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In a position of seeming importance, Rossoni had to weigh the discontents of the workers he was supposedly leading against the hostility of the factory owners who were determined to resist any possibility of Italy’s recently turbulent industrial relations reasserting themselves, even under the protection of fascist rule. The arbiter between the two sides, Mussolini, had no more interest than the industrialists in a fascist ‘socialism’. Removed from his union position in 1928, Rossoni went on to hold several junior posts before, in 1935–9, being promoted again to the middle-ranking position of minister of agriculture and forestry.61
Another former syndicalist who played a role in the literary defence of the regime was Sergio Panunzio, an academic lawyer and philosopher who had argued for the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism prior to 1910. Like Rossoni, he had later called for a fusion of nationalism and revolutionary syndicalism. He wrote for Mussolini’s papers during the First World War but remained aloof from the fascists and only joined them in 1921. From 1924, he served in the Chamber of Deputies and later as undersecretary in the Ministry of Communications. Panunzio was appointed to an academic post as the head of Fascist Faculty of Political Sciences at Perugia University in 1928, the first specifically fascist institution of higher education, and wrote a number of books for fascist publishers maintaining that the regime was in continuity with the radical theories of the pre-war Italian left, and an alternative to the universal decadence of liberalism.62
In the case of Germany, the existence of a fascist ‘left’ narrows to the figures of Gregor and Otto Strasser. The two brothers were born into a strongly Catholic and conservative, Bavarian family. Gregor, the oldest, was a young soldier at the front during the war, and this experience left him with a romantic, even sentimental belief in the comradeship of military experience. Gregor Strasser worked briefly as a pharmacist before becoming a career Nazi and member of its paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA).63 He served as the party’s head of organisation from 1927. In that role, he was given responsibility for negotiating with conservative and nationalist groups outside the NSDAP. Gregor was, however, distrusted and isolated by Hitler. He resigned from all party roles at the end of 1932 and was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, along with other SA leaders and rivals of Hitler on the right.
In comparison to his elder brother, Otto Strasser was a more complex character. A member of the Freikorps in 1920, and therefore associated with the extreme right of German politics, quixotically he also joined the Socialist Party in the same year. Between 1925 and 1930, he was a Nazi and controlled a Berlin publishing house, the Kampfverlag, which claimed to be seeking a synthesis between Communism and fascism. In 1930, following a furious meeting with Hitler, in which he was ordered to pledge his loyalty to the Nazi leader or cease publishing, but declined to do either, Otto Strasser resigned from the National Socialists, forming a small rival party on the far right, the Black Front.64
Otto Strasser criticised capitalism, albeit as a nationalist and from the right. But it would be a real exaggeration to portray his five-year membership of the NSDAP as in any way significant to the development of that party.
Prior to 1934 Gregor Strasser had, by contrast, been within the two dozen figures at the head of German fascism. Yet his critique of Hitler or of Nazism was shallow. As his biographer, Peter Stachura, indicates, Gregor Strasser’s ‘“socialism” was vacuous, amounting to no more than an emotionally based, superficial, petty-bourgeois anti-capitalism ... [He] cannot be regarded in any meaningful sense as the leader of a “Nazi left” because such an entity simply did not exist as a coherent ideological, organisational, or political entity.’65
Misogyny and Agency
The interwar Marxists were fascinated by the question of who joined the fascists. Often, as we shall see, this turned on an appraisal of how deeply fascist support extended into the working class, the ruling class or the classes in between. But it was also obvious that part of what made fascism possible was the world war, the desire of large numbers of people to return to something like wartime conditions and the ability of the fascists to organise a street-fighting militia made up of men nostalgic for war. In the words of one historical sociologist, Michael Mann, ‘Italian fascism triumphed more through violence than the ballot box’.66 The interwar Marxists would have agreed with him, and it is possible to find any number of passages commenting on the success of the Italian or the German fascists in recruiting a private army of street-fighters to be employed against the left. As Trotsky wrote in November 1931, ‘Without a doubt, the fascists have serious fighting cadres, experienced shock brigades. We must not make light of this: the officers play a big part even in the civil-war army. Still, it is not the officers, but the soldiers who decide.’67 Trotsky went on to compare the limited social weight of the fascists with the deep roots of the Socialists and Communists.
Although interwar Marxists were keenly aware of the importance of private militia to fascism, relatively few Socialists or Communists commented on the ways in which the recruitment of former soldiers (who were all men) or those who aspired to be soldiers, shaped the demographics of the early fascist parties.
The largest study of a fascist party at the stage when it existed as a movement, was a report carried out by the PNF in November 1921. This provided basic data on some 151,644 fascists, or around half the party’s then membership. Fewer than 2 per cent of members were women. More than half were military veterans.68
Various lists have been kept of the membership of the German National Socialists in the same period, including one from 1919 comprising 94 per cent of those who had joined the party that year. The most detailed study, by American historian Paul Madden, found that just 8 per cent of the Nazis’ recruits between 1919 and 1923 were women. Eighteen per cent were aged between 17 and 20, around double the presence of this age group within Germany as a whole.69
One trend in the historical literature is to insist on the large number of women who joined the fascist parties once they were in power, and the willingness of the fascist states to allow women to play leadership roles, albeit only within particular women’s campaigns. Young women were offered roles in mass organisations, where they were to be socialised into a fascist mindset. Middle-aged women contributed to the colonisation of Africa and eastern Europe. Older women were told that if they sacrificed their independence in favour of the development of future generations, they would be playing a heroic role. There were, undoubtedly, many hundreds of thousands of women who gave themselves willingly to the regime. ‘The women who followed Hitler,’ writes one historian, Claudia Koonz, ‘like the men, did so from conviction, opportunism and active choice.’70
Yet part of what enabled fascist parties to grow after 1918 was also that women’s equality had made significant advances over the past 50 years. In that context, fascism was the opponent of women’s agency. In an epoch of reform, women had won greater access to education, had been employed during the war in well-paid occupations that had previously been reserved for men71 and had enjoyed a postwar breakthrough (in Germany but not in Italy) in winning the franchise. Fascism was, in this sense, a ‘backlash’ movement. Part of the fascist appeal was the promise it made to right-wing men that it would subordinate a generation of ‘Red’ women. As we shall see, the diaries and memoirs of the earliest fascists thrill in a promise of sadistic violence against women.
Once fascism was in power, these ideas continued, and were expressed in the determination with which fascism demanded control of women’s reproductive capacities. The regimes’ policy was for women to be mothers, while any deemed unfit were to be forcibly sterilised. Following childbirth, women were to become ‘angels of the hearth’,72 excluded from the masculine sphere of politics. Aided by non-fascist institutions such as the Catholic Church, which had its own idea of woman’s rightful subordination within the family, emphasis was given to increasing the birth rate, with medals for those who brought up large families.
Later chapters of this book address how Marxists in the