underway. ‘It is not only Jewish capitalists we will hang, but all capitalists!’
declares a poster in the museum at the Dachau concentration camp. Miliband cites
Mussolini in 1934 defending private property, and notes that big business under
Hitler was given a key role in managing the economy. There was a dramatic increase
in the power of capital over labour and an increase in profits. Miliband concedes
that business under fascism had to submit to a greater degree of intervention and
control than they would have liked, and put up with policies that they found
disagreeable. Kitchen points out that industrialists disliked particular aspects of Nazi
policy (the use of foreign slaves rather than women in the factories, for example,
or the economic inefficiency involved in the mass murder of Jews), but he argues
that, in broad terms, the industrialists were satisfied with Nazi policy (Kitchen,
1976: 59).
As for fascism’s supposedly revolutionary character, Miliband contends that the
state not only does not significantly change in the composition of its personnel
(except to purge it of ‘traitors’, liberals, etc.), but in Nazi Germany, for example,
there were fewer people in the state from working-class origin than before (Miliband,
1973: 82–4). This is why it is not satisfactory to describe fascism as ‘a party of
revolutionaries’ (Linz, 1979: 18), since fascism sought not to transform society and
the state, but to prevent it from being transformed. It is thus counter-revolutionary,
rather than revolutionary in character. It is impossible to agree with Eugen Weber
that fascism is not a counter-revolution, but merely a rival revolution (to
communism) (Weber, 1979: 509).
The orthodox communist position – enshrined in the theses of the Comintern or
Third International – was that fascism represented ‘the most reactionary, most
chauvinist, and most imperialist elements of finance capital’ (Griffin, 1995: 262).
It was only in the mid-1930s that communists dropped the notorious argument that
social democrats were ‘social fascists’ and the enemy of the working class. ‘Finance
capital’ in the orthodox definition cited above, refers to Lenin’s argument in
Imperialismthat bank capital has merged with industrial capital, but it seems less
contentious to accept Miliband’s point that fascism represented industrialists as well
as bankers in a situation in which threat of left extremism made right extremism a
necessary, if far from ideal, choice. George and Margaret Cole argued that fascism
is state-controlled capitalism ‘operated in the interests of the broad mass of property
owners’. Horkheimer, a key figure in the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, declared
that ‘whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent
about fascism’ (Griffin, 1995: 267, 272).
Psychoanalysts argued that fascism is rooted in the human character – it is a
form of personality structure, an authoritarian character, but this does not mean,
as Adorno acknowledged, that such a structure can only be modified by
psychological means (Griffin, 1995: 289), and it could well be argued that we still
need to refer to capitalism and crisis to understand why fascism arises in certain
societies and at certain historical periods, and not at others. Reich, who was expelled
from the German Communist Party in the 1930s for his dissident views, had argued
that fascism is the result of thousands of years of warping in the human structure:
a number of later studies contended that fascism was an attempt to compensate for
mothering and family life (Kitchen, 1976: 13, 23).
Chapter 13 Fascism 295