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For the interwar Marxists, fascism was a new enemy whose threat was expressed in the willingness of Mussolini and Hitler to use violence against Socialists and Communists, to criminalise the unions and the socialist parties and to defeat the social gains won by workers over the previous half-century. While not reducible to the old political right or the capitalist class, fascism was – in its practical effect – the most violently anti-Socialist of all the right-wing parties. It was, in Zetkin’s phase, ‘the concentrated expression of the general offensive undertaken by the world bourgeoisie against the proletariat’. Or, as the exiled Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote before Hitler’s victory, ‘Leaders and institutions can retreat. Individual persons can hide. But the working class will have no place to retreat to in the face of fascism, and no place to hide.’⁴⁵

The historians of the New Consensus school, by contrast, maintain that fascism originated in ideas drawn from both the left and the right of pre-1918 European politics, it belonged to the realm of ideas, and was above such divisions as class. Sternhell describes fascism as ‘a synthesis of organic nationalism and anti-Marxist socialism, a revolutionary ideology based on a simultaneous rejection of liberalism, Marxism and democracy’. Throughout his work, Sternhell’s method is consistently that of intellectual biography. This enables him to stress the right-wing elements in the thought of such writers of the left as the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon or the advocate of the syndicalist general strike Georges Sorel; and the left-wing elements in the thought of such right-wing figures as the French anti-Dreyfusards Édouard Drumont and Maurice Barrès. As a result, one of Sternhell’s consistent themes is the arbitrariness of left–right distinctions. Fascism, he says, emerges on the left while claiming to be anti-left. It is often described as a right-wing phenomenon, but it has no more in common with conservatism than with Communism. Adopting a slogan of the French fascists, Sternhell insists that they were ni droite ni gauche, neither right nor left.⁴⁶

It would take a considerable effort to apply these arguments convincingly to the early history of Italian or German fascism, each of which consistently sought alliances with forces on the right while threatening the left with violence. The Italian fascists first began to grow in 1919, during a period of strikes. Mussolini received large sums of money from the Milan business community and from landowners. In the north, fascism portrayed itself as the alternative to workers’ revolution; in the south, fascist armed gangs broke the back of the peasants’ campaign for land. Mussolini himself only became a major figure in Italian politics in May 1921, when the fascists were able to secure an electoral alliance with the liberals and nationalists, the parties of the centre and the right.

Between 1920 and 1922, fascism emerged in Italy through a campaign of violence against the left and its organisations. Michael Ebner, the historian of these attacks, writes: ‘Blackshirted squadristi beat, shot, ritually humiliated and destroyed the property of peasants, workers, politicians, journalists and labour organisers … Socialists and the working classes were the primary victims.’⁴⁷ Newspaper reports and geographical studies show the same picture: fascist violence was at its worst in industrial rather than in agricultural areas, and correlated closely to areas of previous left-wing electoral success.⁴⁸

In November 1921, the fascisti formed themselves into a party, the PNF.⁴⁹ During the winter of 1921–2, there was a slump in the economy, and this gave employers an excuse to go on the offensive. In the summer of 1922, fascist gangs seized the city halls in Milan and Livorno and occupied the Genoa docks. The magnates of the Confindustria and the Banca Commerciale gave Mussolini and the PNF their backing, as did the Pope.

The roots of German fascism can be traced back to a series of moves from 1914 onwards, carried out by wealthy German conservatives, including the industrialist Alfred Hugenberg, Admiral Tirpitz and Wolfgang Kapp, to enlist support for the war by financing patriotic working-class parties: ‘the origins of the [Nazi] Party are properly understood within the context of a failed attempt by the conservative German military-industrial complex to enlist the support of labour for the war effort’. The German Workers’ Party, later the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) had fewer than 50 members when Hitler joined it as an army spy in 1919. It was the Reichswehr (Germany army) Information Department which organised Hitler’s initial training and which employed him as an agitator to prevent other former soldiers from being won over to socialism.⁵⁰

Like the early Italian fascisti, the NSDAP was a movement of former soldiers before it was a mature political party. Many of the leading Nazis had been members of the Freikorps, demobilised patriotic soldiers and middle-class youth backed by the Social Democratic defence minister, Gustav Noske, to end the November revolution. The Freikorps were responsible for the murders of prominent Communists, including Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and almost seized power during the attempted Kapp Putsch. These soldiers constituted the nationalistic and armed milieu from which the cadres of German fascism were recruited. Until 1923, the Nazi Party was mainly a Bavarian party, operating under the patronage of conservative politicians and generals from this state. During the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s failed coup in 1923, the NSDAP received the active support of General von Ludendorff, formerly the second in command in the German army, and relied on the tacit assistance of the state commissioner, Gustav Ritter von Kahr, and the head of the Bavarian army, General Otto von Lossow, all of them advocates of elite power.⁵¹ Indeed, these alliances between centre- and far-right German politicians continued after 1923, with the decisions to dissolve parliament in 1930 when support for the Nazis was growing and to bring down the Social Democratic government in Prussia in 1932 in a coup that placed the largest police force in Germany beyond democratic control.

For the historian of German fascism, Geoff Eley, fascism is therefore best understood as a part of the German far right, within which it is principally distinguished by the brutality of its anti-socialist reaction:

The recourse to political violence – to repressive and coercive form of rule, to guns rather than words, to beating up one’s opponents rather than denouncing them from the speaker’s platform – was ultimately what distinguished fascism from existing forms of right-wing politics. The coercive apparatus of the state had always been used against certain kinds of opposition … [But] killing socialists rather than just arguing with them, or at most legally and practically restricting their rights, was a new departure.⁵²

According to the German statistician Ernst Gumbel, who was writing at the time, between January 1919 and June 1922 there were 376 political murders in Germany; 354 of which were carried out by supporters of the Freikorps or other supporters of the far right. The victims included Bernhard Schottländer, a local leader of the Independent Socialists in Breslau, and Gustav Landauer, the anarchist commissar of enlightenment and public education in the Bavarian Soviet Republic. The average sentence for a radical right murder was four months imprisonment and a two Reichsmark fine.⁵³ These killings predated the rise of the NSDAP but contributed to it, in cheapening lives, and in permitting a kind of political terror which Hitler later sought to generalise.⁵⁴

It is sometimes said that Hitler must really have been a leftist since his party sometimes used the word Socialist or because it borrowed from the Socialists and the Communists in its use of flags and posters. This is to misunderstand what Hitler was and how his party proposed to govern.

German fascism had as its defining purpose the destruction of Hitler’s political and racial antagonists. The former meant Communists and Socialists. The latter included not just the Jews but the Sinti and Roma,⁵⁵ and a number of other perceived undesirables, including disabled Germans and gay men, who might adversely impact on the nation’s gene pool.⁵⁶ These two distinct groups – Marxists and Jews – were in Hitler’s imagination but a single enemy.

On trial following the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler summarised his views in a single sentence, telling his judges, ‘From the very first I have aimed at something more than becoming a mere Minister, I have resolved to the destroyer of Marxism.’ From this single and determining perspective, Hitler was willing to borrow aspects of the left’s approach to politics – its emphasis on public marches, its pageantry.⁵⁷ In his autobiography Mein Kampf(My Struggle), Hitler justified this method:

When from his little workshop or big factory, in which he feels very small, he [the fascist], steps for the first time into a mass meeting and has thousands and thousands of people of the same opinions around him, when, as a seeker, he is swept away by three or four thousand others into the mighty effect of suggestive intoxication and enthusiasm ... The man who enters such a meeting doubting and wavering leaves it inwardly reinforced: he has become a link in the community.⁵⁸

Hitler did not call his party socialist because he wanted to reform capitalism. He did so because he wanted to use parts of the socialist repertoire to different ends. He did so rather to confuse and demoralise his enemies, to defeat them.⁵⁹

Part of the argument for the socialist character of the PNF and the NSDAP rests on the existence of a small number of fascists who had been on the left. This was more notable within Italy, as Mussolini had spent several years as a socialist before breaking with that party over its unwillingness to support Italian involvement in the First World War, and his leadership attracted former revolutionary trade unionists who had abandoned a belief in class struggle for the idea that the competition between nations was the driving force of history.

The former leftists included Edmondo Rossoni, who had been a member of the Socialist Party between 1900 and 1907 and then a supporter of syndicalism, the belief that workers’ strikes could grow in number until the trade unions were a revolutionary alternative to capitalism. In America in 1910, he was a supporter of the Industrial Workers of the World. In 1914, he called for Italy to join the war, and on his return to Italy he worked through a union federation the Unione Italiana del Lavoro (UIL), which vacillated between nationalism and syndicalism. In January 1922, Rossoni accepted an offer to quit the UIL to become the general secretary of the Confederazione dei Sindicati Nazionali, a fascist party organisation but one which grew rapidly, reaching a peak of 1.8 million members in 1924 which, even allowing for some paper membership, was still significantly larger than the fascist party itself, whose claimed membership was just 650,000 people.⁶⁰

In a position of seeming importance, Rossoni had to weigh the discontents of the workers he was supposedly leading against the hostility of the factory owners who were determined to resist any possibility of Italy’s recently turbulent industrial relations reasserting themselves, even under the protection of fascist rule. The arbiter between the two sides, Mussolini, had no more interest than the industrialists in a fascist ‘socialism’. Removed from his union position in 1928, Rossoni went on to hold several junior posts before, in 1935–9, being promoted again to the middle-ranking position of minister of agriculture and forestry.⁶¹

Another former syndicalist who played a role in the literary defence of the regime was Sergio Panunzio, an academic lawyer and philosopher who had argued for the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism prior to 1910. Like Rossoni, he had later called for a fusion of nationalism and revolutionary syndicalism. He wrote for Mussolini’s papers during the First World War but remained aloof from the fascists and only joined them in 1921. From 1924, he served in the Chamber of Deputies and later as undersecretary in the Ministry of Communications. Panunzio was appointed to an academic post as the head of Fascist Faculty of Political Sciences at Perugia University in 1928, the first specifically fascist institution of higher education, and wrote a number of books for fascist publishers maintaining that the regime was in continuity with the radical theories of the pre-war Italian left, and an alternative to the universal decadence of liberalism.⁶²

In the case of Germany, the existence of a fascist ‘left’ narrows to the figures of Gregor and Otto Strasser. The two brothers were born into a strongly Catholic and conservative, Bavarian family. Gregor, the oldest, was a young soldier at the front during the war, and this experience left him with a romantic, even sentimental belief in the comradeship of military experience. Gregor Strasser worked briefly as a pharmacist before becoming a career Nazi and member of its paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA).⁶³ He served as the party’s head of organisation from 1927. In that role, he was given responsibility for negotiating with conservative and nationalist groups outside the NSDAP. Gregor was, however, distrusted and isolated by Hitler. He resigned from all party roles at the end of 1932 and was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, along with other SA leaders and rivals of Hitler on the right.

In comparison to his elder brother, Otto Strasser was a more complex character. A member of the Freikorps in 1920, and therefore associated with the extreme right of German politics, quixotically he also joined the Socialist Party in the same year. Between 1925 and 1930, he was a Nazi and controlled a Berlin publishing house, the Kampfverlag, which claimed to be seeking a synthesis between Communism and fascism. In 1930, following a furious meeting with Hitler, in which he was ordered to pledge his loyalty to the Nazi leader or cease publishing, but declined to do either, Otto Strasser resigned from the National Socialists, forming a small rival party on the far right, the Black Front.⁶⁴

Otto Strasser criticised capitalism, albeit as a nationalist and from the right. But it would be a real exaggeration to portray his five-year membership of the NSDAP as in any way significant to the development of that party.

Prior to 1934 Gregor Strasser had, by contrast, been within the two dozen figures at the head of German fascism. Yet his critique of Hitler or of Nazism was shallow. As his biographer, Peter Stachura, indicates, Gregor Strasser’s ‘“socialism” was vacuous, amounting to no more than an emotionally based, superficial, petty-bourgeois anti-capitalism ... [He] cannot be regarded in any meaningful sense as the leader of a “Nazi left” because such an entity simply did not exist as a coherent ideological, organisational, or political entity.’⁶⁵