British Fascism

How should we identify fascism, given that virtually no contemporary political party attempting to build a mass movement, or secure power through the ballot box, will self-identify as fascist? The political situation is widely assumed to have shifted following the Second World War. Understandably, the Nazi industrialization of murder has meant that fascism, as a political creed, is forever discredited in the eyes of the majority of people. However, as Billig (1978: 125) points out, analysis of fascist discourse from the inter-war period reveals that fascist movements “encountered a qualitatively similar problem”, encouraging concealment of the true intentions of the party. In the period between 1930 and Hindenburg appointing Hitler Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) tried to appear more moderate; they wanted to be perceived as a political party aimed at achieving power by constitutional means rather than violent direct action. This political goal was reflected, sometimes in subtle and implicit ways, in their propaganda. For example, one line of the song Die Fahne Hoch (“The Flag on High”)—widely known as The Horst Wessel Song—was changed in order to underplay their by now well-established paramilitarism. The line which used to be sung:

Bald flattern Hitlerfahnen über Barrikaden

[Soon Hitler's flags will flutter above the barricades]

was now sung as:

Bald flattern Hitlerfahnen über alle Straßen

[Soon Hitler's flags will flutter above all streets]

The genocidal intent of Hitler was similarly absent from mass propaganda until 1939 (Herf 2006) and, until the outbreak of war, was not “publicly proclaimed as the ultimate goal of the Nazi programme” (Billig 1978: 125). Cohn (1967: 183) argues that a book published in 1924 by Hitler’s mentor Eckart—entitled Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: a dialogue between Adolf Hitler and myself—was downplayed by the ideologues and propagandists of the NSDAP “precisely because it was too revealing”. Similarly, contrasting the ideas and arguments in Goebbels’ public speeches, private diaries and an interview, Eckhardt (1968) suggested that “one explanation for the difference between the values of the Goebbels’ diaries and his other fascist sources might be that the diaries were not intended for public consumption” (from Billig 1978: 70).

Contradictions remain in both contemporary fascist ideology and between the pronouncements and actions of political extremists—that is, between what they say they stand for, and what they do. As early as 1923, Klara Zetkin argued “If you compare the programme of Italian fascism with its performance, one thing is already apparent today: the complete ideological bankruptcy of the movement. There is the most blatant contradiction between what fascism has promised and what it actually delivers to the masses” (p.108). Some of these contradictions are the product of attempting to appeal to different audiences, and are therefore similar in kind (but, perhaps, not degree) to the forms of chicanery observable in modern political communications from across the political spectrum. So, for example

Hitler made no mention whatsoever of the Jews in his notorious speech delivered before the Hamburg National Club in February 1926. The sole aim of the Nazi movement, he underscored then, was the ‘total and complete’ annihilation of Marxism. This contrasts with remarks made when speaking before his ‘own’ audience in the Munich beer halls, where almost every speech was replete with brutal attacks on Jews as the ‘masterminds behind financial capital’, ‘polluters of the people’ and adherents of the ‘subversive doctrine of Marxism’. (Kershaw 2008: 54)

Other inconsistencies, ambiguities and contradictions are specific to fascism. The above quote contains an obvious one: that Jews are, apparently, both the ‘masterminds behind financial capital’ and the ‘subversive doctrine of Marxism’. This seeming contradiction is resolved through recourse to a higher order explanation. That is, fascists’ frequent criticism of capitalism using a pseudo-leftist vocabulary, and frequent criticism of Communism using a conservative vocabulary, are reconciled in fascist ideology through an explanation that sees both capitalism and communism as two sides of a single ‘internationalist’ conspiracy.

Other contradictions in fascist discourse are the direct reflection of the deceptions that fascists need to perform, in order to appeal to a mass audience. Fascism is inherently and inescapably inegalitarian. This inegalitarianism is marked in two major ways: first, fascism seeks to deny and, in its regime form, reverse the small progressive victories that have helped ameliorate the structural violence that capitalism heaps onto workers. These include the destruction of working class organisations and removing legal constraints on unbridled economic exploitation. These basic facts of fascist economics (which I discuss in more detail below) mean that fascist discourse must conceal the ways it encodes the economic interests of the minority, in order to entrench the exploitation of the majority. Even the liberal historian Roger Griffin acknowledges that Marxist approaches to the analysis of fascism have demonstrated “empirically how any apparent victory of […] fascism can only be won at the cost of systematically deceiving the popular masses about the true nature of its rule” (1998: 5). This leads on to the second way that fascism enshrines and enacts inegalitarian politics: “fascist movements use ideology deliberately to manipulate and divert the frustrations and anxieties of the mass following away from their objective source […whether through] an emphasis on essentially irrational concepts such as authority, obedience, honour, duty, the fatherland or race […or] emphasis on the hidden enemies who have sinister designs on society and who threaten the longed-for sense of community” (Kitchen 1976: 86). As well as embracing, inter alia, xenophobia, racism and conspiracy theories, this fundamentally deceitful and manipulative mode of political communications indexes the hierarchical and elitist distinctions between groups of people inherent in fascist political structuration. Specifically: the leader(s) is/are wise and knowledgeable; the party and movement exist to service the vision of the leader(s); and the general population is to be managed—ideally kept ignorant and misled regarding their true interests and opponents, but terrorised, imprisoned and even killed should obedience not be achieved.

Academic discussion of fascism

Milza and Bernstein (1992: 7) argue that “No universally accepted definition of the fascist phenomenon exists, no consensus, however slight, as to its range, its ideological origins, or the modalities of action which characterise it”. Indeed, since it emerged, there has always been variability and disagreement about how to classify or define fascism. These disagreements have themselves shifted, so the arguments of the 1930s were different to those of the 1960s, different again to the debates now, and shaped in part by the histories, debates and current political realities in different national contexts. Nevertheless, a sense remains that there must be an ideological core—or collection of essential (fascist) political or ideological traits—that allows us to recognise and identify fascism as fascism. Or, at minimum, there must be a group of “definitional characteristics of the genus fascism, of which each variety is a different manifestation” (Griffin 1998: 2). Accordingly, since the 1970s there have been repeated academic attempts to codify the plurality of what fascism ‘really’ was—and perhaps is—and what the aims and characteristics of a fascist political movement are.

Central to these discussions were a number of debates which have yet to be resolved: is fascism an ideology or a system of rule? Was fascism limited to a period between 1919 and 1945—a mini-epoch? Or is it a praxis, or an ideology, that has survived the end of the Second World War? Is fascism modernising or conservative? Is fascism reactionary, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary? To what extent was fascism a generic phenomenon, with various permutations within one unified ideological family; or were different regimes the product of different socio-political conditions and historical traditions? Should we regard fascism as an aberration? A psycho-social pathology? As a product of crisis and disease in society (Gregor 1974: 28), of “blackest, unfathomable despair” (Drucker 1939: 271), or a reflection of the prejudiced authoritarian personality of fascist leaders and their supporters (Adorno et al 1950)? Within work advancing historical and socio-economic frames of reference, fascism has been given a bewildering variety of contradictory classifications, and placed at almost all points on the ideological spectrum: as a counter-revolutionary movement of the extreme right (Renton 1999), as the extremism of the centre (Lipset 1960), as a synthesis of both left and right offering a combination of “organic nationalism and anti-Marxist socialism” (Sternhell 1986: 9), or as a particular form of totalitarian government, which shares key features with the Communist left (Friedrich, summarised in Kitchen 1976: 27).

There is, in short, an almost insuperable volume of quite contradictory work on fascist ideology and fascist movements. De Felice (1991), for example, lists 12,208 books and articles in a bibliography devoted to Italian Fascism, generic fascism and the history of the Second World War; Rees’ (1979) annotated bibliography on fascism in Britain lists 608 publications on British fascism by that date alone, and a further 270 written by fascists themselves. Given this outpouring, and the ways that such theorisation has, in part at least, reflected broad trends in Western geopolitics (particularly post-WWII), it should come as little surprise that one’s definition of fascism (or indeed Fascism3) is as much a reflection of the political commitments of the writer—and specifically, their perception of the function of scholarship on fascism—as it is a reflection of the material or historical ‘facts on the ground’. On the one side of the argument we find the challenging polemics of Renton (1999: 18), demanding “how can a historian, in all conscience, approach the study of fascism with neutrality? […] One cannot be balanced when writing about fascism, there is nothing positive to be said of it.” On the other, there is Griffin (1998), who argues that historians should “treat fascism like any other ideology” (p.15); in other words, it should be approached and defined “as an ideology inferable from the claims made by its own protagonists” (p.238).

Since the end of the 1960s, a body of work has developed whose primary focus is on fascist ideology, and aims to extract the ideological core of “generic fascism that may account for significant and unique similarities between the various permutations of fascism whilst convincingly accommodating deviations as either nationally or historically specific phenomena” (Kallis 2009: 41). This work on generic fascism has sometimes formulated lists of such “significant and unique similarities”, aiming to distil the “various permutations of fascism” down to a minimum number of necessary and sufficient characteristics: the so-called ‘fascist minimum’. Ernst Nolte (1968) developed the first of these, wherein he argued that fascism was characterised by three antagonistic ideological elements—anti-communism; anti-liberalism; anti-conservatism—and three political arrangements: the Führerprinzip; a party army; and the aim of totalitarian control. Nolte’s objective (though not his theoretical approach) was then developed in novel and fruitful ways by others—amongst them Juan Linz, Stanley Payne, Roger Eatwell and Walter Laqueur. Such work reaches its apotheosis in the work of Roger Griffin, whose one-sentence definition of fascism—“Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” (Griffin 1993: 26), or “formulated in three words: ‘palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism’” (1998: 13)—is, truly, a minimal fascist minimum. Indeed, the extreme brevity of his definition drew withering comment from Paxton (2005: 221), who suggests Griffin’s “zeal to reduce fascism to one pithy sentence seems to me more likely to inhibit than to stimulate analysis of how and with whom it worked.”

There is no doubting, however, the significant influence that Griffin’s approach has had, particularly on American and British scholars. Some praise his scholarship and the heuristic value of his definition, and include themselves within his claimed ‘new consensus’ on fascism studies; others are far more circumspect about its politics and the degree of convergence that Griffin claims between his work and that of others. For example, Woodley (2010: 1) has argued that the ‘new consensus’ in fascism studies developed by “revisionist historians” such as Griffin, “is founded less on scholarly agreement than a conscious rejection of historical materialism as a valid methodological framework.” Baker (2006b: 286) goes as far as to accuse Griffin of “methodological colonialism” in his attempts to argue that (seemingly all!) writers share his definition of a fascist minimum, and the notion of palingenesis in particular. It is towards Griffin’s definition that this chapter now turns.

Griffin’s mythic core:

fascism as palingenetic ultra-nationalism

Roger Griffin argues that fascism should be defined as “a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” (1991: 26). Fascism, he argues, aims to rejuvenate, revitalise and reconstruct the nation following a period of perceived decadence, crisis and/or decline. Griffin uses the Victorian term ‘palingenesis’, meaning ‘rebirth from the ashes’, to characterise this central motivating spirit (Geist) of fascism, though it is only when combined with the other elements in the noun phrase, that his fascist minimum is given a sense of ideological form. Thus, in response to criticisms that ‘national rebirth’ is not a uniquely fascist ideological commitment, Griffin argues: “I agree entirely […] It is only when the two terms are combined (‘palingenetic ultra-nationalism’) that they form a compound definitional component” (Griffin 2006b: 263–4). Detailing his noun phrase a little more, he uses

‘populist’ not to refer to a particular historical experience […] but as a generic term for political forces which, even if led by small elite cadres or self-appointed ‘vanguards’, in practice or in principle (and not merely for show) depend on ‘people power’ as the basis of their legitimacy. I am using ‘ultra-nationalism’ […] to refer to forms of nationalism which ‘go beyond’, and hence reject, anything compatible with liberal institutions or with the tradition of Enlightenment humanism which underpins them” (Griffin, 1991: 36–7).

Since 1998 Griffin (c.f. 2006a, 2006b, 2007: 179–183) has argued that a ‘new consensus’ has developed in Anglophone fascist studies around the utility and application of his definition. Like him, this ‘new consensus’ “rejects Marxist, essentialist or metapolitical notions of the ‘fascist minimum’ [and] identifies this minimum in a core ideology of national rebirth (palingenesis) that embraces a vast range of highly diverse concrete historical permutations” (Griffin 2006a: 29). His own heuristic definition has shifted, slightly, since its first iteration (for an interview discussing this, see Griffin 2008). In Modernism and Fascism, for example, he wrote:

FASCISM is a revolutionary species of political modernism originating in the early twentieth century whose mission is to combat the allegedly degenerative forces of contemporary history (decadence) by bringing about an alternative modernity and temporality (a ‘new order’ and a ‘new era’) based on the rebirth, or palingenesis, of the nation. Fascists conceive the nation as an organism shaped by historic, cultural, and in some cases, ethnic and hereditary factors, a mythic construct incompatible with liberal, conservative, and communist theories of society. (Griffin 2007: 181)

For theorists who work within this approach, fascist ideas are revolutionary, not reactionary; modern, not conservative; and ‘positive’, in the sense that they envision and are directed towards utopian ideals, rather than a range of fascist negations (such as the anti-communism, anti-liberalism and anti-conservatism of Nolte’s (1968) minimum). That said, Griffin has also argued: although “the rampant eclecticism of fascism makes generalizations about its specific ideological contents hazardous, the general tenor of all [fascist] permutations places it in the tradition of the late nineteenth-century revolt against liberalism” (Griffin 1993, reprinted in Griffin 1998: 37). Thus, despite his stated reservations regarding Nolte’s definition, he regards anti-liberalism, or (with a nod to fascism’s “futural dynamic”) “post-liberalism”, to be a necessary feature of a fascist ideological programme.

Griffin’s heuristic definition approaches fascism primarily as a set of ideological myths expounded by its leaders. As he has argued: “The premise of this approach [the ‘new consensus’…] is to take fascist ideology at its face value, and to recognize the central role played in it by the myth of national rebirth to be brought about by a finding a ‘Third Way’ between liberalism/capitalism and communism/socialism” (Griffin 1998: 238). That is, Griffin and similarly idealist historians form their conclusions regarding the ideological content of fascism on the basis of discourse produced by fascists themselves. Griffin (1993, reprinted in Griffin 1998: 38) maintains that fascists have “produced relatively elaborate theories on such themes as the organic concept of the state, the leader principle, economics, corporatism, aesthetics, law, education, technology, race, history, morality and the role of the church.” These theories, he argues, should be the main foci of analysis, preceding analysis of specific movements and contexts.

My approach taken in this book overlaps, to a degree, with that proposed by Griffin; the exact manner of this overlap I will detail later on in this chapter. However, it also differs in several significant ways, which position my analysis squarely outside of the ‘new consensus’. For example, take Griffin’s definition of populism, quoted above: “a generic term for political forces which […] depend on ‘people power’ as the basis of their legitimacy” (Griffin 1991: 36–7). This may be a necessary aspect of any definition of populism, but it is insufficient to account for the particular form of populism orchestrated within fascist movements. At a bare minimum, we need to make a distinction between right wing populism and left wing populism (see Wodak et al 2013). De Grand (2006: 218) offers this useful distinction between the two:

Left-wing populism has traditionally blamed economic elites for many of its grievances and has supported labour unions, the right to strike and egalitarian values, whereas right-wing populism has traditionally railed against the evil influence of Marxists, liberals, Jews, Blacks or immigrants, and, rather than attacking upper class material interests, has [de facto or de jure] defended them by opposing labour unions and labour strikes and by channelling social anger towards racial or ethnic ‘inferiors’.

Looking at De Grand’s two broad-brush descriptions, it is immediately apparent that fascism—as ideology, political programme and regime—fits squarely with the second: fascism is not simply populist, but right-wing populist. Fascism’s populist agenda does not depend simply on ‘people power’, but on channelling anger towards ‘parasitic’ and/or ‘contaminating’ Outgroups. Within left-wing populism, the working class are (rhetorically) united against political-economic elites; within right-wing populism the working class are divided, and an unpatriotic and/or internationalist political-economic elite is blamed for the existence of the portion of the population deemed ‘undesirable’. Left-wing populism orientates towards egalitarian principles; right-wing populism orientates towards chauvinism—inclusion for Us, exclusion (at best) for Them. The distinction is stark, and needs to be made patently clear in any heuristic account.

I will now outline three further key points of divergence before introducing my discourse analytic approach in more detail. The following sections draw heavily on the debates published in Griffin et al (2006).

A mythic (not political-economic) core

The key problem which I, and others (inter alia De Grand 2006; Mann 2004; Woodley 2010, 2013), have with Griffin’s definition of fascism stems from his philosophical idealism and the constitutive power imputed to political myth. Griffin’s ontology has its origins in the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century, and specifically in the way it lays “emphasis on the way in which we invest the world with our own meanings” (McLellan 1986: 7). From such an Idealist ontological foundation, there is believed to be a movement from ideas to material reality; in other words, social consciousness is taken to determine social being. Opposing such an approach is a Materialist view of social practice. Those who adopt a materialist perspective suggest that this determining relationship is predominantly the other way around, from material reality to ideas. Critiquing the Idealistic philosophical position, Marx argues it is “a mistake to start from human consciousness and to proceed from this to an investigation of material reality. The correct approach [is] the other way around. The origin of the problem was not mistaken ideas, but the misshapen nature of social reality which generated mistaken ideas” (McLellan 1986: 12). I point this out not to push for a narrowly deterministic explanation of the relationship between social practice and (fascist) ideology, nor to argue that fascist ideology is simply symptomatic of class conflict and so a reflection of ruling class interests—such interpretations were always a caricature of Marxist dialectical analysis. Rather, it should be acknowledged that political ideas are never divorced from social practice—they are both constituted and constituting; shaped by situations, institutions and social structures, but also shaping them (Fairclough & Wodak 1997: 55). As De Grand (2006: 96) puts it, by “cutting the analysis off from the economic and social realities, we lose a sense of how the regimes affected real people. Abstract projects become more important than realizations”. Or, in more stark terms:

Griffin’s idealism is nothing to be proud of. It is a major defect. How can a ‘myth’ generate ‘internal cohesion’ or ‘driving force’? A myth cannot be an agent driving or integrating anything, since ideas are not free-floating. Without power organizations, ideas cannot actually do anything. (Mann 2004: 12)

The three concepts Griffin identifies (palingenetic; populist; ultra-nationalism) may well be necessary but, even combined, they are insufficient to properly define fascism since they are detached from material practices. Griffin, however, mocks analysts who approach fascism from a Marxist dialectical perspective:

The sense of living in a post-fascist world is not shared by Marxists, of course, who ever since the first appearance of Mussolini’s virulently anti-communist squadrismo have instinctively assumed fascism to be endemic to capitalism. No matter how much it may appear to be an autonomous force, it is for them inextricably bound up with the defensive reaction of bourgeois elites or big business to the attempts by revolutionary socialists to bring about the fundamental changes needed to assure social justice through a radical redistribution of wealth and power. (Griffin 2006a: 37)

There are three points to make regarding this extract. First, he claims that Marxists “have instinctively assumed fascism to be endemic to capitalism” [my emphasis]. Marxists would argue that their conclusions are based not on instinct or assumption, but on an understanding of how labour is organised under capitalism and basic empirical observation. Capitalism rests on workers not being paid the full value of their labour. An employer will pay workers, but they will not compensate them for the full value of their labour—the remainder, this ‘surplus value’, is the accumulated product of the unpaid labour time of workers. In layman’s terms, this is what is called profit. Every fascist regime was founded on such a capitalist mode of production; every fascist ideology is founded on (qualified) support for a capitalist mode of production; no fascist regime threatened the property and economic privileges of the upper classes (Mann 2004: 62–63; see also Chapter 5). Benjamins (1973: 243) summarises this as follows: “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” As I discuss below, fascist opposition to certain capitalists, or companies or (especially) international capital does not remove the basic fact that, under fascism, labour continued to be organised in such a way that it generated surplus value—profit—for companies and their owners. Indeed, Griffin (2006a: 44) acknowledges this, stating that Nazism ‘renewed’ the economic sphere of inter-war Germany “by adapting capitalism rather than abolishing it”. Obviously there are many different forms of capitalism; clearly these can be more or less repressive, more or less exploitative, more or less illiberal. But all fascisms are capitalist—that is, they assume and advocate a political economy structured with the means of production in private hands, and labour power purchased in order to produce surplus value (profit).