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Different classes had widely different experiences of fascism in power. For workers, Italian fascism was a brutal dictatorship. In 1925, all remaining independent trade unions were closed. Wage rates were decided by the employer unchecked by any union. Between 1927 and 1932, according to official statistics, nominal wages were cut by 50 per cent. In 1935, the government placed all workers connected directly or indirectly with war production under military discipline. All other workers were subject to the decisions of the Labour Court. Strikers were punished with imprisonment. For the petty bourgeoisie too, fascism brought relatively few benefits. Decrees regulated retail prices. After prices rose by 41 per cent between 1934 and 1938, shops were ordered to carry out price cuts. Small manufacturers were not allowed to have any separate organisation to represent them. They were subsumed within the fascist-run Federation of Commercial Associations. Farm labourers also suffered from harsh wage cuts. As for small peasants, in 1922 the fascists had promised to confiscate and share out the larger estates, but this redistribution never happened.87
The class which benefited most from fascist rule was the layer of big industrialists. Capital gains tax was abolished, as was inheritance tax, and the tax on war profits. The government intervened time and again to save failing companies, especially the commercial and the Catholic banks, many of whom were on the verge of collapse after the Wall Street crash. Between 1934 and 1938, war industries benefited from 36 billion lire of extraordinary expenses. As Mussolini put it, ‘The corporative economy respects the principles of private property. Private property completes the human personality.’88
Adrian Lyttelton, a historian of Italian fascism, describes some of the contradictions of fascism in its relationship to the factory owners:
At first sight, the advanced program and ex-revolutionary leadership of the fascist movement might seem to be unattractive to capitalist backers and indeed some of the more short-sighted, or honest, were discouraged. But these same factors also meant that it could offer more; and it was the only instrument which might serve to ‘channel the reactionary forces into the national camp’ ... While fascism as a political movement originally gave expression to the revolt against the emergent forces of organised capitalism, fascism as a regime furthered its development and provided it with a theoretical justification.89
The story was little different in Germany. Between 1932 and 1938, according to official figures, workers’ wages fell by 3 per cent. Meanwhile the cost of living rose by 5 per cent, food prices rose by 19.5 per cent and the hours worked in an average week rose by 15 per cent. Managers in the power stations in Baden, for example, forced their workers onto a 104-hour week. Meanwhile the intensity of work also increased, with productivity per worker rising by 11 per cent in the same period.90 Workers suffered as their freedom to meet and organise were removed: ‘The German worker has lost his freedom of speech, his freedom of the press and his freedom of organisation. The labour press has been destroyed, the labour organisations, including the trade unions, have been dissolved.’91
Despite the Nazi promises, the middle classes suffered under fascist rule. Small manufacturers and independent craft workers were hurt by the scarcity of raw materials and a lack of markets. The number of companies having a capital reserve between 4,000 and 1,000,000 Reichsmarks dropped from 7,512 in 1931 to 3,850 in 1937. Small farmers also lost out. Hereditary farms were declared inalienable under the Reich’s Entailed Farm Law. This meant that the large estates were left intact, while small farmers were unable to borrow to make improvements.92
Between 1932 and 1938, the income of employers rose, on average, by 148 per cent.93 Between 1933 and the end of 1936, average profits rose by 433 per cent. The profits of I. G. Farben increased from 74 million Reichsmarks in 1933 to 240 million in 1939. Meanwhile, the company’s contributions to the NSDAP rose from 3.6 million Reichsmarks to 7.5 million. The largest combines, I. G. Farben, AEG, Daimler Benz, Krupps and Allianz, benefited from the war and the Holocaust.94
You might think of fascism as a uniquely stable form of capitalist rule. The fascist parties had unchallenged control of the state, and the workers and peasants were spied on and isolated. And yet, fascism was in other ways insecure. Because there was no formal mechanism by which minor grievances might be addressed within the system, and because every act of opposition was criminalised, any dissent had the potential to become an all-out challenge to the regime. A later chapter describes some of the ways in which postwar Marxist historians have studied the conflict between workers and bosses after the fascist seizure of power. It draws in particular on the writings of the New Left historian Tim Mason and his argument that the National Socialist regime was weaker than it appeared from outside, and that its leaders were terrified by the memory of social revolution.95
Change: Cultural, Political and Social
One criticism that might be made of the interwar Marxists is that they assumed that any revolution worthy of the name would be a social revolution, that is, it would need to see the replacement of an old ruling class, and its replacement either by a new ruling class recruited from former peasants and the urban poor, or indeed by the abolition of class altogether and the equalisation of social opportunity. But surely there have been many instances in the history of revolutions which followed a different and lesser path? As it happens, one of the most significant theorists of revolution in the last hundred years was a member of this generation of interwar Marxists, Antonio Gramsci. In his prison writings, Gramsci sought to develop an idea of how fascism ruled. He reached for an analogy in the processes which had led to the formation of Italy as a nation state 50 years before. At the heart of the Sonderweg theory of German and Italian fascism, as we have seen, was the idea that modern societies should, in any healthy case, have followed the model of the transition to capitalism in England, France or America, and reached their mature condition as a result of a political revolution. Gramsci’s approach, in common with Sonderweg theories, began from the failure of Italy to follow this model. If in Italy, Gramsci reasoned, there had been a revolution of sorts – the unification of the country in 1861 – this change had been one in which most of the people had been passive bystanders. Such a ‘passive revolution’ had made possible Italy’s delay in modernising, which meant she could take advantage of the economic changes which had already taken place elsewhere in Europe, and the willingness of Italy’s pre-1861 ruling class to compromise with the new post-unification rulers.
Gramsci’s arguments will be further explored in subsequent chapters. It is enough to note here that the word ‘revolution’ was now being pulled in at least two different directions. On one axis it was being stretched to include both circumstances where the large majority of people had intruded into history, manifesting themselves as agents of their own destiny (active revolutions) and circumstances where the popular contribution was more limited or short term, and a minority was able to impose its preferred outcomes over the previous intentions of the majority of the people (passive revolutions). Meanwhile, on another axis, revolution was being asked to take on both circumstances of economic change, where the rich and their companions were cast down, and mere political change, where a leading political party or a group of parties gave way to a new set of rulers, perhaps representing merely a different faction of the same governing class.
This chapter has already referred to Stanley Payne, who, like Ze’ev Sternhell, is a historian of west European fascism. Payne describes fascism as a series of ideas possessing three main strands: fascist negations, fascist goals and a distinctive fascist style. By ‘negations’ he means such standard fascist politics as anti-Communism and anti-liberalism. As for ‘ideology and goals’, Payne includes the creation of a nationalist dictatorship,