Page:Minority of One January 1961.pdf/8
The American Experiment
Fascism Through Evolution
"The mistake of Marxism lies in its belief that there are only two classes, and worse, that these two classes are involved in a permanent contradiction." -Benito Mussolini (in a December 20, 1923 speech).[1]
"The class struggle is not that of the trade union but that of Marxism which has turned the trade union into an instrument of its own class struggle." -Adolf Hitler in "Mein Kampf"[2]
People have learned to discern fascism by its spectacular ornamental manifestations and by the nature of its psychological appeal to those who embrace it. In both respects fascism has very distinct features and they act as a kind of a seismograph to register its presence. However, fascism amounts to more than a population's mood.
The fascist mood serves as a point of attraction and departure rather than as a homogeneous social goal of the fascist movement. Fascism's raison d'etre and ultimate goal are not to provide a certain type of mass entertainment; rather it seeks to achieve and perpetuate a specific system of socio-economic relations. Its mass public demonstrations, parades, sports events; its regimentation of the citizenry, from young to old, in a well centralized and monolithic system of state controlled groupings; its emotional appeal to national grandeur, accompanied by distinctive uniforms of all kinds and sorts-all these are the instrumental paraphernalia through which fascism attempts to reach the masses and to control them, but they do not exhaust its actual social goals: these lie outside the immediate and direct structure of the fascist party which in itself is a means and not an end.
THE CRADLE OF FASCISM
Fascism is unique among the principal social movements of our times in that it cannot invoke any historic prototypes as its forerunners. Communism and socialism can claim as their historic prototype the commune of the primitive tribe of millenia ago. Athens and its scholars still provide direct sources of inspiration for the political democrat of our times. Only fascism has no pre-history. Hitler's worship of Bismarck provided no more than nationalistic inspiration, void of any socio-economic significance. Mussolini's Spartan nostalgias came to fan nationalistic grandeur but not to provide clues for the solution of Italy's economic and social problems. In its socio-economic content, fascism is a completely new movement, without any roots in past centuries. Born in the twentieth century, fascism could not have been born in any earlier period because it came to arrest a struggle between classes that specifically developed in the Industrial society. The concentration of labor in the cities and the spread of literacy among its ranks that accompanied the process of industrialization brought about a class consciousness of unprecedented intensity, with the possible exception of the guild consciousness of the French Revolutionary period.
With or without Marx it soon became quite clear that the industrial working class did not raise postulates whose fulfillment would lead to permanent tranquility between itself and its employers. No demand for higher wages, improved working conditions or social services constituted a final program. Each achievement of the employees became no more than a stepping stone and a point of departure for further demands. The propertied class soon realized that the employees would keep on posing new postulates until their progressive achievements and the diminution of its own exploitive benefits resulted in the liquidation of the exploiting class itself. This historic struggle was not for the crumbs from the table but for the title to the house itself.
Marx did not create this process and had Marx never been born, this struggle would still have taken place. Marx provided no more than a rationalization for a social process that was self-impelled. But with or without that rationalization, the process would still be taking place. History offers no evidence that man is inclined to resign himself to permanent exploitation by others. Rather the opposite is true: the timidity of the exploited has ever been temporary.
"INSATIABLE" LABOR
How to defend their basic privileges against the challenge of the working class became the most frustrating problem of the employers. Compromises, they learned, led nowhere. Each wage increase was followed by a new demand for another wage increase. The granting of a 10-hour work day provoked the demand for an 8-hour work day. When Sunday work was outlawed, demands for a 5-day work week were raised. The workers' demands for social or fringe benefits were equally "insatiable," and soon enough they openly demanded seats on management boards. The resort to violence to crush the workers' ambitions and restlessness only provided opportunities to emphasize that the battle was raging between a vast majority of suppressed people and a privileged, power-entrenched minority. There could be no doubt that the use of sporadic violence and police measures against the self-emancipating wage earners would ultimately lead to the latter's victory by means of the very violence initially introduced against them.
Against this background fascism was born. It introduced two principal measures to arrest the class struggle: politically neutralizing the laborer and providing tolerable economic and social conditions for him.
Since the political neutralization of labor and attempts to arrest the class struggle by means of occasional economic concessions proved as ineffective as the reliance on sporadic police actions, they were made basic tenets of the fascist state's structure. This was achieved by subordinating the entire social and political structure of the country to the dictates of one political party. This alone, however, would by no means suffice. Divorcing the political expression of a people from their socio-economic interests and groupings was at best a strained, artificial arrangement whose durability could not be counted on. To reinforce it, the most acute afflictions of the working class had to be alleviated. And, the fascist capitalists have proved immensely more intelligent than their democratic counterparts. Hitler stated that "the national-socialist employer must know that the happiness and contentment of his employees is the precondition for the existence and development of his own greatness." This indeed the fascist employer did know, or was made to know by the fascist state and party, but the laissez faire capitalist has refused to accept it as a part of his philosophy, even at the risk of self-destruction.
THE SUICIDAL TENDENCY
The employer's interest in what Hitler called the employee's "happiness" is not only a means of pacifying the most unmanageable aspirations of the worker and thereby making him more inclined to accept the basic system of exploitation; capitalist prosperity itself depends directly on the consumer role of the workers. This, however, is an aspect of modern capitalism which most capitalists fail to appreciate. The reason for this shortsightedness amounts to something that can justifiably be termed the suicidal tendency of the system. It stems from the fact that the individual capitalist is not planning for the preservation and welfare of the entire system of which he is a part. He is planning for himself only. He is not inclined to accept voluntarily any restrictions upon his immediate profits. The uniqueness of the business psychology lies not only in its greed but also in its impatience. It seeks maximum returns in minimum time. Planning under those circumstances is never long range. Prove to a capitalist that the way he presently operates to secure maximum