Introduction
Fascism differs from other forms of reaction like Bonapartism because it has a mass base. This is what makes it so dangerous to the working class. Its mass base permits it to smash and atomise the workers’ movement in a way that ordinary military police dictatorships can never do.
The social base of fascism is always the same: the petty bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat. In order to win the mass of ruined petty bourgeois, the Nazis imitated the language of socialism. They used anti-capitalist demagogy and even called themselves “national socialists”.
The petty bourgeois shopkeeper hated the big capitalist monopolies that were ruining him, but he also hated and feared the proletariat into which he feared he would be pushed. He fulminated with equal vehemence against strikers who were “destroying the country” and the big banks and monopolies that were “sucking our blood”. In order to win over this layer, the fascists demagogically attacked “big Capital”, usually in the shape of finance capital. The nationalisation of the banks always figures in the programme of fascist parties.
This concentration on finance capital then enabled them to attack the “bad” Jewish capitalists as opposed to the “good” Aryan capitalists. Hitler denounced the big bourgeoisie for its “proverbial cowardice”, its “senility”, its “intellectual rottenness” and its “cretinism”. And yet the Nazi regime, like the regime of Mussolini in Italy, was nothing but the naked dictatorship of monopoly capitalism. He offered, in effect, to save the bourgeoisie from itself, to seize the reins of state power from its trembling hands, to discard the old, senile, cowardly regime of bourgeois parliamentarism, with its compromises and deals, and replace it with the open, undisguised rule of Capital. Of course, the bankers and monopolists would be forced to pay the fascist gangsters handsomely for the privilege!
The bourgeoisie does not take lightly to fascism. It is not the first resort, but the last resort, when all the other options are exhausted and the bourgeoisie is faced with overthrow by the working class. The German capitalists and Junkers looked with a mixture of contempt and alarm at the plebeian upstart Hitler and his Nazi gangsters. They did not relish the prospect of handing them state power. It was a leap into the dark that they only undertook because they were terrified of the alternative.
The plebeian masses that followed Hitler were naturally amorphous and unorganised. With the large sums of money donated by big business, he put the declassed lumpenproletarians and ruined petty bourgeoisie into uniform and gave them a military discipline, slogans and esprit de corps. The Nazi storm troops of the SA (Sturm Abteilung) grew to 100,000 members. Hitler’s gangs terrorised the workers on the streets. They began to feel that they were the masters, when in reality they were merely the mindless pawns of big business.
Racism in the form of anti-Semitism was a key element in German Nazism, although originally it played hardly any role in Italian and Spanish fascism. It was, however, not original but an old tradition going back to the Middle Ages, a period from which much of the Nazis’ intellectual stock-in-trade was derived. Hatred of the small Jewish moneylender served as a means of diverting the attention of the masses away from the big capitalists. The declassed plebeians and ruined shopkeepers were made to feel racially “superior” to the “lesser races” of Europe – the Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Russians and, of course, the Jews.
Fascism is the distilled essence of imperialism. Racism is only the most striking reflection of this fact. Just like the poor whites in the Southern States of the USA, who like to feel that the blacks are beneath them, so the dispossessed mass of German petty bourgeois and lumpenproletarians were seduced by racial poison. Despite their empty pockets and the holes in the seat of their pants, they were made to feel that they partook of a mystical union of all “pure” Aryans and the Great German Nation, which (in their addled brains) belonged to everyone. The fact that it belonged to some rather more than others was conveniently forgotten.
Alan Woods
From ‘Trotsky: The Struggle against Fascism in Germany – Introduction to the Spanish edition’, Marxist.com
1 March 2004