The Social Basis of European Fascist Movements

Detlef Mühlberger, Detlef Mühlberger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317359685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Between 1919 and 1945 most countries in Europe spawned some form of fascism. Some have become considerably more notorious than others: this book, first published in 1987, sets out to analyse the social forces that went into the making of the fascist parties of the major European countries and to show the similarities and differences in their constitution as well as to suggest reasons for their different degrees of penetration and success. Few books have surveyed the whole field; the team of contributors engaged in the present enterprise offer a systematic and thorough survey of the social characteristics of European fascist movements, a subject of central importance to social and political history.

Chapter One

ITALY

Marco Revelli

Translated by Roger Griffin

There is now a wide consensus among political sociologists that fascism is in some way or other connected with a pathological interaction between modernity and backwardness. That in other words it is one of the possible permutations of modernisation.

There is however less unanimity on the chief characteristics of such modernisation. To what category of ‘perverse modernity’ does it belong? Then again, what level of backwardness should be taken as the yardstick for measuring the degree of underdevelopment, and, in the same context, what type of backwardness are we to take as our model? Gino Germani, in the essay which has since become a classic, Fascismo e classe sociale, seems in a way to be referring to a predominantly political type of backwardness when he ascribes the gravity of the crisis of the early 1920s to the inadequacy of ‘channels of integration’ offered by the Italian political system which might have contained the radical mobilisation of the masses which followed the First World War.¹ Simultaneously, however, he refers to a relatively advanced stage of economic and social development when he considers fascism primarily as the product of a secondary mobilisation accomplished, that is, by members of the ‘middle classes’ whose secure position of social pre-eminence was already being undermined by the growing strength of the working-class movement. In the interpretation by A.F.K. Organski, on the other hand, the overriding impression given is one of economic backwardness. In fact, in his The Stages of Political Development, political phenomena are presented as strictly related to the stages of economic development defined by Rostow’s model, and hence to the various phases in the process of industrialisation, in terms of which fascism is identified with a low category of development.² In contrast to Nazism, which he associates with the advanced stage of the ‘welfare state’, fascism is seen in fact as one of the political forms typical of the second stage, that of ‘forced accumulation’. What is more, it is according to him one of the least modernised examples of these forms in that, as a compromise between residual agrarian elites and emerging industrial elites it clearly qualifies as the product of ‘retarded industrialisation’. To take another example, the analysis of Barrington Moore Jr. focuses on the various permutations in the process by which the city becomes divorced from rural life and forms an elite endowed with a mercantile and entrepreneurial mentality, giving rise to a concept of backwardness which is more specifically social.³ According to this approach fascism is seen as the outcome of two aspects of society being drastically out of phase: on the one hand the advanced stage reached by the rapid development of a mass-society in some countries which had started industrialising late but were subjected to violent social pressures in the ‘take-off’ period, and on the other hand the backward nature of the elites (and hence of the political institutions) called upon to govern in such a dynamic situation. A parallel diversity of points of view is to be found in the controversy over the quality and type of social representation peculiar to the fascist movement. This topic forms, as it were, the ‘subjective dimension’ of the debate on backwardness, once the social groups which formed the mass-base and exerted hegemony within it are – in terms of their response to the forces of innovation within the social structure – treated merely as the embodiment of demands and attitudes which are broadly speaking ‘modernising’, and in some respects the product of relatively advanced levels of social development. Was fascism, as Lasswell and Lipset maintain, the political expression of the psychological characteristic of the early stage of industrialisation, and thrown into panic when confronted by processes of concentration and organisation symptomatic of advanced capitalism?⁴ Was it, therefore, to use the definition offered by Parsons and Bendix, a radical form of resistance to rationalisation?⁵ Or, on the contrary, did it not constitute a specifically modern form of mobilisation carried out by the new technical and technocratic caste which emerged at the heart of advanced industrial and social structures, as Burnham seems to argue?⁶ Or was it on the other hand, to quote the famous definition formulated by Dimitrov at the 18th plenary session of the Third International, the manifestation of the extreme stage in the development and crisis of capitalism, embodying the most destructive and corrupt section of the bourgeoisie, ‘the most reactionary, chauvinist and imperialist elements of finance capital’?⁷

Unfortunately, in the face of such a lively theoretical debate and such a wide spectrum of conflicting points of view, the data and the methodologies which might allow an empirical verification of the different interpretations when applied to Italian Fascism are far from adequate. The statistical records compiled by public bodies on Italy’s demographic and economic structures, indispensable to locate the genesis of fascism within the socio-economic continuum of her industrialisation process, are patchy. The Inchieste, or official inquiries, carried out by government agencies into the country’s social conditions (dealing with family incomes, salary structures, consumer spending, social mobility, etc.) are practically non-existent. Research to produce documentary evidence concerning the ruling class and its forms of political organisation and association, whose traditions were nevertheless well established in the period leading up to the First World War, has been totally neglected.⁸ Even in the spheres of science and political culture Fascism, in fact, marked a profound break with the past which contributed to the dissolution, or at least the dilution, of the positivistic and scientistic climate in the social matters which had brought about a significant apparatus for carrying out statistical surveys in the first two decades of the century. Having come into being in the ‘Giolittian era’ as a direct product of the growing concern with the ‘social question’, the Italian statistical bureaux had become a source of annoyance and embarassment at a time when everything was meant to be subordinated to the ‘national question’. Moreover, reliability and objectivity of data was hardly to be expected in a political situation in which heavy-handed government interference in the operations of the bureaucratic and administrative apparatus was the order of the day. What is more, the take-over and monopoly of the state agencies by a single party with a charismatic leader inevitably marked the end of the practice of official parliamentary inquiries which had provided such precious material to politicians and academics of the liberal era, and simultaneously sealed the fate of all documentary or statistical work sponsored by other political organisations (whether parties or trade unions).⁹ Once the Fascist Party was in power it controlled, true to its totalitarian principles, the information channels on all aspects of the country’s political life, issuing its own abundant ideological and propagandistic bulletins, but keeping confidential data relating to its own organisational structure and membership. The modern Behemoth shows its head but keeps its body well-hidden. What strikes the reader of the Annuari del Partito Nazionale Fascista (Statistical Year Books of the National Fascist Party) is precisely the total lack of any statistical information when contrasted with the detailed documentation on every single activity and every public appearance of the party leadership. This perfectly reflects the image of a movement which claimed to epitomise, in a way which is both classless and anti-class, the unity and totality of...