Commentary: When the liberal order falters

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Kees Marges finds food for thought in an authoritative analysis of fascism

Trade unionists should always, and often have, opposed ultra right-wing popular nationalist movements such as fascism. These movements are dark forces that threaten trade unionism – a crucial part of any democracy – as well as other democratic freedoms.

However one compelling aspect of fascist thinking is that while it presents a potentially deadly threat to free trade unionism, it relies on the same mass appeal as trade unionism itself. Indeed, as the American historian Professor Robert Paxton explains in his authoritative account, The Anatomy of Fascism, trade unions have even been linked with the formation of fascist movements.

Paxton’s book contains detailed analyses of the early years of 20th century fascism at a stage of its development when it was not yet recognised, or judged as it is now. Analysing its approach to finding followers, forming alliances, seizing and exercising power, he has identified in fascism a cycle of five stages. This boils down to:

1) the creation of movements,

2) their rooting in the political system,

3) their seizure of power,

4) the exercise of power and

5) their long duration, during which the fascist regime either radicalises or loses direction.

Distinguishing features

Paxton helps the reader to understand fascism not by describing all sorts of abstract qualities, but by ordering the practical appearances of the movement and the acts of its leaders and followers. What emerges is a series of features that might distinguish fascism from other kinds of authoritarian rule: an emphasis on historical grievances, and on the cult of leadership, a reliance on a mass-based militant movement, the repression of democratic liberties, and the use of violence as a political tool.

The German Nazi state is analysed as a particularly extreme embodiment of fascism, where a system was engineered to murder and destroy millions of citizens (including not only Jews but gay, mentally and physically disabled and other people) who were seen as not belonging, and inferior, to members of the Arian race. Left wing opponents however, were the first targets of the regime. As Paxton writes, “It was the cadres of the German Socialist and Communist parties who filled the first concentration camps in 1933, before the Jews.”

The book starts by examining the creation of the first fascist movements. On 23 March 1919, the socialist outcast Benito Mussolini, together with war veterans, war-supporting trade unionists and others formed a new movement, the Fasci di Combattimento, and “declared war against socialism because it opposed nationalism”. From left-wing origins, the group became an ultra right wing movement overnight. It is hard for a trade unionist to accept it, but a group of trade unionists really did co-found a fascist movement.

While Mussolini and his fascists were first to coin the term however, they did not create the intellectual basis of fascism. Paxton refers to the Englishman Thomas Carlyle who, in the mid 19th century, campaigned for a “militarised welfare dictatorship, administered not by the existing ruling class but by a new elite composed of selfless captains of industry and other natural heroes.”

The Nazis later claimed Carlyle as a forerunner. The Action Française movement active in France in the last decade of the 19th century and even the American Ku Klux Klan, founded just after the Civil War in 1867, appear in the book as examples of forerunners to fascist movements.

Paxton draws the readers’ attention to the impact of the voting rights given to millions of citizens in many countries in Europe at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The effects of the first crisis of globalisation hit workers a little later.

Damned as elitists

Conservatives and liberals were not ready to attract voting masses to their ideologies and policies. The new socialist left was the first to gain from the expanded electorate. However they were unable to meet the expectations their promises inspired among new voters. On the contrary, they were judged and damned as part of an elitist system.

A disillusioned part of the traditional working class, which at first supported the socialist left, turned eventually to fascist and related ideologies. One of Paxton’s conclusions is that “one of the most important preconditions (for the coming of fascism) was a faltering liberal order. Fascism grew from back rooms to the public arena most easily where the existing government functioned badly, or not at all.”

It is a sobering conclusion in relation to the current failures of liberalisation policies, and the engagement of many labour and or socialist parties in those policies.

Paxton is not suggesting that fascism is on the rise again, but he sounds a note of caution at the adoption by liberal capitalist nations of more authoritarian measures in response to the fear of terrorism. At the same time he sees already authoritarian societies, turning to capitalism, and watches former colonies grappling with the market forces that were bequeathed to them without accompanying democratic institutions.

Fascism, like these current realities, reminds us that democratic and market freedoms do not always go together.

The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O Paxton was published by Alfred A Knopf, 2004.

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Issue 21 October 2005

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