THE SOCIALIST ROOTS OF FASCISM
There are few words in the English language that have as negative a connotation as “fascism.” The word brings to mind the horrors of Nazi Germany, Japanese imperialism during the first half of the twentieth century, and Hitler’s ally, the Italian dictator Mussolini. After World War II the socialist dictator of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, engineered a rhetorical/propaganda coup (with the help of the worldwide socialist movement) by repeating the notion that the only alternative to Russian socialism was fascism. Classical liberalism, with its emphasis on individual freedom, free-market economics, peace, and constitutionalism was treated as though it never existed; indeed, it was conflated with one of its deadliest enemies and opponents, fascism. But as we’ve seen, socialists are never much concerned about truth.
The truth is that fascism was always a form of socialism. Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascist Italy, had been an international socialist before a national socialist, the latter being the essence of fascism. Nationalist socialism was also content to allow private business to survive as long as it was directed by government subsidies and policy, a form of socialist control that in our own country goes by the name of “crony capitalism,” where government rewards its political friends rather than allowing the operation of a free market.
In 2007 the University of Chicago Press published Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom as volume two of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, edited by economist Bruce Caldwell.1 This version of the book included several appendices, including a 1933 essay that Hayek wrote entitled “Nazi-Socialism.” “[T]he socialist character of National Socialism [Nazism] has been quite generally unrecognized,” Hayek wrote.2 German businessmen who supported the Nazi Party were incredibly shortsighted, said Hayek, for they did not recognize the pervasive anti-capitalism that was at the heart of national socialism.
Referring to the economic policy positions of the Nazi Party (as opposed to its militarism and anti-Semitism) Hayek noted that the Nazi policy platform was “full of ideas resembling those of the early socialists.”3 The dominant feature, he said, was a fierce hatred of anything capitalistic—“individual profit seeking, large-scale enterprise, banks, joint-stock companies, department stores, international finance and loan capital, the system of ‘interest slavery,’ in general. . . .”4
Hayek described the Nazi policy program as nothing less than a “violent anti-capitalistic attack,” which is not at all surprising since “It is not even denied [in 1933] that many of the young men who today play a prominent part in it have previously been communists or socialists.”5 Moreover, the common characteristic of all the German journalists at the time who supported the Nazis “was their anti-liberal and anti-capitalist trend”; they even adopted the slogan “the end of capitalism” as their “accepted dogma.”6
One distinguishing feature of German national socialism, as opposed to Russian international socialism, was that it purported to be “middle class socialism” as opposed to proletarian socialism. All of the “leading men,” in Italian and German fascism, Hayek point out, “from Mussolini downward. . . . began as socialists and ended as Fascists or Nazis.”7
FASCISM AS A VARIETY OF SOCIALISM
As with all forms of socialism, fascist ideology was first and foremost an attack on classical liberalism, the philosophy that underpins capitalism, and that was perhaps stated clearest in Ludwig von Mises’ 1927 book Liberalism.8 The key features of classical liberalism, as defined by Mises, are property rights, freedom, peace, equality under the law, acceptance of the inequality of income and wealth based on the reality of human uniqueness, limited constitutional government, and tolerance.
Socialism in all its varieties is nothing if it is not an attack on every one of these principles, especially private property. Indeed, “THE ABOLITION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY” is the hallmark idea of The Communist Manifesto. Socialist ideologues and propagandists like Benito Mussolini spent years crusading against the principles of classical liberalism and capitalism to lay the ideological groundwork for their brand of socialism. In his book, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, Mussolini wrote that “The Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. . . . It is opposed to classical liberalism . . . [which] denied the State in the name of the individual” (emphasis added).9
The second chapter of The Road to Serfdom compares and contrasts the philosophies of collectivism, which is socialism in all its variants, and individualism, defined simply as respect for the individual as an individual. Human beings own themselves, the individualist philosophy contends, and should not be viewed as pawns in political chess games operated by politicians, or as human “rats” to be experimented upon by social engineers. Socialists believe exactly the opposite. As expressed by Mussolini himself: “The maxim that society exists only for the well-being and freedom of the individuals composing it does not seem to be in conformity with nature’s plans, which care only for the species and seem ready to sacrifice the individual.”10 This idea that individuals can be and should be sacrificed for “the greater good” is the essence of the fascist/socialist/collectivist philosophy.
Mussolini declared classical liberal ideas to be dead when he pontificated that “if the XIXth century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the ‘collective’ century, and therefore the century of the State. . . . If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government.”11
Like Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, Mussolini harshly denounced capitalism and free markets. He bemoaned “the selfish pursuit of material prosperity”; declared fascism to be a “reaction . . . against the flaccid materialistic conception of happiness”; and implored his audiences to “reject the economistic literature of the 18th century,”12 presumably referring to the free market writings of Adam Smith.
Italian and German fascists nationalized many, but not all, industries. They allowed a much larger degree of private property ownership and private business ownership than the Russian socialists did, but the key was that private business was to be heavily regulated and regimented so that it operated in “the interests of the Nation as a whole,” as defined by the government. As explained by the Italian fascist apologist Fausto Pitigliani: “The function of private enterprise is assessed from the standpoint of public interest, and hence an owner or director of a business undertaking is responsible before the State for his production policy.”13
Thus, Italian fascism was an assault on private property and private enterprise, only in a slightly different form than under Russian socialism. Both forms of socialism advocated pervasive government planning of the economy and society. Pitigliani called for a government “plan which comprises the harmonious gradations of the economic life of the nation,”14 whatever that means, while Mussolini promised that centralized government planning would “introduce order in the economic field,”15 as opposed to the supposed “chaos” of capitalism. Consequently, the Mussolini regime established government regulatory agencies that dictated orders to every business, every industry, and every labor union, all in the name of governmental “coordination.” It achieved the basic aims of socialism—government control of the means of production—while leaving corporate managers in place. Government control, of course, means taxpayers foot the bill. As Italian writer Gaetano Salvemini explained in his book, Under the Axe of Fascism: “In December 1932 a fascist financial expert . . . estimated that more than 8.5 billion Lira had been paid out by the government from 1923 to 1932 in order to help depressed industries. From December 1932 to 1935 the outlay must have doubled.”16 Massive government regulation and taxpayer bailouts of failing favored industries meant that Italian fascism, like every other form of socialism, was an economic failure.
GERMAN NATIONAL SOCIALISM
German fascists, like their Italian allies and Communist rivals, waged a relentless propaganda campaign against classical liberalism and capitalism. One of the intellectual fathers of German fascism was Paul Lensch, who wrote in his book Three Years of World Revolution:
This class of people, who unconsciously reason from English standards, comprises the whole German Bourgeoisie. Their political notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘civic right,’ of constitutionalism and parliamentarianism, are derived from that individualistic conception of the world, of which English liberalism is a classical embodiment, and which was adopted by the spokesmen of the German bourgeoisie in the ‘fifties, ‘sixties and ‘seventies of the nineteenth century. But these standards are old fashioned and shattered, just as old-fashioned English liberalism has been shattered. . . . What has to be done now is to get rid of these inherited political ideas and to assist in the growth of a new conception of State and Society. In this sphere also Socialism must present a conscious and determined opposition to individualism.17
By “English standards,” Lensch meant the ideas of such men as Adam Smith and John Locke. German fascism, like all collectivist ideologies, held that individuals must serve “the community” as defined by the state. As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “The Aryan is not greatest in his mental qualities as such, but in the extent of his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community. . . . He willingly subordinates his own ego to the community and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it.”18 This was the basic philosophy of the National Socialist German Workers Party, expressed under the slogan, “The Common Good Comes before the Private Good.”
Like Mussolini and the Russian socialists, Hitler condemned “hyper-individualism” in particular and capitalism in general. The individual was said to have no rights, only duties to the state. “The Official 25-Point Program of the Nazi Party,” published in 1925, laid this out.19 It insisted that “the activities of the individual must not clash with the interests of the whole, but must proceed within the framework of the community and must be for the general good.” Of course, Hitler would decide for all Germans what constituted “the general good.” In Soviet Russia it would be Stalin, and in Italy Mussolini. The Nazi Program announced: “We demand ruthless war upon all those whose activities are injurious to the common interest.” This included “usurers” and “profiteers” who “must be punished with death. . . .”
The Nazi Program condemned private banking by calling for “the abolition of the slavery of interest” and called for the socialization of land “without compensation” and the “prohibition of all speculation in land.” The Nazi Program stated: “We demand the education of . . . children . . . at the expense of the State.” All schools were to be turned into national socialist indoctrination academies.
Jews were singled out as personifying the hated and despised capitalist system that the Nazis wanted to destroy. “The party . . . combats the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without us, and is convinced that our nation can achieve permanent health from within only on the principle: the common interest before self-interest.” Among the other “demands” were “abolition of unearned incomes”; “breaking of debt slavery”; “the nationalization of all associated industries”; and “an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.” Children were to be indoctrinated in socialist philosophy “as early as the beginning of understanding”; and the media were to be under strict government control to prevent “known lies” about fascism. There was certainly nothing capitalistic about any of this.
Much of this was also in The Communist Manifesto, which is not surprising since, as Hayek pointed out, all of the early fascist theorists were first and foremost socialists or had been Communists. The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, contained a ten-point Communist Platform that called for abolishing the private ownership of land and the nationalization of industry. The German and Italian fascists did not abolish all private property or nationalize all of the means of production, but the Germans nationalized about half of the German economy, according to Hayek, and then took effective control of the rest of it through extensive and pervasive regulation and regimentation of all industry and agriculture, just as Italy had done under Mussolini.
The Communist Manifesto also called for “Centralizing credit in the banks of the state,” which the Nazis did, as well as government control of “the means of communication. . . .” The Nazi Program and The Communist Manifesto demanded an “obligation” for all to work at jobs approved of or prescribed by the state. And of course both advocated some form of what the Manifesto called “Free education for all children in public schools.” The educational system had to be nationalized and centralized so as to prevent criticisms of socialism, however it was defined.
Perhaps the biggest commonality between Russian, Italian, and German socialism during the twentieth century was the creation of a highly centralized bureaucratic state that eradicated political power at the state and local levels. As stated in the final, twenty-fifth point of the Nazi Party Program, “we demand the formation of a strong central power in the Reich” along with “Unlimited authority of the central parliament over the whole Reich. . . .”
Socialists, of all varieties, tolerate no opposition, allow no competing authorities, and are at continual war with individuals, families, private organizations, churches, businesses, and local and regional authorities that might oppose or interfere with their grand vision for reordering society. Socialists believe in total control. They want to control you.