Throughout the inter-war period, right-wing fears of Bolshevism and left-wing hopes of a new world coalesced into an ongoing and violent struggle in many countries. Because of the existence of a ‘left-wing’ state in the form of the Soviet Union, the right-left polarity was not confined within national boundaries but was replicated in the international arena. What few realized was the extent to which the Soviet Union was rapidly to become more of a totalitarian nightmare than a workers’ paradise. In the course of the civil war and foreign invasion, Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership were obliged to give defence of the Soviet state precedence over long-term Utopian goals. In the face of international isolation and internal economic collapse, the revolutionary instruments of workers’ power, the soviets, were soon bureaucratized and a powerful secret police developed to guarantee the perpetuation of the Bolshevik state. The extent to which the Bolsheviks became a cruel and repressive minority had an element of inevitability. Lenin and the Bolsheviks perceived themselves as carrying forward the last stage of world revolution, that of the revolutionary industrial proletariat against the bourgeoisie that, in theory, had long since made its own revolution against the forces of feudalism. Unfortunately, what might have been true in Germany or Britain was not the case in backward Russia where the proletariat was a recent addition to an essentially agrarian country. It was Russia’s backwardness rather than her advanced status which permitted the success of the October revolution. The world war, the revolution, the subsequent civil war, emigration, and famine had reduced the Russian population by 10 million since 1914 and halved the industrial proletariat to a mere 1,500,000.
The horrendous cost of the first years of the Russian revolution
Was replicated internationally in the sense that one of the more unexpected sequels to the events of 1917 was that the next two decades in Europe saw an almost uninterrupted chain of working-class defeats. Occasional heroic episodes aside, the overall trend was catastrophic. The crushing of revolution in Germany and Hungary was followed by the destruction of the organized left in Italy in a sporadic but prolonged civil war and more systematically after Mussolini’s arrival in power, the establishment of dictatorships in Spain and Portugal in the i9zos, and even the defeat of the general strike in Britain. The rise of Hitler would see the annihilation of the most powerful working-class movement in western Europe and within a year the Austrian left suffered a similar fate, although there, for the first time, workers took up arms against fascism in 1934. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, it was to be only the latest and fiercest battle in a European civil war which had been under way since the Bolshevik triumph of i9i7. That war had begun with Allied intervention against the fledgling Soviet Union and the savage repression of the left-wing movements in Germany, Hungary, and Italy—all part of a reaffirmation of bourgeois Europe. There is no denying the strength of the old order or the resilience of bourgeois forces in forging new weapons against revolutionary threats. However, the successive defeats of the working class could not be attributed exclusively to the power of its enemies.
The Bolshevik experience, while perhaps providing a symbol of hope for many workers, had fatally weakened the international workers’ movement. The most acrimonious divisions followed the creation in i9i9 of the Communist International, its imposition of rigid policies on individual communist parties irrespective of national realities, and its blatant efforts to poach socialist militants by dint of smear campaigns against their leaders. All these factors severely diminished the capacity of European labour and the left to meet the indiscriminate rightist onslaught stimulated by i9i7. Convinced of the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism, the Comintern’s leaders saw Social Democrats not as possible allies against fascism but as obstacles to revolution. While the European right reacted with hysterical fear to the mere idea of the Comintern, the communists, confident that fascism was doomed along with the capitalism that spawned it, concentrated their fire on the socialists. At its Sixth Congress in 1928, the policy of ‘class against class’ was adopted. From it was developed the notion that the reformism of the Social Democrats would make capitalism more palatable and so divert the working class from its revolutionary mission. The socialists were therefore excoriated as ‘social fascists’.
With the triumph of Stalin’s notion of ‘Socialism in One Country’, world revolution had taken a back seat in Soviet calculations. Its warriors had increasingly dropped back to become the frontier guards of the ‘first workers’ state’. Russia’s appalling economic problems combined with Stalin’s instinctive insularity to ensure that he regarded the Comintern with an indifference bordering on contempt. By 1930, the leadership of the Comintern was dealing not with hypothetical prospects of future revolution but with the disturbingly real threats of fascist aggression at national and international levels. The most damning indictments of the Comintern have centred on its share of blame for the rise of Hitler apportioned because of its abusive treatment of Social Democracy. In fact, in the darkest hours for the international working class, the iron certainties of 1919 had begun to crumble. Bewilderment rather than villainy was the order of the day at Comintern headquarters, with the leadership riven by complex disputes over how best to meet the fascist threat. Moreover, for all the KPD’s slavish dependence on Moscow, socialist-communist hostility was based on more than Comintern-scripted insults. Apart from the memories of Noske’s encouragement of Freikorps atrocities, there was the undeniable social reality that the respectable, well-housed, skilled workers of the SPD were bitterly resented by the young, unskilled, unemployed labourers recruited by the KPD. Indeed, KPD electoral success was greatest when its ‘social fascist’ line was at its most apparently absurd and irrelevant.
Italian Fascism
While the international left was in fact ripping itself asunder, the Soviet Union and its agent of world revolution, the Comintern, were perceived by the right throughout Europe as dangerous enemies properly opposed only in Italy by fascism. Ironically, the Italian fascist regime was less novel than it tried to make itself appear and was based on compromise and consensus with establishment forces. The radical, rhetorically anti-oligarchical, fascists of the early days were tamed and Mussolini relied on figures from the conservative elite. As prime minister, president of the fascist Gran Consiglio, Foreign Minister, Minister of the Interior, Minister for the Corporations, Minister for the Army, the Navy and the Air Force, and Commander-in-Chief of the Militia, Mussolini (‘the Duce’) had enormous power. The Fascist Party became an administrative machine, its power based on its position as the fount of government patronage and backed by the fascist militias, the police, and the secret political police (OVRA). Despite its ever thinner veneer of revolutionary novelty, fascism offered no challenges to the private ownership of industry or land, to the monarchy, the army, or the Catholic Church. Only the industrial working class and the radicalized peasantry of the north felt the full repressive weight of fascism as class conflict was smothered in the corporative system. The left-wing trade unions were suppressed. Wages fell to between 20 and 40 per cent of their pre-1922 levels. The basis of corporativism was the so-called Palazzo Vidoni Pact of October 1925, a deal made between the industrialists’ organization, the Confindustria, and the fascist unions, the Confederazione dei Sindacati Nazionale, by which both sides recognized each other as the exclusive representative of capital and labour. Inevitably, the system worked in the near exclusive interests of industrialists who saw it as a device to control labour. It not only did that but also became a huge and cumbersome bureaucracy which provided jobs for party functionaries. The Fascist Party, militia, and corporations provided more than 100,000 jobs. This, together with skilful fascist propaganda, the totalitarian control of media, and the apparent achievement of social peace produced internal stability and political apathy, which added up to a kind of passive popularity.
Italian fascism had no real economic system. Mussolini, like General Franco in Spain, had no original ideas about economics.
His anti-capitalist rhetoric was soon abandoned in favour of ‘productivism’ which effectively meant the acceptance of Italy’s existing economic legacy. Traditionally, the Italian state had tried to boost heavy industry, at the cost of a weak consumer sector as personal income was diverted through taxation into subsidies for heavy industry. In 1925, Mussolini appointed the banker Giuseppe Volpi to run the economy, which he did by a mixture of protectionism and deflation. This was hardly distinguishable from other capitalist economies at this period. High tariff barriers to protect heavy industry (steel, shipping, armaments, chemicals, electricity) and the big landowners, or agrari, (especially wheat growers) created a primitive form of selfsufficient war economy or autarky. Deflation, wage-cutting, and the destruction of organized labour revealed fascism’s social preferences. Stability was preferred to a vigorous domestic market economy. Many small businesses went under and there was a major concentration of capital. The most characteristic feature of fascist economics was created in 1933, the major instrument of autarky—the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale—a massive state holding-company controlling investment in steel, shipping, and other heavy industries.
World History
