Socialism Beyond the Pale:

Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists

Joseph J. Paczelt

Dr. Karl Bahm

History 497: Senior Thesis

7 May 2007

Introduction

In the spring of 1940, as the German Blitzkrieg tore across France and threatened to hop

across the channel into Britain, the British government passed Defense Regulation 18b which

allowed them to hold any individual suspected of foreign influence or loyalty. A number of the

individuals interned were members of Britain’s foremost interwar fascist organization, the

British Union of Fascists. The most prominent Blackshirt imprisoned was the movement’s

leader Oswald Mosley and in many ways it was a fitting culmination for someone Roger Eatwell

described as “a radical young man in a hurry.”1

Indeed, radicalism and urgency had been the characteristics of Mosley’s entire political

career. In the 22 years that preceded his imprisonment, Mosley had spent time in governments

of Britain’s two major political parties in the period and, dissatisfied with both of them, he

formed his own party in 1932, the British Union of Fascists. The life of the BUF would always

be tumultuous, by 1933 they had gained the support of the Daily Mail; in 1934 they would hold

an infamous indoor meeting at Olympia Hall that would witness BUF ushers violently ejecting a

number of anti-fascist demonstrators to the horror of the British populace; 1936 saw “Battle of

Cable Street” where the BUF once again clashed violently with anti-fascist demonstrators as they

marched through East London. The violence this time resulted in the British Government

passing an ordinance banning them from wearing their tell-tale black shirts; and by 1940 it was

all over, the party outlawed and effectively crushed through internment. These are the

“hallmarks” of the organization’s history; this is how Oswald Mosley and the British Union of

Fascists are remembered. However, an approach to the BUF through honest and un-cynical eyes

will reveal that Oswald Mosley’s formation of the British Union of Fascists was an attempt to

create a movement that would ultimately build a real living, breathing, socialist state along

1 Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History, (New York: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1995) 228.

1

national lines. Furthermore, if one looks to the continent they will notice that this was a general

phenomenon among a number of European fascisms.

This conception of fascism is very much contrary to the general understanding of

fascism, in modern language there are few terms that conjure up images of evil the way fascism

does. The word peppers our political discourse, Islamic fundamentalists are called Islamo-

fascists, Greenpeace is an eco-fascist organization, Christian conservatives are Christian-fascists,

really any movement or organization perceived as dogmatic or authoritarian is slapped with the

hyphenated “-fascist.” The word has become the ultimate political pejorative and it seems that

this has been the state of affairs for the last fifty years, as George Orwell complained in his essay

Politics and the English Language, published in 1946: “The word Fascism has now no meaning

except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.”2 The problem here is not that this

interpretation is wrong per se but rather that it is much too simple. When the pundits use the

word ‘evil,’ consciously or not, they are appealing to emotion at the expense of rational

understanding. Unfortunately, the state of scholarship on fascism is currently traveling similar

terrain. Granted, the arguments of academics tend to be a bit more nuanced than rants in the

press, but most scholars still tend to paint fascism as the great negative movement; not really for

anything but against quite a bit.

A symptom of this perception of fascism is an almost universal misunderstanding and

lack of exploration of the relationship between fascism and another political movement,

socialism. This is remarkable considering the ubiquitous presence of socialism in the scholarship

concerning fascism. Some of the earliest and most influential attempts to theorize the movement

were offered by Marxists in the early twentieth century. In their eyes, fascism was essentially a

2 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” first published in Horizon (April 1946), http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit – accessed March 19, 2007, 11:01 am

2

counter-revolutionary movement, both created and coordinated by the ruling and middle-classes

to preserve capitalism in view of an imminent socialist or communist revolution.3 This classic

Marxist interpretation seems to have launched the traditional depiction of socialism and fascism

as two political forces in opposition.

Much of the contemporary scholarship offers what amounts to an update of this formula.

Two of the leading historians writing in this vein are Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism,4

and Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism.5 Both authors acknowledge that fascists used the

rhetoric of socio-economic radicals as they struggled to gain power, but those who succeeded

abandoned utopia as they governed in tension with the old established elite. In light of this solid,

if un-interesting, revelation, Paxton and Griffin argue that the social-revolutionary aspect of

fascist rhetoric should not be taken seriously. But this is intellectual sleight of hand, can one

imagine pointing to life in the early Soviet Union, comparing it to Bolshevik propaganda, and

concluding that Marxism-Leninism ought not to be taken seriously?

Thankfully, there are some more reasonable voices in the conversation, notable Stanley

G. Payne and George L. Mosse, widely recognized as two of the foremost scholars in the field.

For Mosse the key to understanding fascism lay in direct confrontation, seeing fascism through

its own eyes. Payne was very much influenced by Mosse the two worked together at the

University of Wisconsin Madison, and it shows through in his writing. As part of his general

theory, Mosse recognized that fascists counted capitalists among their adversaries though the

majority of their hatred was reserved for finance-capital specifically.6 He also posits that fascists

3 For a good historiography of the Marxist conception of fascism see A. James Gregor, The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

4 Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, (New York: Vintage Books – A Division of Random House Inc., 2004).

5 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, (New York: Routledge, 1993, originally published 1991 by Pinter Publishers Limited).

6 George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism, (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999).

3

conceived of classes of nations with a corresponding class struggle among nations. Stanley

Payne’s stance on the socialist/fascist nexus was not too distant from Mosse’s. Writing about

Mussolini’s political development he notes that; “during the First World War his commitment to

nationalism became complete and extreme, and his goal became combining nationalism with

some form of socialism that would come to terms with all classes.”7 The problem, though, with

Mosse and Payne, and a number of scholars like them is that they note the presence of socialism

but do not really delve into it. Stanley Payne never tells us how Mussolini sought to reconcile

nationalism and socialism, and then proceeded to create fascism.

By contrast, the relationship between socialism and fascism is the prime focus of two

books by the scholar Zeev Sternhell. In Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, and

The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, he offers a

genealogy of ideas beginning with the “crisis of Marxism” during the Fin de Siecle tracing a

strand of though from revolutionary socialists in France to a revolutionary socialist in Italy who

would go on to “invent” fascism.8 The socialist in question of course is none other than Benito

Mussolini. In The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, A. James

Gregor travels a similar path comparing Mussolini’s Fascism with Lenin’s Bolshevism. Gregor

concludes that ultimately the two movements were very similar, not only in their exercise of

power but also in their original intentions and aspirations.9

It is the contention of this essay that intentions and aspirations are in fact important,

particularly when it comes to understanding social/political movements. Sternhell puts it well in

Neither Left Nor Right stating that “it is before coming to power, before pressures and

7 Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism: 1914-1945, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 87. 8 Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel,(Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1986).Zeev Sternhell with Mario Snajder and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From

Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. David Maisel, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).9 A. James Gregor, The Faces of Janus.

4

compromises have transformed them into governmental groups like all the others, that ideologies

and movements may be discovered in their purest form. The nature of a political ideology

always emerges more clearly in its aspirations than in its application.”10 What is offered here,

then, is a case study of fascism from this perspective. Oswald Mosley and the British Union of

Fascists make for a good case to study, for as Roger Eatwell has pointed out, the BUF published

more, and put forward what is perhaps the clearest statement of policy of any fascist group in the

inter-war period.11 A sensitive reading of this program and the political journey of Mosley and

other Blackshirts will demonstrate, as stated earlier, that the ultimate goal of the BUF was living,

breathing socialism in Britain, albeit a National Socialism. Furthermore, the BUF was not an

anomaly; they fit in well with a trend of inter-war revolutionary thought that sought to create a

revolution that would ultimately achieve some sort of socialism through the coupling of social

and political myths with an alliance of the working and middle classes in a general assault on

finance capital.

Oswald Mosley’s Political Journey

In 1918, Britain saw the election of the youngest M.P. ever to hold office, Sir Oswald

Ernald Mosley. Born in 1896 to a wealthy landowning family in Staffordshire County, Mosley’s

early years were typical for many young aristocrats. Educated at Winchester and Sandhurst, the

young man’s interests were predominantly sporting and there was little inkling that he would one

day become one of Britain’s most notorious politicians.12 The Great War changed all of that, as

he would write years later: “For better or for worse, I owe the dynamism of my political impulse

to the First World War.”13 Like many young men of his generation, he was filled with nationalist

10 Zeev Sternhell, Neither Left Nor Right, 1. 11 Roger Eatwell, Fascism, 231. 12 Michael Quill, introduction to Revolution by Reason and Other Essays, by Oswald Mosley, ed. Michael

Quill (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd., 1997), xiv-xv. 13 Dan S. White, Lost Comrades: Socialists of the Front Generation, 1918-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1992), 15.

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fervor and an impatience to see action. So at the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 Mosley joined

the 16th Dragoons and quickly got himself attached to the Royal Flying Corps. He injured his leg

in a training accident in 1915, and before properly healing he returned to the trenches in time to

be caught in the German artillery barrage and gas attack at the Second Battle of Ypres. As

Mosley’s leg wound worsened he was invalided out of the war in 1916 and an operation that

saved him from amputation gave him a shortened right leg and permanent limp.14

Upon returning home Mosley worked for the next two years as a civil servant for a time

in the Ministry of Munitions and later the Foreign Office. As he himself stated, the war

politicized him and by 1918, impressed by David Lloyd George’s promise to build “a land fit for

heroes,” Mosley got himself elected a member of parliament for Harrow on Lloyd George’s

Coalition Unionist ticket.15 While Mosley had been elected as a member of the Unionist

(conservative) Party, Dan S. White notes that his “own oratory suggested service in the ranks of

a loftier entity.” White goes on to quote Mosley declaring himself to be a member of the

“Greatest National Party that the country has ever known…a party that was all embracing, a

party which had in it everything that was worth having.”16

Mosley’s election address in 1918 demonstrates how he understood the promise to “build

a land fit for heroes.” Speaking of industry he asserted that: “High wages must be maintained.

This can only be achieved by high production based on increased efficiency and organization. A

hig standard of life must be insured by a minimum wage and reduced ours, which are proved to

increase rather than curtail production.” He also saw housing as a “crying need” and argued for

the state to subsidize individuals looking to buy their own houses as well as tearing down slums

and replacing them with decent dwellings. When it came to education, Mosley wanted teachers’

14 Ibid, 15-16. 15 Michael Quill, introduction to Revolution by Reason, xv. 16 Dan S. White, Lost Comrades, 23.

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salaries to be increased, as well as “numerous scholarships to be provided for higher and

university education…a good brain must be given every chance.”17

With initial political goals and ideas like these it easy to see how Mosley would become

increasingly frustrated with the government that he was supposed to consider his political

comrades. By 1920 Mosley had had enough and he crossed the floor of the House of Commons

to sit as an independent with the opposition, this was done as a protest of the sitting

government’s failure to take economic action at home and their use of the brutal “Black and

Tans” who were terrorizing Ireland in an attempt to suppress the guerilla war being waged for

Independence.18 Mosley became increasingly attracted to the Labour during this period and by

Marc of 1924 he had joined the party. He did have some misgivings, though, and interestingly

the shortfalls that Mosley perceived in Labour were not that much different from the ones that

had caused him to leave the conservative party. As he wrote about Labour leadership in 1923;

“worthy of every respect…I do wish that they would abandon, at any rate for the time being,

their habit of discussing ultimate issues and advance in a concrete and concise form an

immediate programme to deal with immediate issues.”19

Not satisfied to wait around for Labour to advance such a program, Mosley began to

draw up his own. Published in 1925, the pamphlet Revolution by Reason is not only the most

coherent summation of Mosley’s economic ideas at the time, but also an indicator of the urgent,

impatient nature of is politics:

“We hold that evolutionary socialism is in itself not enough. Time presses in the turmoil of war’s aftermath. The year 1925 holds not the atmosphere of a secluded study where pedants may stroll their way through go-slow philosophies…Crisis after crisis send capitalist society staggering ever nearer to abysses of inconceivable catastrophe to 17Oswald Mosley, A Soldier M.P.: November 1918, in Revolution by Reason and Other Essays, ed. Michael

Quill (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd., 1997), 2.18 Dan S. White, Lost Comrades, 51-2. Michael Quill, introduction to Revolution by Reason and Other Essays, xvi. 19 Dan S. White, Lost Comrades, 52.

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suffering millions…Measures of a drastic socialist character must be enforced rapidly over a whole field of industry.”20

Mosley’s approach embraced the idea of national economic planning as a step towards socialism

which was a total break from what Mosley himself described as “the strange view that socialists

could do nothing until capitalism had collapsed.”21

A key element in Mosley’s plan was the nationalization of banks in order to end the

“public plunder of private interests.” The idea was to transfer the control of banks from

capitalists to “representatives of the workers” and create a national credit. The nationalized

banks, which Mosley equated with socialized banks, would hold two main objectives: “the

expediting of socialism, and the alleviation of the condition of workers during the transitional

period from capitalism to socialism.”22 This would be achieved through the creation of

“consumer and producer credits.” Consumer credits would be given to poor workers with the

idea that by giving them more purchasing power, poverty would be alleviated and there would be

increased demand, which would in turn create more jobs. This was also the purpose of the

producer credits which were to be given in order to increase both production and employment.23

An economic council also would be created to guide industry so that “demand did not outstrip

supply and rise prices.” The idea was to raise the wages of the working class, and the level of

production but to keep prices down so the standard of living would actually increase for the

worker.24

20 Oswald Mosley, Revolution by Reason, in Revolution by Reason and Other Essays, ed. Michael Quill (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd., 1997), 5.

21 Dan S. White, Lost Comrades, 6. 22 Oswald Mosley, Revolution by Reason, 6. 23 Ibid, 13.24 Oswald Mosley, Revolution by Reason, 14-5.

8

Mosley’s aims of nationally socialized banks and industry guided by an economic council

was to take a socialist controlled parliament and extend that control into the economic sphere, it

was revolution by reason. As Mosley put it:

“The firm grip of the socialist state over the whole remaining field of capitalist activity would be established. All industry would owe money to the state banks. The constitutional government would wield the vast powers now exercised by private bankers. Today, as their spokesman proudly claims, the bankers dictate the conditions under which industry is conducted. Under these proposals a similar authority would be vested in servants of the people. It is an ironic reflection that during the transition to socialism the remaining capitalists might become the “wage-slaves” of the workers.”25

It is both interesting and important to note that what was most radical about Mosley’s ideas were

that they involved action, a plan of implementation. Three years before Mosley wrote

Revolution by Reason, Arthur Henderson, one of the founding members of the Labour Party,

published an article in the International Journal of Ethics with the subject and title – “The

Character and Policy of the British Labour Party.” Henderson’s article talks about a number of

things that Labour would like to do when they finally assumed control of parliament, for

example:

“We aim at the establishment and maintenance of a greater efficiency in industry and agriculture; but the criterion of efficiency for us is not the amount of private gain…but the quality of service performed…We view the production of goods as a public service, whether it be organized by the State or not. In some cases, as in regard to coal mines and railways, accidental circumstances and not abstract theory compel us to the opinion that such services unless there is a national ownership or ownership by the state, but even in these cases, our aim is not simply a change of control, but a greater efficiency for public service.”26

Oswald Mosley would have agreed with everything Henderson said, but he wanted to do more

than talk about socialism, he wanted to build it.

25 Ibid, 19.26 Arthur Henderson, “The Character and Policy of the British Labour Party,” International Journal of

Ethics 32, no. 2 (Jan. 1922): 122.

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Mosley would eventually come to be as disappointed with Labour as he had been with

the Conservative party. When Labour took office in 1929, Mosley was appointed chancellor of

the Duchy of Lancaster as an assistant to lord privy seal J.H. Thomas; the two were to find a

solution to the unemployment problem.27 As Michael Quill notes, “after the lack of support for

the programme set out in Revolution by Reason, he attempted to modify his proposals in the hope

that they might be implemented.” These proposals would come to be known as the Mosley

Memorandum which would also ultimately be rejected.28 By 1930 he had had enough of the

established political parties who had failed to not only take the action he recommended, but any

radical action at all. He resigned from Labour in the spring of 1930 and attempted to establish the

“New Party.” After their disastrous showing in the elections of 1931 the party was dissolved.

But Mosley was not ready to give up on politics completely, and, intrigued by what

Mussolini was doing for Italy, he traveled to the country in January 1932 to observe fascism first

hand. Mosley was impressed by Mussolini’s programs, as he wrote in his memoirs:

“…chief among them was the Corporate State, whose study in detail is available to all; its mechanism for industrial conciliation could be used with or without its compulsive aspects. The chief achievement of this organization was the labour charter which abolished the chattel concept of labour, and prevented those who had served industry well being thrown on the scrap-heap when no longer wanted. The abolition of ‘wage slavery’ had long been in every socialist programme, but that overdue reform was left to the Corporate State.”29

While Mosley like the organizational aspects of the Corporate State he felt he could go much

farther, and immediately be more creative and radical in Britain than Mussolini was at the time

in Italy.30 This is understandable when one compares the level of development and

27 Dan S. White, Lost Comrades, 109.28 Michael Quill, introduction to Revolution by Reason and Other Essays, xviii.29 Oswald Mosley, My Life (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1968), 361. 30 Oswald Mosley, My Life, 362.

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industrialization in Britain with that found in Italy and by October of 1932 Mosley launched the

British Union of Fascists.31

The Publications of the B.U.F.

As Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists in 1932 he also published a book, The

Greater Britain, which outlined his vision of a fascist Britain. At the center of this vision lay the

establishment of a corporate state with mechanics revealing that by embracing fascism Mosley

had not abandoned his goals as a socialist but rather had found a new way to achieve them. He

himself said as much and did not consider this a phenomenon exclusive to Britain but rather a

general trend of fascism:

“In all countries, fascism has been led by men who came from the “Left,” and the rank and file has combined conservative and patriotic elements of the nation with ex-Socialists, ex-Communists and revolutionaries who have forsaken their illusions of progress for the new and orderly reality of progress…we have no place for those who have sought to make fascism the lackey of reaction, and have thereby misrepresented its policy and dissipated its strength.”32

In Fascism – 100 Questions Asked and Answered, Mosley answered the question “Why fascism?

Why is the movement called Fascist?”

“Fascism is the name by which the modern Movement has come to be known in the world…The alternative name for the modern Movement is the National Socialism used in Germany. But the German Movement is also known throughout the outside world as Fascist, which is the name commonly used to describe the phenomenon of the modern Movement whether in Britain, Germany, or Italy. National Socialism and Fascism in my view are the same Movement...For seven years in the Labour Party before founding Fascism in Britain, I fought for a National Socialist Policy in contradiction to the International socialism of that party.”33

Years later in a letter to The Times, published in 1968 Mosley wrote; “I am not, and never have

been a man of the right. My position was on the left and is now in the center of politics.”34

31 Michael Quill, introduction to Revolution by Reason and Other Essays, xx. 32 Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain, 2d. ed., (London: BUF Publications, 1932), 15.33 Oswald Mosley, Fascism – 100 Questions Asked and Answered,

(http://www.oswaldmosley.com/downloads/free_ebooks.htm, accessed March 21, 2007, 11:12 a.m.)34 Oswald Mosley, letter to The Times, April 26, 1968, quoted by Michael Quill in the introduction to

Revolution by Reason, xiii.

11

In Mosley’s eyes the problem was that democracy as a system of government was

obsolete especially when it came to dealing with the crisis of capitalism in the early twentieth

century. His conception of the crisis shows all the urgency of his earlier days in parliament:

“We are faced, in fact, with a new and intensive competition for foreign markets. The intensity of the struggle for foreign markets is further increased by the shrinkage of all home markets, which drives the industrialists of every nation ever more desperately to seek a foreign outlet for surplus production…So a dog-fight for foreign markets ensues in which weaker nations go under, and their collapse in turn reacts upon the victors in the struggle by a further shrinkage of world markets. A continuation of the present world struggle for export markets is clearly the road to world suicide.”35

The purpose of the BUF was to “reconcile the revolutionary changes of science,” which had

brought humanity to an incredible capacity to produce, “with our (Britain’s) system of

government, and to harmonize individual initiative with the wider interests of the nation.”36

The BUF sought to accomplish all of this through the creation of “The Corporate State.”

The Corporate State would have been organized into three tiers of government; at the top would

sit the central Government comprised of nine ministers kept in power by a plebiscite held every

five years, followed by the National Corporation, and finally there would be a corporation for

every occupation – one for mining, one for agriculture, one for education etc. – as well as a

corporation for women. In The Coming Corporate State, Alexander Raven Thomson, the BUF’s

chief ideologue after Mosley, described how employers, workers, and consumers would be given

equal representation in each corporation. By employers Thomson meant “managers and

directors,” who would elect their own representatives, and all other workers “including clerical

staff, excepting those engaged in a managerial capacity,” would elect their own representatives.

Consumers’ representatives would be nominated by the central government, since “the nation

was the ultimate consumer,” and when appropriate other corporations would be able to elect

35 Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain, in Revolution by Reason and Other Essays, ed. Michael Quill (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd., 1997), 77.

36 Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain, 12-13

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consumer representatives. Furthermore, no one group of representatives would have more power

than another and no one group could be outvoted by the other two.37 In Mosley’s eyes this would

“weave existing organizations such as trade unions and employers’ federations into the fabric of

the Corporate State,” and they would “there find with official standing not a lesser but a greater

sphere of activity.”38 This sphere of activity would not only include “the settlement of the

questions of wages and hours,” but also a “permanent feature in the direction of economic

policy.39 As Thomson put it, “trade unionism is entirely retained and advanced 100 percent.”40

The National Corporation, which would have sat just above the occupational

Corporations, would have overseen these corporations to make sure they were all basically

working together, in Thomson’s words: “It will be the duty of the National Corporation to co-

ordinate activities in the interests of the national welfare. The National Corporation will be

elected upon the same principle as are the employers and workers. The number of members

from each Corporation will not be equal, but will be weighted in accordance with the industry to

the national welfare.”41 A moment should be taken to explain how people would vote and elect

representatives in the Corporate State. There would be an occupational franchise, which would

make sense in a government organized according to spheres of production rather than geographic

region. Mosley felt that this was “rationalized democracy” since people were probably better

informed in their own jobs than political elections dominated by vague promises and

propaganda. In his words: “Occupational Franchise, therefore, will secure a technical Parliament

suited to the problems of a technical age. A vote given with full information and consequently

with a sense of responsibility will secure a serious and dignified assembly…It is clear that such a

37Alexander Raven Thomson, The Coming Corporate State, (http://www.oswaldmosley.com/downloads/free_ebooks.htm, accessed March 21, 2007, 11:12 a.m.) 7-8

38 Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain, 28. 39 Ibid, 28-29.40 Alexander Raven Thomson, The Coming Corporate State, 8.41 Ibid, 10

13

system brings to an end the party game and apart from other advantages it is deliberately

designed to that end.”42 As Thomson would note early in The Coming Corporate State, what the

BUF had in mind was very similar to the syndicalism of the nineteenth century but a central

authority would be introduced in the Corporate State in order to prevent “merely replacing class

war with internecine industrial conflict. The consumers’ representatives are in a certain sense

the delegates of the central authority, to give warning of unjustifiable raising of prices or

restricting of output.”43

The vision that the BUF had for Britain did not end with the radical changes they wanted

in the mechanics of government, they actually had a number of progressive ideas not usually

associated with fascist movements. For example, there was a lot of attention paid to, for lack of

a better term, women’s issues. The BUF was by no means a feminist movement but Mosley

believed that an entire corporation was needed solely for the representation of women. This

corporation would be particularly, but not only, devoted to the interests of mothers.44 It is

possible to interpret this as somewhat oppressive, creating an organization for one gender seems

to reinforce the idea that that gender has specific roles, but this was not what the BUF was trying

to do. Mosley clarified the movement’s position on women’s issues in Tomorrow We Live, he

agreed that relegating women to the home was oppressive but he also argued that an economic

structure that drives women out of their homes and away from their children because their

husbands had poor wages was equally oppressive. The idea was to give mothers a choice and if

they did decide to hold jobs they would be given equal representation in both their occupational

corporation and the women’s corporation.45 In The Coming Corporate State the BUF also

42 Oswald Mosley, Tomorrow We Live, 17. 43 Alexander Raven Thomson, The Coming Corporate State, 9 44 Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain, 40-42. 45 Oswald Mosley, Tomorrow We Live, 17.

14

promised “equal pay for men and women doing similar work and no dismissal upon marriage” as

well as “Holiday on full pay for mothers upon the birth of a child.”46

The BUF also promised that all children would receive an education to the age of 18; at

age 15 it would be determined whether a child was better suited for university or trades school –

those better suited for trades would learn one in their last three years and those better suited for

the university would be guaranteed a university education.47 This type of an education system

was a part of what was perhaps the BUF’s most radical goal, that of “breaking down the barriers

of social class.”48

It is useful to quote Mosley at length to get an idea of the way he and British Union of

Fascists felt about the issue of social class, for in all of the evils Mosley saw in liberal

democracy, it was in his discussion of class that he was the most acidic:

“…the worst vices of the hereditary system which British Union will sweep away arise from the transmission of hereditary wealth by quickly-rich financiers and speculators, whose children have no sense whatever of hereditary responsibility in return for hereditary wealth… From them in particular has come the disgusting spectacle of flaunting extravagance and parading riches in the face of poverty…the accident of birth and the mere fact of being their ‘father’s son’ is held by these miserable specimens of modern degeneracy to elevate them without effort of their own above their fellow men… The snob and the parasite shall go, and with him shall go his values in the classless state which accords “opportunity to all but privilege to none.”49

Instead the “British Union system of heredity” was “designed on the one hand to encourage to

the utmost the initiative and enterprise of the individual not only in working for himself but also

in the deep and human motive in working for his children. On the other hand, it is devised to

eliminate the parasite and to deprive of all hereditary advantage those who prove unworthy of

46 Alexander Raven Thomson, The Coming Corporate State, 30. 47 Oswald Mosley, Tomorrow We Live, 60-1. 48 Oswald Mosley, Fascism – 100 Questions, 9. 49 Oswald Mosley, Tomorrow We Live, 58-9.

15

their forebears’ exertions… Equity Tribunals of Peoples justice will be established to determine

such questions.”50

This position on heredity was also evident in the BUF’s position on land ownership:

farms and other land could pass from parents to children as long as the children worked the land

for the benefit of the nation. Urban property would pass almost entirely to “the ownership and

care of the state,” and virtually all landlords would lose their holdings. If individuals could

somehow show that private ownership of land somehow benefited the nation it would be

allowed.51

Looking at programs like these that retained a certain amount of private ownership,

scholars often level the charge at fascists that they were basically a “petty-bourgeois-populist

movement,” but this fails to take into account the way fascists conceived of the evils of

capitalism and the way that they wanted to revolutionize private ownership. In The Coming

Corporate State, the way that Thomson saw the legal system under liberal-democracy – a legal

system basically dedicated to the protection of property and the rights of property owners who

use their financial power to make such laws whether they benefit the public or not – betrays the

fact that he was an active Communist Party member before joining the BUF.52 When it came to

revolutionizing private property, in Thomson’s words, “private ownership and initiative is

encouraged, but the individual is encouraged to consider public welfare as well as private

interest…economic justice will be the first object of the corporate state.”53 The BUF felt that by

combining this attitude towards private property with the “establishment of employers’ and

workers’ organizations with full powers to negotiate national wage and hours agreements for

each industry,” they would be uniting the “worker, small trader, and honest producer in a 50 Oswald Mosley, Tomorrow We Live, 57. 51 Ibid, 57-58. 52 Alexander Raven Thomson, The Coming Corporate State, 16. 53 Alexander Raven Thomson, The Coming Corporate State, 17.

16

common onslaught upon the tyranny of high finance realizing that employers have common

interests with the workers in the attainment and maintenance of a high standard of life.”54

This preoccupation with finance capital, and the “parasite,” was central to Mosley and the

BUF’s understanding of class. In Fascism – 100 Questions Asked and Answered, where Mosley

was almost certainly both asking and answering the questions, he responded to, “How are you

going to break down the barriers of class?” saying: “By establishment of the principle of no

reward without service, and the consequent elimination of the parasite who creates the barrier of

social class…differences of social class will be eliminated. They arise from the fact that in

present society the few can live in idleness as a master class upon the production of the many.”55

Comparing Oswald Mosley’s writings after he had embraced fascism to those published

as a member of the Labour Party, he seems even more radical. In Revolution by Reason he spoke

of nationalizing banks and creating an Economic Council, by the time he was writing The

Greater Britain and Tomorrow We Live he wanted to “break down the barriers of class” and his

cohorts like Alexander Raven Thomson were speaking of “advancing trade unionism to 100

percent” in the creation of an updated form of syndicalism.

Membership of the BUF

Moving away from the founders and ideologues of the movement to the rank and file it is

clear to see that the rhetoric of the BUF struck a chord among those at the bottom of the

economic ladder. Stuart Rawnsley’s essay, “The Membership of the British Union of Fascists”

54 Ibid, 29-30.55 Oswald Mosley, Fascism – 100 Questions Asked and Answered, 9.

17

offers a number of examples of regions with a high amount of working-class membership, and

attempts to specifically draw such a constituency. Rawnsley states:

“…in south-east Lancashire the Blackshirts launched special ‘cotton campaigns’ to attract cotton workers. It was claimed, for instance that a total of 65,000 jobs could be saved in the industry by the implementation of BUF policy. There is evidence that many cotton workers did respond to this message. In Middleton the leader though there were many working class members, mainly cotton workers, and considered this to be true of BUF membership generally in East Lancashire.”56

That leader in Middleton, at least from 1936 on, was G.P. Sutherst who joined the movement

when he was 19. His involvement in the BUF’s efforts to recruit cotton workers raised the level

of local membership in the area from a few dozen to over 200 between 1936 and 1939.57

In the Hull area the district leader put unemployed, working-class individuals at about

40% of the total membership and thought that in Bolton, where his brother was the district

leader, the situation was the same.58 Rawnsley goes on to assert that “a significant proportion” of

the membership in the north was drawn through a fear of unemployment and “a lack of faith in

the established political parties to deal with unemployment.”59

Another useful study of membership is Thomas P. Linehan’s East London for Mosley

which, as the title suggests, is a case study of BUF membership in East London. Linehan’s

choice of the East End is particularly useful as it appears that by 1935 about half of the total

membership of the BUF was located in London with 70-80% of the city’s total membership

located in East London. Much like Rawnsley’s picture of BUF membership in northern Britain,

Linehan shows a substantial amount of working-class support in East London; 51.44% of the

BUF membership in the area.60 The picture one gets of the boroughs the study looks at is one of

56 Stuart Rawnsley, “The Membership of the British Union of Fascists,” in British Fascism: Essays on the Radical Right in Inter-War Britain. Eds. Kenneth Lunn and Richard C. Thurlow. (New York: St. Martins Press, 1980), 160.

57 Ibid, 159.58 Ibid, 160.59 Ibid, 160. 60 Thomas P. Linehan, East London for Mosley: The British Union of Fascists in East London and

South-West Essex 1933-1940 (Taylor and Francis, 1996), 211.

18

a crowded population living in both dirt and squalor. In Bethnal Green, Linehan notes the New

Survey of London Life and Labours (1931) which put the poverty rate in the area at 17.8% of a

total population of 108,194. Bethnal Green also had the second highest population density in

London at 142.4 people per acre and in 1928 health inspections revealed 29,671 sanitary

deficiencies afflicting dwellings.61 The borough of Stepney was a similar setting with a poverty

rate of 15.5% and a population density of 127.5 people per acre. Linehan also states that in

Stepney there was “between 77 and 80 deaths per 1,000 infants during the period 1927-1936”

and this was regularly in excess of the London average.”62 By comparison, the borough of

Poplar was roomier with only 66.5 people per acre however the poverty rate was higher than

many others at 24.1%.63

The poor economic conditions in much of East London show through in many of

boroughs’ political histories as well. For example, Bethnal Green was controlled by a Labour-

Communist coalition from 1919 to 1928. After the coalition failed to deliver, the region turned

to the Liberal Party for six years, and then back to Labour in 1934.64 This swing from a Labour-

Communist coalition to the Liberal Party and back to Labour can be interpreted as a group of

people sharing poverty as well as rational calculations on behalf of their class. But what is

perhaps more interesting, especially for our purposes, is that only a year after bringing Labour

back to power in Bethnal Green the party became extremely unpopular after failing to support a

public celebration of King Edward’s Silver Jubilee of accession which was seen as “socialist

anti-patriotism.”65 So what we see in East London is a poverty stricken area with a history of

61 Ibid, 57.62 Ibid, 58. 63 Ibid, 58. 64 Ibid, 65-68. 65 Linehan, East London for Mosley, 66-7.

19

left-wing politics mixed with traditional British patriotism and nationalism – a ground that

proved rather fertile for the Blackshirts.

In East London for Mosley, Linehan also includes a section that is essentially an oral

history of why certain individuals joined the BUF. What is remarkable is that many of the “rank

and file” Blackshirts followed the same political trajectory as their leader Oswald Mosley;

coming to fascism from socialism. For example E.B., a clerical worker for a French shipping

company in London was originally struck by the BUF’s social program:

“…The fascist British Union in those days, in a social sense, was very very radical, radically socialist you could call them. Both in their economic policy, in their housing, in their schooling…and that’s what actually got me first interested…coming from an Irish background, you see. That’s the first thing that really started getting my attention, when he (Mosley) started talking about the socialist parties and the economic ideas…”66

B.V., an upholster from Bethnal Green, also joined out of a desire to change his economic

conditions and because of the BUF’s nationalism. He joined the Bethnal Green North East

Branch sometime in March 1936 when he was 25 years old:

“…I joined it for…the betterment of my conditions and also for…my country. And I liked the policy and er I…I believed in National Socialism. I believed charity begins at home and the basis of the Blackshirt policy was…charity begins at home…National Socialism. I believed in it. I believed in it because first of all I’m a Socialist…and coupled with that I am a Nationalist. I love my country…I love my country and believe in preserving its standards…”67

R.E., who came from a working-class family traditionally affiliated with Labour, joined the

Shoreditch Branch in 1936 at the age of 19. He echoes B.V. in his reasons for becoming a

Blackshirt:

“…We lived in a very poverty stricken area and I suppose…at that age without really putting one’s finger on it, you felt that there was something wrong. And I suppose it would have been easy to have joined the Communist Party. But I found that the more

Linehan does not include full names of members of the BUF just initials and the occasional first name. 66 Ibid, 259. 67 Ibid, 255.

20

patriotic party had a lot more appeal to me. And I think this was the same with a lot of members. You could have gone one way or the other.”68

Our next speaker, C.M. who joined the East Ham Branch in early 1937 when he was 22, was

another member who would have been drawn to the Communist Party had it not been for their

internationalism. As Linehan puts it, “C.M. was another of the many on the radical Left of local

fascism who were attracted by the BUF’s capacity to synthesize militant socialism with

traditional Empire patriotism:

“…I suppose it was attitudes beginning to formulate. I was interested in politics. I belonged to the Labour League of Youth at one time. I was interested in trade unionism…I didn’t know what I was really, but I know I certainly wasn’t Tory! I was more socialist or Communist inclined…although I never really liked Communism, you know, because…the Communists always talked about Russia and they were always foreign-ish looking…and I think I took a dislike to them.”69

L.W. and ‘Jack’ W. (L.W.’s father) not only seem to follow the same political path as Mosley,

they almost seem to be walking next to him. In Linehan’s words, “‘Jack’ W. was an unemployed

French polisher and general labourer, of Wrights Road Bow, enrolled in 1934 at the age of 52,

after a protracted period of disillusionment with Labour politics. A member of the pre-1914

Labour Party in Bow, the rejection of the Mosley Memorandum by the Snowden-Thomas-

Henderson triumvirate was to complete the disintegration of his belief in the Labour Party as a

reliable instrument of radical regeneration in society. As L.W. recalls:

“…and when Snowden turned down Mosley’s proposals he (‘Jack’ W.) became very disillusioned with the Labour Party. And then he almost went Communist, because they were the only people, in their own way, who was offering any salvation for the working class in this country. And then one Sunday I went in and said, ‘the Blackshirts have got a meeting in Roman Road, Dad,’ and he said, ‘Oh I’ll go round and listen to it.’ Now that appealed to him because my father was a great patriot…he loved England…he loved England, and when he went round there and Mosley said ‘Britain for the British…men have got the skill…we’ve got it all…we can build a “Greater Britain,”’ well, he joined…he joined overnight.”70

68 Linehan, East London for Mosley, 261-2. 69 Ibid, 263. 70 Linehan, East London for Mosley, 254-5.

21

Looking back at leadership for a moment, W.F. Mandle’s study, “The Leadership of the

British Union of Fascists” is particularly useful, more for his inclusion of an appendix of “raw

data” than for his conclusions, which actually do not correspond numerically to the data in the

appendix. Mandle’s sample of 103 Blackshirt leaders includes the known social-class distinction

of 98 individuals. Twenty-eight percent of the leaders are listed as either working-class, small

independent, or farmer, an even 60% are considered professionals or in business, and the

remaining four percent make up the five members whose class distinction is unknown.71 In

terms of political affiliation prior to joining the BUF that of only 30 individuals in the sample is

known. Within this group, 36.66% had been affiliated with the Conservatives, 36.66% with

Labour, 10% with the Liberal Party, and 16.66% with the Communists. Or to look at it another

way; 36.66% of the leadership came from the right and 63.44% came from the left of British

politics.72

Stepping back to the social class of Blackshirt leadership, it would be incorrect to argue,

the way that many have about all socialist parties in the inter-war years, that middle class

leadership steered the party towards middle class values. For as Dan S. White puts it in Lost

Comrades, “It does insufficient credit to the intelligence and perceptions of self-interest of the

mass workers to suppose that they accepted leadership from groups who consistently failed to

represent them.”73 In other words, the prominent working class membership of the BUF joined

the organization because they believed in its radical social program and its nationalism and the

leaders of the movement were put in place to help make that goal a reality.

Other Fascisms and Socialisms

71 W.F. Mandle, “The Leadership of the British Union of Fascists,” The Australian Journal of Politics and History 12. (1966), 370-383.

72 Ibid, 370-383.73 Dan S. White, Lost Comrades, 44-45.

22

It would be a mistake to consider Oswald Mosley and the B.U.F. a complete aberration of

European fascism; just the opposite is true and the organization fits like a puzzle-piece in a

current of socialism that developed in the interwar period. There were in fact a number of

socialists in this era who were essentially considered heretics in their day as they looked for new

avenues toward revolution and the actual building of socialism. Dan White tells us that the Front

Generation leaders, during the early 1920’s, were clarifying their own world view – their

experience in the war and their dissatisfaction with the established Socialist Parties led them to

reject both the “deterministic historical materialism of Marx,” as well as the “unencumbered

Liberalism of Marxism.”74 Consequently: “by one avenue or another they found their way to

academic perspectives that had been unknown in Marx’s day…At the end of this peacetime

education their formation as socialists was complete. So was their freedom from the

movement’s orthodoxies. And the resemblances among them, of which they could not yet be

aware, were emerging.”75

One of the foremost thinkers to come out of this period was the Belgian theorist and

socialist politician Henri De Man. As Zeev Sternhell notes, he was not just anybody either:

“Vice president of the Parti Ouvrier Belge (POB, Belgian Worker’s Party), and then on the death

of Emile Vandervelve in 1938, its president.”76 Much like Mosley, De Man was utterly

dissatisfied with the “sit-around-and-wait” approach to socialism and demanded that socialists in

power begin to build socialism in their respective countries. The program he developed for

Belgium, Le Plan du Travail, was, as Richard Griffiths puts it, “a state plan based on a mixed

economy, central direction of that economy, inflationary fiscal policies, and Keynesian deficit

74 Ibid, 40-1.75 Dan S. White, Lost Comrades, 26. 76 Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 246.

23

financing.”77 All of this would have been achieved through the alliance of the working and

middle classes against finance capital which, as Sternhell states, is simply a “variation of the idea

of an alliance of all ‘producers’ against all ‘parasites.’”78 Le Planisme was also contingent upon

a strong state, something that De Man knew; by 1938 he was prepared to write: “In the future,

we shall have to be more determined in realizing a socialist order at the same time as setting up

an authoritarian state, the one conditioning the other.”79

It should be apparent that De Man’s ideas of a strong socialist state creating and

conditioning a socialist order through an alliance of the working class and middle strata of

society against the “parasite” that was finance capitalism is essentially what Oswald Mosley was

advocating in Britain with the BUF. Equally interesting, however, is that these ideas run from a

vein of older and well established socialist thought, that of Pierre Joseph Proudhon.

Furthermore, one does not have to look for obscure passages within his work to find these ideas;

rather they stem from what is perhaps his most well known dictum, “Property is theft.” As J.

Salwyn Schapiro states, “It is only by reading Proudhon carefully – and fully – that it is possible

to understand what he meant by “property and why he regarded it as “theft.” Schapiro goes on to

explain that “according to Proudhon property was, in essence, a privilege to obtain rent, profit,

and interest without any labor whatsoever. It reaped without sowing, consumed without

producing, and enjoyed without exertion. It was the “worst usurer as well as the worst master

and worst debtor.”80

With this in mind it is easy to see how, and why, certain socialists embraced De Man’s

ideas which were extremely heretical for a Marxist of his day, they were simply drawing on

77 Richard Griffiths, “Fascism and the Planned Economy: “Neo-Socialism” and “Planisme” in France and Belgium in the 1930’s,” Science and Society Vol. 69, No. 4. (October 2005), 582.

78 Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 248.79 Henri De Man, Apres Coup, as quoted in Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 248. 80 J. Salwyn Schapiro, “Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Harbinger of Fascism,” The American Historical Review

Vol. 50, No. 4 (July 1945), 720.

24

another strain of socialist thought. One of the individuals that Le Planisme impressed was the

French neo-socialist Marcel Déat who had gathered around him a number of like minded

individuals that in 1933 advocated that all of French socialists embrace Le Planisme.81 De Man’s

ideas were ultimately rejected in France but not before Léon Blum asked the 1933 congress

whether or not the program was that of a National Socialist Party.82

There was another aspect of De Man’s thinking that was also very influential in this

period, one which concerned motivation. De Man had fought in the First World War and his

experience led him to take issue with a number of facets of established Marxism, particularly the

idea that motivation is almost completely grounded in economic calculations. It is important to

note that De Man did not so much critique Marx as he critiqued Marxism, specifically the

Marxism of Karl Kautsky who was perhaps the most influential figure of continental Marxism in

the late 19th and early 20th centuries. De Man’s objection was that Kautsky had accepted Marx’s

doctrines essentially as a science which condemned him, and thus much of socialism, to an

“optimistic fatalism.”83 In 1926, De Man published what in many ways was a response to

Kautky’s determinism, Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus, or Beyond Marxism as it was titled in

most other countries. Dan White states that the book “became both source and reference point of

a developing critique of socialism which focused on the pivotal question of motivation.”84 One

of the central tenets of De Man’s theory was the idea that capitalist exploitation was as much

psychological as it was material or economic and thus motivating the masses towards the

toppling of capitalism had to rely heavily on ethical calculations.85

81 Richard Griffiths, “Fascism and the Planned Economy,” 582. 82 Ibid, 588.83 Dan White, Lost Comrades, 60 84 Dan White, Lost Comrades, 58. 85 Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 247.

25

In this De Man was heavily influenced by the French theorist Georges Sorel. Sorel,

while never affiliated with any political movement, considered himself a Marxist and at the turn

of the century offered what can only be described as an anti-materialist revision of Marxism.

Sorel, a committed revolutionary, was in total despair at the social reforms that cooled the

revolutionary impulse among workers. The problem was that History had not progressed the

way that Marx and Engels said it would; capitalist democracies were not creating the material

conditions that would drive workers towards a revolution and in fact were actually granting them

reforms to, at least materially, make their lives a little better.86 This was a true crisis for the

orthodox Marxist – the entire ideology banked on the belief that capitalism would make life so

unbearable, in material terms, for the working class that they would be driven into revolution.

Since capitalism was not behaving the way it should according to Marx, at least the Marx that

was known at the turn of the twentieth century, socialist revolutionaries sought to save the

relevancy of Marxism. In response to this crisis, Sorel looked to what he called the

“apocalyptic” content of Das Kapital and argued that what socialism needed in order to achieve

a revolution was to turn this “apocalyptic content” into a social myth.87 As Sternhell describes:

“…it was intended to develop the class consciousness of the proletariat, to encourage its combativeness, to structure a labor elite properly organized in syndicates, and to create a deep psychological gulf between this avant-garde and the ruling bourgeoisie. This psychological gulf had to be deepened by day through a constant rejection of social reforms; thus social polarization would be accomplished through willpower, and the atmosphere of a crisis of capitalism, which because of economic growth had failed to develop, would become a reality.”88

The adoption of myth in order to create social change is of course one of the great hallmarks of

fascist movements but it was also central to De Man’s argument for a socialist ethic, or moral

myth to push a united working and middle class against high finance.

86 Ibid, 54. 87 Ibid, 56 88 Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 54

26

One of De Man’s admirers was the Italian Fascist Dictator Benito Mussolini; the two

actually corresponded to discuss similarities between what Mussolini was doing with Fascism in

Italy and what De Man had advocated in Beyond Marxism. De Man himself had a number of

reservations about Fascism, however he did not condemn it outright and actually wrote to

Mussolini:

“Having said this, I beg you to believe that no prejudice prevents me from following daily, insofar as one can from reading, with an ardent concern for objective information, the doctrinal and political work that you are undertaking…. It is precisely because, belonging like you to the “generation of the front” and influenced, like you, by the ideas of Georges Sorel, I do not close my mind to any manifestations of creative force, it is precisely because I am not afraid to do justice to certain organizational aspects of the Fascist enterprise that I follow its progress with a passionate interest.”89

Mussolini’s connections to socialism actually ran much deeper than this shared appreciation for

the work of Georges Sorel. Mussolini was of course a socialist long before he launched Italian

Fascism and, as A. James Gregor has noted, it was “as leader of Italy’s socialists that Mussolini

developed the views on society and revolution that were to inform the doctrines of Fascism.”90

In fact, it seems that Fascism seems to be to Mussolini what Bolshevism was to Lenin: a

revolutionary vanguard whose immediate mission once power had been seized would be to carry

out the task of the middle-class and industrialize the state in order to produce a proletariat

capable of managing a socialist state. As Mussolini himself would say after he had taken power:

“…when I went to the school of socialism…I was told that socialism was possible only at the

conclusion of the bourgeois transformation of the medieval, into a capitalist, economy…

Socialism would be impossible without a fully developed economic base and a class conscious,

politically astute proletariat.”91

89 Letter from Henri De Man to Benito Mussolini, quoted in Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 246.90 A. James Gregor, The Faces of Janus, 131.91 A. James Gregor, The Faces of Janus, 131.

27

Gregor notes that by 1921, Fascist thinkers in Italy, a group that contained not only

nationalists and “philosophical idealists” but radical Marxists as well, were arguing that if the

task of revolutionary Russia was the “rapid development of its productive forces, nothing less

could be said of the tasks that confronted revolutionaries of the Italian peninsula.”92 It is also

important to understand that Mussolini saw the world, similar to Mao’s theory of three worlds, as

divided between “plutocratic” and “proletarian nations.” In his view, as Gregor states, “Those

nations that were “late developers” …required not Marxist revolution, “proletarian

internationalism,” or “class conflict,” but a state-directed strategy of rapid, massive, sustained

economic growth and technological development.”93 Mussolini received this argument largely

from the radical Marxists who had joined the Fascist movement in 1919 as National Syndicalists

arguing that Fascism “was the socialism of ‘proletarian nations.’”94

Gregor is not the only scholar to come to the conclusion that if one is to understand

Mussolini’s Fascism one must take into account the fact that it had its roots in the socialist

movement. In “Mussolini and the Legacy of Revolutionary Socialism,” Domenico Settembrini

quotes Palmiro Togliatti, the leading communist in Italy at the time, stating that “one must bear

in mind what are the cadres of fascism, and realize that they came to a great extent from

revolutionary syndicalism.”95 Settembrini himself goes on to assert “that fascism was originally

an attempt to give concrete form to the revolutionary idea vainly preached by socialist parties

and movements for a century.”96 He argues that the courses that both Lenin and Mussolini were

trying to “trace out for the revolutionary movement,” while possessing certain differences, had a

number of similarities. The most important of these being, in his words, the “essential condition

92 Ibid, 135. 93 Ibid, 141 94 Ibid, 135-6. 95 Domenico Settembrini, “Mussolini and the Legacy of Revolutionary Socialism,” Journal of

Contemporary History Vol. 11, No. 4, Special Issue: Theories of Fascism. (October 1976), 239.96 Domenico Settembrini, “Mussolini and the Legacy of Revolutionary Socialism,” 240.

28

that the rational connection between the end – socialism – and the means – revolution – should

be reversed, that revolution should be an end in itself.”97

At some point any argument concerning fascism has to at least touch on Adolf Hitler and

National Socialism. It is a tricky subject considering the fact that there is still debate as to

whether or not the Nazis ought to be considered fascists or a similar yet ultimately separate

movement. Resolving this argument is beyond the scope of this article, however it does seem

useful to point out that, at least for a time, there were striking similarities between the National

Socialist movement in Germany and the general current of inter-war revolutionary thought that

sought to create a revolution that would ultimately achieve some sort of socialism through the

coupling of social and political myths with an alliance of the working and middle classes in a

general assault on finance capital.

As Dietrich Orlow points out in “The Conversion of Myths into Political Power,” there

were essentially two factions of the Nazi Party, which were, in his words, “chronologically and

sociologically quite distinct groups.”98 The first group, strongest in southern Germany, fits the

classic interpretation of fascists as a group of lower middle-class, romantic nationalists and anti-

Semites. This is the group that seems to be closest to Hitler’s heart; these were the people he

would ultimately ally himself with in order to politically outmaneuver, and sometimes murder,

the second faction within the Nazi party. This second group, strongest in the north and thus

often referred to as the “northern faction,” was made up primarily of individuals who had fought

in the First World War, and who, in Orlow’s words, “proposed to convert the proletarian masses

from a belief in international socialism (Marxism) to faith in National Socialism.”99

97 Ibid, 246. 98 Dietrich Orlow, “The Conversion of Myths into Political Power: The Case of the Nazi Party, 1925-

1926,” The American Historical Review Vol. 72, No. 3, (April 1967), 908.99 Dietrich Orlow, “The Conversion of Myths into Political Power,” 908.

29

The coupling of “national” and “socialism” ought not to scoffed at, as Dick Geary has

argued, the National Socialist German Workers Party, “as its name suggests…understood itself

to be a party of and for the German working class. Its initial program combined völkisch

elements with social-radical demands for the punishment of war profiteers and the confiscation

of their profits, the abolition of unearned incomes, the nationalization of industrial trusts and the

communalization of large department stores.”100 Geary also points out that much of the recent

scholarship on Nazi demographics argues that the Nazis received far more working class support

than was originally thought. Perhaps the most provocative work is that of Conan Fischer, who

puts the working class at 40 percent of the Nazi electorate. Geary agrees with the conclusion that

Fischer draws stating that “although this means that the working-class voter was proportionally

underrepresented in the Nazi electorate, in absolute terms it probably means that working-class

voters outnumbered any other group of Nazi supporters at the polls, given the shear number of

workers in the population at large.”101

Even Hitler felt that National Socialist ideology shared a deep connection to socialism,

thought it was in a madly perverse way. At a private meeting he spoke to a group of

“confidants” about connections between Nazism and Christianity:

“Socialism is a political problem. And politics is of no concern to the economy… Socialism is a question of attitude to life, of the ethical outlook on life of all who live together in a common ethnic or national space. Socialism is a world view! But in actual fact there is nothing new about this world view. Whenever I read the New Testament Gospels and the revelations of various of the prophets… I am astonished at all that has been made of the teachings of these divinely inspired men, especially Jesus Christ, which are so clear and unique, heightened to religiosity. They were the ones who created this new world view which we now call socialism, they established it, they taught it and they lived it! But the communities that called themselves Christian churches did not understand it! …they denied Christ and betrayed him!”102

100 Dick Geary, “Nazis and Workers before 1933,” Australian Journal of Politics and History Vol. 48, No. 1, (2002), 40.

101 Ibid, 44.102 Richard Steigmann-Gall, “Nazism and the Revival of Political Religion Theory” in Fascism,

Totalitarianism and Political Religion, ed. Roger Griffin (New York: Routledge, 2005) 96.

30

Hitler would go on to say in October 1941, “The Galilean, who later was called the Christ,

intended something quite different. He must be regarded as a popular leader who took up his

position against Jewry… He set himself against Jewish capitalism, and that is why the Jews

liquidated him.”103 As stated before this is a perversion of the liturgical record, as Richard

Steigman-Gall notes, in this passage Hitler feels the need “to rescue Christ from his own

Jewishness.”104 However what we can take away from this is that even for Hitler, perhaps the

most irrational fascist if he was indeed a fascist, his “world view” was shaped by a notion of

socialism as ultimately something worth striving for. Furthermore, this conception of socialism

as a world view is not unlike De Man’s argument that the motivation of socialists is, and should

be, as much based on ethical calculations or a “world view” as it is on material calculations.

Conclusion

This essay, when read…if it is read at all, will undoubtedly be the bearer of much

controversy. For as anyone marginally familiar with the academic conversation attempting to

distil a “general theory” of fascism knows, it is a truly contentious debate. Accept for the few

scholars favorably represented here, this essay argues in the face of 80 years of established

scholarship, it can not help but be controversial. Reactionary members of both the right and the

left will no doubt have a field day with the conclusions drawn in this paper. Right-wing

reactionaries will read this as an affirmation of capitalism, and an indictment of the entire left in

general as being culpable of in what was perhaps the greatest man made catastrophe the world

103 Ibid, 96-7. 104 Ibid, 96.

31

has ever seen, the Holocaust. Members of the right will read this in this way and approve of it –

“dump the reds in a pile.” Ironically, the reactionary left will, in all likelihood, also read this

paper in this way the only difference being that they will disapprove. Ultimately, both camps

miss the point. If this essay is an indictment of anything as general as “right” or “left,” it is an

indictment of capitalism. It should be abundantly clear by now that what pushed large groups of

people into the ranks of men like Mosley, Mussolini, and Hitler was in large part the exploitative

and destructive nature of capitalism.

There will also be those who take issue with this essay for methodological reasons, this

group is more perceptive but ultimately as misled as the reactionaries. They will argue that the

methods utilized here are too empathic, that understanding fascists as they understood

themselves offers validation, and thus methodological heresy has been committed. This position

is understandable; this kind of scholarship is indeed frightening. It is frightening because it asks

the reader to allow themselves to become so intimate with the rational aspects of fascism that

they are able to understand how one could rationalize fascism’s irrational aspects. But the

argument against an empathic approach to fascism will result in more scholarship filled with

judgment and demonization; this is nothing more than an argument for academic punditry.

We no longer have time for this. As we “tease out similarities and observe family

resemblances, stipulate meaning and offer operational definitions in the effort to bring order to

our domain of inquiry,” it seems that we must also ask ourselves if there is a deeper ethical

reason for studying fascism. 105 Is the aim prevention? If it is, our current understanding is very

badly equipped. By focusing only on what fascism became once in power and then reading these

findings backwards into the movement’s original intentions we have blinded ourselves to the true

origins and aspirations of fascism. This is extremely dangerous in a country with a political

105 A. James Gregor, The Faces of Janus, 182.

32

climate like that which is found at present in the United States, a nation that for nationalists

seems to have lost its soul; embroiled in a war that seems to have no end, incurring a huge

national debt, the perception of foreign forces – outsourcing and immigration – destroying the

American economy, and all the while the gap between rich and poor continues to grow

exponentially. The point is that there is a growing dissatisfaction in this country and while this

does not mean that social/political radicals will come to power, it does mean that the time is right

for such an occurrence. We must be careful to guard against some new form of fascism or

national socialism. It is for this reason that the revolutionary socio/economic aspect of fascism

so desperately needs to be understood and taken seriously.

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