Unlike other forms of reaction, fascism is the mass movement of the ruined middle class who have been organized as a human battering ram against the labour movement. The crisis of capitalism completely crushes the petty bourgeois and drives them into a frenzy. In Germany unemployment rose to four million in 1931, five million in 1932 and over six million in the following year. Inflation had earlier thrown whole layers of the middle class into penury. The suicide rate increased dramatically during these years. Many professionals fell below the level of the skilled worker. A professor was paid less than an ordinary worker. Not a small number were turned into vagabonds. After 1923, 97 percent of Germans were without any capital, resulting in a startling polarization of wealth.
The rationalizations of the boom years created enormous concentrations of capital as small industries and businesses were quickly swallowed up. In the crisis after 1929, at least the organized workers could fall back on the limited protection of trade union contracts and unemployment allowances. But for the German petty bourgeois – the bankrupt shopkeepers, the unemployed professionals, those on depreciated fixed incomes – they were in a state of utter desperation. They had lost everything, with many being thrown into the streets. In the past, sections of the middle class were pushed into the ranks of the working class, but now, with mass unemployment, they were turned into paupers. This situation resulted, as Trotsky explained, in the “despair of the petty bourgeois, its yearning for change, the mass neurosis of the petty bourgeois, its readiness to believe in miracles, its readiness for violent measures; and the growth of its hostility to the proletariat, which has deceived its expectations.”
The fascists fed the frustrations and the despair of the ruined peasants, the unemployed youth, the devastated small business people crushed by the monopolies, and the lumpen proletariat – the spies, prostitutes, gangsters and criminals. Through anti-capitalist demagogy they pulled this despairing mass together, imbued it with a mission of salvation, and filled it full of illusions in overthrowing the system. Due to its intermediate social position and heterogeneous make-up, the middle class is incapable of playing an independent political role: it is forced to either support the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. In the immediate post war period the bulk of them looked towards the workers’ organizations as a way forward. The failure of the workers’ parties to transform the situation drove them back towards the bourgeoisie.
But the mass of the petty bourgeois are disenchanted by the actions of capitalist politicians who stand for the maintenance of the status quo. The ruling class therefore has to shape a new weapon to dupe the middle class. It finances the fascists, builds them up, and uses them to exploit the problems and discontent of the petty bourgeois.
The fascist organization originates as anti-labour gangs, harassing workers’ organizations, and attracting bands of mercenary thugs from the dregs of society. These layers formed the basis of Hitler’s Storm Troops, the Sturmabteilung (SA), and the SS (Elite Guard). This human rubbish, made up of the lumpen proletariat in the main, can only become a serious mass force under special circumstances. Not only must there be deep economic crisis, and disillusionment with the workers’ parties, but they need in particular the financial and political backing of the ruling class. “We need a Führer,” sighed Moeller van den Bruck as early as 1923. In the late 1920s, many industrialists began to yearn for a “strong man of destiny to liberate us from our misery.”
Before 1930, the Storm Troops were used mainly to break up workers’ meetings, but later they were brought onto the streets to break up demonstrations, provoke workers, and carry through assassinations. Originally they were very weak, and, if the labour movement had swiftly used its strength against them, they would have been crushed. Even Hitler later confessed:
Only one thing could have broken our movement – if the adversary had understood its principle and from the first day had smashed, with the most extreme brutality, the nucleus of our new movement.
Unfortunately, the labour leaders turned to the bourgeois state for assistance to “curb the fascists”!
Germany, in 1930, had reached a turning point – for the masses, frustration had turned to despair. The feeling that “so kann es nicht weitergehen” (things can’t go on like this) became widespread. The SPD and the KPD, while keeping their own support broadly intact, failed to capture the millions of petty bourgeois facing horrendous conditions: it offered them no hope, no solution. They deserted the main bourgeois parties and turned to Hitler en masse, who promised them real salvation. The Nazis, however, completely failed to win support amongst organised labour. In 1931 the Nazis got only five percent of the vote in the factory committee elections, and by March 1933, despite all their efforts, it had declined to a mere three percent. Hitler’s appeal was to the upper and middle classes – and the amorphous non-political mass who did not bother to vote. The gigantic vote for the National Socialist Workers’ Party in September 1930 meant a serious change in the balance of forces.
The SPD vote had declined since 1928 by 6 percent, but the Communists’ had risen considerably (by 40 percent) to over 4.5 million. The National Socialist Workers’ Party, in contrast, had increased its vote by over 800 percent (nearly 6.5 million), going from the ninth largest party in the Reichstag to second!