The US Antifascism Reader

Bill Mullen, Christopher Vials, Bill Mullen, Christopher Vials

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781788733502
• eBook ISBN: 9781788733519
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the birth of fascism in the 1920s, well before the global renaissance of "white nationalism," the United States has been home to its own distinct fascist movements, some of which decisively influenced the course of U.S. history. Yet long before "antifa" became a household word in the United States, they were met, time and again, by an equally deep antifascist current. Many on the left are unaware that the United States has a rich antifascist tradition, because it has rarely been discussed as such, nor has it been accessible in one place. This reader reconstructs the history of U.S. antifascism into the twenty-first century, showing how generations of writers, organizers, and fighters spoke to each other over time.
Spanning the 1930s to the present, this chronologically-arranged, primary source reader is made up of antifascist writings by Americans and by exiles in the U.S. - some instantly recognizable, others long-forgotten. It also includes a sampling of influential writings from the U.S. fascist, white nationalist, and proto-fascist traditions. Its contents, mostly written by people embedded in antifascist movements, include a number of pieces produced abroad that deeply influenced the U.S. left. The collection thus places U.S. antifascism in a global context.

PART I

Can It Happen Here? US
Antifascism in the Time
of Dictators, 1932–1941

_______________________________________________

“Fascism after Ten Years,”
Wall Street Journal, October 29, 1932

______________________________________________________

This piece typifies the coverage of the Italian Fascist regime by the US business press, at least up until 1935. American business praised the dictatorship for turning a “basket case” nation into an exemplary economy and society. Mussolini, they argued, revived trade, established law and order, disciplined labor, stabilized the lira, and restored efficient management. Indeed, from the early 1920s into the 1930s, Mussolini created a more orthodox market economy using statist means. Yet business soured on Italian fascism in 1935, when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, unsettling the colonial balance of power. By the late 1930s, many US elites also turned against statism as a solution to the Depression as Roosevelt’s more redistributive “Second New Deal” appeared as a threat to their power. The Third Reich enjoyed a much shorter period of sympathy in the US business community, though its “openness” to the Nazi regime was never uniformly extinguished.

Another anniversary, the tenth, of the fascist march on Rome comes and goes, this time without shattering Europe’s nerves or even distracting its attention from its grim bread-and-butter troubles. In contrast with the saber rattling on these anniversaries of a few years ago, Il Duce [Mussolini] this year opened a new railway, unveiled a memorial or two and extended political amnesties by way of observance.

So far from any longer regarding it as a menace to what is referred to as the peace of Europe, or invidiously comparing it with democracy or parliamentary rule, the world outside Italy is now interested only in the fact that fascism works. Whether it works, for Italians in their home country, better or worse than something else might or ought to, is Italy’s own business, as the outside world is beginning to perceive.

Nearly seven years ago a parallel was drawn in this column between the then comparatively new fascist system in Italy and a receivership for a corporation. That parallel still holds good and has now extended itself to apply to the structural reorganization that takes place under a receiver. It is the purpose of receivership, political or corporate, to discover the altered means of carrying on a national civilization or a private undertaking under the altered conditions which surround it and set new tasks for management. The fact that its tenth anniversary finds fascism in Italy apparently firmly established among an apparently more tranquil people than Italy has contained for more than a decade speaks a great deal for the reorganization of the state that has taken place since 1922.

In the editorial of January 26, 1926, above referred to, the late William Peter Hamilton made this discerning observation: “A thoughtful Italian would not worry about Mussolini, but he ought to be much exercised about Mussolini’s successor.”

That, to be sure, remains for Italians the Italian problem. His grant of amnesty to political prisoners the other day can only mean that Mussolini himself is thinking of it and undertaking its solution, not because of any specific or immediate urgency, but because every political system requires time for its solidification. He cannot be unaware of the degree to which fascism remains an expression of his extraordinary but still human personality.

All of which perhaps sums up in the recognition that fascism has since 1922 undergone an evolution, as all successful institutions must. It is but reasonable to suppose that the process will be still more characteristic of fascism’s second decade.

Vincenzo Vacirca, “The Essence of
Fascism: A Marxian Interpretation,”
American Socialist Quarterly
vol. 2, no. 2, spring 1933

___________________________________

Vincenzo Vacirca (1886–1956) was one of the most active Italian antifascist exiles in the United States, yet he is now only faintly remembered in the English-language world. In Italy, he had been a parliamentarian for the Socialist Party, which was democratic socialist in orientation. He lived in the United States from 1913 to 1919 and again from 1925 to 1946, where he survived multiple assassination attempts by Italian nationalists. In the 1920s, the Italian fascist state pressured the US State Department to silence Vacirca, along with other exiles. He returned to Italy in 1943 as an agent of the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA), where he remained after the war.

Vacirca offers a complex class analysis of fascism’s base of support and the ways this base shifts when fascist movements become fascist states. His class analysis, moreover, is roughly in line with those of a number of prominent contemporary historians of fascism. Vacirca also advances here the “gangster theory” of capitalism, a recurring motif in left antifascist writings during the 1930s and 1940s. The gangster metaphor rejected the idea that capitalists were the primary agents of fascism and instead described capitalists as enablers of fascism who could not control its direction once it assumed state power. It received elaborate expression in the literary modernisms of Bertolt Brecht and Dashiell Hammett, and it served as a digestible, popular metaphor for a generation reared in detective noir, one that crystallized a more complex theory of class structures under these regimes. Also of interest is Vacirca’s analysis of the relationship between fascism and the liberal state, for it reflects views that were not unusual among socialists working within the parties of the Second International.

This essay appeared in the American Socialist Quarterly, the theoretical journal of the militant wing of the American Socialist Party. The membership of the once-mighty SP had dwindled in the 1930s as that of the Communist Party USA rose, yet it continued to produce rich analytical texts on the nature of fascism.

The exalting of Hitler to the German chancellorship has focused anew the attention of the world on the social phenomenon known under the name of Fascism. The former little Austrian corporal is trying to tread in the foot-steps of the former little Italian school teacher, just as the latter attempted to make himself a replica of the third Napoleon. A study of the policies, methods and system of government of the man of December the second, of Mussolini and Hitler, would show a striking similarity in these three historical movements—and in all probability the two contemporary ones will end, as their French predecessor, in the only possible way open to an oligarchic or a personal dictatorship: war.

Twenty-three centuries ago, the founder of political science wrote:

The tyrant, who in order to hold his power, suppresses every superiority, does away with good men, forbids education and light, controls every movement of the citizens and, keeping them under a perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in the meetings, and spreads dissension and calumny among the citizens and impoverishes them, is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied and impose on them permanent need of a chief.

From the time of Aristotle the psychology of the tyrant has not changed. And Hippias had nothing to learn from Hitler or Mussolini. But if the personal character and the external forms of a modern tyrant do not differ much from the most ancient ones, there are some social factors which are new and typical of the economic structure of our contemporary society. The analysis of these factors will help us to understand Fascism, in its double manifestations: as an accomplished fact in those countries where it has celebrated its triumphs, and as a menacing tendency in those countries where democratic forms of government still hold sway.

…

What is Fascism? A wave of supernationalism sweeping those countries which came out of the great war defeated, humiliated, enslaved and, what is more important, pauperized—as in the case of Germany? A reaction to the “excesses” of a briefly triumphant Bolshevism—as in Hungary? A revolt of the middle class, crushed in the struggle between proletarians and capitalists and succeeding for the first time in history in establishing an autonomous dominant power—as has been said of Italy? Or—according to the communist interpretation—a pure dictatorship of capitalism which attempts to solve its unsolvable crisis by discarding all democratic pretenses and entrenches itself beyond the machinery of the State used openly as a mere class instrument for the oppression of the proletariat and the brutal defense of its own interests and privileges? Or—as alleged psychologists and easy philosophers of history presume—a collective madness by which a free people surrenders its long-fought-for and hardly acquired liberties into the hands of a “man of destiny” to whom they assign the magic role of their savior in time of hardships and insurmountable difficulties?

None of these hypotheses is entirely valid, although in some of them there is a grain of truth.

The causes which brought on Fascism are several. Some of them are of general character and in a way permanent; some transitorial [sic] and local. Historically, Fascism is a phase of the old struggle started on the European continent the day the Parisian people demolished the Bastille, and continued with varying fortunes for 144 years.

A mystic would call it a struggle between light and darkness, liberty and reaction. An historical materialist would see in it a product of continually changing conditions begotten by the development of the capitalist society and of which wars, revolutions and counterrevolutions are simply episodic effects.

Fascism is not, therefore, a new social event, but simply a new name for an old thing. War, with a revival of the spirit of violence and cruelty, has been not a real cause of Fascism but an occasion which gave a peculiar color to that movement. The secret alliance between Italy, Hungary and Germany is a replica of the Holy Alliance that bound Austria, Prussia and Russia 118 years ago after the Napoleonic hurricane died down.

The later was an open league of victorious and dominant States for the enslavement of Europe and its sterilization from the epidemic spread of the ideas born with the French Revolution. The former is a conspiracy of privileged classes, of weak and partly defeated States which try to find a compensation for their weakness and poverty by intensifying the exploitation of their subjected masses and later in new war that would destroy the richer capitalism of the lately victorious nations. At the bottom of Fascism, therefore, we find a twofold conflict: one within the national frontiers, between wage-earners and property classes; and one over the national boundaries between different groups of international capitalists.

The first form of the conflict has been temporarily solved by the reduction to a condition of slavery of the workers of those countries where Fascism won its day. The second part has no possible solution, even if it will lead fatally to a war. In fact, a war could give one of these two results: either Fascist capitalism will emerge victorious—and that will provoke a revolution among defeated nations, which may spread in the ranks of the victorious; or—as is almost certain—the victory will be with the democratic nations and in this event all the Fascist regimes will be overthrown and the suppressed masses will conquer their lost liberty and something more. (It is inconceivable, for instance, that the German and Italian workers, once master again of their destiny, will limit themselves to the conquest of political freedom, instead of making a social revolution.)

Another aspect of Fascism is the large participation of the middle classes. The 12 millions who voted for Hitler cannot be called capitalist and cannot be disposed of easily as unconscious and ignorant masses.

It is true that in Italy and still more in Germany, Fascism started as a middle-class movement. It is true that it introduced itself (especially in Italy) with a quasi-socialist program. But a political movement, so rich in demagogic elements, cannot be judged by its program and promises. Those are the necessary catch-words to attract the most easily deceivable of all classes: the petty bourgeoisie, which never, in any country and in any period of history, has been capable of taking and keeping power alone. This poor middle class finds in Fascism an illusion of power and a promise of well-being, and follows it about blindly without even noticing that it becomes a tool in the hands of high finance and big industry in their game for the defeat of the workers. When the game is won, the middle class pay the cost together with the workers, and sometimes more than they. Then comes disillusion but usually it is too late to regret and amend the error. In Italy this has already happened. The middle class, ruined by the economic policy of Fascism, is spiritually in revolt against the monster that it helped so efficiently to snatch power. But spiritual revolt is of little use against men armed with guns and ready to use them pitilessly.

An important factor is the particular political moment and its psychological effect over a large part of the nation. In Italy, it was the abuses of general strikes in 1919–1920 and the revolutionary fever which exhausted itself without ever crystallizing in a concrete act which engendered a mad fear in the property classes and a sense of deluded expectancy and irritation in the middle classes, which contributed powerfully to create the political atmosphere that made possible the Mussolinian adventure. In Germany, the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles, the humiliation of the occupation of the left bank of the Rhine by colonial troops, and the occupation of the Ruhr four years after the end of the war helped not a little the Nazi movement which announced itself, among other things, as an avenger of the national honor.

Another element, the most faithful of all, typical of the old European society, which is always ready to rally to any reactionary movement and therefore has been a strong supporter of Fascism, is the military caste—a social group which is above any economic class and forms a world by itself. The military look instinctively with dismay at any democratic progress and especially at the march of the proletarian toward power. They know that labor and democracy are the natural enemy not only of war but of professional militarism. They like Fascism for its authoritarian spirit and for the prestige it gives to their caste. The military hierarchy is among the diversified forces that supported Fascism from the start, the only one which did not suffer any disillusionment. They got increased pay—while wages and salaries were enormously cut—and are extolled and flattered by the dictator as the flower and the columns of society.

As regards the big industrialists and rich landlords, even they are not well satisfied with the turn of affairs in Italy … The Fascist regime, initiated as a class dictatorship has, as it was fated to do, degenerated into an oligarchy and, worse, into personal tyranny. Mussolini has been quick in changing his position of hired gunman at the service of the Confederation of Industry, into that of boss. The onetime most powerful man in Italian industry, Commander Gualino, the Italian Henry Ford, a few years ago was deported without trial to one of the famous or infamous islands where many Socialists, Communists and Liberals are suffering. His crime: a show of independence in the face of Mussolini’s power.

Fascism in Italy now takes towards capitalism the position of certain gangsters, hired by some American manufacturers for strike-breaking purposes, of whom they cannot rid themselves and who blackmail them without mercy. So, after all, Fascism has been no solution for the evils with which Italian capitalism was afflicted—and will not be for its German confrère.

In conclusion, we can say of Fascism: It is a reactionary movement camouflaged with socialistic coloration; formed principally and initially by elements of the middle class, but vigorously supported by capitalists, the military caste and all privileged groups; colored by political and sentimental contingencies. It begins when in control of the government as a class dictatorship supported by a large part of the population, although not by a majority; it transforms itself rapidly into a restricted oligarchy and then into a personal tyranny which may rule against the will and interests of all classes.

…

What has been said above belies the theory according to which Fascism is the last stand of capitalism, a kind of heroic remedy adopted when any other means prove to be inefficient to prevent its downfall.

The most natural political form of capitalism is liberalism. That does not mean that the capitalists are fond of liberal institutions and really love democratic regimes. Capitalists as individuals may have very reactionary inc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Anti/Fascism and the United States
• Part I: Can It Happen Here? US Antifascism in the Time of Dictators, 1932–1941
• Part II: Antifascism and the State, 1941–1945
• Part III: Antifascism, Anticolonialism, and the Cold War, 1946–1962
• Part IV: The Politics of Backlash and a New United Front, 1968–1971
• Part V: Anti/Fascism in the Age of Neoliberalism
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index