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Introduction: Fascism as the Dictatorship of Capital

THIS BOOK EXAMINES the origins of American fascism between the two world wars. My analysis is based on a consensus of writers—historians, political scientists, social critics, Marxists and non-Marxists alike—who saw its rise within the growing powers of monopoly and finance capital during the booming 1920s and the general crisis of the following decade, which we call the Great Depression. For these writers, Big Business, as it was commonly known, was the main source of embryonic fascism in the United States. On the basis of their findings and observations, I identify processes inherent in capitalist production and sociopolitical relations throughout the period as fascist because they extended and deepened the hold of capital over American political institutions and mass consciousness. Though these processes never merged to create a distinct fascist trajectory, all contributed to the totalizing powers of capital that made the United States the rising epicenter and hegemon of the world capitalist system—and the coming of the American Behemoth.

My argument is grounded in the principles of Marxist political economy set within the epoch of contemporary world history. Fascist processes inhered in production and exchange at a pivotal moment in the ascendance of U.S. capitalism after the First World War. America became the world’s industrial leader and banker during the 1920s, requiring ever-greater levels of capitalist accumulation necessary for the cycle of investment, production, and exchange—a cycle repeated exponentially for continued economic growth and profits. We see this during the Great Boom of the twenties. The drive to increase the productivity of social labor by means of technological innovation fueled the concentration of economic power—monopoly—and its centralization in Big Business, quickly becoming a system of power, one in which the government was a willing partner. But unprecedented economic growth and the centralization of economic and political power also heightened the contradictions always present in monopoly capitalism: each new cycle of production sharpened the divide between capital and labor. Why? The greater the drive to increase productivity with use of more machines, the more human labor was displaced from production, creating the paradox of growing poverty within an ever-rising sea of plenty. Then the bust! The Wall Street crash in 1929 ushered in a general crisis of American capitalism during the Depression decade of the 1930s.

It is within this historical framework that we find the efficient cause of American fascism: from the growth of state power in the service of the capitalist ruling class to the reactionary politics of the middle class, to the manipulation of the public by advertisers and public relations experts whose sole aim was to commodify everything. All were fascist processes because they aimed at the domination of capital over society. What emerges from this approach is a dynamic definition of fascism as an inherent function of monopoly-capitalist production and relations whose telos was and remains the totalitarian rule of capitalist dictatorship.

Of course, the intellectual and political origins of fascism predate its actual coming to power in Europe after the First World War. Fascist ideas had emerged from the turmoil of European political culture at the end of the nineteenth century and gradually became a force in sectarian politics. Some sects ultimately grew into movements; in Italy they coalesced rather quickly to become the world’s first fascist regime under Benito Mussolini and the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) in 1922. The global capitalist crisis that commenced in 1929 and deepened the following decade fueled the growth of fascism worldwide and the seizure of power by Hitler and the National Socialists in Germany. No wonder, then, that the Italian and German examples are rarely absent in any study of fascism, since anything considered fascist must always pass the litmus test of both in some manner or degree. Writing in 1952 under a pseudonym, the Marxist political economist Paul Baran put it succinctly:

For a political system to “qualify” as fascist, it has to display the German or Italian characteristics of fascism. It must be based on a fascist mass movement anchored primarily in para-military formations of brown shirts or black shirts. It must be a one-party regime, with the party headed by a Führer or a Duce symbolizing the principle of authoritarian leadership. It must be violently nationalist, racist, anti-Semitic. It must be frankly illiberal, intolerant of opposition, hostile to civil liberties and human rights.¹

Baran saw this approach as indicative of a sterile paradigm in the study of fascism. Taking his cue, I make a conscious effort to move in another direction by recovering a long forgotten consensus held by many U.S. writers during the 1930s and early 1940s that Big Business or the business system was primarily responsible for the genesis of fascism in the United States. In the process, I discovered a most striking feature about American fascism—its utterly disguised character. This was clear to Dwight Macdonald in his introduction to Daniel Guerin’s Fascism and Big Business (1939): “Our fascists,” Macdonald wrote, “not only don’t (yet) wear brown shirts; they proclaim themselves ‘anti-fascist’ as well as ‘anti-communist’ and march under the banner of ‘liberty’ and even ‘democracy.’” For Macdonald, here was the real danger:

By spot-lighting the secondary characteristics of European fascism, such as Jew-baiting and book-burning, without exposing its class roots, the false impression is built up that such manifestations are something unparalleled in the history of “civilized nations.” This makes it easy to divert the energy of the American working class and its liberal supporters into a crusade against overseas fascism, while our own ruling class is left in power, undisturbed, biding its time to introduce fascism over here when the situation demands it.²

Macdonald’s was one of many voices warning that fascism would come in the name of anti-fascism; that is, it would be presented as True Americanism. At the same time, he affirmed what his contemporary, the eminent Marxist philosopher and social theorist, Max Horkheimer, said when he declared that “whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism.”³

FASCISM AND THE WORLD ECONOMY: THE UNITED STATES AS CAPITALIST EPICENTER

This book builds on the seminal contribution of the sociologist Walter Goldfrank, who employed in 1978 the perspective of world-system theory to argue that fascism was caused primarily by the global economic contraction during the interwar period that accelerated a shift in international relations. Goldfrank reminded his readers that fascism was a unique product of contemporary world history. A global economic crisis had damaged the international order and especially Great Britain, whose domination over the world market was by then nearly eclipsed. What made the capitalist world system less stable was the war of positioning between three rising and competing world powers that challenged Britain’s declining imperial reach: a semi-isolationist United States that had already surpassed Britain as the new hegemon; the Soviet Union, the leader of a global revolutionary-socialist alternative to capitalism and imperialism; and Nazi Germany with its sudden rise and horrific hegemonic designs of its own.⁴

According to Goldfrank, fascism emerged in the three zones of the world capitalist system—core, semi-periphery, and periphery—in the first half of the twentieth century. Each zone was determined by the level of capital formation, from the highest form in the core nations, to those in the semi-periphery where capitalism was less developed and therefore at times dependent on the core for capital, to poorer countries and colonies in the periphery, which had no capital of their own and depended entirely on the core and semi-periphery. Fascism had emerged for the first time in Italy, which Goldfrank considered part of the European semi-periphery because its capital formation was lower than the dominant core powers of Great Britain and France, its European allies during the First World War. Soon after the war ended, a postwar economic crisis developed in Italy that threatened the political position of its ruling classes, not all of them fully capitalist. For Goldfrank, Mussolini’s coming to power was something of an experiment, the same position taken by a leading communist writer and theorist in the mid-1930s, R. Palme Dutt, who asserted that Italian fascism had “developed only in an experimental stage in a secondary capitalist country.”⁵ What both said about Italy was striking because it provided another way of thinking about the first fascist regime in history. Italy’s semi-peripheral status in the world capitalist system, which reflected that country’s weak capital formation, certainly played a huge role in determining fascist forms and processes. For one thing, Mussolini and the primarily middle-class movement he led came to power without protracted struggle, in part because Italy’s ruling classes were weak and quickly fell into line. The impotence of the Italian state corresponded to the weakness of Italian capital in relation to the more entrenched landowning class and other traditional elites in the army and the Catholic Church. Capital’s weak hold on Italy explained why the driving force of fascism came from a movement led by a fiery demagogue whose political rise subsumed the power of the ruling classes quickly.

Could the same be said of Germany? Here again, the actual developments during the 1920s confirmed Goldfrank’s assertions. The political turmoil of a fragile economy made shakier by the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 and the passive resistance of German industrialists and workers to it, fueled one of the worst inflationary runs in history. Only massive loans by American bankers the following year stabilized the Weimar Republic. For the next few years, American investors provided huge loans to German public credit institutions, local governments, and large corporations.⁶ As a result, the dependence of German capital on American bankers made it semi-peripheral to the United States. When the Wall Street crash signaled the global crisis, the dependency of German capital on U.S. bankers permanently destabilized the economy and opened the door to a rising middle-class movement, primarily the lower-middle class, led by Hitler. For Germany, the historical circumstances differed from Italy’s only in scale. Capital formation in Germany was far greater than in Italy, thus its fascist development was more advanced. From Goldfrank and Dutt, we understand that fascism came to power in Germany because it had arisen in a dominant capitalist country as a result of the global crisis. Given its greater capitalist strength, parliamentary rule lasted longer in resisting fascism. Once American capital was withdrawn after 1930, Germany’s capitalists could not sustain their class rule without Hitler, who saved them in 1933 when he came to power.

Goldfrank’s approach to fascism established two criteria for comparing different forms of fascism on the world stage in the 1920s and 1930s: first among its various forms in the core, semi-periphery, and periphery, and then within each zone. Here was a way to determine similarities and differences of fascist and non-fascist responses to acute crisis conditions developing in the world capitalist system. The specific forms of fascism that emerged in Italy and Germany reflected their respective levels of capital formation, and how existing conditions and circumstances determined their standing in the capitalist core. What Goldfrank failed to do on the basis of the same logic was to show how the world crisis that began in the United States, the new epicenter of the world system, determined its particular form of fascism.

Goldfrank’s world-system approach provides us with insights into the origins of American fascism. Did the absence of a mass movement in the United States on the level of Germany’s mean there were no fascist processes? Or did they take other forms? Given its position as the epicenter of world capitalism, where the concentration of capital was the greatest, did fascist processes emerge from the needs of U.S. capitalists themselves? To answer these questions required an inquiry beyond descriptive comparisons. Having theorized that fascism in all its forms were products of the world capitalist crisis, Goldfrank omitted the United States, where a number of writers during the 1930s and early 1940s had already made the connection. Having argued that every manifestation of fascism should be examined in relation to the world capitalist system, however, he made no effort to examine how many observers saw its particular form developing in the United States.

Failing to do this, Goldfrank simply submitted to the reigning paradigm that Baran had criticized nearly thirty years earlier, concluding, “If no serious fascist movement had arisen in the twenties, the effects of the Depression were not by themselves so severe as to generate more than echoes and imitations” of those that had developed in Italy and Germany.⁷ Yet his analysis of fascism as a world-system theorist suggested otherwise. Based on its dominant position in the world-capitalist system, American fascism would differ from Italian and German forms because its level of capital formation was the most advanced, the highest in the world-capitalist system. As my study shows, this was indeed the case. Whatever the shortcomings, Goldfrank’s analysis still validated Horkheimer’s claim in a stimulating and profound way, and confirmed the approach Gregory Meyerson and I would take in 2008 about the plausibility of fascism in the United States.⁸

A crisis in the world-capitalist system was indeed the efficient cause for the global development of fascism during the interwar period—and beyond.⁹ Based on what American observers were saying at the time, fascism was definitely in the works during the interwar period, though the record shows that all attempts to create a distinct fascist movement never got very far. Still, these same observers provided palpable evidence of other fascist processes that indicated characteristics of a generic fascism in the United States, the most advanced of all capitalist core countries. This was revelatory. For one thing, Paul Sweezy’s assessment in 1942 that “every capitalist nation, in the period of imperialism, carries within it the seeds of fascism,” seemed to make even greater sense. This didn’t make fascism inevitable. But Sweezy made clear that it “arises only out of a situation in which the structure of capitalism has been severely injured and yet not overthrown.”¹⁰

THE FORGOTTEN VOICES OF THE 1930s AND EARLY 1940s

Much of my work stems from the recovery of what I consider a “lost” discourse on fascism in the 1930s and early 1940s. Recognizing fascism’s embryonic forms in the interwar period provides a foundation and perspective for understanding American fascism in the present, now more fully developed with the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency in 2016.

Two communist writers in 1938, A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, in writing the only comprehensive treatment of U.S. fascism to date, argued that “the germ of fascism was inherent within American monopoly capitalism; but it was not until the economic crisis of 1929 that it developed into a definite political force of ominous proportions.”¹¹ Their view echoed that of leftist journalist Mauritz Hallgren, who five years earlier asserted that the growth of monopoly capitalism is “the principal element in the making of fascism.” Hallgren viewed fascism as “a political philosophy based upon the need of capitalism to employ the power of the State to protect the institution of production for private profit.”¹² Both works substantiated what Georgi Dimitroff said when he defined fascism as “the power of finance capital itself” in his report to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International in 1935.¹³

In this study, I use these and other writers to identify and analyze a wide range of fascist processes that inhered in U.S. monopoly-finance capitalism in the 1920s and 1930s. As such, they are not archival sources but rather written accounts—secondary sources, as historians call them—that have been buried, marginalized, or trivialized, a story itself that needs telling. Among the most significant are the works already mentioned, as well as those by Lewis Corey, Carmen Haider, Robert Brady, and others. Indeed, much of my understanding of conditions that led to the emergence and intensification of fascist processes is derived from the extraordinary analysis by Lewis Corey in his indispensable 1934 work, The Decline of American Capitalism. Despite their differences, all these writers shared common ground in viewing monopoly-finance capitalism as the seedbed for American fascism. All of their writings have become the basis for deeper inquiry. Although they emphasized the coercive and often violent practices that capitalists used to extend and secure their hold over the mass of working people, we must also consider how they shaped mass consciousness through manipulation and persuasion. Along with the terrorism came a politics of acquiescence and accommodation to capitalist imperatives essentially non-terrorist in character. To develop this position, I borrow and modify a theoretical tenet from Herbert Marcuse who, in the opening pages of One-Dimensional Man, views contemporary industrial society as essentially totalitarian in two forms: “a terroristic political coordination of society, but also non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.”¹⁴

PLAN OF THE BOOK AND ITS MAIN ARGUMENTS

The book is divided into two parts. In the first six chapters that make up Part 1, I discuss how the seeds of American fascism were sown in the Great Boom of the 1920s, a time of unprecedented capitalist growth and a dazzling spectacle of prosperity that concealed its contradictions and ultimately resulted in the worst economic crisis in the history of capitalism. This may strike the reader as counterintuitive since fascism is generally associated with crisis rather than prosperity. Nevertheless, I argue that this is precisely how fascism develops in the epicenter of the world capitalist system. When understood properly, American fascism is the product of capitalist modernization, which inevitably leads to the domination of finance capital over the rest of society.

In chapter 1, I introduce the reader to the sweeping changes in American economic, political, and cultural life brought by the capitalist ruling class in the 1920s, which transformed the means of production and social relations and widened the gap between wealth and poverty. Chapter 2 builds on what Magil and Stevens meant when they stated that the “germ” of fascism was inherent in American monopoly capitalism. I explain how the contradictions in capitalist accumulation displaced labor and made it increasingly subject to capital. To support their claim and for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with political economy, I examine Karl Marx’s analysis of the processes of capitalist accumulation as explained in his great work, Capital. I then discuss how Lewis Corey applied Marx’s analysis to the U.S. economy in the 1920s and 1930s. By doing so, the reader comes to an understanding of how the Great Depression was the result of contradictions in the so-called Great Boom of the previous decade.

In chapter 3, I describe the material abundance achieved between 1922 and 1929 that created a spectacle of prosperity, which could only be sustained by a corresponding rise in the rate of consumption. Here I introduce the reader to non-terrorist fascist processes in the form of advertising, public relations, and propaganda, all aimed at the increasing commodification of society. In chapter 4 I offer a detailed description of an evolving ideology within the business system as it developed its political arm. In chapter 5, I discuss how the spectacle and ballyhoo of material abundance and its attendant New Era ideology masked the growing divide between those who enjoyed some level of prosperity and the majority of Americans who were left behind. This general condition in U.S. society of growing poverty in a sea of plenty generated a political reaction that fueled the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan during the early and mid-1920s. I close the chapter with a discussion of how the ruling class intensified fascist processes by strengthening their hold over American society as well as other nations and peoples by its expanding global reach—Pax Americana on the rise.

I begin chapter 6 with Corey’s detailed and still unrivaled analysis of the origins of the era’s general crisis. More than any other economist of the 1930s, he brilliantly explains how overproduction in capital goods caused a halt to further productive investment throughout the entire economy, resulting in rampant speculation, culminating in the Wall Street crash. I summarize Corey’s explanation of the “bust in the boom” that set in motion the intensification of fascist processes during the Great Depression.

Part 2 focuses on the general crisis of the 1930s and the extent to which many believed that fascist rule was possible in the United States. These six chapters cover the period from the stock market crash to 1940 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt won his third term in the White House.

Chapter 7 describes the worst years of the crisis between 1929 and 1932 and the toll it took on millions of people. I focus on the rising political instability of the federal government and its failure under President Herbert Hoover to end the crisis. The increasing paralysis caused many business leaders and politicians to call for the suspension of the Constitution and agree to emergency measures that amounted to an American counterpart to Mussolini. Chapter 8 recovers a remarkable discussion of 1934 and 1935, virtually absent in recent historiography and political commentary, about whether the New Deal was fascist or a transition to fascism. It is here where we grasp the vital connection between liberalism and fascism in the transition to state monopoly capitalism in the United States, which for many resembled the corporatist state in fascist Italy. Chapter 9 examines the plethora of fringe groups that made up what many considered to be relatively insignificant in the making of American fascism—what one left-liberal journalist famously called “small-fry fascisti.”¹⁵ I also discuss the political trajectories of the two most reactionary populist demagogues of the times, the Catholic radio priest Charles Coughlin and Senator Huey Long of Louisiana, both of whom failed to build mass movements.

This leads to my discussion in chapter 10 of writers in 1934 and 1935 whose class analyses determined that the middle class would not play the primary role in the making of American fascism. In chapter 11, I focus on President Roosevelt’s assertion that the business system was “fascist.” I examine the background to his use of the word when, in the spring of 1938, he called for an inquiry into the growing power of monopolies and financial institutions that he deemed fascist. I discuss how Roosevelt’s position illustrates the “good vs. bad capitalism” dynamic in American politics, which persists today. Chapter 12 closes out the second part of the book with a discussion of Robert Brady’s detailed analysis of the business system and the progress it had made since the early 1920s in synchronizing capitalist domination over the marketplace while extending its political influence in government.

I consider this book an introduction rather than a detailed and comprehensive account. I leave the latter to U.S. historians and other social scientists whose knowledge of American history is greater than mine. I wrote this book from the perspective of a world historian who deemed it necessary to consider fascism as a product of capitalist development, specifically in the particular form that fascism took in the United States in the interwar period.

There are aspects of the making of American fascism that will not be found in the following pages. I do not treat the major personalities of the period who are rightly considered its usual fascist suspects—Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and William Randolph Hearst to name a few. Their activities have been covered by many other historians and writers. Nor do I focus on race, gender, religion, or other cultural forms of differentiation, recognizing that the entire history of American fascism in this period requires that these aspects receive full treatment. Instead, I have chosen to emphasize the capital-labor relationship and the various ways it was understood by my predecessors in the 1930s and early 1940s. Their findings were central and foundational to my work. I have also chosen not to discuss the man who was considered to be the leading American fascist intellectual of the day, Lawrence Dennis. This is because his peculiar worldview and politics were tangential to those who were the real architects of American fascism: the ruling class and its various attendants in government; trade associations like the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; and the media outlets that knowingly or unknowingly supported fascist ideas and processes.

My hope is that this brief study will convince others that there is much work to be done. Even though this book reflects my training as an historian, what I have done here also reflects my work as a journalist, with the object being to tell a story grounded in the evidence and made readable for the public. To that end, I have endeavored to make the most compelling case possible about the coming of the American Behemoth, to its now mature and frightening presence as a capitalist empire in utter decline and decay leaping from the carcass of liberal capitalist democracy into fascism.

IN 1942, FRANZ NEUMANN published his historic analysis of National Socialism, Behemoth, as much of the world fought against the fascist Axis of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Neumann justified his choice of the title by comparing it to Thomas Hobbes’s use of the same word for the title of his book on the Long Parliament, which Hobbes called a time of “complete lawlessness” in England, between 1640 and 1660, and which he described politically as a “non-state.”¹⁶ This condition, Neumann said, applied to Germany under National Socialism. Moreover, fascist ideology virtually defied theorizing within the boundaries of existing political theory. Though it contained elements of every conceivable philosophy—idealism, pragmatism, positivism, vitalism, etc.—these were not integrated to form a whole. In short, Neumann wrote, National Socialism was “incompatible with any rational political philosophy,” and the reason for it could be found in the structure of National Socialist society itself. “There exists,” he wrote, “a fundamental antagonism between the productivity of German industry, its capacity for promoting the welfare of the people and its actual achievements, and this antagonism is steadily deepening.” Neumann noted that the huge and continuous industrial machinery had been geared toward war while the regime broke one sweet promise after another.¹⁷

At the same time, National Socialism had grown stronger because it had acted “according to a most rational plan, that each and every pronouncement by its leaders is calculated, and its effect on the masses and the surrounding world is carefully weighed in advance.”¹⁸ For Neumann, what made National Socialism a distinct political phenomenon was its appeal to the people. This was the main reason it came to power. It had incorporated into its own ideology the very thing it had wrecked: large-scale democracy under the Weimar Republic. But the appeal of the former lived on in the latter and was essential to it. “National Socialism has transformed institutional democracy of the Weimar Republic into a ceremonial and a magic democracy, a development made necessary by the requirements of totalitarian war, in which the distinctions between civilians and soldiers are annihilated and in which the civilian suffers even more than the soldiers.” Neumann referred to the American political scientist Harold Lasswell, who described this situation as “the socialization of danger,” which more than ever required “full control over the whole mass of the people and over each aspect of their individual lives.”¹⁹ In order to manipulate the masses, to control them, to atomize them, to terrorize them, they had to be captured ideologically. This, Neumann said, was the essence of the fascist dictatorship.

But fascism did not end capitalism and that was central to Neumann’s critical analysis of the structure of National Socialism. No deep antagonisms among the German ruling classes existed, but neither were there common loyalties. “The cement that binds them together is profit, power, and, above all, fear of the oppressed masses,” Neumann wrote. But he also recognized that the widening contradictions between the rulers and the ruled held out the possibility that the Nazi regime would not survive, that the German masses would ultimately act on the understanding many had of the whole fraudulent and fictitious character of the regime’s ideological front—that it was all just “bunk.”²⁰ Sooner or later, all the contradictions between those who understood the realities beneath the paradox of National Socialist ideology and its anti-capitalist and anti-state propagandas would unwittingly further genuine socialist trends. Unfortunately, the history of National Socialism tragically proved otherwise.

As for the United States, fascism never came to power in the interwar period, though it is marching toward it in the present. For sure, its path is less clear than it was in Italy or Germany. Nevertheless, fascist processes in the United States have now coalesced into a clear fascist trajectory. As we go to press, it is especially evident that the ruling class has taken a decisive step in its dance with a president whose crude pragmatism is at the root of his fascist ideology. In this respect, Trump is no different than was Hitler, who railed against the ruling class and then embraced it at a crucial moment in the consolidation of his power.

To know the American Behemoth as Neumann knew its German predecessor is the condition required to bring it down. This is why I have chosen to study its origins.