integral" or "total" nationalism (epitomized by
> Barres in France,  Corradini in Italy,  or the German *Blut* und Bloden*
> school was an essential component of fascism;  that this nationalism that
> exalted the primitive force,  vitality,  vigor and organic unity of the
> nation,  helped to undermine the validity of universal moral norms;  or that
> in their desire to resolve the "social question" by integrating the
> industrial proletariat,   radical nationalists helped to lay the ideological
> foundations of both national socialism and fascism.     But the centrality
> of the Sorelian revision of Marxism suggests a fascism that is a direct
> offshoot of the European revolutionary tradition (Richard Imiah,  *The
> European Roots of Modern Fascism,  1874-1918* The Hague,  1995: Verlagen) 
> 
> Few French socialists at the beginning of this century had indeed as deep a
> knowledge of Marxism as Georges Sorel or were as committed to its
> apocalyptic core,  the class struggle.    Few were as insistent on regarding
> Marxism as an instrument of social war against bourgeois democracy,  while
> at the same time desiring to preserve private property and the free play of
> market forces as the source of economic progress.    Sorel went on to reject
> economic determinism and even the most temporary alliance with the liberal
> bourgeoisie.    In contrast to other French socialists (like Jean Jaures),
> he detested the legacy of the French Revolution and Enlightenment
> rationalism.    His vitalistic,  heroic Nietzschean vision of socialism was
> intended to rejuvenate civilization and free it from bourgeois decadence.   
> 
> Sorel's emphasis on myths as a catalyst for social action and as a means to
> galvanize the masses was later to prove a key element in the transition from
> Marxism to fascism,  as was the widely perceived failure of classical
> Marxism to successfully resolve the national question.    Sorel's
> revolutionary patriotism and militant interventionism,  like (later)
> Mussolini's, stressed national interests and great power ambitions,  the
> need for economic development and modernization based on solidarity between
> the classes.    Like later fascists,   Sorel was convinced that the economy
> must *not* be managed by the state,  and that capitalism still had a lot of
> life in it. On the other hand,  the state as a political and juridical
> reality must be the source of all sovereignty,  the incarnation of the
> nation and the instrument for implementing a dynamic revolutionary process
> leading to economic renovation and a superior moral order.   Ironically,  he
> hailed the Bolshevik Revolution and eulogized Lenin.    He died three weeks
> before Mussolini's March on Rome.  
> 
> Fascism,  once it had matured and merged with other modern movements of the
> Right,  was weak in positive aims and ideals.   It had a cautious and
> tentative appeal to religion (the appeal to faith against reason was a
> recurrent *leitmotif* of its propaganda).    It posed as the principle
> bulwark of western society against Bolshevism, while at the same time
> seducing sections of the proletariat--making a parade of radical and
> socialist elements in its creed which it of course failed to implement.
> Courage,  hierarchy,  discipline,  oddly enough the clarion call of a
> degenerative ideology that in its heyday was little more than the handmaiden
> of European capital.    An ignominious ending to an auspicious debut.
> 
> Louis Godena
> 
> 
> *Jean-Francois Sirinelli,  *Fascism,  Religion & the French Right,
> 1815-1926*  (Paris,  1994: Gaullimard) 
> 

-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
rosserjb-AT-jmu.edu