Читать книгу Fascism - David Renton - Страница 14

For the interwar Marxists, the characterisation of the fascist regimes was straightforward. While these writers were willing to acknowledge that fascism had made various promises to subaltern groups, the reality of its rule had been to disappoint workers, peasants and anyone else who had one had expectations of it. Clara Zetkin’s 1923 speech gave numerous examples of Mussolini promising reforms and failing to deliver on them. Out of office, she explained, the fascists had promised to reduce the working day to a legal maximum of eight hours. In power, this pledge was forgotten. Fascism had committed to introduce old age and sickness insurance. In power, it had done nothing of the sort. Promises of higher taxes for the rich had been transformed into tax cuts. ‘When we compare the fascist programme with its fulfilment’, she concluded, somewhat optimistically, ‘we can foresee already today the complete ideological collapse of Fascism in Italy.’⁸⁵

One advantage of this approach is that it points the way towards any number of more recent non-Marxist writers, who have emphasised the convergence between fascism and conservatism, in the movement stage of fascism (the largest single group of fascists were former conservatives, whose ideas fused with fascism as fascism became a mass force), during the fascist accession to power (which in both Italy and Germany was at the invitation of conservatives) and during the period of fascist rule where fascists and conservatives worked together as allies. In the words of Martin Blinkhorn, the historian of this relationship, ‘not merely was a boundary between fascists and authoritarian conservatives never drawn with total clarity, but it became more blurred with every year that passed’.⁸⁶

Different classes had widely different experiences of fascism in power. For workers, Italian fascism was a brutal dictatorship. In 1925, all remaining independent trade unions were closed. Wage rates were decided by the employer unchecked by any union. Between 1927 and 1932, according to official statistics, nominal wages were cut by 50 per cent. In 1935, the government placed all workers connected directly or indirectly with war production under military discipline. All other workers were subject to the decisions of the Labour Court. Strikers were punished with imprisonment. For the petty bourgeoisie too, fascism brought relatively few benefits. Decrees regulated retail prices. After prices rose by 41 per cent between 1934 and 1938, shops were ordered to carry out price cuts. Small manufacturers were not allowed to have any separate organisation to represent them. They were subsumed within the fascist-run Federation of Commercial Associations. Farm labourers also suffered from harsh wage cuts. As for small peasants, in 1922 the fascists had promised to confiscate and share out the larger estates, but this redistribution never happened.⁸⁷

The class which benefited most from fascist rule was the layer of big industrialists. Capital gains tax was abolished, as was inheritance tax, and the tax on war profits. The government intervened time and again to save failing companies, especially the commercial and the Catholic banks, many of whom were on the verge of collapse after the Wall Street crash. Between 1934 and 1938, war industries benefited from 36 billion lire of extraordinary expenses. As Mussolini put it, ‘The corporative economy respects the principles of private property. Private property completes the human personality.’⁸⁸

Adrian Lyttelton, a historian of Italian fascism, describes some of the contradictions of fascism in its relationship to the factory owners:

At first sight, the advanced program and ex-revolutionary leadership of the fascist movement might seem to be unattractive to capitalist backers and indeed some of the more short-sighted, or honest, were discouraged. But these same factors also meant that it could offer more; and it was the only instrument which might serve to ‘channel the reactionary forces into the national camp’ ... While fascism as a political movement originally gave expression to the revolt against the emergent forces of organised capitalism, fascism as a regime furthered its development and provided it with a theoretical justification.⁸⁹

The story was little different in Germany. Between 1932 and 1938, according to official figures, workers’ wages fell by 3 per cent. Meanwhile the cost of living rose by 5 per cent, food prices rose by 19.5 per cent and the hours worked in an average week rose by 15 per cent. Managers in the power stations in Baden, for example, forced their workers onto a 104-hour week. Meanwhile the intensity of work also increased, with productivity per worker rising by 11 per cent in the same period.⁹⁰ Workers suffered as their freedom to meet and organise were removed: ‘The German worker has lost his freedom of speech, his freedom of the press and his freedom of organisation. The labour press has been destroyed, the labour organisations, including the trade unions, have been dissolved.’⁹¹

Despite the Nazi promises, the middle classes suffered under fascist rule. Small manufacturers and independent craft workers were hurt by the scarcity of raw materials and a lack of markets. The number of companies having a capital reserve between 4,000 and 1,000,000 Reichsmarks dropped from 7,512 in 1931 to 3,850 in 1937. Small farmers also lost out. Hereditary farms were declared inalienable under the Reich’s Entailed Farm Law. This meant that the large estates were left intact, while small farmers were unable to borrow to make improvements.⁹²

Between 1932 and 1938, the income of employers rose, on average, by 148 per cent.⁹³ Between 1933 and the end of 1936, average profits rose by 433 per cent. The profits of I. G. Farben increased from 74 million Reichsmarks in 1933 to 240 million in 1939. Meanwhile, the company’s contributions to the NSDAP rose from 3.6 million Reichsmarks to 7.5 million. The largest combines, I. G. Farben, AEG, Daimler Benz, Krupps and Allianz, benefited from the war and the Holocaust.⁹⁴

You might think of fascism as a uniquely stable form of capitalist rule. The fascist parties had unchallenged control of the state, and the workers and peasants were spied on and isolated. And yet, fascism was in other ways insecure. Because there was no formal mechanism by which minor grievances might be addressed within the system, and because every act of opposition was criminalised, any dissent had the potential to become an all-out challenge to the regime. A later chapter describes some of the ways in which postwar Marxist historians have studied the conflict between workers and bosses after the fascist seizure of power. It draws in particular on the writings of the New Left historian Tim Mason and his argument that the National Socialist regime was weaker than it appeared from outside, and that its leaders were terrified by the memory of social revolution.⁹⁵