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The political economy of fascism: Myth or reality, or myth and reality?

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13563460600655581

1469-9923

David Baker,

Economic Theory and Institutions

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their excellent comments and useful suggestions. 1. S. J. Woolf, ‘Did a Fascist Economic System Exist?’, in S. J. Woolf (ed.), The Nature of Fascism (Random House, 1968), p. 119. 2. Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 86–7. 3. Classical fascism refers to the phenomenon which existed between 1919 and 1945. Fascism, large ‘F’, is reserved for the original Italian movement/party and small ‘f’ for the generic concept. The author considers Nazism a form of ‘Germanic fascism’ in line with the extensive writings of Roger Eatwell, Roger Griffin and Stanley Payne. 4. See Ian Kershaw's excellent discussion of the issues raised by and for Marxists when dealing with Nazism in his The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, fourth edition (Arnold, 2000), especially pp. 48–56. 5. See Mutualist.Org, ‘Free Market Anti-Capitalism (G). The Frankfurt School: Fascism and Abandonment of the Law of Value’, http://mutualist.org/id93.html (accessed 10 July 2005). This includes a quotation from Frederick Pollock, ‘State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations’, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. IX, No. 3 (1941), pp. 200–25. For Adorno, Horkheimer and Neumann on this subject, see Michael Harrington, The Twilight of Capitalism (Simon & Schuster, 1976), pp. 216–18. 6. Maier, In Search of Stability, p. 71. 7. The first suggestion that there was no room for ‘economic man’ in a fascist society was in Peter F. Drucker, The End of Economic Man (Heinemann, 1939). 8. Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (Penguin Books, 2005), p. 410; R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy (Penguin Books, 2005), p. 313. 9. In a famous article published in 1979, the historian Gilbert Allardyce employed the metaphor of a black cat in a dark room to suggest that with regard to generic fascism there was indeed nothing to be found in the conceptually empty room. Gilbert Allardyce, ‘What Fascism is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept’, American Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 2 (1979), pp. 367–98. 10. A. James Gregor, Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship (Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 126–7. In his most recent book, Mussolini's Intellectuals (Princeton University Press, 2005), Gregor demonstrates the impact of Spirito's corporatist agenda on Fascist policy that was oriented along liberal lines prior to the Matteotti Affair. See also Zeev Sternhell's two major statements on this subject: Neither Left Nor Right: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton University Press, 1995) and The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1994). 11. Oswald Mosley was an exception to this. See Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (Macmillan, 1975), p. 137. 12. Benito Mussolini, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions (Ardita, 1935). The anti-intellectualism of Mussolini was a form of anti-rationalism (as against irrationalism) and a form of hostility to many Enlightenment views. He also considered that intellectuals were ‘bourgeois’, ‘safe’ and ‘predictable’. 13. Sternhell has been rightly attacked for drawing the conclusion that France was the key incubator of classical fascist ideology and Nazism is not a form of fascism, as well as for overstressing the significance of fascist ideology in French political culture in the first half of the century and for seeing all true fascism as essentially a revision of Marxism. See Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–39 (Yale University Press, 1995); Robert Wohl, ‘French Fascism Both Right and Left: Reflections on the Sternhell Controversy’, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 63, No. 1 (1991), pp. 91–8; Antonio Costa-Pinto, ‘Fascist Ideology Revisited: Zeev Sternhell and his Critics’, European History Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1968), pp. 465–83. 14. The three founders of neo-socialism were Déat, Marquet and Montagnon. To critics who have suggested that such groups were never influential in France, Zeev Sternhell has repeatedly pointed out that the relative lack of impact of these ideas should not be allowed to disguise their significance as examples of authentic and early fascist ideology. He also points out that that while the true fascists were relatively small in number, there existed a wide variety of ‘quasi-fascist channels of transmission’, including intellectuals, movements, journals and study circles attacking materialist decadence and its liberal, Marxist and democratic manifestations, creating an intellectual climate promoting a fascist values. See Sternhell, Neither Left Nor Right, pp. 270, 295. 15. Ibid., p. 16 16. Ibid., p. 302. 17. On the general question of fascist economics in practice, see Barkai Avraham, Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory, and Policy (Berg, 1990); Berenice Carroll, Design for Total War: Arms and Economics in the Third Reich (Mouton De Gruyter, 1968); Richard J. Overy, The Nazi Economic Recovery 1932–1938, second edition (Cambridge University Press, 1996); John R. Gillingham, Industry and Politics in the Third Reich: Ruhr Coal, Hitler and Europe (Columbia University Press, 1985). For Italy, see Roland Sarti, Fascism and the Industrial Leadership in Italy (University of California Press, 1971); A. James Gregor; Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship (Princeton University Press, 1979); David D. Roberts; The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (Manchester University Press, 1979). For a rare political economy approach see Alan S. Milward, ‘Towards a Political Economy of Fascism’, in Bernt Hagtvet & Reinhard Kuhnl (eds), Who Were The Fascists? (Stockholm University Press, 1980), p. 56. 18. Franco's Spain is regarded by the author as a Catholic authoritarian monarchist regime and contemporary Japan as an emperor-worshipping form of pre-modern authoritarianism. Both are excluded from any fascist typology. 19. For the best attempt at this approach, see Aristotle Kallis, ‘The “Regime-Model” of Fascism: A Typology’, European History Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2000), pp. 77–104. 20. Milward ‘Towards a Political Economy of Fascism’, pp. 61, 63. 21. These included proto-fascists such as Sergio Panunzio, Ottavio Dinale, Agostino Lanzillo, Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, Michele Bianchi and Edmondo Rossoni, and fascists such as Mussolini's only credible rival in the early years, Dino Grandi, his academic guru, Giovanni Gentile, and of course Mussolini himself. 22. The ‘middle orders’ (‘Mittelstand’) were epitomised by small-town middle class individuals, sometimes described as the ‘old middle class’ as opposed to the rising middle class, which was more commercially attuned and adapted for the new markets. 23. ‘Anti-capitalist’ is a more accurate term than ‘left’ for this phenomenon, especially in Germany, as these were mainly ‘Jewish’ targets. 24. Alexander De Grand, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: The ‘Fascist’ Style of Rule (Routledge, 1995), p. 42. 25. The Strasser brothers, Gregor and Otto, exhorted Hitler to instigate a revolution that would be socialist as well as nationalist. Otto joined the Nazi party in 1925 and Gregor in 1920 and became the leader of the SA. Both opposed Hitler's links to big business. Gregor was murdered in the Night of the Long Knives purge; Otto fled abroad, returning to Germany later. Strasserism was later influential on the neo-fascist ‘International Third Position’. 26. Ordo-liberalism was developed between the 1930s and 1950s by German economists such as Röpke, Eucken, Franz Böhm and Hans Großmann-Doerth and later employed to create the German social market economy. For Röpke and his colleagues the state's task was to protect the weak and limit market power when necessary, although thy believed in free markets as the basis of civilisation. See A. Labrousse & J.-D. Weisz, ‘Institutional Economics in France and Germany: German Ordoliberalism versus the French Regulation School’, Economic Systems, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2002), pp. 73–6. 27. Philip Manow, ‘Modell Deutschland as an Interdenominational Compromise’, Working Paper 003 Program for the Study of Germany and Europe, pp. 8–9, http://www.ces.fas.harvard.edu/publications/Manow.pdf21/07/05 (accessed 30 September 2005). 28. I am grateful to Paul Petzschmann of St Anthony's College, Oxford for discussing this idea with me. 29. Cited by Maier, In Search of Stability, p. 74. 30. Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (Harper & Row, 1952), p. 155. 31. David D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (University of North Carolina Press, 1979), pp. 257–60. 32. Cf. Stanley, G. Payne, A History of Fascism: 1914–1945 (UCLA Press, 1997), pp. 157–61 and 218–19. 33. Otto Dietrich, Das Wirtschaftsdenken im Dritten Reich (Berliner Verlag, 1936), p. 14. 34. A UK term denoting ‘Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations’. 35. Maier, In Search of Stability, pp. 79–80 36. Catholic industrialist Clemens Lammers critiqued the economic rationale of Nazism in his Autarkic, Planwirtschaft and berufstdrrdischer Staat? (Heymann, 1932), cited in Henry A. Turner, Jr., German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 251 and Maier, In Search of Stability, p. 79. For Catholic conservative resistance to Hitler's propaganda, see Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent: Bavaria, 1933–1945 (Oxford University Press, 1983). 37. Milward ‘Towards a Political Economy of Fascism’, pp. 56–7. 38. Christoph Buchheim & Jonas Schemer, ‘The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry’, unpublished paper, University of Mannheim, 2004, p. 23, http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/webfac/cromer/e211_F04/buchheim.pdf (accessed 10 September 2005). 39. Buchheim & Schemer ‘The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy, pp. 20–1; Richard J. Overy, ‘Heavy Industry and the State in Nazi Germany: The Reichswerke Crisis’, European History Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1985), pp. 313–40. 40. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (Harper Collins, 1993). 41. Buchheim & Schemer, ‘The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy’, p. 17; also Neil Gregor, Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 1998). 42. The ‘Battle for Grain’ was devised for propaganda purposes (to boost Fascist morale) and because Mussolini wanted to make Italy economically stronger and self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs to a level suited to his autarchic policies of a well-fed militarised population. Large farmers were guaranteed a good price for grain and grew rich on the proceeds, but at the expense of high-value exports of olive oil, wine and citrus fruit and of the Italian diet. 43. Der Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsfuehrer SS (SD) was the intelligence agency of the SS until June 1934, when it took over this function for the entire Nazi Party. The Gestapo and the SD were linked together in 1936, when Reinhard Heydrich, the Chief of the SD, was promoted to chief of the Security Police, which included the SD, Gestapo (Die Geheime Staatspolizei) and the Criminal Police. Both the Security Police and SD were voluntary organisations. 44. This model was famously promoted by the neo-Marxist Tim Mason in ‘Primacy of Politics: Politics and Economics in National Socialist Germany’, in Stuart J. Woolf (ed.), The Nature of Fascism (Random House, 1968). 45. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (Penguin, 2001); also Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, chs 3–4. Kershaw's thesis also explains why there is no solid evidence or paper trail linking Hitler to the Holocaust. 46. Otto Dietrich, Hitler (Henry Regnery, 1955). Dietrich was Hitler's press secretary. 47. S. J. Woolf (ed.), The Nature of Fascism, p. 143. 48. Near-suicidal, because in the face of huge odds once the Americans had entered the war, Hitler's policy of mass genocide arguably took a huge toll on the ability of the Nazi war machine to operate, diverting funds and manpower to extermination and away from the front line. Even the slave labour camps operated by Speer were relatively low in productivity because of the starvation rations the inmates were kept on. 49. Richard Grunberger, A Social History of the Third Reich (Penguin, 1974), pp. 258–9. 50. Cf. Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, pp. 47–68. 51. Karl Hardach, The Political Economy of Germany in the Twentieth Century (UCLA Press, 1980), p. 7. 52. Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left, p. 28. 53. Giovannia Gentile, Fascismo e cultura (Treves, 1928), pp. 54–5. 54. For Hitler's limited grasp and use of economic ideas, see Turner, German Big Business, pp. 71–83. 55. Nuremberg Military Tribunal, Volume VII, pp. 789–80, http://www.mazal.org/archive/nmt/07/NMT07-T0787.htm. See also Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (Penguin, 1999). Goering was a significant choice since he was equally innocent of economic theory, but also equally familiar with war. 56. Adolf Hitler, Speech to building workers, 21 May 1937, in John Hite & Chris Hinton, Weimar & Nazi Germany (John Murray, 2000), p. 236. 57. For a survey of this authoritarian nationalist historical tradition of German political economy, see Paul Hayes, Fascism (Allen & Unwin, 1973), pp. 89–105. 58. David Baker, Ideology of Obsession: A.K. Chesterton and British Fascism (I. B. Tauris, 1996), pp. 178–83. 59. Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, p. 137. 60. Another classic example is provided by Alexander Raven Thompson, The Coming of The Corporate State (BUF, 1935); John Beckett & Alexander Raven Thompson, The Private Trader and Co-operator: The Fascist Solution to the Problem of the Distributive Trades (BUF, 1935). 61. Richard C. Thurlow, ‘Review of Breeding Superman: Nietzche, Race, and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain by Dan Stone’, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 76, No. 2 (2004), pp. 182–4. 62. Adrian Lyttleton, ‘What Was Fascism?’, New York Review of Books, Vol. 51, No. 16 (2004), pp. 1–4. 63. Buchheim & Schemer, ‘The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy’, p. 23. 64. Maier, In Search of Stability, p. 74. 65. Hardach, The Political Economy of Germany, p. 7. 66. Barkai, Nazi Economics, p. 183. This is something of an exaggeration, however. 67. For an excellent analysis of Nazism as an autarchic phenomenon in foreign policy terms, see William M. Carr, Arms, Autarky and Aggression: A Study in German Foreign Policy, 1933–1939 (Arnold, 1979). See also Overy, ‘Heavy Industry and the State in Nazi Germany’, pp. 313–40. 68. Roland Sarti, ‘Fascist Modernisation in Italy: Traditional or Revolutionary?’, American Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 3 (1970), p. 1044. 69. See Antonio Costa Pinto, ‘Elites, Single Parties and Political Decision-Making in Fascist Era Dictatorships’, University of Lisbon Working Papers, WP 4–01, November 2001, http://www.ics.ul.pt/publicacoes/workingpapers/wp2001/WP4-2001.pdf (accessed 10 August 2005). 70. Marco E. L. Guidi, ‘Corporatist Theory and The Italian Tradition of Political Economy: A Research Project’, paper presented to the conference on International Economic Thought in Southern Europe, Porto, 27–28 November 1998, p. 27. 71. Roger Eatwell pioneered this approach. See ‘Towards a New Model of Generic Fascism’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1992), pp. 161–94; ‘On Defining the Fascist Minimum: The Centrality of Ideology’, Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1996), pp. 303–19. 72. Edward Tannenbaum, ‘The Goals of Italian Fascism’, American Historical Review, Vol. 74, No. 4 (1969), pp. 1183–204. 73. In Italy the Military/SS/secret police state was less significant in the drive to autarchy than the industrialists, who promoted autarchic politics after 1935 because by then protectionism had driven the relatively weak Italian production system inwards and to turn back was now impossible. The high number of agricultural-industrial cartels formed after 1935 was due to their growing protectionist identity of interests. See Roland Sarti, Fascism and the Industrial Leadership in Italy 1919–1940: A Study of the Expansion of Private Power under Fascism (UCLA Press 1971), pp. 104–12. 74. Cited in Dietmar Petzina, Autarkiepolitik im Dritten Reich: Der nationalsozialistische Vierjahresplan (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 1968), pp. 50–1. 75. Gerald D. Feldman, ‘The Economic Origins and Dimensions of European Fascism’, in Harold James & Jakob Tanner (eds), Enterprise in the Period of Fascism in Europe (Aldershot, 2002), p. 5. 76. Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, p. 67. This does not suggest, however, that Nazism is not ‘fascism’. See Roger Griffin's extensive writings on this, especially The Nature of Fascism (Routledge, 1993). 77. Eatwell, ‘Towards a New Model of Generic Fascism’, pp. 1–68; Eatwell, ‘On Defining the Fascist Minimum’. 78. Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (Penguin, 1996), p. xxi. 79. See especially Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (New Left Books, 1984). 80. Marco E. L. Guidi, ‘Corporatist Theory’, p. 26. ‘Productivism’ provided Mussolini with an ideology to transfer from socialism to Fascism, since it sounded leftist, but appealed to managerial elites and leading members of the Confindustria. This was paralleled in Germany by the Schtirtheit der Arbeit, which combined ‘sober modernism and technological aesthetic even within the unpromising framework of National Socialism, with its other emphases on blood and race’. See Maier, In Search of Stability, pp. 77–8. See also Anson Rabinbach, ‘The Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich: Schonheit der Arbeit’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1969), pp. 37–58; Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 1985). ‘Non-zero-sum’ is also from Maier, In Search of Stability, p. 115. 81. Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left, p. 270. 82. ‘Hypercapitalism’ was a term adopted by the Belgian ‘Rexist’ fascists. 83. Marcel Deat, ‘Syndicalisme et corporation’, La Vie socialiste, 17 March 1934, p. 1. 84. F. Bacconnier, La Monarchie de demain’, L'Action Francaise, 15 October 1902, pp. 472–4, quoted in Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left, p. 63. 85. Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left, p. 105. 86. Henri De Man, Réflexions sur l'économie dirigée (L'E´glantine, 1932), p. 5. 87. Maier, In Search of Stability, p. 72. 88. Buchheim & Schemer, ‘The Role of Private Property’, p. 23. 89. S. J. Woolf, ‘The Economics of Fascism’, in Woolf (ed.), The Nature of Fascism, p. 143.