Abstract
Abstract:
Roger Griffin’s paper points towards the importance of historical time when discussing fascism. Walter Benjamin’s Theses, the discussion of which informs Griffin’s paper, engages with the topic of historical time at several points, especially in its discussion of the theory of progress that Benjamin found in German Social Democracy, to which the Theses was directly opposed. Revisiting sympathetically a theory of progress akin to that of Karl Kautsky and other Marxist writers enables us to add substance to the key Marxist concept of fascism as a reactionary movement. Combining this idea with an emphasis on the autonomous, mass character of fascism enables us to grasp the dynamics of fascism as a contradictory whole: a future-orientated and activist politics without revolutionary content.
There are certain distinguishing features which can be expected of any Marxist theory of fascism worthy of the name. The theory should be extrinsic. Any political analysis has to start outside the tradition to which it refers. 1 An analogy can be made to the position of a voter in an election. At any moment, certain concerns are shared by millions of voters and have to be addressed if any party is to enjoy success, for example, ‘if cuts are made, will I still be able to afford health care when I am old?’ The mere fact that a party announces its support for ‘healthcare’ tells a voter little of value. In any period, much political expression is ‘cynicism and semantic obfuscation’. 2 Every voter learns to distinguish between parties according to what is shared between them and what is distinctive. 3 The uniqueness of fascism lies not in the aggregration of ‘nationalism’ and ‘socialism’ when nationalists and socialists were legion. Its distinctiveness lies rather in the history of Abyssinia and Auschwitz.
Political choices under capitalism are essentially about the desirability and achievability of greater equality. 4 All over Europe and in much of the world, political systems are still shaped by the memory of the emergence of social democracy more than one hundred years ago. Inter-war fascism was born into the same party system that we inhabit; the chief difference then was that the parties were newer and there was greater belief that parliamentary democracy could itself be used to transform society into something else: a social democracy, or its antithesis. In a political world structured by the division between left and right, fascism, for all its protestations to the contrary, was unmissably a movement of the right. It enthused about the inequality of classes, races, genders and nations. One of its functions was precisely the militant suppression of subordinate groups who sought to break out of their appointed roles.
Yet, alone, an analysis of the programme of fascism is insufficient to grasp the totality of fascist politics. Fascism must also be understood as a way of organizing; as a form of politics characterized by spectacular mass meetings, 5 and by a consistent unwillingness to accept the state’s monopoly of force. The genius of fascism has rested in its capacity to mobilize large numbers of people in the demand for a social order in which they would be subordinate. There were many strands of inegalitarian politics in inter-war Europe; fascism distinguished itself from its rivals by its persistent refusal to play down the street in favour of parliament.
In addition, any Marxist theory of fascism should have something distinctive to say about the evolution of fascism since 1945. All over Europe, 6 there are elected politicians who were trained in their youth by membership of recognizable fascist parties existing in a mimetic relationship to the fascism of the inter-war years. 7 Many, albeit not all, of these parties now stand in an equivocal relationship to that same past. 8 In so far as the journey along which the parties have travelled is one of accommodation towards the institutions of parliamentary democracy, history has not yet spoken as to whether the parties of the present are incapable of reradicalization. More troublingly still, in several countries new mass parties have emerged promising a return to exactly those fascist habits which elsewhere have been discarded (street demonstrations, political uniforms, the use of political or racial violence). 9
Marx and historical time
Turning directly now to the subject of this collection, Roger Griffin’s challenge to Marxist theorists of fascism starts with the idea that a persuasive understanding of fascism can be built upon the basis of a theory of historical time which he derives from a reading of Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History. I will disagree in due course with what he has to say about both Benjamin and fascism. But one great virtue of Griffin’s piece is that it draws our attention towards the concept of historical time. This idea is essential to any compelling theory of fascism, Marxist or otherwise.
Various ideas of historical time were central to Marx’s work. One was the belief that any society could be characterized by the ways in which its members addressed the problems of hunger and cold. The tools that people invented, and the relationships that they chose to allocate tasks of manufacture, defined what Marx termed the mode of production. 10 There was a relationship between technology and social change; ‘The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.’ 11 The succession of modes of production was a narrative of increasing productive power culminating in capitalism, the first society in which the natural environment had ceased to dominate man.
A second key idea that can be found in Marx is that each mode of production is born; it has vigour in its youth, but ages, declines, and is brought to an end. The reason why feudalism was overthrown, and capitalism followed, is that the former mode of production applied techniques of production (increasing division of labour in the cities) and of exchange (international trade) which produced entire classes of people who remained disenfranchised. The result was civil war and the execution of the Kings of England and France in 1649 and 1793. The conjunction between the emergence of new means of production and heightened dissatisfaction with existing social hierarchies marked the moments of ferment at which history turned.
The third key sense of time in Marx is that all recorded human history had been a story of mastery and servitude. The transition to capitalism had seen an accumulation of productive power which was also a necessary precondition for a new stage of human history, communism (i.e. general freedom), to begin. This was Marx’s idea of the end of history. With the transition from capitalism to communism, history would cease to be time’s carcase; 12 an epoch of epochs would end.
If these are the three defining notions of historical time that appear in Marx’s work, there are at least three further ideas of historical time that appear in the Marxist tradition, each in a partial relationship to the approaches I have outlined.
History as progress; history as reaction
The first additional notion is the idea usually associated with the theorist Karl Kautsky 13 that the story of increasing production is a story of human progress. This, I shall go on to argue, can be used to add meaning to terms often found in the Marxist theory of fascism. It is also needed (negatively) to make sense of Benjamin’s Theses. Now Kautsky’s place in the history of Marxist ideas is, alongside Eduard Bernstein, August Bebel, and others, to have been the outstanding personality of the second generation of writers to reach prominence after Marx’s death in 1883. Lacking the creative genius of Marx or Engels, Kautsky’s role was to systematize Marxist ideas, turning them into a doctrine capable of comprehension by the millions of Social Democratic voters who had not read Marx but did read the party press. 14 Kautsky’s personal addition was a stock of metaphors derived from Darwinian biology; as he himself acknowledged late in life, ‘Marx and Engels … started out from Hegel; I started out from Darwin. The latter occupied my thoughts earlier than Marx, the development of organisms earlier than that of the economy, the struggle for the existence of species and races earlier than the class struggle.’ 15
Over time, Kautsky insisted, each new generation tended to acquire more knowledge and better mastery of technology than its predecessors. Humanity was constantly tending to ascend from an old condition of subjection to the natural environment, to a new state of advance, i.e. political and social democracy: The capitalist social system has run its course; its dissolution is now only a question of time. Irresistible economic forces lead with the certainty of doom to the shipwreck of capitalist production. The substitution of a new social order for the existing one is no longer simply desirable, it has become inevitable.
16
The Marxism of Kautsky provides the intellectual context within and against which the Theses on the Philosophy of History was written. Benjamin, it should be recalled, was born in 1892 and began publishing essays in his teens.
17
By 1914, he was President of the Free Students’ Union, a movement indebted to the Young Germany of the 1830s.
18
He grew into political consciousness, in short, just when Social Democracy was at the very zenith of its pre-war influence.
19
Very roughly half of Benjamin’s individual theses refer to ‘historical materialism’, several others to ‘Social Democratic theory’. His ambition in this work was negative, to explain why writers whose ideas had influenced millions had been wrong: Social Democratic theory, and even more its practice, have been formed by a conception of progress which did not adhere to reality but made dogmatic claims. Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the progress of mankind itself (and not just advances in men's ability and knowledge). Secondly, it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind. Thirdly, progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course. Each of these predicates is controversial and open to criticism …
20
Benjamin’s verdict on Social Democracy was ultimately dismissive: The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided all the strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism' is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.
21
The tendency of most contemporary Marxists is to treat Kautsky as an embarrassment, 22 and this contempt is matched by universal admiration (admittedly not just among Marxists 23 ) for Benjamin. Yet Kautsky’s Marxism, one-sided as it must now appear, provides a useful starting point to grasp a part of the significance of fascism. Without Kautsky, or something like him, there is no way to give meaning to the common Marxist notion of fascism as reactionary mass politics.
Observation of the last century of human history does provide a sense that our societies have evolved, albeit discontinuously and in an incomplete manner, in the general direction of progress. This can be measured in terms of human mastery of the environment (i.e. the spread of technology), better knowledge of our bodies (i.e. increased life expectancy), the decrease of absolute poverty, the spread of democratic forms of government and the association of democratic rule with – in the most general terms – a more egalitarian and less militaristic way of doing politics.
Progress, in Kautskyan terms, is not about the transition from backward-looking pastoralism to modern-looking industry; it is rather about the transition from inegalitarian early industrial capitalism towards a more democratic capitalism and (ultimately) social democracy. Reaction, it follows, need not be about replacing industry in favour of pasture; rather it can be about purging the elements of social democracy (the vote, the welfare state) from contemporary capitalism.
We can see the fascist rejection of ‘progress’ (or this meaning of it) in Asvero Gravelli, writing in the fascist journal Antieuropa in favour of, … the concept of hierarchy, the participation of the whole people in the life of the State, social justice through the equitable distribution of rights and duties, the injection of morality into public life, the prestige of the family, the moral interpretation of the ideas of order, authority and freedom.
24
The same anti-progressivism can be found in François de la Rocque of the Croix de Feu: … the crowd, abandoned to itself, reverts to its lowest reflexes: it becomes chaotic, an avalanche, a tidal wave. The masses must not absorb power and, voluntarily or involuntarily, make it its prisoner. Or else the democrat becomes a tramp and the demagogue becomes a tyrant.
25
One alternative to progress was the emphasis on hereditable human inequality that was common to such otherwise diverse post-war British fascists as Arnold Leese, Oswald Mosley, Alexander Ratcliffe, the Duke of Bedford and Captain Gordon-Canning. 26
Fascism belongs in this way to a family of political ideologies that actively seek to reverse social progress. 27 The classical fascism of the 1920s and 1930s was able to absorb a variety of what would in other times have been incompatible strands, from the nostalgic conservatism of Oswald Spengler or General Hindenberg, to the military command politics of General Franco or the millenarian Christianity of the League of the Archangel Michael in Romania. 28 Contemporary fascism draws on, if anything, an ever wider set of allied reactionary politics.
While fascism is like other reactionary political movements, one way it has distinguished itself from similar ideologies is by the fervour with which it has rejected liberalism and social democracy. Its rejection is different from that of classical conservatism, for example, in which there is often a formal enthusiasm for the goal of increased fairness. This willingness is then joined to a characteristic pessimism 29 as to whether human beings in general or any nation in its particular moment of impoverished finances can move towards this desirable state. The conservative emphasis on human nature as an impediment to change is not shared by fascists, 30 who are radical believers in change. Fascism holds that society can be turned dramatically towards a desired future of preparation for technological war. 31
Capitalism and wage slavery
A further additional idea of historical time which has been important to Marxists has been the distinction between the subjective experience of seasonal time under feudalism and of clock time under capitalism. Edward Thompson’s famous essay on ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism' gives a series of examples of irregular labour time surviving into 18th-century England, including agriculture, building and transport (where working time remained subject to the weather), workshop production (in which length of the working day depended on the availability of physical resources) and mixed occupations (tin-miners moonlighting as fishermen, domestic workers who left their work for the harvest and so on). Set against these, Thompson finds increasing evidence of the presence of clocks and watches, tending ultimately towards the 20th-century institution of the work clock. 32
This analysis of capitalism as a social system of disciplining time has been shared by other Marxists including Henri Lefebvre, 33 Istvan Mészáros, 34 Sumit Sarkar 35 and Moishe Postone. 36 There are several ways in which it can contribute to the development of the Marxist theory of fascism. It reminds us that Marxists have not shared the common contemporary habit of treating capitalism as primarily a combination of political choices. An example of this way of thinking is the analysis of the Italian and German fascists as ‘anti-capitalists’ on the basis of their belief that the national economy should be pushed in the direction of military spending and a more corporatist state. If Marxists are right that capitalism is a system of private ownership characterized amongst other things by workplace relationships of concealed but effective enslavement, it follows that fascism’s critique of capitalism is thin gruel indeed. As Benjamin’s argued in a piece published five years before the Theses, ‘The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.’ 37
A sense of capitalism as a system of controlling time also gives meaning to the passages in Benjamin’s Theses which refer to ‘homogenous’ or ‘empty’ time. Social Democracy treated all history as a constant, empty tableau. In an essay written two years before the Theses, Benjamin complained that historical time is seen by the ideologues of progress as an endless clockwork mechanism, its tempo beaten by the machinery of incessant production. 38 His personal notion of time-keeping as applied labour discipline explains the celebration in the Theses of the July revolutionaries in France whose first act was to fire on all the clocks. 39 These time-pieces were not mere clocks; they were documents of barbarism.
The insight that the key historical distinction in Marxism is not between primitive communism and all that came after, but between capitalism and all that will come after, enables Marxists to challenge the suggestion that Marxism contained within it a strain of ‘mythologizing retrospection’ comparable in some way to the Nordic cults of Nazism. This analysis misunderstands both Marxism and fascism. Marx’s notion of primitive communism was a descriptive category to enable him to place within the story of successive modes of production the large set of societies, increasingly well-documented in his and Engels’s day, 40 which lived on hunting and gathering and in which the fixed class hierarchies which historians find in societies characterized by settled agriculture were absent. One point about hunter-gatherer societies for Marx was that their existence refuted the conservative notion that inequality has been always with us. They were very far however from shedding any light on what a desirable society would look like. They may have been relatively equal but there was also unacceptable poverty and hunger in them. This helps to explain why (for example) the Bolshevik state of 1917 to 1921 was enthusiastic about technology, industry and modernist art and used these themes routinely in its propaganda, and why the same regime is not particularly remembered for its celebration of such primitive communists as the Iroquois of North America. 41
It would be wrong also to draw any comparison which is too neat between the mythologizing retrospection of the fascists and the retrospection of any other recorded ideology. There is a reason why for example the advocates of parliamentary government in 17th-century England relied on a stock of images that they found in the Bible or Rome or Greece. The Fifth Monarchist, Digger or Anabaptist willing to read deeply in the Old Testament could find in that text stories justifying the doctrines to which we presently apply the labels anarchism, republicanism or communism. 42 To an extent, this dynamic was both mythologizing (it relied on religious imagery) and retrospective (it depended on stories of how man used to live). But any historian would recognize the dissimilarity between the 17th-century rebels, for whom a reading of the past was a way of conjuring hope and life, and the Nazis, for whom something else was at stake.
In any moment of political change, new actors come to the fore and justify new types of political decisions. In doing so, they rely on images culled from the past. 43 This process is general; but fascism can be distinguished within it. A part of the uniqueness of Fascism and Nazism has been that, alongside images of youth, vitality, rebirth (which it has shared with almost every other tradition), the fascist vision has also stared lovingly on images of subordination, suffering and death. 44
Benjamin and the subjective experience of triumph
From Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History it would be possible to derive the insight that in any sort of moment of crisis, there will be revolutionaries, and that it is part of their mind-set to experience their victory as a triumph over the continuities of historical time. This mentality is capable of being shared as much by true revolutionaries (in the sense of people seeking to complete the revolution of progress) as by militant counter-revolutionaries. Now, certain varieties of socialist politics have indeed shared with fascism an emphasis on the will. This has been true of some varieties of Maoism, and many strands of anarchism. It is true of the writings of Georges Sorel, 45 whose ‘mythical, law-making violence’ Benjamin judged ‘pernicious’. 46 But what all these traditions have in common is that they rejected Marx’s complex notions of historical time in pursuit of a simpler emphasis on will. The individuals concerned might not always have acknowledged the shift; but they were moving towards the negation of the tradition in which they had been raised. 47
The purpose of Benjamin’s manuscript was to ask how, after a century of human progress, society in general was now turning towards the misery of war, and how he in particular could be faced with the abyss, living as he was as an anti-Nazi refugee in Paris in danger of capture and in all likelihood death. 48 In this context, Benjamin’s story of the puppet chess player should be read not as a satire on a wrong turning in Marxist theory, but as a blast of contempt against all those he had listened to in whose youth whose strategies had let down the millions engaged in the struggle against fascism. Winning the game, as Benjamin urges us to do in the same Thesis, is not a merely turn of phrase. It is the whole point of his text.
Instead of fascism, Benjamin offers us the figure of the Angel of History: His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
49
Benjamin’s most basic point is that rising technological achievement correlates poorly to human liberation. The continuation of capitalism is a story of catastrophe and human wreckage. The Angel seeks to repair this human suffering. Yet the continuation of life under conditions of class society and capitalist social relationships leaves the angel impotent, and despite his presence the debris grows.
Untold generations of readers have recognized that the basic emotional register of Benjamin’s Theses is one of sadness. ‘The immediate Messianic intensity’ of the Theses, ‘passes not through happiness but through suffering and misfortune’. 50 Whatever reading the text can be made to support, it is most certainly not primarily a study of the ecstasy enjoyed by revolutionary groups.
Within Benjamin’s register of ‘organised pessimism’, 51 encouragement survives in the militant watchfulness of fascism’s victims. A series of metaphors, people and resources appear in the Theses pointing away from the moment in which they were composed: Judgment Day (Thesis III), the tradition of the oppressed (Thesis VIII), Marx and the Spartacus Group of Rosa Luxemburg who had fought to ensure that the proletariat would be the last enslaved class (Thesis XII), the historian blasting the present out of the homogeneous course of history (Thesis XVII) and (the final metaphor in the Theses) the Jews of the Torah who refused to let themselves be overcome by the dead weight of the present, ‘for every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter’. 52
The intended message of Benjamin’s Theses was that, either by studying the whole history of class struggle, or by looking with intense care at any single episode of resistance, a historian (the paradigmatic revolutionary) could draw out convincingly for his audience the lesson of hope that all established hierarchies could yet be brought to an end. This narrative of human liberation could enable others to overcome both the immediate moment of fascism’s ascendancy and the longer horror of the ongoing subordination of millions of people at work.
Benjamin’s phrase, ‘The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action’, 53 was not intended as an insight into the mind-set of just anyone set on change, irrespective of the consequences of that change. Benjamin meant his analysis to be limited to a narrower class of people, and indicated this most clearly by his words ‘the revolutionary classes’ (a term from which fascism was by definition excluded) and ‘the continuum of history’ (i.e. clock time, in the context of which fascism was merely the latest in a long series of imprisoning beliefs).
Griffin invites us to praise Benjamin for his purported belief that a mythicized past would guarantee a revolutionary future. But the past of his Theses was not a scene of benign pastoral contentment. It was a past rather of enslaved ancestors (the first victims of clock time), in whose name the latter-day working class was called upon to complete the task of human liberation. ‘The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.’ 54 If his writings are to live, then Benjamin too must be read in this same spirit of anti-fascist partisanship.
We are invited to chide Benjamin for his failure to recognize that fascism contained elements of future-operated hope. Yet he knew fascism at first hand, and could see still more directly than us the disconnection between the fascist popular movement and fascism’s goal. It was with the direct knowledge of Hitler’s power that the Theses were written, ‘to improve our position in the struggle against Fascism’. 55
Benjamin grasped the multi-sidedness of the human experience of time. He saw the intervention of the whole history of capitalism in every moment of rebellion against class rule; and conversely the involvement of the entire story of the effort to build a society of general freedom in the anti-triumph of Nazism.
The theme of the Theses, it follows, is that we can understand history as an integrated whole, in which the succession of modes of production, the specificity of capitalism and the possibility of the transcendence of class society are all present. It is a world of defeat, yes, but a world always looking beyond fascism, to the alternative of human liberation, or, as Benjamin would have said, to communism.
The limited autonomy of ideology
In conclusion, mythologizing retrospection can be found in many political traditions. What is of greatest interest is not its existence, per se, but its content (the way it imagines the future, and the extent to which images of the past are intended to inform or overwhelm the present). The mythic superstructure of Nazism was not a sign of the commonality of its thinking with other political traditions. Rather it was a sign of the movement’s denuded utopian content. Fascist symbolism was a necessary component of a movement whose actual lived future was always going to be barren.
The problem with defining fascism as revolutionary is that such an approach reduces ‘revolution’ to the enthusiastic participation of outsider groups and ignores the direction and outcome of the process of change. In the Marxist tradition, by contrast, it is assumed that for a force to deserve the label revolutionary it must also be ‘progressive’ in the Kautsky-type sense, which I have outlined (i.e. more advanced and more democratic). Now non-Marxists will no doubt complain, accusing Marxists of special pleading and saying that such an emphasis on progress allows a permanent teleological veto. Any force in history of which you approve may be defined progressive in this way, and any hostile force reactionary. But Marxists have a perfectly good rejoinder, which is that plenty of social forces have represented ‘progress’ in Marxian terms without their victory being desirable at all. To take just one example, Marx himself argued that the advance of capitalist states into 19th-century Asia opened up the economies of the latter to the world market, and was in that sense progressive. Yet unlike almost all of his contemporaries, he supported the 1857 Indian revolt against the British empire, understanding that the participation of thousands pointed the way beyond foreign rule. 56 Marxists are familiar with the challenge of evaluating a historical moment both in terms of the extent of popular participation in it, and the extent to which it points towards a future in which most people will have greater control of their own lives. It is those rare moments of change which provide both greater fairness and the actuality of participation which alone deserve to be called ‘revolutionary’. Fascism, a political movement for the subordination of the majority, cannot fall within this group.
Benjamin would have accepted that fascism did contain an autonomous radical element which existed independent of any attempts by existing class forces to use it. But this is to take an image of fascism, and to reproduce it as a static photograph, without considering how fascism interacted with the other social and political forces present at its birth. What is missing is history: the story of the establishment of fascism as an electoral force (characterized by relative autonomy from existing elites), followed then by a later moment of invitation into government (in direct alliance with existing political, social and economic elites), followed in turn by a final stage of fascist rule (in which the fascist party is autonomous of former political elites, and in alliance with the previous and continuing economic powers, but in which both trends are overwhelmed by the dynamic of urgent preparation for racial war). 57
To say that in general ideology may operate as a relatively autonomous factor is misleading, because such an assertion fails to ask what ideology is being considered and in what historical context the ideology is found. When a single individual interacts – as a voter, say – with any piece of political propaganda, then of course their individual response may be either wholly or partially independent of any underlying material logic. But once the choices of individuals are agglomerated and what is being analysed is the decision-making of millions of people, the relative autonomy of ideology is diminished. Whole classes of people adopt ideas, especially at times when an anti-systemic movement is in the process of capturing power, not haphazardly, but directly in response to their perceived economic and social interests. When analysing the specific rise to power of fascism and Nazism, the process, far from proving the invisibility of economic interests in political contests, shows rather the interpenetration of economics and politics at every stage.
Benjamin grasped that Nazism was capable of mobilizing vast numbers. Yet this insight was constantly joined to the equal knowledge that Nazism was a movement of generalized dystopia. It set millions to work in their own defeat. Fascism had no more desire to limit capitalism than it had to limit poverty or war. The only hope for humanity, he insisted, lay in the defeat of the fascists. In the admittedly very different circumstances of our time, that imperative remains.