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The purpose of this book is to explain why fascism was such a destructive form of politics, first as a movement and then in power. There are countless examples in history of subversive parties being tamed once they were in government. With the rare honourable exception, the electoral history of the Socialist movement, the Greens, the various digital parties of this century¹ can each be fitted into this pattern. But, unlike these examples, the fascists became more radical in office. Whether you were a worker, a socialist or one of the fascists’ racial enemies, life was unmistakeably different and worse in 1939 than it had been before the fascists took power in 1921 or 1933. How did fascism continue to radicalise?

This book derives an answer from those interwar writers who accurately predicted fascism’s cruelty. They were overwhelmingly located on the far left of politics and among the group of people who were fascism’s oldest and most irreconcilable adversaries, the Italian and German Marxists. From the pamphlets and newspaper articles written by these leftists and from their speeches, a coherent theory of fascism emerges. Fascism was not a form of ideas but a kind of organisation and a kind of rule. Indeed, it was essentially the same politics wherever it occurred. Fascism, these writers argued, should not be understood as an ideology, but as a specific form of reactionary mass movement.

The argument of the interwar Marxists was that, because fascism (unlike traditional right-wing politics) sought to build a mass base, it had a capacity to win recruits at a time of crisis and among social layers that the left liked to think of as its own, including workers, the unemployed and the young. As a result, even when fascists were relatively few, they were able to grow quickly. The Marxists insisted that there was a tension between the goals of fascist ideology and the aspirations of its members. That contradiction could play out in numerous ways: in the collapse of fascist parties through conflict with a non-fascist rival, or in the radicalisation of fascist parties in power. But the one possibility that could be excluded was the gradual taming of fascism once its leaders were in office.

When fascism began, hardly anyone else in politics agreed with it. The set of people who were potentially anti-fascists is very large indeed. It includes liberals, conservatives, Christians, anarchists, feminists and countless others besides. None of these traditions, I would argue, grasped fascism’s potential for violence as quickly as the Marxists. At the time of the fascist triumphs, Socialist and Communist ideas had an unchallenged authority on the European left. They were part of a common approach to politics which was shared by tens of millions of people. ‘Marxism’ was not a singular thing but a range of politics.² It appealed to people who believed in the actuality of revolution and were determined to bring about an immediate popular uprising. It was employed by others who had no truck with any idea of mass revolt but restricted their desire for change solely to the slow advance of the rights of workers and other subaltern groups. It also had the support of millions of people who held to any number of positions in between.

As the twentieth century wore on, Marxism was dethroned from its position of authority, as a result of the rightward drift on the part of post-1945 social democracy, the collapse of the Communist regimes and the dissolution of the Communist parties. But if we focus on the period of the rise of fascism, this subordination belonged to the future. So you will find in the pages of this book Marxism being used as a shared means for understanding and resisting fascism by the likes of Clara Zetkin, who had been for 25 years the editor of the German Socialist women’s newspaper Die Gleichheit (Equality) and a sponsor of the resolution which led to the establishment of today’s International Women’s Day; Leon Trotsky, the former leader of the Bolshevik Red Army; and Daniel Guérin, who lived into the 1970s when he was an anarchist, a member of the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action in France and one of the leading figures of the gay liberation movement.³ In the Europe of the 1920s and 1930s, and in the face of fascism, they shared a common language and had essentially the same approach for resisting the rise of Hitler.

The interwar Marxists were the first to formulate what can be called the anti-fascist wager. This is the belief that fascism is an especially violent and destructive form of right-wing politics, that it has the capacity to grow rapidly in times of social crisis and if ignored will destroy the capacity of the left to organise and set back by decades the demands of workers and other dispossessed groups for change. If the wager is correct, it follows that it is repeatedly a priority for its opponents to confront fascism, even at times when other forms of discrimination are endemic, and even when other right-wing politics have more support than fascism. This way of thinking assumes a present in which labour is still exploited and discrimination on grounds of race and sex is prevalent. Even in these circumstances, it warns, fascism is an unruly, chaotic agent of negative change. It can make systematic what today is limited. Fascism is capable of extending suffering on an enormous scale. Conversely, where fascism is defeated, the other forms of oppression on which it thrives can also be weakened.⁴

The anti-fascist wager is not a distinctively Marxist position; all sorts of people have held it. But the first time in history that any significant group came to adopt it was in the mid-1920s, when the Marxists discussed in this book began to campaign against the threat of fascism outside Italy. This approach recognised the potential of Mussolini to inspire imitators including in Germany.

At the time these clear-sighted warnings were first made, Hitler himself was a mere regional politician. Any electoral success he had enjoyed had been modest, and he faced a series of competitors in a space between fascism and conservatism, several of whom were better funded, had easier access to the media and their own means to employ paramilitary violence against their rivals. To say that fascism, despite all Hitler’s weaknesses, was the most threatening opponent facing the German left was to make a prediction about how fascism would grow and what it would do in power. It is worth listening to the people who grasped that risk, at a time when almost everyone else on the right and centre of European politics disagreed with them. In writing this book, I trust that their approach will be of interest to others facing the different right of our own times.

This is the second edition of this book.⁵ The original spoke in some detail about the revival of fascism after 1945 but I have cut that material almost entirely from this edition. The reason I have removed it was not because I am blithe to the danger of fascism’s re-emergence but because I have long been preoccupied with it. There are countless examples of journalists and contemporary historians taking a strong and understandable dislike to political figures in the present day, reinterpreting fascism to mean whatever processes they reject in the present and then hunting for echoes of them in the past. But the contemporary right is in many ways unlike fascism. The temptation is there to define fascism in terms of some secondary characteristic, emphasising perhaps not so much Mussolini’s actual killing of his opponents but maybe his willingness to taunt them and threaten them with violence; or Hitler’s support, say, for tariffs and economic protection as opposed to global institutions of free trade.⁶ The risk is of chasing after some passing feature we dislike in the present and thereby softening our shared understanding of fascism, making the past fuzzier, blurred and less exact.

Once you have a definition of fascism then the extent of the analogy between different generations of reactionary mass politics legitimately arises, and this is something which I have explored in another recent book, The New Authoritarians,⁷ to which this study stands as a companion. But the analogy must be considered in relation to something of a fixed and definite meaning, which has been drawn up in order to be as accurate as possible to what happened 80 years ago rather than to keep up with the changing demands of the present.

This book is an exploration of the Marxist theory of fascism, which is treated as if it was a single analysis of that politics. And yet it should be acknowledged that there has not been just one Marxist theory, but at least three. The first, which I have described as the left theory of fascism, has tended to explain fascism as a form of counter-revolution acting in the interests of capital. The more stridently this interpretation has been advanced, the less concerned its adherents have been to examine what was specific about fascist counter-revolution. The Italian and German Communist Parties described fascism as one form of counter-revolution among many, and in doing so they disarmed their supporters, leading them away from organising with a single-minded focus against the fascists.

The second, or right theory of fascism, by contrast, could only see the mass, radical character of the fascist movement. The Marxists who argued for this interpretation treated fascism as something radical, exotic, outside and threatening to capital. They called for alliances with anyone at all, with centrist and even right-wing politicians. In this way, the Italian and German Socialist Parties in the 1920s, and subsequently the world’s Communist Parties after 1934, allowed their anti-fascism to be moderate and irresolute, militant only in undermining the mass movements around them, which they disarmed both metaphorically and literally in the face of fascist advance.

This book also explores the third, or dialectical theory of fascism. That theory treated fascism as both a reactionary ideology and also a mass movement, as a politics which could grow incredibly fast and do untold damage but was also vulnerable when faced with popular challengers which confronted it and could offer its supporters a more persuasive means of effecting transformative change. This book argues that this third theory reached a more accurate appreciation of fascism, not just than other Marxists but than anyone else in the interwar years.