Abstract
We have contributions from six angles, some convergent, some seemingly incongruent, but all illuminating and challenging. So here I will seek to pinpoint what seem the most salient areas of convergence and divergence and to identify the most promising areas for dialogue. At issue is not only how we are to understand the trajectory of fascism, but also how we are to place it, especially in tandem with the virtually contemporaneous Soviet experience, to deepen our understanding of both modernity and revolution. One premise of this discussion has been that even insofar as we grant that fascism was a revolutionary quest for an alternative modernity, it was neither successful nor desirable, so we must attend to the sources of its limits and failures. Encompassing both aspirations and outcomes, what can we hope to learn from the fascist experience about the ongoing possibilities and dangers of modern politics?
Woodley and Renton address the criteria of ‘revolution’ most explicitly, and their criteria converge to a considerable extent. On the basis of those criteria, they also converge on the reasons for denying that fascism was genuinely revolutionary. As Woodley sees it, modern revolution can only mean overcoming capitalist domination and capitalist social relations, all based on Marx's recasting of Hegel, with a dash of Habermas. Only ‘emancipation’ would count. In his use of Marx, Renton is a bit less abstract: ‘for a force to deserve the label revolutionary it must also be “progressive” … i.e. more advanced and more democratic’. As an aspect of the revolutionary desideratum, it points towards a future in which most people will have greater control of their own lives. Moreover, focusing on the process of revolution itself, ‘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.’
But Woodley, when he gets down to cases, introduces still more concrete criteria to deny that fascism was revolutionary. Put simply, fascism was bound up with cultural rebellion, aesthetic politics and especially myth, which Woodley finds inherently incompatible with genuine revolution.
Woodley takes it as a given that fascism entailed a specifically modern politics, in light of its ‘sophisticated exploitation of image and rhetoric’. ‘What is in doubt,’ he goes on to say, ‘is the revolutionary quality of aesthetic politics as an alternative modernity: aesthetic politics turns political values into emotional experience, nullifying the complexity of modernity by reducing the capacity of subjects to practise normative differentiation.’ Still, it is not aesthetic politics in general but myth in particular that proves central to Woodley's critique. And at least as embraced within fascism, he finds myth to have had two decisive, though rather disparate, implications.
On the one hand, Woodley finds the fascist embrace of myth to be ‘a collective act of disavowal … myths exhibit a speculative and intrinsically particularistic nature which cannot provide an objective basis for revolutionary transformation’. So myth is ‘disavowal’ precisely in turning from the possibility of the grasp necessary for a genuinely revolutionary transformation. Conversely, a transformation would have to have ‘an objective basis’ if it is to be genuinely revolutionary. And insofar as Griffin's palingenetic myth characterizes fascism, fascism was not revolutionary virtually by definition. Renton insists on something like the same limiting feature of myth: ‘The mythic superstructure of Nazism… 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.’
But Woodley carries the argument further in making his second point about myth. It was especially because of its reliance on myth that fascism played its particular role, buttressing capitalism as it did. Although he does not use this older notion explicitly, Woodley implies that fascist myth served an ‘objective function’ in sustaining capitalism at a certain stage: Despite its ‘energizing’ force as a political commodity, the fascist myth of regeneration constitutes an alienated political value which conceals the degenerative process of a capitalist society. By consolidating and intensifying the ‘animal spirits’ latent in the Darwinian logic of capitalist rivalry, fascism constitutes a grimly irrational manifestation of the rapacity and decay it sought to overcome through the aestheticization of struggle and war.
The bottom line: ‘the uniquely counter-revolutionary quality of fascist myth lies in its creative orchestration of popular emotion to restabilize social relations.’ Fascism was a way of ‘channelling the “congealed anger” of the dispossessed into support for patriotism, domestic repression and military adventurism’.
Criteria of revolution are obviously bound up with the role of material factors. This is clear for Woodley and Renton, but Yannielli, even as he proves more willing to take fascism as revolutionary, offers the most explicit challenge to both Griffin and myself on that basis: … in the last analysis, authentic revolutions involve a shift in class power, ‘the expropriation of the expropriators’. And this is the crux of the matter. Unless Griffin and Roberts are willing to concede the structuring role of class in historical development, they will remain at loggerheads with those who see social struggle as the engine of history.
The criteria that Woodley, Renton and Yannielli invoke may well seem plausible, but they can be questioned in light of fascism. On occasion they are dualistic and abstract, and they sometimes involve value judgements, question-begging or prejudicial, one-sided characterizations of fascism. It sometimes seems as if fascism is to be measured against revolution in principle, as an ideal, as abstract ‘emancipation’. There is no mention of ‘real, existing’ revolution, as in the Soviet experiment, even though both Griffin and I brought it in – and surely plausibly, in light of the set of issues proposed for discussion. Indeed, Griffin's challenge was based not only on the claim that fascism was revolutionary but, more provocatively, on the claim that when we add the communist experiments to the mix, we might find fascism, more obviously revolving around palingenetic myth, the archetypal modern revolution.
It can of course be argued that the Soviet experiment was not a measure of Marxist revolution but wayward, on the basis of some combination of Russia's relative ‘backwardness’, the heterodoxy of Leninism and Stalin's personal idiosyncrasies. But it seems important that those like Woodley and Renton should address the Soviet case, even if only to show why it is not relevant, in light of their criteria of revolution. Abstract though they sometimes are, the criteria they adduce might be shown to rule out both the Soviet experiment and fascism while allowing earlier departures – for example, in France in 1789 and even in 1830 and 1848 – to have been genuinely revolutionary. But the issue needs to be addressed insofar as the criteria of modern revolution are at issue.
Griffin asked whether we can specify criteria that do not boil down to personal value judgements. Renton's desideratum of a future in which most people will have greater control of their own lives might seem self-recommending, but it surely reflects a species of individualism that could be disputed on the basis of other values. And Renton, in casually portraying fascism as ‘a political movement for the subordination of the majority’, introduces a dismissive category without sufficient analysis – and thereby simply begs the question. Much of what Woodley says about ‘the aestheticization of struggle and war’ is well put. Certainly there was some of that, but what else? What proportions? There is a tendency here to understand fascism teleologically, privileging certain perceptions, aspirations and directions in light of our knowledge of the outcomes.
But more important than this tendency towards one-sided characterization is a failure to consider the scope for an alternative, non-Marxist and even anti-Marxist revolution in principle under the actual circumstances at issue, in light of, first, the performance of liberal democracy, and second, all that seemed to elude or call into question classical Marxism, especially the various revisions of Marxism, the First World War and the Russian Revolution. It was possible to agree with the Marxists on the need and scope for a systematic alternative to the modern liberal mainstream but also to insist that a different revolutionary departure was necessary and possible. We noted that for Woodley the only genuine modern revolution would be to overcome capitalism. Like the other revisionist students of fascism, Griffin and I take it as a given that fascism, though it engineered some socioeconomic change, did not entail a socioeconomic revolution, as, for example, Soviet communism did. But that is not the end of the matter. We must consider why this may not rule out fascism as revolutionary, why the appropriate, plausible modern revolution might have entailed other targets and aspirations, why radical political-cultural change might have seemed the revolutionary desideratum under the circumstances, which reflected experience that arguably went well beyond Marx's.
Claiming better to grasp the historically specific challenge and opportunity in light of experience with the modern liberal dispensation, the fascists were contesting precisely Marxist criteria as they sought a systematic alternative to the liberal mainstream. Experience had come to suggest that the problems of mainstream modernity could not be reduced to capitalism to the extent that Woodley, for example, simply takes for granted. It was necessary to rethink the relationship between politics and culture, on the one hand, economy and society, on the other. The target was not capitalism but liberalism and what might loosely be labeled ‘positivism’, the set of assumptions that kept human beings from grasping their collective potential to shape their world, even, up to a point, their economic world. From within a new political-cultural framework, it would be possible to relate differently to the capitalist economy itself. And in light of what the appropriate revolution had to entail, it would not be spearheaded by the communists, or the working class, but by a new elite defined by its consciousness, its values, its will, as opposed to its objective place in the socioeconomic substructure.
With respect to Yannielli's charge to Griffin and myself, we are talking about ‘social struggle’, to be sure. But social struggle along which axes? Why must ‘class’ be privileged if we take struggle to be the engine of history? With the conflation in his characterization, Yannielli takes it a priori that only class struggle can be genuine struggle. On what basis do we take that for granted? Was it not possible to challenge precisely any such privilege to class categories, even to argue that insistence on class terms was actually impeding the revolution that was presently possible and appropriate? We might recall the impact of Vilfredo Pareto, who insisted, before fascism had emerged, on the scope for post-Marxist ways of conceiving societal conflict and the need and the requirements for radical change. 1
In proposing an alternative revolution, the fascists were challenging the Marxist hegemonic claim to the post-liberal space. Saage notes in his essay here that the frontiers between revolution and counter-revolution are blurred in the new thinking about fascism. And such blurring had to take place at the time insofar as boxing out what seemed the wrong revolution was necessarily part of the process of making what seemed the appropriate one.
Of course it is not enough to say simply that the fascists claimed to be making the appropriate alternative revolution; we must assess the plausibility of their diagnoses and prescriptions. We certainly find myth-making, wishful thinking, blind spots and ideological blinders in fascist claims, but arguably that is not all. At this point, especially, dialogue among students of fascism should surely be possible, but only if we eschew prejudicially teleological and dismissive characterizations, only if we take seriously the possible scope for an alternative revolution and only if we are willing to countenance challenges to our own assumptions, categories and expectations.
In light of the scope for challenge and contest, let us first return to Woodley on the role of cultural rebellion, aesthetic politics and myth, which he derives, plausibly enough, from Griffin's influential account of fascism. From my perspective, those like Griffin and Emilio Gentile go further than necessary in opening the way to such dismissive readings as Woodley's. Although Griffin himself proclaimed a new consensus around ‘the primacy of culture’ in fascist studies, and though Saage, in his essay here, adopts the term to characterize the new thinking about fascism at issue, much is disputed among those of us claiming to take fascism seriously as a revolutionary quest for an alternative modernity. 2 It is true that ‘culture’ was central, but that has proven too readily conflated precisely with aesthetic politics and myth, as well as something like the sacralization of politics. Like Roger Eatwell, for example, I think Griffin sometimes overemphasizes the place of myth in fascism, just as I think Emilio Gentile does. 3 By overdoing a certain notion of culture and the place of myth, Griffin and Gentile make it too easy for Marxist-leaning scholars like Woodley to reduce fascism to mere ‘emotional experience’. We need to cut deeper to assess Woodley's assumptions about the place of such aesthetics and of merely emotional experience in the overall trajectory and experience of fascism.
We must note, first, that whereas ritual, spectacle and the like were certainly significant from the start, the inflation of the aesthetic dimensions, as well as one aspect of myth, were to some extent consequences, bound up with frustration and failure, and to that extent they cannot tell us about originating aspirations or even about the nature of the dynamic at work. To grasp what else matters besides aesthetics, we must get deeper into the substance of the fascist case against parliamentary government, for example, as central to the fascist insistence on the scope for an alternative revolution.
But myth, especially, was undeniably important to fascism and must be central to our analysis. We must be clearer, however, on what we mean by myth and on its place in fascism, considering how it interplayed with whatever else, and in what proportions – as I have sought to suggest by distinguishing, but also considering in tandem, ‘myth, style and substance’ in the case of Italian fascism. 4 Myth in fascism was more multivalent than the accounts of either Griffin or Gentile seem to encompass. And it was sufficiently complex to elude Woodley's way of invoking it to dismiss any notion that fascism was genuinely revolutionary. Most basically, to embrace myth in the Italian case was not irrationally to disavow a grasp of reality but to seek to take advantage of new insights into the place of non-rational factors in social coherence, social change and effective collective action. It should be noted, moreover, that myth can be genuinely mobilizing, based on shared belief, as opposed to mere manipulation through propaganda or brainwashing.
Whereas Woodley links fascism to myth, he finds genuine revolution to have an ‘objective basis’ and to be ‘immanent in the constitution of reality’. But I find such dichotomies too neat. On the one hand, what ‘objective basis’ would make a transformation genuinely revolutionary? On what basis could it be deemed ‘objective’, or immanent in the constitution of reality? Woodley invokes Habermas, but I recall Gadamer's objections to Habermas in their famous debate. The point was not that Habermas was wrong but simply that his criteria were subject to discussion, which cannot be stopped by invoking reason or objectivity. 5 On the other hand, whereas Griffin may overdo myth, can we conceive of revolution without an element that could be called myth? Woodley and Renton embrace Benjamin as genuinely revolutionary and deny Griffin's suggestion that Benjamin's thinking entails the palingenetic mythical dimension that Griffin finds at the root of the fascist and Marxist/communist revolutions. But whereas Benjamin claimed to find myth inherently corrupting, his way of denying myth seems merely arbitrary. If bound up with a revolution he found desirable, the mentality would not count as myth, though it might look exactly like myth to an outside observer.
Up to a point, Yannielli seems to converge with Woodley, because each implies that fascist novelty, bound up with Darwinian struggle, was necessary to sustain capitalism – at least in Italy and Germany – at this point in time. And Woodley would surely grant that, for all the excesses of long-standing modes of imperialism and racism, fascism constituted a departure from liberal democratic practices and modes of self-understanding, even if it cannot be considered revolutionary. Yannielli is more willing to view fascism as revolutionary, but is the difference instructive, or simply a reflection of plausible differences in their respective criteria of revolution? Insofar as it is instructive, this is because Yannielli insists more single-mindedly on the international capitalist framework, which was at a particular stage demanding departure from conventional liberal practices. Whereas something like the same framework is surely implicit for Woodley as well, he chooses to emphasize that fascism was too bound up with aesthetics and myth to constitute a revolution. But he might well find the major thrust of Yannielli's argument consistent with his own. It would be illuminating to hear their conversation on the topic.
In any case, Yannielli insists that ‘without a proper understanding of the American, or broader transnational context of both fascism and communism, neither movement is fully intelligible’. In the same vein, he asks, ‘what if we view fascism as a process – as a historical moment deeply embedded in a larger history and a larger international context?’ If we do ‘locate fascist praxis on a much wider chronological and geographical continuum’, we find ‘that fascism is endemic to the contradictions of capitalist modernity’. Conversely, we find that ‘the transnational dynamics’ at issue played a structuring role, laying the groundwork for and conditioning the experience of the fascist movements. As a prime example, Yannielli invokes Adam Tooze, who argued that Hitler’s regime … regarded the United States as one of its chief rivals in the epic Malthusian showdown that was to determine the fate of world history. Hitler himself was fixated on the economic threat emanating from North America, which explains both his embrace of American-style mass production and the urgency of his genocidal thrust into Eastern Europe.
In the last analysis, the aggressiveness of the Nazi regime was an intelligible response to tensions stemming from the uneven development of global capitalism.
Although Tooze seems to me to impute more prominence to ideology, as opposed to rational economic interests, than Yannielli lets on, I find Yannielli's argument, including the point from Tooze, convincing and important to a degree. So what separates us? It is not, as Yannielli sometimes seems to imply, that Griffin and I excessively confine fascism to the national level. I, for one, certainly agree that the fascist revolution not only developed from within ‘a larger international context’, but that it was a process, and not ‘a static entity to be compared or contrasted to other static entities’. Up to a point, moreover, Yannielli's argument is not incompatible with either Griffin's or my own way of understanding fascism as modern and revolutionary. Part of the challenge of modernity was indeed global capitalist economic competition, and the fascists concluded that a radically different political-cultural framework was necessary to make their respective nations effective.
But important though it was, global capitalism did not exhaust the wider, dynamic international framework at work in the emergence of fascism. Yet Yannielli seems to want to privilege global capitalism a priori, as if it had to have been decisive. He makes quite a leap when he argues, or simply assumes, that if we ‘locate fascist praxis on a much wider chronological and geographical continuum’ we end up acknowledging ‘that fascism is endemic to the contradictions of capitalist modernity’. The importance of global capitalism is an empirical matter that can be assessed only if we consider the other factors at issue in a non-reductive way.
Insofar as we are open to the possibility of an alternative revolution, we see that we might turn Yannielli around on the place of the wider chronological and geographical framework. A chronological framework wider than we often find is indeed necessary, but it does not necessarily lead us to privilege capitalism. Rather, it enables us to back up to encompass more of modern mainstream experience and thereby better to grasp the basis for the fascists' alternative diagnosis and prescription.
Yannielli's point about the wider geographical framework is more challenging, but here, too, he is too quick to privilege capitalism. The creators of fascism found the liberal-positivist dispensation limited, and ripe to be overcome through political-cultural revolution, not only because it did not make the nation fit for global economic competition. There were wider reasons, in light of a wider sense of the historically specific challenge and opportunity, involving the scope for new modes of collective action in light of how history could and should get made. What the wider international framework entailed, most basically, was precisely this sense of historically specific challenge and opportunity. From within that framework, the two fascist regimes responded to each other, but they also felt an energizing sense of competition with, on the one hand, Soviet communism and, on the other, liberal democracy, which seemed subject to challenge as smug and complacent – or even decadent. In light of all that was on the table, Yannielli, careful though he is to eschew the old reductionism, tends to fall into it in spite of himself in privileging the capitalist economy to the degree that he does. 6
At this point, however, the distinction between fascist perceptions and intentions, on the one hand, and objectively conditioning factors, on the other, must be considered. Although Yannielli takes fascism as a revolutionary effort to confront the contradictions of capitalist modernity, he implies that the fascist revolution could only have been negative, and unsuccessful, because it could not genuinely have overcome those contradictions. That could have been done only by overcoming capitalism altogether. In his implication that only a revolution overcoming capitalism could be genuine and lasting, Yannielli converges with Woodley, but because Yannielli is more willing to take fascism as revolutionary, with its direction and failure symptomatic, he seems a bit more open to learning from the fascist revolution and its outcomes. We can best return to this issue in concluding, as we consider the failed outcomes of the fascist revolution – and the possibility that Marxist modes of analysis might especially illuminate them.
Closely related to the notion that fascism was in some sense revolutionary is the claim that it was not some ‘revolt against modernity’ but a quest for an alternative modernity. Slippery though it obviously is, ‘modernity’ has long been central to discussions of fascism. Revisionists have addressed the category especially to counter the long-standing way of dismissing fascism as a revolt against modernity on the part of ‘losers’ in the modernization process, often identified with the petty bourgeoisie, unable to adjust to industrial modernity. 7
Among our collaborators, Woodley and Renton take fascism as distinctively modern, though in denying that it was genuinely revolutionary they seem also to deny that it was a coherent quest for an alternative modernity. Yannielli, more willing to take fascism as revolutionary, is also explicit in insisting that antebellum Southern intellectuals conceived the Southern slave system precisely as an alternative, and superior, modernity. At the same time, however, Yannielli's usage, linking alternative modernity to deeper exclusion, makes it especially clear that ‘modern’ need not be understood as honorific – as it seems to be for both Pellicani and Saage, among our contributors. And it is partly, but only partly, thus, it seems, that Pellicani and Saage prove the most determined to deny that fascism was distinctively modern at all. What are the stakes of such a denial?
Pellicani forcefully features the anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist side of fascism in a way that obviously departs from Woodley and Renton, and that leads me to hope that the two sides will have occasion to engage each other. But for Pellicani the fascist subordination of the capitalist economy, and private property more generally, to politics and ideology was but one aspect of a deeper reaction against the whole Enlightenment tradition, with its accents on individualism, rationalism, freedom and secularization. These, for Pellicani, are the hallmarks of modernity, so fascism must be seen as quintessentially anti-modern. Fuelled by the ‘alienation and anomie’ that were the by-products of modernization itself, fascism sought to arrest the process of secularization by sacralizing politics. In this respect the fascists were rejecting the secular and liberal modern state, resting on the free development of civil society. In the fascist state, any distinction between the state and the individual was lost; everything had to be public. More specifically, according to Pellicani fascism rejected the quintessentially modern ‘open society’ in order to confine society to a mode of permanent military mobilization. Born of war, fascism lived for war.
Pellicani attributes to me in particular the notion that fascism was seeking an alternative modernity, but of course Morgan, Eatwell, Griffin, Mann and others make essentially the same point. Surely none of those who speak of an alternative modernity would deny that fascism was reacting against mainstream modernity, entailing much of what Pellicani takes to be modern by definition, including a certain mode of individualism, freedom and pluralism. But as Pellicani sees it, to question the quintessential aspects of modernity was anomalous, by implication understandable only through reduction to sociological or psychological weakness. In invoking anomie and alienation, he implies that whether or not we can characterize them in class terms, the fascists were indeed the losers, the ones unable to handle the pressures of individualism, secularization and openness – the ones seeking to ‘escape from freedom’. 8 But as I have noted, the fascists were questioning precisely that mainstream understanding of what modernity was to entail. The question, again, is the basis of that questioning and what we take to be its plausibility. Before concluding that the fascist revolt was merely anti-modern, we need to do greater justice to the fascist case against the modern mainstream, especially liberal individualism and parliamentary democracy.
It is certainly true that the new fascist direction was ‘totalitarian’, in the sense of making everything public, and Pellicani insists that ‘totalitarian modernity’ is simply an oxymoron. This is especially because he finds totalitarianism bound up with political religion, whereas modernity entails secularization, the disenchantment of the world. But totalitarianism was surely no throwback. As I have argued in detail elsewhere, the totalitarian impulse is best understood as specifically modern – novel, historically specific, an alternative reflecting experience within mainstream liberal modernity to that point. 9 It stemmed most basically from a new historical sense, unimaginable before, and bound up precisely with secularization, as even the shadow of providential developmentalism fell away, leaving only a nakedly open-ended history that humans might try to master as best they could.
On the level of specific contemporary problems, totalitarianism meant expanded state sovereignty and political-cultural intervention, overcoming, among other things, the liberal understanding of the place of the capitalist economy. Although he may overdo fascist anti-capitalism, Pellicani has good reason to portray it as serious, not merely rhetorical. More particularly, he implies that the fascist way of distinguishing between productive and parasitical capital was meaningful – and not merely a polite cover for anti-Semitism. But neither need that differentiation be taken as anti-modern. In Italy the much-trumpeted distinction between ‘producers’ and ‘parasites’ was bound up with anti-parliamentarism and the embrace of a distinctly modern form of corporativism, itself totalitarian in politicizing the workplace and in involving people more constantly and directly in public life through their economic roles.
If we recall the importance of corporativism to the Italian fascist self-understanding, we recognize that Pellicani becomes too teleological when he insists that fascism, born of war, lived for war. It is true, however, that fascism in both Italy and Germany embodied the perceived lessons and virtues of the First World War. But that is another reason why fascism cannot be considered a mere throwback. The First World War seemed to have ushered in a new age of war or potential war. That was modern, like it or not.
As for political religion, I have elsewhere insisted on the limits of the category, which too easily can be used to gloss over what was new and historically specific, whatever the periodic comparisons with religion we find in expressions of the fascist self-understanding. 10 Fascism was not a repudiation of secularization but an effort to navigate a secularized world, an effort producing something new, unprecedented.
Like Pellicani, Saage denies that fascism constituted an alternative modernity, though on the basis of a somewhat different argument, more willing to grant that fascism was at least potentially modern and even revolutionary. So he does not preclude revolution based on definition to the extent that Woodley and Renton do. But for Saage the bottom line is that fascism simply did not turn out to be revolutionary in practice.
Saage acknowledges that the fascists had sufficient autonomy to mobilize masses; thus they could function as alliance partners of the old elites. But the fact that the fascists, in contrast with the Bolsheviks, probably could never have come to power without conservative support, or at least acquiescence, seems an argument against the claim that fascism was in some sense revolutionary. However, as has by now been shown many times, conservatives in both Italy and Germany consistently underestimated precisely the revolutionary potential of fascism. Conversely, though the fascists generally sought to avoid frontal challenge, they consistently pushed beyond what their sometime conservative allies expected. Not that that in itself would make the two fascist regimes revolutionary, but the fact that they came to power only thanks to support of others does not in itself deny their revolutionary credentials.
However, that leads to another layer of questions, which Saage addresses explicitly as he acknowledges a possible objection, only to dismiss it: One might object that once at the lever of political power, Fascism attempted to use the alliance with the old elites precisely to get rid of them, especially through the power of its charismatic leader cult – in other words, that Fascism attempted something like a ‘second revolution'. But this thesis is also fragile. Mussolini and Hitler each stopped the attempts of the fascist left – under Farinacci and Röhm, respectively – to end frontal attacks on the social domination of the Ancien Régime.
Variations of this argument are widely heard; I discussed Ernesto Laclau's comparable way of invoking Roberto Farinacci and Gregor Strasser in my earlier article in this journal. 11 Like Saage, Laclau fastens upon what he takes to be the most anti-capitalist fascists, only to show that they were marginalized. And in our present discussion, one obvious tack would be to grant that fascism included some genuinely revolutionary aspirations but to insist that they were frustrated in practice. But though this line of argument is certainly plausible, it is too often framed in a delimited way, based on arbitrary selections and a restricted sense of what fascist radical or revolutionary aspirations could have entailed.
Even as Saage fastens upon Röhm, whereas Laclau had fastened, perhaps more plausibly, on Gregor Strasser, they agree in fastening upon Farinacci in the Italian case. But as I noted in the earlier context, it is superficial to feature Farinacci as the archetypal leftist or revolutionary Italian fascist. He was radical in one way, but his aims were limited when compared with those of other generally leftist fascists like the corporativist Giuseppe Bottai, with whom he was often at odds. To understand the revolutionary potential in fascism, but also its failure to realize that potential, we need a more differentiated sense of the contending forces, even the contending revolutionary forces, within fascism itself. And we must recognize the possibility that, as I have discussed, the key criterion of revolution was not anti-capitalism per se; changing the political and cultural framework surrounding the capitalist economy might have qualified.
In the case of Italy, many definitive defeats of the left have been adduced, but somehow the radical current kept coming back. Still, even as it had to play against the fascist right, including those with roots in the earlier Nationalist movement, the fascist left was itself fragmented, as I have emphasized repeatedly, and as Breschi notes in his essay here. Even the institutional base of radical fascism was uncertain. Emilio Gentile accents the ongoing radical role, or potential role, of the Fascist Party, though I have argued that he overdoes this. 12 But this difference, too, is obviously bound up with questions about criteria of revolution. From my perspective, Gentile is too willing to settle for the sacralization of politics, entailing a certain mode of involvement – the sort of aestheticized politics that Woodley, especially, denies can count as revolutionary. I tend to agree with Woodley, but I also deny that that was all there was to radical fascism in Italy. Still, this is surely an area for continuing discussion among Marxist-leaning and liberal-leaning students of fascism, not least because we liberal-leaners disagree mightily among ourselves.
In any case, for Saage whatever radical potential fascism included was sufficiently blunted that fascism in practice cannot even be accounted an alternative modernity, let alone revolutionary. He notes that, even as Ralf Dahrendorf and David Schoenbaum, in influential works of the 1960s, pinpointed unintended long-term consequences of the Nazi experience that ended up furthering democratic modernization in Germany, they did not go so far as to suggest that National Socialist ‘modernization’ would have produced an alternative modernity.
But Saage, much like Pellicani, seems to be taking for granted a certain model of modernity, derived from Weber, Parsons, et al., and comparably taken for granted by those like Dahrendorf and Schoenbaum. And Saage seems to assume that by ‘alternative modernity’ we could only mean an alternative way of moving towards modern society as conventionally understood. However, the premise of those who find in fascism the quest for an alternative modernity is that those categories could be contested. The argument is not that the fascists sought, let alone actually produced, ‘normal’ or mainstream modernity but that they were seeking an alternative to precisely that. Still, by the end Saage promisingly suggests that in light of fascist directions that seem to have transcended capitalism and even bourgeois society, dialogue between Marxist and non-Marxist students of fascism could surely prove fruitful after all.
Of our six contributors, Breschi is the most willing to take fascism seriously as entailing ‘an autonomous revolutionary dynamic’, more or less along the lines Griffin and other revisionists have proposed. In doing so, he is able to illuminate not only the revolutionary thrust of Italian fascism but also some of the limits that Mussolini's regime encountered in practice. Although he confines himself to the Italian case, Breschi provides a sense of how to probe for the revolutionary fuel of fascism more generally.
After showing why, in light of both idiosyncrasies in the mainstream Italian liberal tradition, Italy's political and cultural elites failed to recognize the revolutionary potential of fascism, Breschi turns to the nature of the revolutionary thrust they were missing. Reviewing the concept of revolution itself, he convincingly insists that revolution can be political and constitutional; it need not frontally assault the socioeconomic system. On that basis he concludes that ‘fascism can be considered revolutionary because the political institutions of the parliamentary system were emptied and the one-party structure essentially replaced it. It was a novelty in the European political panorama of the first decades of the 20th century.’ But he also makes it especially clear that revolution is not necessarily positive. In the Italian case, in fact, it entailed carrying to often negative extremes idiosyncratic traditions that had emerged from the Risorgimento struggle.
Partly because of a bifurcation in the Risorgimento tradition, even the fascist quest for revolutionary change was fragmented, so fascism combined neo-statism and neo-populism in an uncertain synthesis. As a result, departures that might be considered revolutionary had ambiguous outcomes. Even as Breschi characterizes the fascist corporativist system, the regime's institutional centrepiece, as an innovative, modern departure from liberalism in regulating workplace relations and in enabling the workers to represent their interests within the state, he recognizes that, as it actually functioned, the system left the working classes involved only passively and fostered the development of a hyper-bureaucratic state.
In light of the heterogeneity even of revolutionary fascism, Breschi seeks to identify a least common denominator – and finds it in a kind of activism, linked to voluntarism and violence. And this, he concludes, ‘may be the content of the palingenetic myth that Griffin talks about: a myth of community regeneration’.
Breschi is right to stress the messy heterogeneity of fascism, even revolutionary fascism, but he is too quick to turn to activism as the least common denominator, without having probed more deeply the content of the radical strands at issue. For example, although he convincingly portrays corporativism as genuinely innovative, he barely scratches the surface in explaining the fascist corporativist rationale, nor does he consider how the wider fascist heterogeneity played out within the corporativist current – evident in the differences between Alfredo Rocco and Giuseppe Bottai, for example. Although they were arguably the two most significant fascist corporativists, they conceived the purposes of corporativism in different, even incompatible, ways, which inevitably weakened that current overall. Breschi's reading of the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile similarly proves too limited to illuminate not only the revolutionary fuel of fascism, but also the disabling tensions among the currents for radical change.
Convincing though it is up to a point, Breschi's way of repairing to the familiar ‘activism’ argument proves misleading regarding the sources, nature and implications of the fascist emphasis on ‘action’. He is too close to the old stereotype, as if what was at issue was merely ‘action for its own sake’, ‘perpetual dynamism’ to ‘keep the masses in motion’, or some such. He has an opening to clarify and deepen when he writes that: ‘The liberal method was abandoned in order to make more rapid and sharper responses to the social question, insofar as internal politics was concerned, and to the challenges unleashed by the clash among great-power imperialisms, insofar as foreign policy was concerned.’ This suggests that with its attempt at a more activist, energetic mode of action, the fascist regime was not just engaging in action for its own sake but addressing specific issues of the moment, out of a sense that the liberal method, especially as tried out in Italy, had proven inadequate to the challenge – and opportunity. The common denominator was indeed a departure from liberalism, but the direction was not so much activism per se but a new, energetic and totalitarian mode of collective action based on expanded state sovereignty and more constant mass mobilization.
In both Italy and Germany, fascism engineered a radical departure, leaving the values and institutions of liberalism behind while also defeating Marxism on the domestic level. What the fascists offered, to replace the liberal mainstream, responded not merely to emotional needs, stemming from alienation and anomie, and it was not confined to the aesthetic realm, although the sense of acting collectively in a new way engendered genuine enthusiasm and, among many, a sense of expanded involvement in public life. The new mode of action meant tackling unprecedented great tasks, from politicizing economic roles in Italy to re-engineering the population in Germany. Thus it is arguable that, even as both regimes proved caught up in a trajectory that led to failure, they so altered their respective countries that they must count as revolutionary.
But the mode of action entailed overreach and proved unsustainable, so each regime tended towards shoddy improvisation as it concentrated power in the hands of a charismatic leader, surrounded by myth-making and empty ritual. So despite the originating aspirations, and despite all the damage each regime did, in the last analysis they were too lacking in substance to count as revolutionary. Although such cynicism can be excessive, we must surely ponder Saage's insistence that there was something merely propagandistic and bogus about what have seemed the most obviously modernizing dimensions of Nazism.
I believe we all agree on the limits and failures of fascism in the end, even as we might disagree about the sources. Especially in connection with Yannielli, I raised the possibility (as I did in my earlier article) that Marxist modes of analysis might especially illuminate those limits and failures. But I question whether the failed outcomes stemmed especially from the structuring force of international capitalism that Yannielli highlights or, for that matter, from the aestheticist, myth-making side of fascism that Woodley features. These matters are certainly open for further discussion, but we need a wider sense of the possibilities if we are to assess the relative importance of those factors.
As I see it, the fascist quest for alternative revolution was bound up with a novel totalitarian mode of action, which seemed necessary not only to respond to the challenges of international capitalism but to address a much wider challenge and opportunity in light of the perceived limits of liberalism. Totalitarianism was not first about ‘domination’, or cementing ‘total control’, but about forging the means for history-making collective action. And it was that mode of action that produced the overreach and proved self-defeating.
As for what we learn from fascism about the scope for radical change at our phase of modernity, Griffin concluded in his earlier essay that any modern revolution is likely to take palingenetic form and thus lead to comparable excesses. He finds Kantian ‘metamorphosis’, or gradual, piecemeal reformism, the only alternative. As I noted in my earlier response, I believe I am more open than Griffin to keeping Marxist categories on the table. That Leninism and Stalinism, as forms of modern revolution, have been implicated is apparently not in dispute among us here, but the degree to which Marxism itself has been implicated seems to me still open for discussion. In several earlier publications I have sought to show that the excesses and failures of the earlier revolutionary era stemmed especially from totalitarianism, distinguishable from Marxism, and with its own sources.
The question is the scope for a historicist radicalism without totalitarianism. 13 As historicist, that radicalism would preclude any a priori claim to a privileged grasp not only of the direction of history but of the forces underlying and/or structuring history. As far as I am concerned, Benjamin, in his use of ‘historicism’ and his sense of temporality more generally, merely throws us off, but that, too, could surely be open to discussion. I addressed Benjamin, historicism and modes of human history-making in a preliminary way in my earlier essay, and I wish I had the space to return to this set of issues, especially in light of Renton's use of Benjamin. But doing so would require another article. In any case, the exchanges among us here surely suggest the scope for continuing to learn more deeply from our recent historical experience not only about the dangers, but also about the possibilities, of modern politics.