It has been widely overlooked that Karl Marx in the early 1840s anticipated some of the most essential features of the fascist movement of our time.
Several reasons for this oversight might be adduced. Marx's posthumous work, to which we are referring, was only published after the Great War, by D. Rjazanoff, in Moscow.1 It is a commentary, not intended for print, on §§ 261–313 of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, i.e., the parts dealing with the State. The beginning of the manuscript (relating to §§ 257–260) appears to be missing; the text itself is of inordinate length and is inevitably somewhat repetitious. Yet it is of exceptional interest; some of its most brilliant passages refute the mystifying application of Hegel's logic with unsurpassed penetration. For all that it might have seemed singularly inappropriate to seek for illumination on a typically modern industrial and political development, such a fascist corporativism, in a philosophical writing produced several generations ago, merely because it discusses gilds or corporations.
Indeed, it might easily appear as if, misled by the identity of the term ‘corporation’, we were comparing like to unlike. In the century which separated Hegel from Mussolini liberal capitalism ran its course from start to finish. In the Germany of 1841–42 – the presumed date of Marx's voluminous draft – liberal economy had not yet been born, while the corporative experiments of the 1920s and 30s in Italy, Austria and some other countries marked its end. In Hegel's time the ancien régime still held sway and gilds had not yet been discarded in favour of a competitive economy; in the era of Mussolini, competitive economy itself was passing away and was being replaced by new gild forms of industry. Eighteenth-century gilds were of course based on traditional handicraft while twentieth-century corporatism was using highly mechanized plant. The revived corporations were now to serve as bastions of the new industrial feudalism which was to hold monopoly of power over a helpless proletariat … Thus the two kinds of corporations were certainly vastly dissimilar both in regard to technical level and to historical function. Undoubtedly, Marx's critique of corporativism was based on entirely different grounds from those of the modern Marxists’ attack on fascist corporations.
Yet in one most important respect the position was analogous. Now as then corporations formed part of an industrial system hostile to democracy. Both pre-liberal and post-liberal gilds were a form of industrial organization antagonistic to popular government and well suited to obstruct its development, or to destroy it, if it already existed. Marx in 1841 was inveighing against corporativism in the name of democracy, and liberals as well as socialists are fighting its recrudescence today under the same banner. This circumstance may help to explain the deep insights opened up by Marx into the nature of fascism at a time when this sinister development was still entirely beyond the horizon of the age.
Marx was 23 years old when he penned his notes on Hegel's opinions on the nature of the State. He was at that time not yet a socialist. Politically, he was a Radical, passionately opposed to the reactionary absolutism of the Prussian régime which denied a constitution to the people, and detesting almost as much the sham constitutions of some German states with their monarchical prerogatives, paternalistic police state methods, and antiquated Estates. These anachronistic régimes were propped up by the influence of no less outmoded gilds. Marx was, therefore, equally emphatic in his advocacy of the popular vote and his denunciation of corporativism. Radical reform in the political sphere called for a similarly radical reform in the economic sphere. No democratic politician could accept the perpetuation of the outworn gild organization in industry.
This takes us straight to the point. The young Marx, though otherwise still wrapped in idealistic philosophy, was already thoroughly ‘Marxian’ in this respect. He unhesitatingly stood for progress, and preferred capitalism however ‘inhuman’ to feudalism however ‘humane’. Against Hegel's romantic “medievalism” he pressed the claims of liberal capitalism in its most undiluted form. Industrial life required free competitive markets, while political life was to rest on free popular democracy.
As Marx recognized, such a development involved a complete separation of the political and the economic sphere in society. Yet, so Marx believed, only if economic individualism was unhindered by corporative rules and regulations, could public life be founded on political individualism and the people succeed in achieving power in the State.
At this point Marx showed an almost prophetic insight. No one before him, and for a long time none after him, had recognized the importance of the institutional separation of the political and economic sphere in society. Such a separation is the true characteristic of liberal capitalism. More than that, Marx did not fail to note that compared with medieval feudal society, this represented an advance since it made the development of political democracy possible. Later, when Marx became a socialist, he realized that political democracy was not enough, but that democracy must be made to compose the whole of society including the economic sphere. It was in respect to the latter that fascism attempted to sidetrack human progress. For instead, far from extending the power of the democratic state to industry, fascism endeavoured to extend the power of an autocratic industry over the State, and thus destroy the very basis of political democracy. Marx's analysis of the reactionary role of corporativism in his time foreshadowed a vital aspect of the part played by fascist corporativism in our own time.
Hegel made no secret of his desire to justify the existing ‘constitutional’ position in Prussia, though that country actually possessed no constitution at all. It was a system of personal rule of the monarch slightly qualified by the existence of provincial Diets some of which had the right of the purse in respect to traditional taxes. Not even a National Diet was in being in Prussia. The provincial Diets were of the most multifarious character. The Estates combined various forms of representation, from personal participation as in the case of the feudal nobility to delegation by corporations some of which were municipal, the great majority however, were vocational, corresponding to the gild organization of economic life. No suffrage of any kind, no representation of the citizen as such obtained. The cry for constitution raised by Liberals of all shades ranged from the modest demand for a National Diet to the abolition of the Estates altogether and their replacement by a representative assembly elected by the citizens.
Hegel's apologia for the status quo hinged on two contentions. Firstly, he defended the Estates [and] argued that only “representation” through them had an “organic” character and safeguarded the unity of society; secondly he emphasized that the existing craft gilds or corporations offered the only natural basis for a “constitution” (as he insisted on calling the state of affairs in Prussia).
Marx's critical commentary may be summed up as follows:
[…] for Prussian constitutionalism, i.e. absolutism, thinly camouflaged by the presence of so-called Estates; Marx stood for representative government, the popular vote and the abolition of the antiquated institution of the Estates. The main part of his Notes was an attack on Hegel's attempt to establish Prussian ancien régime methods as the apogee of human freedom.
It was at this point that gilds or corporations moved into the picture. Under the ancien régime, gilds or Korporationen (as they were called in eighteenth-century Germany) formed an important part of the constitution since they were represented in the Estates. In his attack on the Estates, Marx was confronted with Hegel's insistence on the gild organization of industry and on the alleged necessity of allowing the gilds a function in the State.
We can thus clearly see why the role of the gilds was a major preoccupation of Marx, why he was bound to oppose them as props of the ancien régime, and why in the fight against corporativism the cause of political democracy was involved.
Now, the corporative State of modern fascism was in a very real sense an attempt to make use of essential features of the traditional gild system under changed circumstances. How different the conditions were both technologically and socially will be seen later on. Yet the decisive analogy with the past lay in the antidemocratic function of the gild system, now as then. Marx probed into this aspect of the matter with an extraordinary penetration and, incidentally, revealed the basic alternative underlying social development in our time.
We are hinting here at Marx's insistence on the tendency of market-economy to destroy the unity of society by establishing a distinct economic sphere in society. For such a development must lead to an institutional separation of the political and the economic sphere, which could only be transitory and necessarily raises the fundamental question on what basis the unity of society shall be restored. Eventually, it was to this issue that socialism and fascism offered opposite and mutually incompatible answers. Marx had indeed hit on a crucial problem, the full importance of which for the future he could not, of course, yet gauge.
These introductory remarks may leave us wondering why the matter had hitherto been overlooked. Whether the corporativism of the Prussia of 1842 and that of the Italy or Austria of the 1930s had really as much in common as we have seem to assume? And how far can it therefore be seriously claimed that Marx's thoughts bore a definite reference to broad problems raised by corporative tendencies in our own time?
Only comparatively recently has this voluminous manuscript been made available to the Western European public. Up to the end of the Great War it was in the keeping of the German Social Democratic Party. It was first published under the title Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State by the Marx-Engels Institute of Moscow, under the editorship of D. Rjazanoff in 1927. But only in 1932 was the text reprinted in Germany, by Landshut & Meyer, in a two volume edition of the early works of Marx. This edition also contained an important hitherto entirely unknown manuscript, entitled “Nationalökonomie und Philosophie”, which justly attracted great interest.
As to the “Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State” which was included in Volume l, Landshut and Meyer themselves did not fail to emphasize its importance, which they saw, however, primarily in the field of philosophy and logic. They pointed to the brilliant critique of Hegel's mystificatory use of the dialectic, which undoubtedly marked a turning point in the development of the young Marx. Feuerbach's naturalism was now coming to his help in his effort to emancipate himself from the spell of idealistic dialectic. To my knowledge, Macmurray commented upon the ‘democracy of unfreedom’ passage in 1935, and, later, Adams gave a subtle analysis of its role in the development of Marx's logic. The political content of the “Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State” was hardly touched upon.
‘Korporation’, as we said, was the term in common use in eighteenth-century Prussia for ‘gild.’ Other terms also were current as ‘Innung’, ‘Zunft’ or ‘Genossenschaft’. Hegel, who preferred to define terms for his own purposes, used the generic term ‘Korporation’ as a synonym for ‘gild.’ In numerous passages he expatiates on the role and function of the ‘Korporation’ as a monopolistic organization of those professing a craft of industry. Gierke's monumental Deutsches Genossenschaftsrecht went into every ramification of German gild organization and followed step by step the development which led by the eighteenth century to the adoption of a term ‘Korporation’ to denote all forms of industrial gilds in Germany.
The modern term ‘corporativism’ again is a derivative of the Italian name for gild, namely ‘corporazione’. The idea to revive the gild system under the conditions of modern large scale industry was mooted both by socialists and by fascists after the Great War. In gild socialism, as represented by G.D.H. Cole in the 1920s, the producers became the owners of industry, and the gild form of organization was meant to ensure both functional democracy and harmonious cooperation with the State and municipality. In Italian fascism the gild was meant to serve the opposite purpose. Ownership remained with the capitalists, i.e. with the non-producers, the workers unions or syndicates forming merely a section of the gild or corporation. A society thus grounded was the utter denial both of industrial and political democracy. It was first suggested by Rossoni (or Bottai) in 1919, and sponsored by Mussolini in 1920. Next year, Othmar Spann in Vienna produced an elaborate social philosophy, which in somewhat different terms laid out the same general plan, in his Wahre Staat (1921). Partly to this inspiration was due the Papal Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of 1931, which was meant to universalise the idea of the Corporative State. Seemingly it made concessions to the democratic idea but in essence maintained the sole rule of the capitalist class over State and industry.
(Incidentally in the Anglo-Saxon world the term ‘corporation’ took on a number of meanings which are different from that of gild. It may denote the broad medieval conception of organic community or the more modern issue of a public body incorporated by charter or statute; in the United States its most frequent meaning is simply that of limited company).
Clearly corporations in the Prussia of the early nineteenth century, when Hegel wrote, and corporations in the early twentieth century were very different matters. When the party programmes of the Italian fascists (1922), the German Nazi fascists (1923), and the Austrian Heimwehr fascists of Starhemberg (1929) and Dollfuss (1932), as well as the Papal Encyclical (1931) declared for the corporative idea, liberal capitalism had had its run. In Hegel's time it had not yet started on its course. While in the age of Hegel and the young Marx, market economy was still to come and its full development was inhibited by the medieval survival of the gilds, in the age of Mussolini and Hitler market economy had spent its force and the corporative principle was invoked under entirely different circumstances.
The situation had indeed changed in almost every respect. The gild was a remnant of the pre-machine age, the time when crafts and mysteries were carried on with the help of comparatively simple tools; the new corporativism was designed to apply to highly mechanized plant and mammoth enterprises. The gilds had been formed in an environment of independent craftsmen and artisans, in which the journeyman belonged to the same class as his master or at least was not far removed from it; the fascist corporation was, on the contrary, founded on rigid class distinction of owners and non-owners, of capitalists and proletarians, separated from one another as by the barriers of caste. Thus the two kinds of corporation were certainly vastly dissimilar both in regard to technical equipment and to social function, and it may appear rather artificial to link the one with the other on account of a mere similarity of name.
Actually there was a striking likeness in the political role of the corporations defended by Hegel and those advocated by almost all fascist movements of our period. Then as now the gild organization of privately owned industry was a powerful enemy of popular government; it was an obstacle to its introduction, and a means of abolishing it, once it had been introduced.
In other words: While under socialism the unity of society is restored through the extension of political democracy to the economic sphere, fascism represents the diametrically opposite effort to unify society by making an undemocratic industry the master of the State.
In conclusion, let me say that what Marx here called the separation of the political and economic sphere in society has been now for some time recognized as the incompatibility of liberal capitalism and popular democracy. By eliminating the one or the other, the unity of society can be restored. Even before the author of this article had read Marx's comments on Hegel's views of the State, he summed up (in 1934) the position thus2:
Basically there are two solutions: the extension of the democratic principle from politics to economics, or the abolition of the Democratic ‘political sphere’ altogether.
The extension of the democratic principle to economics implies the abolition of the private property of the means of production, and hence the disappearance of a separate autonomous economic sphere: the democratic political sphere becomes the whole of society. This, essentially, is socialism.
Conversely:
After the abolition of the democratic political sphere only economic life remains: Capitalism as organized in the different branches of industry becomes the whole of society. This is the fascist solution.
Clearly this amounts to hardly more than a paraphrase of Marx's critique of corporativism written in 1841–2.