Nazism is better understood by seeing it as a variant of fascism – of course, with
its own particular features. The idea that racism was a German import into
Mussolini’s Italy is untrue, even though German fascism was much more extreme
(and competent) than its Italian counterpart, and the genocidal policies towards the
Jews were not part of the anti-Semitism of Italian fascism. Nevertheless, the case
for considering Nazism as a form of fascism is overwhelming, and bears upon the
important question of other forms of fascism that arose not only in the inter-war
years, but in the post-war period. Griffin’s collection of documents is noteworthy
for its inclusion of non-Nazi forms of German fascism. Spanish fascists like Primo
de Rivera denied that they were imitating Hitler and Mussolini: he argued that ‘by
reproducing the achievements of the Italians or the Germans we will become more
Spanish than we have ever been’ (Griffin, 1995: 188).Fascism and capitalism
There can little doubt that fascists were anti-capitalist in their rhetoric. Radek, one
of the communist leaders, was to describe fascism as the ‘socialism of the petty
bourgeois masses’ (Kitchen, 1976: 2). Ramos (1905–36), a Spanish fascist, blamed
the bourgeoisie and its ‘agents, advocates and front men’ for fragmentation,
impotence, exhaustion and egoism. De Rivera argued that fascism was neither
capitalist nor communist: he advocated a national syndicalism that would pass
surplus value, as he called it, ‘to the producer as a member of his trade union’. La
Rochelle, a French fascist, spoke of ‘annihilating’ liberalism and capitalism. A
Latvian fascist made it clear that ‘we acknowledge private enterprise and private
property’ but are opposed to anarchy (Griffin, 1995: 186, 189, 203, 218).
Zetkin influenced the Comintern in its argument that fascism ‘by its origin and
exponents’ ‘includes revolutionary tendencies which might turn against capitalism
and its state’ but in fact it is counter-revolutionary, supporting capitalism in a
situation in which the old, allegedly non-political apparatus of the bourgeois state
‘no longer guarantees the bourgeoisie adequate security’ (Griffin, 1995: 261). The
argument echoes Marx’s comment in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
that when the parliamentary system seems to aid the socialists, then ‘the bourgeoisie
confesses that its own interest requires its deliverance from the peril of its own self-
government’ (Marx, 1973: 190). The merits of this argument are that it indicates
the dangers which an explicitly illiberal regime poses to the bourgeoisie, and that
in ‘normal times’, a liberal parliamentary system would be much more congenial
to a bourgeois regime than an explicitly authoritarian one. It is only when there is
the fear that a parliamentary system might help the enemies of capital to power in
a situation of crisis and revolutionary threat, that ‘deliverance’ is sought. Miliband
stresses that capitalists had to pay a high political price for a system that advantaged
them: they had no real control over a dictatorship that arguably served their interests
(1973: 85).
Miliband argues that the ‘anti-bourgeois resonances’ (1973: 80) are important if
only to enable fascist movements to acquire a mass following, nor need we deny
that supporters of these movements believed that an anti-capitalist revolution was294 Part 2 Classical ideologies