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One theme of the interwar Marxist literature was that fascism was drawn disproportionately from the middle class. Thus Clara Zetkin blamed the mass support for fascism on ‘Large numbers of the former middle classes [who] have become proletarians … masses of ex-officers, who are now unemployed.’⁷³ Similar passages can be found in the writing of Gramsci, Trotsky and many of the interwar Marxists whose writings are discussed in this book.

The trend is for historians to disavow such sociological explanations of fascism, and to insist rather on the ‘messy, catch-all’ nature of fascist recruitment.⁷⁴ In particular, the New Consensus school rejects sociological explanations. Roger Griffin insists that the disproportionate presence of the middle class in the vanguard fascist parties was a matter of coincidence:

If the middle classes were over-represented in the membership of fascism and Nazism, this is because specific socio-political conditions made a significant percentage of them more susceptible to a palingenetic form of ultra-nationalism than to a palingenetic form of Marxism or liberalism. There is nothing in principle which precludes an employed or an unemployed member of the working classes or an aristocrat ... from being susceptible to fascist myth.⁷⁵

In any movement of millions of people, you would expect to find individual members of the aristocracy or some unemployed workers. The question, really, is whether the overrepresentation of the middle class within interwar fascism is better understood as a consequence of what Griffin terms ‘specific socio-political conditions’ (i.e. the tradition of a workers’ movement which to some extent protected its supporters against fascism), or as something essential and recurring. We must choose, Griffin insists, between explanations of fascism that insist on the latter’s emergence as a movement of people or as a strain of ideas.

Any number of historians have rejected that choice. For example, Michael Mann, in his detailed study Fascists, argues that Mussolini was leading a class movement of a petty-bourgeois character. Its members were drawn disproportionately from the professional middle class, with white-collar workers, students and teachers massively overrepresented in the fascist party compared to Italian society as a whole, by a factor of around 5:1, and industrial workers, peasant farmers and tenants relatively poorly represented in the fascist ranks. This does not cause Mann to reject ideological explanations of fascism. ‘Was [Mussolini] fronting a class movement or was he leading a movement genuinely committed to paramilitary nation-statist ideas?’ Mann concludes: ‘he was doing both’.⁷⁶

In Genoa, fascists initially recruited among a layer of working-class syndicalists who had supported Italian intervention in the war. However, these groups opposed the strikes of 1920 and lost support, they ‘withered and died’. The Genoa fascists had to be reconstituted entirely, based on a different, more respectable support. The fascist party which emerged in that city ‘was a relatively homogenous organisation; it did not really recruit much from the working class but had a good base among the white-collar workers and the petty bourgeoisie and the less prosperous professional classes’. This pattern is not unusual. Mussolini claimed that many of his supporters were workers. Indeed, according to PNF statistics, ‘in 1921–2 about a third of the membership were listed as workers and peasants’, but the more accurate figure was closer to 15 or 20 per cent, while in Rome and Milan there was a working-class membership of only 10 to 12 per cent, much less than the presence of that class within these cities as a whole.⁷⁷

As for German fascism, between 1919 and 1923, around a fifth of all recruits were artisans (21.7 per cent) and a quarter white collar (25.2 per cent), meaning that both groups were overrepresented compared to their presence within German society (13.5 per cent and 14.7 per cent). Semiskilled and unskilled labourers were under-represented (16.2 per cent of NSDAP recruits compared to 33.1 per cent of the German population).⁷⁸ The most proletarian element of the Nazi movement was the SA, which recruited a number of young unemployed workers: ‘the SA mobilised the politically unaffiliated, jobless, young workers and some salaried staff in the towns and the countryside’.⁷⁹ Many of these, however, were drawn from rural areas. The Nazis achieved their first electoral breakthrough in rural northern Germany in the 1928 elections, and later it was the rural Prussian elite who would hand power to Hitler. Although workers made up 46.3 per cent of the population in January 1933, only 29.7 per cent of Nazi Party members were officially classified as workers, and even this estimate may have been too generous. In 1931, less than 5 per cent of the party’s nearly one million members were also members of its workers’ organisation, the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization. Meanwhile, although 20.7 per cent of the population were peasants, only 9 per cent of Nazis were peasants. Over half the members of the Nazi Party were white-collar workers, civil servants or self-employed. Leading members of the Nazi Party were drawn from this layer, not only Hitler, but Bormann, Frick, Himmler, Röhm, Rosenberg and others.⁸⁰

There was more to fascist success among the middle class than a simple accident of fate. The Italian and German working classes had been courted over the preceding 30 years by first Socialist and then Communist parties, which retained a significant (albeit by 1921 or 1933 diminished) infrastructure of supportive organisations: unions, workers’ sporting clubs, tenants’ associations. These organisations trained their members in left-wing politics. This helps to explain why, for example, even after the Nazi electoral breakthrough in 1930, the party did extremely poorly in works’ council elections, winning just 1.7 per cent of the vote in elections in the metal industry in 1931.⁸¹

Nazi propaganda repeatedly stressed ideas of status. It appealed to ‘small men’, self-employed producers, artisans and petty owners, incorporating the mood and grievances of this class into its daily agitation. The best example of this method is Mein Kampf, where Hitler wrote that the basis of his movement would be former members of the working class who had dragged themselves out of that position: ‘for people of modest situation who have once risen above that social level, it is unendurable to fall back into it even momentarily’.⁸² The connection between Nazi agitation and the middle class can also be seen in the work of the National Socialist Party’s Mittelstand Office, later known as the Combat League of Middle-Class Tradespeople. The Mittelstand Office attacked specific large businesses, especially Jewish firms and the large department stores. Nazi propaganda among the middle classes earned the NSDAP its earliest successes, which it achieved among the student unions and artisan associations.⁸³

A recurring message of the writers studied in this book was that fascism generalised from the class position of intermediate classes, who treated the wealth of organised workers as an offence, while organising the profits made by the super-rich. ‘To the small self-employed the NSDAP offered an ideological framework in which they could be militant and conservative, anti-capitalist and anti-Socialist at one and the same time.’⁸⁴ Anti-Semitism told the members of the middle class that the workers who undermined them by demanding high wages, and the large companies and the banks above them, constituted a single – Jewish – enemy.