Dave Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice (London: Pluto Press, 1999).
It is pleasure to be able to review Dave Renton's short new book on fascism for The Voice of the Turtle, the organ which four years ago printed extracts from Dave's earlier research on the activities of the British Union of Fascists in Oxford. While Dave's doctoral thesis at Sheffield University continued his researches into British fascism, Fascism: Theory and Practice is a separate spin-off from this project, and one which concentrates on the more theoretical and historiographical aspects of fascism research. The book's main argument is twofold. On the one hand, Dave sets himself firmly in opposition to the approach taken by recent scholars, including Roger Griffin, Zev Steernhall, Roger Eatwell and Stanley Payne, which has, it is sometimes claimed by its own practitioners, produced a "new consensus in fascism studies". On the other hand, he presents a sympathetic account and historical survey of the Marxist tradition of writing about and against fascism as his preferred alternative approach.
What is wrong with the leading proponents of "fascism studies"? Dave believes that their detailed examinations of fascist texts and ideological pronouncements exaggerate the significance of what the fascists said while de-emphasising the things which they did. Fascist ideas, in themselves, are not especially interesting, and the attempts to delineate the detailed structure and content of fascist ideology seem to give fascism a static or timeless character, which it certainly lacked. Nor are "fascism studies" politically neutral. Dave deplores those works which seek to locate a "revolutionary" or "socialist" content in the fascist project; he opposes the apologetic ambitions of some writers, who seek to emphasise the differences between Italian and German fascisms in order to attempt to rehabilitate the former; and he worries about the malign political effect such works might have in an era of fascist revival across Europe. ("The philosophers have only interpreted fascism, in various ways, but the point is to prevent it?")
Above all, by treating fascism principally as a distinctive constellation of ideas about politics and society, Dave thinks these approaches miss its essence, as a reactionary mass movement, the line of analysis developed by the Marxist thinkers, and which he expounds in the second half of the book. According to this analysis, fascism is a mass movement which originates outside of the mainstream state institutions, which flourishes in the wake of the failure of socialist advance, and which articulates the grievances of a section of the insecure middle class which feels itself squeezed between the big capitalists and the organised proletariat. Fascism only achieves state power when conservative elites attempt to co-opt the energy of the fascists for their own purposes. And in government fascists are only able to promote the cause of big capital, with the result that the regime can only seek to displace the contradiction between the constitutents it claims to represent and the interests it in fact serves through racist persecutions, foreign expansion and war.
Dave presents us with both "left" and "right" variants of the Marxist account of fascism. The leftist deviation sees fascism as chiefly or only a tool of capitalist reaction, a mode of governance adopted by the ruling class in order to smash the independent organisation of workers in a time of social crisis. The rightist deviation, by contrast, refused to see fascism as an elite movement, and argued that it was a mass movement which did not require the patronage of capitalists for its existence, for it enjoyed alternative bases of popular support. The third, or "dialectical" approach to fascism, while rejecting both of these theories as being too simplistic, drew on some of the insights they helped to provide in order to develop a form of analysis which always kept the contradictions and tensions at the heart of the fascist project at the centre of analysis. Dave finds the earliest statements of this dialectical approach in writings by Klara Zetkin and Gyula Sas from 1923, and he shows in a valuable and informative historical survey how the richest Marxist writings on fascism followed in this third tradition. The Comintern itself officially adopted the left theory (later extending its logic into the gross equation that "social democracy equals social fascism"), so that by the time the Nazis were winning mass support in Germany the only interesting work on the nature of fascism was being produced by Marxists working outside Stalin's suffocating embrace, a distinguished cohort which included John Strachey, August Thalheimer, Ignazio Silone, Antonio Gramsci and, of course, Leon Trotsky.
A short book with a wide range of reference and polemical intent is bound to throw up grounds for contestation and disagreement, and Dave does not disappoint. His attack on the "fascism studies" crowd is welcome, for a number of reasons, but I found Dave at times too swift to dismiss important and interesting arguments. Dave rightly mocks the claim that fascism was in fact a variant of leftist or Jacobin politics, but the affinities between left politics and fascism do run deeper than he is prepared to acknowledge. The "ideational" study of political ideologies is not as necessarily barren as Dave suggests, and the theoretical and empirical writings of a scholar like the historian of British liberalism Michael Freeden might offer a stimulating model for writing the history of ideologies in a satisfyingly "dynamic" way. Dave further opposes studies that concentrate on fascist ideology because he believes the ideas themselves are of no interest or value, yet his condemnation is too brutal, and the study of fascist ideology (and of its lingering appeal) remains of enormous interest and vital importance. (Why was Nazi Germany the first country to launch a public health crusade which stressed the link between smoking and lung cancer? Why do distinctively fascist strains continue to resurface in the rhetoric of contemporary political leaders from Newt Gingrich to Tony Blair?). And while Dave is quite right to call for a critical attitude towards fascism in scholarship, at times he seems to confuse being critical with being oppositional. A critical attitude is precisely not one of blanket condemnation, and it remains important to be able to formulate nuanced judgments about fascist ideology and practice without inviting charges of apologetics or political irresponsibility. These reservations, however, and others like them, apply mainly to aspects of the style of Dave's presentation, are thorougly debatable, and don't touch his core argument. It is this that I want to engage in the rest of this review.
Dave likes the Marxist approach to thinking about fascism, first, because it seems to him to capture the nature of fascism better than the "fascism studies" paradigm, and second, because its focus on the constitutive contradictions of fascism provides a way of beginning to formulate effective strategies of anti-fascist action. Dave challenges "fascism studies" precisely because its practitioners claim that the era of fascism is over, and that fascism can now be studied "just like" any other historical phenomena. Dave's book, on the other hand, begins and ends with his concerns about the importance of anti-fascist action in contemporary Europe, and it is clear that he judges strategies of academic inquiry in part by their possible contributions to an anti-fascist politics. (Nor is it clear that he is wrong to do so.) But the historical analysis he takes over from his distinguished Marxist predecessors does not seem to generate a plausible enough analysis of the historical origins of fascist politics to justify his claims for the superiority of the Marxist tradition of analysis.
"Men make their own history", proclaimed Marx in one of those splendid sentences that open the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, "but they do not make it just as they please... but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past." Bourgeois scholars like Barrington Moore and Gregory Luebbert have taken this warning to heart, delving deep into the political and class structures of European societies for clues as to why certain nations succumbed to fascist rule and others did not. Dave's historical analysis of the rise of fascism begins, by contrast, round about 1919. Far from considering the constraints imposed by the patterns of historical development, Dave stresses the open terrain of politics between the wars: Italy and Germany "could have gone in different directions, towards workers' control, towards bourgeois democracy or towards fascism". Dave acknowledges the inheritance of the past, but immediately devalues its importance: "There was backwardness in both Italy and Germany, but it is hard to see it as decisive" (p.30).
On its own, it might not have been decisive, true. Other late-industrialising economies did not become fascist. But when we consider the histories of Germany and Italy in the period since unification, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the strains of rapid modernisation coupled with the failure to consolidate a functioning parliamentary democracy in both countries before the Great War played an important role in enabling fascists to destabilise those regimes afterwards. In Germany, for example, rightists had little need to organise in political parties before the war, as the democratically-elected Reichstag possessed very few powers of its own. In Italy, a restricted franchise was in place for far longer, and parliamentary politics was far more a matter of elite patronage and clientelism than of partisan or ideological confrontation. As parliamentary politics resumed after Versailles -- this time with universal suffrage in Italy and a democratic regime in Germany -- right-wing political leaders lacked stable and stabilising bases of mass support. Instead of right-wing voters being mobilised by established formations like the British Conservative Party, long resigned to the need to contest periodic elections, the right-wing political scene in Germany and Italy was more fluid, and the political and economic chaos of the postwar years threw up opportunities upon which the fascist movements were swift to capitalise.
The Republican government in France, by contrast, never came close to being subverted, though France, like Italy, suffered horribly during the Great War and experienced severe political and economic difficulties afterwards. The fascists in Paris provided oppositional street theatre rather than a fundamental threat to the regime, whose electoral institutions they were never able to penetrate: the right-wing electorate was too well organised at a local level to allow that to happen, and France had had by 1918 almost fifty years to adjust to the demands of the politics of universal manhood suffrage. And as the French right is now more personality-driven, as the demands of Presidential politics emphasise top-down patronage rather than bottom-up grassroots organisation, and as the electoral system has more proportional elements of the kind that enable fringe groups to flourish in elected chambers, these considerations also help us to see why France has a bigger problem than other European countries with the far right today.
Dave insists that the era of fascism might not be over, as capitalist crisis still produces misery, and misery may still throw up fascism. True enough. But when we examine some of these more detailed explanations of fascist success, Dave's model comes to seem crude and mechanistic by comparison, a far cry from the Marxist demand for concrete analysis and dialectical explanation. And if there are many more factors at work which help to generate large-scale fascist politics than the miseries induced by capitalism, then it becomes much less clear that the Trotskyist tactic of the United Front will be always and everywhere the most suitable strategy for resisting any renewed fascist advance.
Finally, if we are going to analyse contemporary far right formations, it is vital that we pay attention to the differences that obtain between these movements and their predecessors, as much as to their similarities and continuities. We need to think about how neo-, post- or just straightforwardly fascist parties today stand in relation to existing institutional structures of power, and of memory, and about how their own strategies are going to differ from the ones employed by the far right in interwar Europe. It is too easy to assert, as Dave does, that "the rise of fascism in 1990s Europe can be compared to the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the same processes are there, the film winds, but - for the moment - at a slower speed" (p.12). For in those same stirring pages at the start of the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx criticised the revolutionaries of 1848 who "anxiously conjure[d] up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow[ed] from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language". Marx's contemporaries reenacted the dramas of the 1790s, but the historical context had changed, changed utterly, and with it the meanings and implications of their otherwise-identical actions changed also. Marx knew that the sixty years between 1789 and 1848 were a long time in politics, and we should not underestimate the ability of the sixty years between the 1930s and the present to have transformed the problem posed by far right politics in quite far-reaching ways.
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