By the end of World War I, Mussolini the socialist who had organized strikes for workers and peasants had become Mussolini the fascist who broke strikes on behalf of financiers and landowners. Using the huge sums he received from them, he projected himself onto the national scene as the acknowledged leader of i fasci di combattimento, a movement composed of black-shirted ex-army officers and sundry toughs who were guided by no clear political doctrine other than a militaristic patriotism and dislike for anything associated with socialism and organized labor.
Between January and May 1921, the fascist blackshirts destroyed 120 labor headquarters, attacked 243 socialist centers and other buildings, killed 202 workers (in addition to 44 killed by the police and gendarmerie), and wounded 1,144 others. During this time 2,240 workers were arrested and only 162 fascists. In the 1921–22 period up to Mussolini’s seizure of state power, “500 labor halls and cooperative stores were burned, and 900 socialist municipalities were dissolved.”18
In 1922, the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusiness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the “March on Rome,” contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy’s top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist “revolution”—really a coup d’état—took place. In the words of Senator Ettore Conti, himself a very loyal representative of the moneyed interests, “Mussolini was the candidate of the plutocracy and the business associations.”19
Within two years after seizing state power, il Duce had shut down all opposition newspapers and crushed the Socialist, Liberal, Catholic, Democratic, and Republican parties, which together had commanded some 80 percent of the vote. Labor leaders, cooperative farm leaders, parliamentary delegates, and others critical of the new regime were beaten, exiled, or murdered by fascist terror squadristi. The Italian Communist Party endured the severest repression of all, yet managed to maintain a courageous underground resistance that eventually evolved into armed struggle against the fascisti and the German occupation force.
In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. In the period following World War I, under the Weimar Republic, workers and farm laborers won the eight-hour day, unemployment insurance, and the right to unionize. But the nearly total collapse of the German economy in 1929–30 presented the owning class with a momentous investment crisis. Only massive state aid could revive their profits. Wages, social welfare, and human services had to be cut. Union contracts had to be abrogated. The crisis in agriculture was equally severe, and the large land proprietors, the Junker class, demanded higher subsidies, heavier duties on foreign agriculture imports, and an end to farm unions that were protecting wage levels and thereby cutting into profits.
During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown-shirted “stormtroopers,” subsidized by business, were used mostly as an anti-labor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers, farm laborers, socialists, and communists. In the words of Nazi leader Herman Goering, they were the “bodyguard of capitalism.”
By 1930 most of the influential landowners and big industrialists and bankers had concluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their interests, being too accommodating to the working class and to certain sectors of light industry. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler and propelled the Nazi party onto the national stage.
In the July 1932 electoral campaign, fortified with vast sums of money from the German cartels, the Nazis gleaned about 37 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in an election. Their reliable base was among the more affluent strata along with substantial numbers of petty bourgeoisie and lumpenproletarians who served as strong-arm party thugs. As with the fascists in Italy, the Nazis in Germany never had a majority of the people on their side. The great majority of the German working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.
True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist Party’s proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds. Earlier in 1924, Social Democratic government officials in the Weimar Ministry of Interior used fascist paramilitary troops to attack left-wing demonstrators. They imprisoned seven thousand workers and suppressed Communist Party newspapers.20 Then in January 1933, a number of right-wing parties coalesced behind the Nazis and, just weeks after the election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor.
Upon assuming state power, Hitler and his Nazis pursued an agenda not unlike Mussolini’s. They crushed organized labor and eradicated all elections, opposition parties, and independent publications. Hundreds of thousands of opponents were imprisoned, tortured, or murdered. In Germany, as in Italy, the communists endured the severest political repression of all groups.
Neither in Italy nor Germany was the left ever strong enough to effect a revolution. But popular forces had developed enough strength to resist the austerity and the rollback that the capitalists tried to impose in order to maintain their own profit levels. The bourgeoisie resorted to fascism less out of a response to the proletarian disturbances in the street and more as a response to the contradictions within their own economic system.
The Italian and German cartels looked to huge armament contracts and related public works as an expanded source of profitable investment. This also fit with their desire for a more aggressive foreign policy that might open new markets and put them on a better footing with their French and English competitors. So the fascists became a very useful ally against the capitalists’ two worst enemies: the workers in their own country, and the capitalists in other countries.
Not all the big industrialists and financiers supported fascism with equal fervor. Some, like Thyssen, were early and enthusiastic backers of Hitler. The aged Emil Kurdoff thanked God that he lived long enough to see the Führer emerge as the savior of Germany. Others contributed money to the Nazis but also to other anti-socialist parties on the right. They backed Hitler only when he appeared to be the most effective force against the left. Many of them remained privately critical of the more extreme expressions of Nazi propaganda and were uneasy about the anti-bourgeois rhetoric enunciated by some of the plebeian brownshirts.
Some business elements were not that enamoured with Hitler. Light industry had lower fixed costs and more stable profits than heavy industry, and was more dependent on consumer buying power. Consequently, light industrialists were not that keen about a more aggressive foreign policy and subsidies to heavy industry. But when push came to shove, they may not have been close to the fascists, but they were not about to ally themselves with the proletariat against the business class, of which they were a part. They either sided with the cartels or kept their mouths shut.
There was another element in these two societies that not only tolerated the rise of fascism but supported it: the capitalist state itself. Not the parliament as such, but the instruments of the state that had a monopoly on the legal use of force and violence, the police, the army, and the courts. In Italy years before Mussolini emerged victorious, the police collaborated with the fascists in attacking labor and peasant organizations. They recruited criminals for the fascist squadristi, promising them immunity from prosecution for past crimes. While applications for gun permits were regularly denied to workers and peasants, police guns and cars were made available to Mussolini’s goons.
Likewise in Germany immediately after World War I, the military police and the judiciary tended to favor the rightists while suppressing the leftists, a pattern of collaboration that continued into Hitler’s day. In other words, these liberal capitalist democracies—that supposedly were “equally opposed to totalitarianism of the left and right”—were not really equally opposed. They often collaborated with the extreme right, those who were protecting the interests of big capital and the existing class structure. If def
eating socialism and communism also entailed destroying democracy, so much the worse for democracy.
The literature on who supported fascism and Nazism is long and much debated. But a much neglected question is: whom did fascism support when it came to power? How did fascist Italy and Nazi Germany deal with social services, taxes, business, and the conditions of labor? For whose benefit and at whose expense? Most of the mainstream western literature on fascism and Nazism has little to say about such things.21
Fascist-sponsored “unions” were set up. Their function was to speed up production and prevent wildcat strikes and apply punitive regulations, including fines, dismissals and imprisonment for those workers who complained of shop conditions. Even a Nazi labor-front newspaper had to admit, “Some shop regulations are reminiscent of penal codes.” Workers could be shifted from one employment to another regardless of their wishes. They could be conscripted for any work assumed useful for the nation’s economy, with no guarantee of wages equal to previous earnings. In both Italy and Germany the government exercised compulsory arbitration in regulation of work and wages. Any worker who contested such an arrangement was declared an enemy of the state.
These measures had the intended effect. According to figures supplied by the Italian press itself, the already meager wages for Italian workers in 1927 were cut in half by 1932. By 1939 the cost of living had risen an additional 30 percent. Taxes on wages were introduced. Regulations were instated against minimum wages. There was no more increased pay for overtime. In some regions, sanitary and safety regulations were dropped. Occupational-safety regulations were eliminated in factories. In many areas child labor was reintroduced. Many of the evils that the Italians thought belonged to a past generation now returned under fascism.
In Germany, it was the same story. Between 1933 and 1935 wages were lowered anywhere from 25 to 40 percent, a harsh cut for ordinary workers trying to make ends meet. Wage taxes were instituted. Municipal poll taxes were doubled and other payroll deductions were imposed. The nonprofit mutual-assistance and insurance associations that had existed before the Nazis were abolished. Their funds were taken over by private insurance companies that charged more while paying out smaller benefits. And in Germany, just as in Italy, inflation substantially added to the workers’ hardships.
In both Italy and Germany, perfectly solvent publicly owned enterprises, such as power plants, steel mills, banks, railways, insurance firms, steamship companies, and shipyards, were handed over to private ownership. Corporate taxes were reduced by half in both Italy and Germany. Taxes on luxury items for the rich were cut. Inheritance taxes were either drastically lowered or abolished. In Germany between 1934 and 1940 the average net income of corporate businessmen rose by 46 percent. Enterprises that were floundering were refloated with state bonds, recapitalized out of the state treasury. Once made solvent, they were returned to private owners. With numerous enterprises, the state guaranteed a return on the capital invested and assumed all the risks. The rich investor did not have to worry about any losses; if a business did poorly, the investor would be recompensed from the state treasury.
What the fascist state attempts is a final solution to the problem of class conflict. It obliterates the democratic forms that allow workers some room for an organized defense of their interests. But this final solution proved very far from final. In fascist Italy and Germany, industrial sabotage and sporadic wildcat strikes continued, inflation increased, whole sectors of the economy remained stagnant. There was widespread corruption, mismanagement, underemployment, and vital social services deteriorated—but profits climbed.
The Italian economy remained in a troubled, stagnant condition right up to the Second World War. In Germany, thanks to the booming armaments industry, the standard of living, most notably the terrible unemployment problem, showed modest improvement, but it never came close to 1928 levels. Under the Weimar Republic, for all its troubles, the levels of food, textiles, and other areas of consumption and production were much better than ever achieved under Nazi Germany.
Here then were two peoples, the Italians and Germans, with different histories, cultures, and languages, and supposedly different temperaments, who ended up with the same repressive solutions because of the compelling similarities of economic power and class conflict that prevailed in their respective countries. Likewise in countries with such diverse histories and cultures as Lithuania, Croatia, Rumania, Hungary, Japan, and Spain a similar fascist pattern emerged to do its utmost to save corporate business from the troublesome impositions of democracy.22 Fascism’s savage service to big capital remains almost entirely a hidden history.
37 THE COLD WAR IS AN OLD WAR
It is commonly believed that the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, known as the “Cold War,” began after World War II. Both nations had been allies in the struggle against the Axis powers, but in short time an otherwise friendly Washington had to adopt a “containment policy” in order to counter Moscow’s expansionist thrusts and military buildups, or so the story goes.
The truth is something else. The capitalist nations, including the United States, treated Soviet Russia as a threat virtually from the first days of its existence. What is called the “Cold War” is really an old war, a continuation of an antagonism prevailing from the first days of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. Long before the Soviets could ever have been a military threat to the West, they posed a political threat, the danger of an alternative system. Most Americans remain completely unfamiliar with this history.
In the century before World War II, U.S. rulers had already piled up a record of violent intervention in various countries, starting with the war of aggression against Mexico ending in 1848 that led to the annexation of almost half of Mexico’s territory. U.S. expansionists then wiped out the last resistant Native American nations and closed the frontier. Some years later, in 1899–1903, they launched a bloody and protracted war of conquest in the Philippines. U.S. expeditionary forces intervened in China along with other Western armies to suppress the Boxer Rebellion and keep the Chinese under the heel of European and North American colonialists. U.S. marines invaded and occupied Nicaragua in 1912 and again in 1926–1933, Cuba in 1898–1902, Mexico in 1914 and 1916, Panama in 1903–1914, Haiti in 1915–1934, and Honduras six time between 1911 and 1925. So it was not an altogether unprecedented step when the United States joined other capitalist nations in an invasion of revolutionary Russia in 1918.
Years before the Russian Revolution, U.S. officials were taking repressive measures at home against syndicalists, anarchists, socialists, and communists who sought, in the words of one official, to “reduce all economic classes to one dismal level.”23 When revolutionary workers, under the leadership of Lenin’s Bolshevik party, seized state power in Russia in 1917, some American labor organizations offered expressions of solidarity.24 But among the moneyed classes of this and other capitalist nations the fear was palpable. The plutocracy’s worst nightmare was coming true: here was a successful socialist revolution by the unlettered and unwashed masses against the natural leaders of society, the persons of talent and property. Unless drastic measures were taken, might not other countries follow suit?
Beginning in August 1918, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, Great Britain, France, and Japan, invaded Soviet Russia in an attempt to overthrow the Bolshevik government. In addition to using their own troops, they provided aid to the reactionary pro-czarist White Guard armies. To justify their action, Western leaders initially announced that the intervention was an attempt to keep Russia in the war against Germany. But the World War ended shortly after the invasion, yet the allies continued in their military campaign against the Bolshevik government for almost another two years. Western rulers also announced that the invasion was an attempt to rescue Czech prisoners- of-war marooned inside Russia. But the plight of the Czech prisoners developed well after the decision to intervene had been contemplated and was seized upon more as an
after-the-fact excuse, a rather lame one at that.25
In truth, the allied leaders intervened in revolutionary Russia for the same reason conservative rulers have intervened in revolutionary conflicts before and since: to protect the existing social order. Recall how various European monarchs colluded against the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. All the bitter rivalries that plagued the courts of Europe weighed less than the aristocracy’s shared interest in class survival. Recall also, almost a century later in 1871, how Bismarck mobilized the same French army he had just defeated so that it could be used by the French ruling class against the revolutionary workers of the Paris Commune.
Likewise, after the 1918 armistice, the victorious Western allies allowed the German militarists to retain 5,000 machine guns to be used against German workers “infected with Bolshevism.” The allies made clear that they would not tolerate a socialist workers’ government in Germany nor permit diplomatic relations between Berlin and the newly installed Soviet government in the Kremlin.”26
While President Woodrow Wilson contemplated sending American troops to Russia, his secretary of state, Robert Lansing, recorded in a confidential memorandum the administration’s concerns. Lansing perceived Lenin and the Bolsheviks to be revolutionary socialists who sought “to make the ignorant and incapable mass of humanity dominate the earth.” The Bolsheviks wanted “to overthrow all existing governments and establish on the ruins a despotism of the proletariat in every country.” Their appeal was to “a class which does not have property but hopes to obtain a share by process of government rather than by individual enterprise. This is of course a direct threat at existing social order [i.e., capitalism] in all countries.” The danger was that it “may well appeal to the average man, who will not perceive the fundamental errors.” The Bolsheviks appealed “to the proletariat of all countries . . . to the ignorant and mentally deficient, who by their numbers are urged to become masters.” Furthermore, the Bolsheviks had actually “confiscated private property” in Russia. For the patrician Lansing, Bolshevism was the “most hideous and monstrous thing that the human mind has ever conceived.”27
Contrary Notions Page 32