Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A. James Gregor is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and Adjunct Professor at the Marine Corps University at Quantico, Virginia. He is the author of twenty-four books.

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Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface.........................................................................xi1. Introduction.................................................................12. The Roots of Revolutionary Ideology..........................................213. The Heterodox Marxism of Ludwig Woltmann.....................................494. The Heterodox Marxism of Georges Sorel.......................................775. The Heterodox Marxism of V. I. Lenin.........................................1026. The Heterodox Marxism of Benito Mussolini....................................1367. The National Question and Marxist Orthodoxy..................................1618. Revolutionary Syndicalism and Nationalism....................................1899. The Great War and the Response of Revolutionary Marxists.....................21510. The Great War, Revolution, and Leninism.....................................24311. The Great War, Revolution, and Fascism......................................27212. Conclusions.................................................................294Notes...........................................................................319Index...........................................................................385

Chapter One

As we move further and further into the twenty-first century, the twentieth takes on more and more an air of unreality. In one sense, its features recede, and in another, some of those same features become caricatures of themselves. Our memories have become uncertain. Mussolini's Fascism becomes a burlesque, and Lenin's Bolshevism the antechamber of gulags and killing fields. One is left with a feeling of disquiet, as though one does not understand any of it.

For a very long time the twentieth century seemed to make sense. The planet was caught up in a Manichean struggle of light against darkness. Marxism, embodying all the values of the Enlightenment, found itself opposed by the irrational evil of reactionary and counterrevolutionary fascism. Fascism, ignominiously struck down in the course of the Second World War, quickly lost whatever cachet it briefly enjoyed among some intellectuals in the West, to be reduced to little more than a public expression of private pathologies. For the nations of the world, antifascism became a compulsory patrimony.

FASCISM AND COMMUNISM

Until the coming of the Second World War, both Mussolini's Fascism and generic fascism had been the subjects of passionate debate. There had been perfectly rational and objective discussion of their respective merits and deficits. Mussolini's Fascism, for example, could be spoken of as possessed of a "complete philosophy" articulated by a number of "young intellectuals" fully competent to argue in defense of their positions. Economists could speak of the "gains and losses" of Fascist economic policy and affirm that "the mass of Italians sympathize with Fascism and, on the whole, support the regime."

After the war, none of that was possible any longer. Antifascism became the negation that unified the capitalist, democratic West and the socialist, nondemocratic East. Fascists were banished from humanity. They became the unprecedented objects of general reprobation. Their very essence was deemed barbarous. Their sole motivation understood to have been war and violence.

Conversely, for years after the Second World War, Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, triumphant in that conflict, the presumptive embodiment of Marxism, became the hope of a surprisingly large minority of Western intellectuals. Fascism was remembered as the tool of a moribund capitalism-seeking to preserve its profits at the cost of war and pestilence. It was seen as the extreme opposite of Soviet socialism. All the simplisms that had been the content of the Marxist interpretation of fascism in the interwar years were seen by many as having been confirmed by the war. Many on the left were persuaded that monopoly capitalism, in its death agony, had unleashed fascism on the world in its desperate effort to stay the hand of history.

The Second World War was understood to have been a war between imperialists who each sought advantage over the other. The Soviet Union, innocent of all that, became the victim of National Socialist Germany-but had heroically succeeded in emerging victorious. The Red Army was depicted as an antifascist army that had sacrificed itself in defense of humanity. For their part, the Western powers were seen as craven spoilers who sought only profit, and worldwide hegemony, from the defeat of fascism.

Some intellectuals in Europe and North America found such an account convincing. Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, Europe's most consistent antifascists before the advent of the war, were somehow transformed into "cryptofascists." Churchill's postwar "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton in 1946 was understood to constitute a provocation calculated to support the effort of "industrialists" who hoped to use a contest with the Soviet Union as the pretext for "curbing the claims of the working classes with the help of the authorities and thus complete the [postwar] process of reorganizing production on monopolistic lines at the expense of the community." General de Gaulle, in turn, long known to be an anticommunist, could only be an enemy of the poor and underprivileged, and, as a consequence, one expected to extend aid and comfort to fascists and "reactionaries" of all sorts.

So convinced of all this were some European and American intellectuals that they could only speak of fascism as an excrescence of capitalism. Some Europeans solemnly maintained that "those who have nothing to say about capitalism should also be silent about fascism." The relationship between the two was conceived as one of entailment.

Marxists, for more than half-a-hundred years, had argued that there could only be "two paths ... open before present society.... [The] path of fascism, the path to which the bourgeoisie in all modern countries ... is increasingly turning ... or [the] path of communism." Marxists and leftist liberals in the West had been convinced by the war that Soviet theoreticians had always been correct. Capitalism was the seedbed of fascism, and the only recourse humanity had was to protect, sustain, foster, and enhance Soviet socialism and its variants. Only with Nikita Khrushchev's public denunciation of Stalin's crimes at the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party, did the support of Western leftists for the Soviet Union show any signs of flagging.

Immediately after Stalin's death in March 1953, oblique criticisms of his regime, by the leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, signaled the forthcoming denunciation-and in February 1956, Khrushchev delivered his catalog of charges against the departed leader in a "secret speech" to the leadership of the Party. In that speech, Stalin's dictatorship was characterized as tyrannical, arbitrary, and homicidal, having created a system in which many, many innocents perished, and in which prodigious quantities of the nation's resources had been wasted. Largely unexpected both within and outside the Soviet Union, the disclosures of the 20th Party Congress created political tensions within the Party and among...