Abstract
As Modris Eksteins reminds us in The Rites of Spring, 1 as the first Christmas of what was still officially a short war approached, a festive mood gripped the soldiers entrenched both sides of no-man’s-land at some points along the Western front, to a point where seasonal greetings were exchanged and some individuals were able walk across to take tokens of good will to their counterparts beyond the wire. On Christmas Day itself there were several joint burials of the dead, occasional incidents of joint carol-singing, and most famously, of improvised football matches between French, British and German troops. It is not recorded who won. In my chapter ‘Exploding the Continuum of History’ that sparked the debate contained in the pages of this special issue of EJPT, I asserted that both Marxist and non-Marxist historians ‘remain largely oblivious to the potential contribution which explanatory strategies employed beyond the ideological no-man’s land between them could make to a more complete understanding of fascism’. 2 Now that seven academics have risen to the occasion and produced a raft of considered responses to my call for entente from both sides of the trenches, it falls to me here to assess whether their essays suggest that anything more permanent could be achieved in the way of reconciliation and fruitful collaboration than a temporary Christmas truce.
Reading David D. Roberts’s EJPT article makes me rather painfully aware that when I wrote the initial essay I had indeed not done my homework sufficiently thoroughly on Gramsci, Benjamin or Laclau, or on Marxist fascist studies as a whole. As a result I have clearly been poorly informed (or rather I have informed myself poorly) on key areas of Marxian scholarship, and the finer points of their arguments, and thus felt licensed to stretch or butcher their concepts of revolution and fascism, not to mention classical Marxism and Bolshevism in their entirety, to fit the Procrustean bed of my theory of fascism and its purported roots in the modernist revolution against anomie. This prevented me from reconnoitring more promising sites along the gorge still separating leftists and ‘liberal’ fascist studies for potential bridge building, even if only of the Indian Jones variety. Indeed, Roberts’s close scholarly reading of my text results in a series of courteous but radical criticisms which cumulatively constitute such an effective demolition job that little of my original essay is left intact as a cogent thesis. I could, of course, return to the fray like the mutilated defender of the bridge in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who, now reduced to a limbless torso, calls out after his attackers who have swept past him: ‘come back here and I’ll bite your legs off’. However, I prefer to respond in the spirit of collegiality in which Roberts has conceived his critique (in such marked contrast to some other eminent colleagues who suffer fools – or this fool – less gladly). So I will recklessly fling down the sword and take to heart several points that stand out from the meticulously scholarly text he has written.
First, it underscores the reassuring fact that there are ‘mainstream’ scholars concerned with fascism, totalitarianism, revolution and modernity who, like me, regret the mutual ignorance and suspicion that have grown up between Marxist and non-Marxist ways of approaching such topics, who recognize the potential of each other’s traditions to enrich scholarly understanding of these crucial aspects of modern history, and who are open to more direct engagement between them. Second, Roberts’s critique confirms my original hunch, namely that the four thinkers I chose to use as a lens through which to examine fascism through fresh (though ‘borrowed’) Marxist spectacles really do open up, in ways I could not fully grasp at the time, exciting new vistas of understanding with respect to both Fascism and Nazism, and by extension to other fascisms. Doubtless, alternative original Marxist minds (e.g. Lukács, Poulantzas) might have had similarly radical implications for non-Marxist fascist studies in the hands of an expert like Roberts. But in their unique ways it seems that as long as they are read in a heuristic spirit based on genuine scholarly engagement carried out in good faith, they all call upon non-Marxist historians to reassess the unique constellations of crisis factors and potential agents of transformation through ultranationalist movements that emerged in a number of countries in the inter-war period, and that helped determine the nature and ultimate fate of fascism in each case.
This line of argument implies (as I had originally hoped however ingenuously) that a process of healthy ‘revision’ informed by sophisticated Marxist perspectives is indeed called for. Carried out in a collaboratively ‘ecumenical’ spirit, it could integrate an appropriately non-reductive version of ‘class analysis’ into the mainstream study of fascism, resulting in a more sustained and nuanced consideration of the ‘material conditions’ of its incubation, in particular the prevailing state of finance capitalism’s development, the economic situation of the ‘masses’, the strength or weakness of organized labour, and the state’s response to it in each unique case. Roberts’s article, particularly when read in conjunction with his recent reconsideration of Gramsci’s interpretation of fascism, 3 also makes it clear to me that Marxist interpretations of fascism at their most sophisticated could make more incisive and less flabby the way historians analyse the relationship of each fascism to existing political elites, to the (mythic) past and the future, to revolution and reaction, to the transcendence or destruction of contemporary laissez-faire finance capitalism, to liberal modernity and to the Bolshevik alternative. The fact that Roberts wrote his rejoinder at all, and thus helped lay the basis for this special issue of EJPT, is in itself ample vindication of my original impulse to ‘explode the continuum’ of conventional fascist studies by breaking down the artificial barriers segregating them from the parallel universe of Marxist studies, no matter how speculative and one-sided my initial article was.
Danilo Breschi’s article, written from a non-Marxist but decidedly leftist perspective, is valuable for this debate if only because it puts empirical flesh on the abstractions which so often have been the scourge of both schools of fascist studies. He highlights the key role played by the federalist, Mazzinian Risorgimento programme (‘myth’) in legitimizing Mussolini’s variant of fascism, which makes it simultaneously a non-revolutionary continuation of ‘capitalist’ Italy as Marxists are predisposed to see it, and a radical rupture with Cavourian liberalism which contained its own element of Garibaldian ‘national socialism’ in its inception, which thus imparts it with a revolutionary élan in Giolittian Italy. It was this ambiguity that made some parliamentary liberals prepared to enlist early Fascism as an ally in their struggle to ward off the threats of socialism and communism in the chaotic aftermath of the First World War, even though anti-liberal elements within the bourgeoisie, the monarchy and the church could also see Fascism as a force to do business with. Italian Fascism emerges as a profoundly ambivalent, compromised force from the start which wanted to have its revolutionary cake while eating its reactionary one. One of its Janus faces looked back to the Risorgimento and to continuity with ruling elites, the church and the Roman legacy, and is virulently anti-socialist, while the other looks to a post-liberal future in which the whole ethos of bourgeois capitalist modernity would be transcended in a new Italy and a new economic system would emerge which would tame the working class movement as well as harnessing capitalism firmly to the transcendent interests of the state as revealed to the Duce. This ambivalence means that Fascism generated empirical realities which provide grist to the mills of both Marxists intent on stressing Fascism’s reactionary, counter-revolutionary, capitalist nature and those (including myself and Roberts) who see the revolutionary, and in my terms ‘palingenetic’, thrust of Fascism as primary from the outset. Hence the regime inherited from the early movement a futural, futuristic dimension which became a permanent component of Fascism, no matter how compromised and adulterated it was for pragmatic reasons by its inherent reactionary and ‘bourgeois’ element and the significant role retained within it by ‘the old liberal ruling class’.
It is particularly useful in this respect that Breschi stresses that ‘revolution does not necessarily and exclusively denote the radical transformation of the economic framework and underpinnings of a society’. This insight allows him to recognize that a regime which replaced ‘the institutions of the parliamentary system’ with ‘the one-party structure’ and introduced a modern, collectivist (totalitarian) type of welfare state was revolutionary both constitutionally and socially. But what I naturally find most reassuring as corroboration of my own approach is the added weight Breschi gives to Roberts’s penetrating deployment of Laclau’s analysis of the Mazzinian legacy subsumed by Fascism. He highlights the importance of the direct link of Fascism’s Mazzinianism with the philosophy of Giovanni Gentile’s neo-Hegelian theory of the state and of ‘actualism’ which he sees as having affinities with certain schools of Marxism. The importance of this passage is twofold. It highlights the failure of most Marxists to take seriously and engage with individual fascist thinkers whose theories refute simplistic equations of fascism with reaction, thereby reducing its ideology to an apologia for capitalist hegemony. This is an untenable position, unless reaction is crudely reduced to ‘anti-socialism’, and all fascist thought and ritual are dismissed as the mystification of power and the ‘aestheticization’ of violence.
It also leads Breschi to remind the reader that Giovanni Gentile’s elaborate (but genuinely philosophical) vindication of Fascism was only one of a wide range of diverse rationales provided for it by its enthusiasts at the time, the outstanding common denominator between which is that they all in unique ways celebrate a ‘psychological and pre-political’ fusion of ‘thought and action’ in a palingenetic myth of ‘community regeneration’. Breschi proposes in his conclusion that as a basis for future collaborative studies Fascism might be seen as an original fusion (or hybrid) of a governmental liberalism that had become statist and nationalist with a republicanism that had become populist and revolutionary. It is an approach that partially justifies both Marxist and non-Marxist interpretations of Mussolini’s regime (which increasingly shed its ties with liberal capitalism as the 1930s progressed), and could indeed serve as a valuable starting point for renewed dialogue between their advocates. What is abundantly clear from Breschi’s essay is that Fascism is too dynamic and heterogeneous to fit any abstract model or definition of fascism, right or left, but that there are grounds for reopening investigations into Fascism’s nature by pooling insights from both sides of the divide. It is an argument that from my point of view is very encouraging.
Turning to Richard Saage’s essay, which in contrast to Breschi’s is largely concerned with the Third Reich, is an altogether more sobering experience. Its immediate merit is that it offers readers an admirably succinct summary of the area of consensus between myself and Roberts concerning the revolutionary nature of generic fascism and its pursuit of an alternative modernity, as well as a clear articulation of a particular interpretation of fascism that radically calls into question key premises of this consensus. This argues that it was not revolutionary, not just when judged by Marxist criteria alone, but more generally when measured by the yardstick of the major revolutions of the modern era. By focusing on the issue of fascism’s success or failure to achieve autonomy from reactionary conservative forces in both Italy and Germany, Saage identifies an important benchmark for evaluating the revolutionary credentials of a putative form of fascism, and finds that in both Germany and Italy it significantly fails to meet it. They thus emerge as a pseudo-revolution or a counter-revolution, but not a revolution. In which case there is no need for Marxists to even try to take on board the possibility that they have underestimated the revolutionary potential of fascism. There is no case to answer.
Saage accepts the argument that fascism in both cases might have aspired to achieve autonomy from the old political order, but neither succeeded, leading Fascism to remain bogged down in compromise with the status quo, and Nazism ultimately to embark on an orgy of destruction due to its inability to ‘give itself positive and constructive goals’. By the same token, Fascism’s modernization of Italy was largely a process of a backward country ‘catching up’ with its contemporaries, while Nazism, though it inherited a highly advanced industrial nation, failed to establish itself as the protagonist of the radical technological revolution it aspired to deliver. This was because the dysfunctional bureaucracy of the state system it created impeded rather than promoted the emergence of a turbo-powered capitalism and science to carry it out. In any case its war economy’s reliance on slave and concentration camp labour is inconsistent with a genuinely modern technological revolution. Thus Nazism was a new counter-revolution in which a totalitarian system used industrial society to destroy the ‘idea of 1789’.
This argument cuts the ground from under ‘our’ feet by radically calling into question the premise that fascism can be regarded as revolutionary and pursuing an alternative modernity. Saage goes on to stress that in any case only Bonapartist approaches to fascism, with their emphasis on the relative autonomy of Bonapartism from the bourgeois power bases it serves, approximate to the view of fascism as transcending capitalism, and even then only in the most limited sense, while the Soviet ‘agent theory’ remains resolutely opposed even to this concession of fascism’s non-capitalist, non-reactionary nature. However, just when all seemed lost, an olive branch of potential reconciliation, or at least the basis for fruitful negotiation, is offered when Saage out of the blue introduces the anomalous case of György Lukács, who though close to the agent theory, conceded that fascism ‘developed into a semi-autonomous politico-economic entity’ and at least partially ‘transcended the restrictive conditions of its society of origin’ (i.e. bourgeois capitalist society). Saage’s suggestion is that fruitful debate between Marxists and non-Marxists might eventually emerge on the issue whether the relative political and economic autonomy gained by fascism from ‘liberal’ capitalism and democracy was not also accompanied by a degree of corresponding ideological autonomy as well.
This line of reasoning would certainly be consistent with the stress in classical Marxism on the way changes in ideological superstructure follow from transformations of the material ‘base’. At this point the intriguing prospect opens up that even hard-line Marxists of a post-Trotsky or post-Dimitrov disposition might one day be prepared through an elaboration of Lukács’s arguments to recognize that the hallmark of this ideological reflection of fascism’s emergence as a semi-autonomous entity was its vision of an ultranationalist rebirth as the New Consensus claims, while for their part New Consensus historians would concede that fascism never struggled entirely free from capitalist (and in the case of Italy even feudal) society, no matter how resolutely and bloodily it tried, and could never completely conceal its origins in prefascist bourgeois ultranationalism.
I am grateful to Saage for identifying in Lukács a thinker whose ideas have sufficient resonance in Marxist circles for some sort of dialogue to be opened. However, the main value of his article for my own understanding of fascism is that its lucidity in identifying the key points of different that separate us has allowed me to see precisely where ‘the shoe is pinching (my foot)’, as a German saying goes. I believe that the utopia that fascists pursued was far more fundamental in both regimes, and that they took far more radical steps to achieve it in both countries than he implies, and than even the most Lukácsian Marxists will probably ever accept. Under the Fascists an elaborate programme of socially engineering was undertaken to mass-produce (in typically modern, Taylorist fashion) a new type of Italian: healthy, patriotic, courageous, industrious, selflessly dedicated to service, single-minded in the effort and ‘sacrifice’ for the New Italy, and distinctly unbourgeois. Certainly the anthropological project of uomo fascista was doomed, the Corporatist economy failed, and the radical futural ‘movement’ within fascism never broke free from the reactionary elements within the Party or from its even more conservative allies. But, apart from the fact no modern revolution has ever succeeded in realizing its utopia, there is abundant evidence that hard-core Fascists were committed until the bitter end to creating a Third Way between liberalism and communism which would allow contemporary humanity to solve the crisis of civilization. In short, I take the palingenetic myth of Fascism more seriously than Saage and see it having a more radical degree of genuine revolutionary charge and drive to absorb the bourgeoisie rather than be absorbed by them than can be accommodated in the Bonapartist theory of fascism. I agree with Saage, however, that it would be in that area of ‘problematic’ that a fruitful historical debate could take place.
In the case of Nazism I would argue that hard-core Nazis took seriously the task of realizing a nebulous vision of a future new order in a reborn Germany protected by a vast imperial hinterland purged of communism, Jews, liberalism, humanism and international finance capitalism, a post-democratic and post-Christian Germany replete with new institutions, buildings, art, culture coordinated with racist principles, and populated by a new type of mentally and physically ‘healthy’ German in an Aryanized Europe. If this is not a revolutionary project I do not know what is, and millions of lives and precious military resources were expended in pursuing it. From this perspective, the regime’s ‘nihilistic’ genocidal politics were the initial purging phase in a vast experimental act of ‘creative destruction’. Nor is this pure speculation or abstract theorizing. It is clear from the detailed empirical work on Hitler’s career, 4 the Nazi economy, 5 Nazi architecture, 6 Nazi racial politics, 7 indeed wherever you look, that the regime’s ‘essence’ was far from being just a counter-revolutionary war of destruction against the humanistic principles of 1789 (including their Bolshevik permutation), Judaism (identified with finance capitalism and decadence) and actually existing modernity. Its most radical activists aspired to more than constructing a premodern society with modern trappings (a position which seems to owe as much to Henry Turner and Ernst Nolte as to Marxist theorizing). It was a bid to go back to a stage before the beginning of modern decadence, before 1789, with the historical imagination in order to build a new type of modernity, a logic that is familiar to any student of Picasso, Nietzsche, Heidegger or such artistic and social movements as primitivism, expressionism, theosophy, or the ‘Lebensreformbewegung’ (Life Reform). Thus -- and this what I would like Marxists to ‘take on board’ without abandoning crucial elements of their own tradition of scholarship -- the manifestations of a futural radicalism of Nazism were no mere ‘clothes’ as Saage contends, any more than its revolution was mere propaganda, as Ernst Bloch argued when he declared: ‘The most terrible white terror against people and socialism the world has ever seen takes on a socialist disguise. To this end its propaganda must develop a revolutionary façade with trappings of the Paris Commune.’ 8
The visions of Nazi eugenicists, technocrats and fellow travellers such as Ernst Jünger and Gottfried Benn, and certainly of the leadership itself, 9 point to something far more radical, a scheme that was never realized and was in essence unrealizable. Nevertheless, following this logic Nazism is to be seen as an abortive revolution to create an alternative modernity based on mythic premodern, predecadent foundations and something far more ambitious and creative than a counter-revolution. The ‘war on modernity’ reminds me (to use a Nazi-style biological metaphor) of cutting off a gangrenous limb by going right back to the healthy living flesh so that a new type of modernity could be grafted on. The Nazi motorways were no more ‘propagandistic’ than the cult of aviation. 10 Indeed, I have gone so far as to maintain that the Fascist and Nazi regimes aspired to be modernist states, an argument which is certainly indigestible to most on the left. 11
If Breschi’s position grudgingly offers partial corroboration of the New Consensus and Saage belatedly offers as tidings of comfort and joy the prospect of a post-Lukácsian acknowledgment of fascism’s relative ideological autonomy from capitalism, Pellicani’s essay has the effect of a shot of grappa in the wintry cold. It provides a positively exhilarating endorsement of one of the cornerstones of my original essay: the essentially anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist animus of fascism in general and Nazism in particular. In this vein he argues that both Fascism and Nazism attempted in very different ways to create a Third Way between communism and liberalism, another indication of the importance of seeing capitalism and fascism as ‘two antithetical categories’ rather than in cahoots. However, there is still a major obstacle to consensus between us, which is his assumption that modernity is to be equated with the principles of 1789, with rationality, with the universality of human rights, with the emancipation of the state from religion to become the champion of liberty. Pellicani maintains that modern society is, by definition an ‘open society’, whereas fascism produced ‘closed societies geared to war’, an approach with has an element of overlap with Richard Saage’s. In our different ways both Roberts and I beg to differ, or rather we insist on differing. For us liberal democracy is only one path that can be taken by modernization and, more importantly, for millions in Europeanized countries after 1918, it was a path that, far from delivering progress, had become a cul-de-sac. Fascism in Germany and Italy created permutations of the modern state to resolve the crisis of modernity resulting from the collapse of liberalism and the rise of Bolshevism, as would all fascist movements have done had they been able to seize power.
What is more, from the perspective of the most significant sociologists of modernity, we are in the best of company to argue this way. Weber, Durkheim, Tönnies, Giddens, Bauman are just a few of the pioneering students of Western modernity who see it as capable of admitting alternative modernities. The Weberian concept of ‘charisma’, for example, is an explicit recognition that the modern crisis of legitimacy caused by the breakdown of tradition cannot necessarily be solved rationally, and Giddens for a brief moment became Tony Blair’s political guru as the prophet of the Third Way. Modernity, as a force of rationalization, disenchantment and ‘disembedding’ thus admits a number of competing projects for a modern state and a modern world which would solve not just the problem of integrating the masses into the state, but address directly the problems of belonging, identity, anomie and purpose which liberalism had failed to resolve, or even exacerbated. In this sense all the many utopian movements (anarchism, revolutionary syndicalism) and totalitarian and authoritarian regimes spawned by modern society can be seen as attempts to solve or suppress the problems of modernity, and are anti-traditional, modern attempts to do so no matter how much they invoke (imagined) traditions and (myths of) the past. For readers of any political persuasion who want to pursue this line of thought further I recommend Peter Osborne’s The Politics of Time, with its sophisticated interpretation of the way under modernity rival temporalities contend with each other for political and cultural hegemony.
With only qualified support from non-Marxists for a process of reconciliation, it would be surprising to sense a great wave of enthusiasm for détente from Marxists ‘proper’. But while Renton, Woodley and Yannielli all reject my overtures to tear down the barbed wire, they at least are willing to leap over it long enough to kick a ball around on this difficult terrain. Renton’s chief merit for the debate as I see it is that he addresses unflinchingly the issue of revolution and reaction that divides us. In doing so he draws attention to the sloppy scholarship that led me, in my eagerness (desperation?) to find allies on the ‘other side’, to presumptuously read into the great Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘exploding the continuum of history’ a conception of temporal rupture that he could or even should have applied to Nazism using his own idiosyncratic concept of revolution if only he had had eyes to see. Renton maintains that it is Kautsky’s gradualist and determinist social democratic concept of progress, not capitalist modernity and all its poisoned fruits, that Benjamin is attacking in his Theses as a believer in revolutionary Marxism. He proceeds to use Kautsky, not Marx, to illuminate a reformist Marxist theory of a progress which can be reversed not by ‘replacing industry in favour of pasture’, but by ‘purging the elements of social democracy (the vote, the welfare state) from contemporary capitalism’. Judged by such restrictive criteria fascism is undeniably a reactionary rather than a progressive force, and the reverse of a genuinely revolutionary one, since it dispenses with voting as the mechanism of a decadent system of government and proposes a welfare state based on ethnocentric national or rational rather than humanistic criteria.
Second, Renton rejects my claim that there is an analogy between the fascist evocation of a mythicized past to inspire a new future and the essentially descriptive function of ‘primitive communism’ within the Marxist scheme of the development of the human control over nature. Instead he insists that, in complete contrast to Marxism, fascism not only cultivates past images to inspire rebirth (palingenesis) like ‘almost every tradition’, but it ‘stared lovingly on images of subordination, suffering and death’ that set it apart from other ideologies of change and underline its regressive nature. Consistent with this, he stresses that for Benjamin the protracted catastrophe of progress that is piling up wreckage before the eyes of the Angel of History is the result of the destructive power of capitalism which was reaching its apogee when he was writing, and it was only ‘the revolutionary classes’ (i.e. the left), from which fascists were excluded ‘by definition’, that were in a position to explode the continuum of a history, one that included fascism as the continuation of capitalism, to bring about ‘human liberation’. In his conclusion Renton explicitly confines the term ‘revolution’ to moments of historical change which ‘provide both greater fairness and the actuality of participation’. Only such moments deserve to be called ‘revolutionary’.
Renton’s position is exemplary in its lucidity and in its own terms unassailable. What it highlights is the insurmountable issue separating traditional Marxist from non-Marxist studies of fascism: the axiomatic equation of ‘revolution’ with the advance of equality, democracy, human welfare and human liberation according to a set of highly value-laden criteria about what constitutes ‘progressiveness’. These criteria, I would argue, comprehensively preclude the Bolshevik and Maoist revolutions in practice (which thus become reactionary as well), and only apply to a limited extent to ‘liberal’ revolutions, as the victims of the Terror in 1794 and of the counter-Commune repression of 1871 would testify. Renton’s Marxian vision of revolution and the progressiveness underpinning it is thus more utopian now than it was even when the Communist Manifesto was first published. Such a semantic straitjacket excludes a priori the possibility that under modernity political movements can pursue radical structural change in society based on competing sets of values, a rival concept of progress, an alternative vision of revolution. By dismissing the fascist vision of the ideal society as a ‘dystopia’, Renton shows himself incapable of acknowledging that the horrors of Nazism were product of the pursuit by its most fanatical believers of a racist and imperialist utopia. I consider such an elementary confusion a failure of the methodological empathy essential to understanding history which surely becomes unintelligible if one does not take the actors’ own vision of their goals into account as primary causal factors. 12
Presumably, as an anti-Stalinist Marxist, Renton would concede that the horrors of the Gulags and the Ukrainian famine were the product of (a perversion of) the Marxist-Leninist utopia, not a deliberate dystopian and hence sadistic-nihilistic-sociopathic attempt to destroy the fruits of democratic human progress and systematically inflict mass suffering and death in cynically planned hecatombs of reactionary violence against fairness, participation and humanity itself. Why cannot both Stalinism and Hitlerism both be seen as failed revolutions against the liberal system, both pursuing different visions of utopia with catastrophic outcomes of similar magnitude, even if motivated by conflicting visions of the ideal future, and even if Stalinism ultimately originated in an undeniably more ‘humane’ teleological view of history? Both totalitarianisms can be utterly condemned by humanistic or socialist criteria without denying their revolutionary intent in the minds of their protagonists and executioners, nor their explosive, though horrific, impact on the continuum of history. In short, I still find it tragically ironic that Benjamin, a victim of Nazism who had such a powerful sense of the role of myth in the revolutionary moment, operated such a restrictive idea of revolution and progress that he could not acknowledge that by the 1930s Stalin’s regime was piling up wreckage and hurling back the Angel of History even more disastrously than social democracy or liberal capitalism at the time. This would have helped him see that the contemporary fascism that was destroying his life was no simple continuation of capitalism and exemplified the evocation of the past to explode the continuum of history far more powerfully than communism. Indeed, for his followers, Hitler embodied the intrusion of ‘Messianic time’ into empty, homogeneous time.
From his own angle Woodley supports Renton’s uncompromising repulsion of my attempt to pressgang Benjamin into providing a sympathetic Marxist reading of fascism’s ‘palingenetic’ concept of revolution, and is no less damning of my attempts to subpoena Gramsci as an unwilling witness for the defence of my thesis when I cite his analysis of Fascism as a ‘passive revolution’. The premise behind this highly articulate bid to rescue these two giants of Marxian political thought from the fate of becoming unwitting fellow travellers of my non-Marxist account of the attempted fascist revolution is a reassuringly familiar Marxist definition of revolution as ‘the overthrow of a system of political organization, leading to a transformation in the social relations of production’. By this is obviously meant the abolition of private property, capitalism and bourgeois rule, and the transfer of hegemony to the proletariat or its appointed representatives. In Gramscian terms, then, any attempt to read fascism’s attempted cultural rebellion as revolutionary is revisionist (and possibly by implication the sort of covert vindication of fascism to be expected from ‘bourgeois intellectuals’), even though for a fascist cultural revolution a transformation of the prevailing Weltanschauung is the precondition for all other structural change (an extreme variant of the Gramscian principle of ideological hegemony).
Woodley claims that Benjamin’s passage on exploding the historical continuum in his Theses on the Philosophy of History is not a recognition of the importance of a mythicized image of the past flashing up in a moment of danger to inspire revolutionary change even within the radical left. Instead it is to be seen in the context of Benjamin’s condemnation of the aestheticization of politics and the mythicization of violence as fundamentally reactionary legitimations of an authoritarian political force, one which suppresses all emancipatory (and hence ‘progressive’) movements. Woodley goes onto reaffirm the classic Marxist position which recognizes only one authentic revolutionary moment in modern history, namely the (Marxist) revolution in social praxis which is the fruit of the dialectic of modernity with reason. What disturbs me even more than the sheer intransigence of this refutation of my argument is Woodley’s honest but dogmatic refusal to accept my invitation to engage with ‘awkward’ historical facts, or think at least heuristically outside the Marxist box. (Indeed, the fixation with praxis seems in some Marxist hands to become a signifier, not of a concern with the practical implementation of theory, but, perversely enough, the refusal to look at the actual practice of a regime of either right or left through the smokescreen of a preconceived ideology. The very use of the term thus comes paradoxically to signal the contamination of an engagement with historical reality by utopianism and a priori arguments.)
There is not a hint of recognition in his repudiation of my argument that fascism, as Pellicani argues so persuasively and empirically in his essay, harboured a profound animus against the bourgeois ethos and the capitalist mode of production, or that this led to the sustained praxis in Fascist Italy of experimenting seriously with Corporatism as a ‘Third Way’ variant of economics, and in Nazi Germany of operating an economy that by the end of the war presented an unprecedented blend of state planning and private enterprise, and of free, directed and slave labour, having within a decade almost entirely destroyed the institutions and role of international finance capital and laissez-faire, market-driven capitalism in the new Reich. Thus fascism, when looked at historically and not simply through Marxist abstractions, certainly aspired to bring about a ‘transformation in the social relations of production’, just not the egalitarian one proposed by Marxists. Again, it must be stressed that the egalitarian transformation in the social relations of production has never been implemented in Marxist praxis. Neither the Soviet or Chinese Maoist economy, nor any other revolutionary socialist economy, succeeded in delivering this utopia, and the Soviet regime resorted instead to mass murder and internment for the sake of a purported revolution which can hardly be considered ‘progressive’. This leads me to ask which paradigm of revolution is Woodley invoking, other than an ahistorical one derived from the hegemony in his political thought and historical reconstructions of a utopian ideal of praxis grotesquely travestied in all Marxist practice and far more destructive than the domestic socioeconomic reality created by Italian Fascism.
As for the aestheticization of politics, what else were the Stalin and Mao and Kim Il-sung leader cults, with all their ritualistic trappings to conceal totalitarianism of the most heinous, reactionary kind? Gramsci and Benjamin could not know of the truth of the crimes against humanity unleashed by the Russian Revolution, but postwar Marxists have no such excuse for maintaining a state of ‘denial’. Yet I see no acknowledgement by Woodley that brutal power was systematically aestheticized under the Soviet regime, nor any hint of concession that Bolshevism was not a revolution at all. Indeed, in terms of praxis there has been no revolution since the American and French Revolutions according to his criteria (and even their credentials as emancipatory, progressive events are problematic). As for the notion that Benjamin did not acknowledge the power of mythic images of the past to provide the affective fuel for socialist projects to explode the present and hurl history on another trajectory through the infiltration of ‘Messianic time’ into ‘homogeneous time’, then we have clearly not got the same edition of the Theses before us. When the Paris revolutionaries of 1830 (who were surely ‘emancipators’ and progressives’) shot at clocks to symbolically stop homogeneous time, it makes no sense rationally, but it makes eminent sense mythically. The mythic, mass-mobilizing aspect of Marxism in key historical moments can be acknowledged without endorsing Sorel’s palingenetic theory of social change.
However, the most fundamental obstacle between me and both Renton and Woodley is still the unquestioned assumption that modernity can only admit one genuine revolution bent on installing an alternative modernity, an anti-capitalist, socioeconomic, Marxist one, which condemns all other temporal projects (even utopian socialist and anarchist ones) to be reactionary or, at most, and somewhat grudgingly, ‘counter-revolutionary’. Faced with two tanks laden with preconceived assumptions about revolution, modernity and fascism heading slowly towards me to gun me down with vintage Marxist ammunition, I am tempted to head for cover, curled up in foetal position in the nearest bomb-crater. It is when Yannielli takes up the pen that I can emerge from my refuge, waving a handkerchief not of surrender but reconciliation. Having conceded that some key points in the arguments put forward by myself and Roberts may contain a germ of truth, he stipulates the sticking point in negotiations, namely ‘the structuring role of class in historical development’. At this point his analysis takes a surprising, and surprisingly promising, turn by drawing attention to the continued use within Soviet thought of ‘revolution’, alongside a narrow Marxist concept, as a generic term to refer to ‘profound qualitative change’ in practically any sphere of life. Providing precisely the sort of creative Marxist response I hoped for when I threw down the gauntlet (or fired off my first shots from behind the parapet), Yannielli proceeds to argue that when historians like I, Roberts, or Pincus write about rival revolutions, conflicting totalitarianisms or competing ‘state modernization programmes’, these subsume a dimension of class conflict which ‘we’ blithely ignore or, as in the case of Pincus, explicitly marginalize from the historical process.
The extended passage on the study of American slavery which follows draws on Yannielli’s own specialism, and could appear a long detour from the theme of this special issue. Yet it surely should instead be read as an illuminating case study in the way ‘qualitative changes’ in the sociopolitical order inevitably have a class dimension. Thus the assumptions about natural human inequality that shaped and legitimized slavery in 19th-century America can be clearly recognized by Marxists, but with more difficulty by liberals or socialists, as integral to an era which treated entire categories of human beings, whether on social, class, economic, ethnic, genetic, ideological grounds, or on the basis of a mythic ‘normalcy’, as intrinsically less equal, and less human than the perceived ‘elite’ or ‘normal’ type of human being, whether White American, Italian, Aryan, ‘able-bodied’, male, Christian or whatever criterion for the ‘fully human’ is applied. It is against such a background that the elective affinities that were sensed by US white supremacists with Nazism, the instant recognition by inter-war Black activists of the sibling relationship between imperialism, white racism and fascism, and the analogies which Yannielli draws between fascism and ‘liberal’ imperialism, become portals to a new dialogue on fascism. The insistence by an anti-racist activist from Martinique that the culmination of capitalism is Hitler is still provocative, and I believe wrong-headed. Nevertheless, Yannielli makes an excellent case for asserting that non-Marxist historians who are not prepared to talk of class should remain silent about fascism. While we wait for a new phase of discussions between Marxists and non-Marxists about fascism to be stimulated by this special issue of EJPT, perhaps a loose association of no-man-landers can be formed as a renegade branch of fascist studies on the model of the Israeli-Palestinian West-Eastern Divan orchestra in music. It would be a utopian gesture towards a more enduring peace settlement.