By Roberta Lexier
For early twentieth-century Marxists, fascism was, explains Alberto Toscana in his 2023 book, Late Fascism, “intimately linked to the prerequisites of capitalist domination.”
“The instrument of the big bourgeoisie,” Robert O. Paxton suggests in The Anatomy of Fascism, its purpose: “for fighting the proletariat when the legal means available to the state proved insufficient to subdue them.”
“At times of economic or political crisis,” David Renton outlines in 2020’s Fascism: History and Theory, “hegemony alone is not enough. When millions of people start to question the ruling class, then something more than persuasive argument is needed.” Fascism, then, “seeks to maintain capitalist means of production… to sustain them without social conflict and it refuses to allow any opportunity for workers to organise against their employers.”
Hungarian economist, Karl Polanyi, concluded that it was “that revolutionary solution which keeps Capitalism untouched,” while Italian socialist, Antonio Gramsci, described it as “the attempt to resolve the problems of production and exchange with machine-guns and pistol-shots.”
Nearly a hundred years later, it is clear that additional factors contributed to the rise of fascist politics, movements, and regimes preceding the Second World War, particularly in Germany: entrenched anti-Semitism, weak liberal democracy, unrestrained nationalist and imperialist ambitions, and the widespread normalization of violence, to name a few. But, as Richard J. Evans insists in The Coming of the Third Reich, “[e]ven the most diehard reactionary might eventually have learned to tolerate the [Weimar] Republic if it had provided a reasonable level of economic stability and a decent, solid income for its citizens.” “[P]eople,” he says, “began to grasp at political straws: anything, however extreme, seemed better than the hopeless mess they appeared to be in.”
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