BY DANIEL GUERIN  
“Mysticism” is not enough; it fills no bellies. The individuals composing the fascist troops are not all equally fanatic, and even the most fanatic do not forget their material interests. Concern for these interests continues to dwell in their subconscious. In order to win them and keep up their enthusiasm, fascism must also hold forth to them a practical solution for the ills from which they suffer. Although in the service and hire of capitalism, it must—and this is what radically distinguishes it from the traditional bourgeois parties—make a show of demagogic anti-capitalism.

But this anti-capitalism, if closely examined, is quite different from socialist anti-capitalism; in fact it is essentially petty bourgeois. Fascism thus kills two birds with one stone: on the one hand it flatters the middle classes by becoming the faithful interpreter of their most reactionary aspirations; on the other, it feeds the working masses, and particularly those categories of workers lacking class consciousness, with a utopian and harmless anti-capitalism that turns them away from genuine socialism.

But this “pass-key” demagogy will not satisfy everybody. Fascism is obliged therefore to speak, not without understandable embarrassment, to the conscious workers, and to the small peasants hungry for land, in a more radical language.

We shall see that they will push this self-styled “socialism” very far—in words. Is it really useful, the reader will ask, to go to such pains to dissect this lying phrasemongering? The undertaking is indeed necessary, both to understand what slogans the fascist demagogues have used to dazzle their followers, and to point up the gulf between promises and fulfillment.

Fascism’s game is to call itself anti-capitalist without seriously attacking capitalism. It first endeavors to transmute the anticapitalism of the masses into nationalism. An easy task! In all periods, as we have seen, the hostility of the middle classes towards big capital is accompanied by a tenacious attachment to the idea of the nation. In Italy and Germany particularly, the masses as well are disposed to believe that the enemy is less their own capitalism than foreign capitalism. Hence fascism has no difficulty in shielding its financial backers from popular anger by diverting the anti-capitalism of the masses to the “international plutocracy….”

Although fascism arouses the popular masses especially against the “international plutocracy” and the Jews, it cannot avoid—without unmasking itself—an attack on its own big bourgeoisie. However, the fascist declamations against the big bourgeoisie, if examined closely, are in no way socialist.

The middle classes’ opposition to the big bourgeoisie differs sharply from that of the working class. The middle classes do not desire the elimination of the big bourgeoisie as a class. On the contrary, they would like to become big bourgeois themselves. When fascism proclaims itself anti-bourgeois, and when it denounces the “degeneration” of the big bourgeoisie, it has no intention of attacking the existing social order; rather, it wants to rejuvenate that order by injecting fresh blood, plebeian blood. Thus it flatters the middle classes, while at the same time diverting the masses from the class struggle and proletarian socialism.…

The Nazis make the big bourgeois their whipping boy. Hitler has not enough epithets at his command with which to flay the big bourgeoisie. He denounces its “proverbial cowardice,” its “senility,” its “intellectual rottenness,” its “cretinism.” But later his real meaning appears: it is necessary, he writes, “to take care that the cultivated classes are continually renewed by an influx of fresh blood coming from the lower classes.…”

Fascism cannot, however, unless it is to unmask itself, avoid taking issue with the capitalist system itself, though here again its anti-capitalism is very far removed from proletarian socialism.

The anti-capitalism of the middle classes has as its chief target the organization of credit. Throughout the nineteenth century, the petty-bourgeois theoreticians attacked not producing capitalism but idle capitalism—the lender, the banker.…

Most of the radical demands of the fascist program of 1919 were directed against the banks and loan capital: “The dissolution of corporations; suppression of all sorts of banking and stock market speculation; state credit through the creation of a national organization for credit distribution; confiscation of idle income; a special graduated surtax on capital.”  
 
 
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