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      Introduction: The Anti-Fascist Wager

      The purpose of this book is to explain why fascism was such a destructive form of politics, first as a movement and then in power. There are countless examples in history of subversive parties being tamed once they were in government. With the rare honourable exception, the electoral history of the Socialist movement, the Greens, the various digital parties of this century¹ can each be fitted into this pattern. But, unlike these examples, the fascists became more radical in office. Whether you were a worker, a socialist or one of the fascists’ racial enemies, life was unmistakeably different and worse in 1939 than it had been before the fascists took power in 1921 or 1933. How did fascism continue to radicalise?

      This book derives an answer from those interwar writers who accurately predicted fascism’s cruelty. They were overwhelmingly located on the far left of politics and among the group of people who were fascism’s oldest and most irreconcilable adversaries, the Italian and German Marxists. From the pamphlets and newspaper articles written by these leftists and from their speeches, a coherent theory of fascism emerges. Fascism was not a form of ideas but a kind of organisation and a kind of rule. Indeed, it was essentially the same politics wherever it occurred. Fascism, these writers argued, should not be understood as an ideology, but as a specific form of reactionary mass movement.

      The argument of the interwar Marxists was that, because fascism (unlike traditional right-wing politics) sought to build a mass base, it had a capacity to win recruits at a time of crisis and among social layers that the left liked to think of as its own, including workers, the unemployed and the young. As a result, even when fascists were relatively few, they were able to grow quickly. The Marxists insisted that there was a tension between the goals of fascist ideology and the aspirations of its members. That contradiction could play out in numerous ways: in the collapse of fascist parties through conflict with a non-fascist rival, or in the radicalisation of fascist parties in power. But the one possibility that could be excluded was the gradual taming of fascism once its leaders were in office.

      When fascism began, hardly anyone else in politics agreed with it. The set of people who were potentially anti-fascists is very large indeed. It includes liberals, conservatives, Christians, anarchists, feminists and countless others besides. None of these traditions, I would argue, grasped fascism’s potential for violence as quickly as the Marxists. At the time of the fascist triumphs, Socialist and Communist ideas had an unchallenged authority on the European left. They were part of a common approach to politics which was shared by tens of millions of people. ‘Marxism’ was not a singular thing but a range of politics.² It appealed to people who believed in the actuality of revolution and were determined to bring about an immediate popular uprising. It was employed by others who had no truck with any idea of mass revolt but restricted their desire for change solely to the slow advance of the rights of workers and other subaltern groups. It also had the support of millions of people who held to any number of positions in between.

      As the twentieth century wore on, Marxism was dethroned from its position of authority, as a result of the rightward drift on the part of post-1945 social democracy, the collapse of the Communist regimes and the dissolution of the Communist parties. But if we focus on the period of the rise of fascism, this subordination belonged to the future. So you will find in the pages of this book Marxism being used as a shared means for understanding and resisting fascism by the likes of Clara Zetkin, who had been for 25 years the editor of the German Socialist women’s newspaper Die Gleichheit (Equality) and a sponsor of the resolution which led to the establishment of today’s International Women’s Day; Leon Trotsky, the former leader of the Bolshevik Red Army; and Daniel Guérin, who lived into the 1970s when he was an anarchist, a member of the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action in France and one of the leading figures of the gay liberation movement.³ In the Europe of the 1920s and 1930s, and in the face of fascism, they shared a common language and had essentially the same approach for resisting the rise of Hitler.

      The interwar Marxists were the first to formulate what can be called the anti-fascist wager. This is the belief that fascism is an especially violent and destructive form of right-wing politics, that it has the capacity to grow rapidly in times of social crisis and if ignored will destroy the capacity of the left to organise and set back by decades the demands of workers and other dispossessed groups for change. If the wager is correct, it follows that it is repeatedly a priority for its opponents to confront fascism, even at times when other forms of discrimination are endemic, and even when other right-wing politics have more support than fascism. This way of thinking assumes a present in which labour is still exploited and discrimination on grounds of race and sex is prevalent. Even in these circumstances, it warns, fascism is an unruly, chaotic agent of negative change. It can make systematic what today is

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