• His name, Benito, was derived from Benito Juárez, a progressive president of Mexico whom his parents admired.
• Benito Mussolini was born to socialist parents; his father was a socialist organizer who was jailed, and his mother was a progressive.
• His name, Benito, was derived from Benito Juárez, a progressive president of Mexico whom his parents admired.
• In his early life, Mussolini was a committed socialist. He organized strikes in Switzerland, wrote for the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) newspaper, and opposed Italy’s invasion of Libya.
• However, Mussolini’s troubles with the socialist movement began with his support for Italy’s entrance into World War I.
• Due to his widespread support for Italian entrance into World War I, Mussolini was expelled from the PSI.
• He then began writing newspaper articles funded by French and Italian industrialists, advocating for war, and he even fought in World War I.
• After World War I, he became a committed anti-socialist and class collaborationist.
• After being kicked out, Mussolini founded the first fascist party, using the symbol of the fasces as a sign of unity. Its membership comprised anarchists, socialists, and others who were disillusioned with the movement.
• Mussolini’s “Blackshirts” became extra-governmental gangs that rounded up socialist leaders and crushed unions, rarely being stopped by the middle-class liberals.

The Petty Bourgeois Nature of Fascism

• In his essays “Marxism and Revisionism” and “Left-Wing Childishness,” Lenin identified the basis for revisionism within the socialist movement as the petty bourgeoisie.
• Basically, as the petty bourgeoisie begins to lose its businesses, they end up joining the working class and the Marxist movement, which leads to two ideological deviations:
  • Left-wing revisionism: Characterized by “left-wing phrases” not connected to a scientific, concrete analysis.
  • Right-wing revisionism: Seeks reformism and capitalism “under a red flag”.
• Fascism also emerged from the socialist movement with its social basis in the petty bourgeoisie; therefore, ontologically, all three deviations serve the same function as opponents of a truly scientific revolutionary ideology rooted in concrete conditions.

Lesser Evilism: Socialists Vs. Communists (Earl Browder)

• The fight against fascism is often described within liberal circles as the fight between bourgeois parliamentary politics and dictatorship.
• However, Marxists recognize that all forms of capitalist governments (monarchist, parliamentary, fascist) are all essentially the same: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Therefore, the true fight against fascism is not against a dictatorship in a vacuum, but against capitalism and the bourgeois state itself.
• While we are often told of lesser evilism or damage control by social democrats, what they always end up doing, though they may win temporary rights and concessions, is never being able to completely address the root cause of capitalist crises and fascist degeneration.
• Therefore, it was social democrats who were in offices in Europe who failed to stop fascism through a supposed lesser evilism, as they attempted to fight fascism on a legalistic basis.
• Likewise, while social democrats could give concessions when capitalism was giving super profits, they “began to break down and dwindle under the pressure of the economic crisis. With the rising colonial revolts, the basis of imperialism began to weaken. Thus a reverse movement set in, no longer to the extension of social concessions, but on the contrary to the cutting down and withdrawal of concessions already granted”.

Fascism and Social Revolution

• Fascism was born out of the specific context of the post-World War I world and the contradictions that were left within it, namely that the war had almost seen proletarian revolutions all over the world but just failed ever so slightly.
• Undeniably, the only way to fight fascism is Communism, though some may “dream of a third alternative” way of peaceful development without class struggle that’s neither fascist nor communist, this dream is completely false.
• The origin of fascism lies within the decay of the advanced imperialist states; it is not inevitable, but in countries where socialist revolution fails to happen, it becomes an important tool of maintaining power during its extreme decay, bringing the contradictions of class society to its ultimate endpoint.
• Dutt described fascism’s class war as becoming a class society “at war within itself”.
• The basis of fascism lies in the fact that all commodities under capitalism are produced for exchange value and not use value. Because of this inevitability, capitalism overproduces more than it needs, leading to economic crashes; it becomes incentivized to stop technological development in order to keep their class relations in order to extract more surplus value, in addition to artificial scarcity under capitalism despite more than enough to go around.
• Ultimately, every single system becomes revolutionary when its productive forces (level of technological advancement) become held back by its relations of production (organization of society), and this is where most capitalist crises originate. This is especially due to the artificial scarcity despite having more than enough, not necessarily technological advancement.
• The only class that can solve this is the proletariat and workers’ revolution; fascism becomes a way to resist this.
• Malthusianism and talks of ‘overpopulation’ then are a wrong answer to the artificial scarcity of capitalism.
• Even when Dutt was writing his book in 1931, capitalism produced more than enough to support 4 times the population of Earth at that time.
• Instead of benefiting the masses, “The outcome of this gigantic increase of productive power has been world crisis, stagnation and closing down of production, mass unemployment, mass impoverishment and the lowering of standards, on a scale without parallel since the beginning of capitalism”.
• The fact of the matter is that capitalism within the imperialist age breeds economic crises and world wars for the redivision of the world, as one World War I leader said a decade after it about the Great Depression: “I am sure that sooner or later we would have been confronted with something approximately like the present chaos. There must be something fundamentally wrong with our economic system, because abundance produces scarcity”.
• Fascism is a further stage of the capitalist crises, of the artificial scarcity caused in a post-scarcity world, and the classes that run said world’s attempt at maintaining their power, especially as capitalism faces crisis of overproduction, unemployment, and recessions and depressions.
• The reserve army of labor becomes a breeding ground for fascism if there is not a strong socialist movement, in addition to the middle class (petty bourgeoisie).
• The laws of capitalism lead to people losing jobs and living standards, continuing to work insane hours despite increases in productivity. And as capitalism gets into deep crises, world wars become easy ways to utilize these productive forces that are lying around, and insidiously to get rid of masses of unemployed workers that are eating at the system.
• As capitalism breaks, we have two paths: socialism or barbarism, with fascism being said barbarism.
• In post-World War I Europe, capitalism, which was facing a great crisis and almost overthrown, was saved by two important allies: 1) reactionary counter-revolutionary guards such as the Freikorps, and 2) social democracy, which allowed the capitalists to put into office people that claimed to represent the working classes, that gave important concessions such as better wages and less hours, but people that still maintained tight control of the bourgeois of the means of production.
• However, social democracy was relegated aside as a controlled opposition as capitalism continued; the reforms were dismantled, and capitalism needed another thing to save themselves: fascism.
• Just like how we are experiencing now, monopoly capitalism, after relative economic stagnation, began to increase prices and pass them onto the working classes.
• During the Great Depression, the conflict between the productive forces and forces of production would become so great many financiers and capitalists would begin to denounce technology, human advancement, and blame the depression on the gains made from scientific and productive discovery. This was solely because they owned the means of production and couldn’t imagine letting them be used for a common good instead scrapping whole factories and machines.
• While in the USSR, Russia was buying and using the latest technologies to lessen the workday, in Nazi Germany the machines in glass blowing factories were being banned, and in America factories were being scrapped so that humans could be employed desperately again under a wage labor system.
• With the breakdown of the capitalist system, the capitalists even began to distrust science, which previously they promoted, for pseudoscience, replacing it with the pseudoscientific theories of Aryans, race replacement, strong man saviors, and other nonsense. It enters into essentially a psychosis, cutting off educations, book bans and burnings, etc..
• With the breakdown of parliamentary capitalism and ‘logical capitalism,’ class dictatorship becomes ugly and apparent, democratic powers become limited, and the mask slips off.
• As world market supplies under imperialism become tightened, free trade as it is known breaks down for tariffs, government subsidized industries, vicious trade wars, all in the name of intensified imperialist conflict for said shrinking imperialist markets. What Trump is doing is not anti-imperialism but seeking to get more out of imperialism from his competitors.
• As capitalism breaks down, as social welfare gets cut, nationalism and arms races begin as huge amounts of wealth get poured into military industries. War becomes a great way to offset the stupors of production and crises of capitalism. As a journalist would write on the upcoming World War II: “We were lifted from a business depression in 1914 by the outbreak of a great war. It would be a curious repetition of function if another war should again come to our industrial rescue”.
• Capitalism in all of its facets, from class war to actualized war, is a destructive system then, that tends towards these great conflicts as ways to get rid of reserve armies of labor, to re-utilize productive forces that sit idle, redivide the imperialism spheres of influence, etc..
• Fascism then is not a unique force that comes out of nowhere but an ideology rooted in the decay of capitalism, with a clear ideological and economic line in the crisis of finance monopoly capitalism to fascism into its most logical conclusions.
• Fascism ideologically is a very confused movement; Mussolini himself admitted he had no real theoretical foundation and simply just invented something to fit his needs. Fascism ideologically then is always confusing, opportunistic, and hard to define, which is why arguing with them is annoying. But on a class basis, in terms of practice, it is easily identifiable.
• Fascism can be identified by 7 basic tendencies:
  1. Maintenance of capitalism in the face of workers’ revolution.
  2. Increasing capitalist dictatorship.
  3. Limitation of working-class movements.
  4. The dismantling of parliamentary ‘democracy’.
  5. State involvement within industry to save it.
  6. Concentration of the imperialism bloc into a more unified structure (e.g., Trump’s tariffs and bullying to extort more money).
  7. Endless war to revive and offset contradictions.
• Elements of fascism are alive within every capitalist country, with fascism being a completion of all of these elements into a singular dictatorship.
• Fascism is ultimately the representation of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; at every turn it is funded, defended, endorsed by big industrialists, while the petty bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat may make up its army, which is used to fight other workers, neither are strong enough to do change; that change comes fundamentally from the big bourgeoisie.
• Some of the Nazi party’s bigger supporters were bankers like Thyssen, including, ironically enough, a Jewish banker.
• The middle class finds itself in fascism as capitalism throws them out of work, crushes or threatens to crush their small businesses, requiring them to become political activists.
• Fascism was born out of Italy and allowed to succeed because their workers’ movement had been strong but unable to take power due to weak leadership, as even though the workers of Italy after World War I were willing to take over the state and en masse revolt, Italian socialist leadership faltered.
• When the Italian workers and peasants rose up in the years of 1919-1920 taking factories for themselves, no strong party or leadership took the position to win political power despite the masses being ready; the PSI’s leadership remained reformist instead, negotiating for reforms. This allowed the bourgeoisie to both become scared and rally their ranks for fascism.
• Just at the exact same time, within the 1920s that the reformist movement within Italy was defeated, the fascists rose in power and began suppressing workers.
• Mussolini came out of the workers’ movement writing for the Italian Socialist Party; however, he was always an opportunist who switched his ideological line and quickly went from anti-World War I to pro-World War I, then leaving the socialist movement and forming what would become the fascist movement.
• While a couple of social democratic leaders in Italy quelled the workers, they slowly made their way for Mussolini’s bombastic entrance into power, as professional officers and the army provided them arms, allowing the fascists to roam and crush labor strikes.
• Fascists would become an unofficial arm of the government to kill or firebomb socialists and workers’ organizers. In 1921 the fascists killed 2,240 workers and destroyed 240 workers’ buildings.
• Despite trying to fight the fascists through legal means and reforms, Mussolini would manage to secure power through his March on Rome, which was supported by almost all major military leaders of Italy who gave him their blessings beforehand. There was no fascist revolution; parliament and the keys to power were handed to Mussolini from above, relatively peacefully, by the bourgeois.
• In Germany, fascism had a similar rise; just like how in Italy the workers’ movement was defeated by reformists, the Spartacus uprising within Germany in 1918 saw workers take over large parts of the government and even set up soviets. The workers were ready for taking the government.
• However, the social democratic leadership hesitated, negotiated with the bourgeois. They even worked with the Freikorps to kill the more radical leaders like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, in addition to helping crush the workers’ movement, laying the basis for fascism.
• Just like in Italy, the social democratic governments that would follow would allow fascist gangs to roam the German country to exist and hound communists and workers’ organizers, with them acting as unofficial police; fascism’s growth was protected by social democrats. The Weimar Republic, though advertising itself as a free democracy, would see several brutal state repressions of labor movements.
• The Nazis, when they attempted their Beer Hall Putsch, would get light sentences and be freed by the German state. The Nazis would combine socialist populist rhetoric, anti-Semitism, and discontent for the Versailles Treaty to win a broad section of German society, especially the industrial proletariat.
• With the onset of the Great Depression and social democrats within the German government scrambling to solve capitalism and failing, the Nazis rose to national prominence in the 1930 elections.
• With workers’ faith in social democrats destroyed, and social democrats refusing an alliance with communists, the bourgeois had only one option to stop the upcoming communist threat in Germany, and that was the fascists.
• The communists knew that they and the social democrats far outnumbered the fascists and therefore on three occasions would attempt to create a united front against fascism; however, every time the social democratic leadership would reject it despite wide support from their own mass bases.
• The communists would even organize many social democratic workers and factions under strikes against the growing fascist threat, but all those who participated would be banned by the social democratic leadership from the wider organization.
• The social democrats would instead try to seek an accommodation with Hitler and try to peacefully defeat him. Hitler ultimately came to power under Von Hindenburg who peacefully put him as chancellor; ultimately once again the fascists once again won a “revolution” top down. The social democrats would even say that now that Hitler is in power, he can be shown to be a charlatan.
• The social democrats in a last desperate attempt to get Hitler on their side would even vote with him a couple times, but they would be dissolved in the end. Germany ultimately was a victim of the revisionism of the 2nd International that led to fascism.
• Fascism is both illogical and logical. Fascism rises out of a very logical need as “The reality of Fascism is the violent attempt of decaying capitalism to defeat the proletarian revolution and forcibly arrest the growing contradictions of its whole development”. However, the ideology itself, as it’s presented to the masses, is completely incoherent, opportunist, and almost made up on the spot. That’s why it’s so annoying to debate fascism; however, its protection of monopoly capitalism and the support it’s always gotten from it is where you can see the real face and ideology of fascism.
• Fascism started out as gangs crushing workers’ organizations and then had to make up an ideology to justify it, as Mussolini said in 1921: “within the two months between now and the National Congress the philosophy of Fascism must be created”.
• Fascism’s national chauvinism, racism, and class collaboration are all borrowed from liberalism, where all of these already exist to some degree; fascism, however, becomes the final expression of all of these tendencies growing out of capitalism’s corpse.
• There is nothing special in fascism; it steals socialist words and populism, its economic planning is borrowed from social democrats, and its racism from liberal Western chauvinism.
• Fascist economies likewise remained hollow; even though they promised economic liberation, unemployment still remained at all time highs, industrial output slowed down, mass privatization, welfare cuts, wage cuts.
• Fascism is ultimately a ticking time bomb; it has several contradictions buried within it: finance monopoly capitalism, class society, and it attempts to force all of these into a square peg through a triangular hole; it’s just delaying the inevitable by force. Fascism’s only choices are to destroy the productive forces or never-ending war to redistribute imperialism spheres.
• Fascism is also an ideology with no hope for the future, the ultimate pessimism of man; its very much in line with end of history theory of neoliberalism. As one fascist newspaper would read: “Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice. We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on the last position, without hope, without rescue. . . . The honorable end is the one thing that cannot be taken from a man”.
• Fascism’s training always comes from colonial empires and their treatments of the foreign populations come home, an “imperial boomerang”.

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Sources

The People Profiles. “Benito Mussolini’s Early Life & Rise to Power.” YouTube video. Last modified March 10, 2024.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/D6OGe1MnuTc?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Lenin, V. I. “‘Left-Wing’ Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality.” Marxists Internet Archive. May 5 (18), 1918. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm.

Socialism For All ☭ Intensify Class Struggle. “Fascism And Social Revolution (R. Palme Dutt, 1934).” YouTube video. Last modified October 18, 2023.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/9Axcr2sZIIk?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Dutt, R. Palme. Fascism and Social Revolution: A Study of the Economics and Politics of the Extreme Stages of Capitalism in Decay. New York: International Publishers, 1935. https://www.marxists.org/archive//dutt/1935/fascism-social-revolution-3.pdf.