II. FASCISM ARRIVES
XXVII. THE END OF REFORM
I
THE spread of fascism is an exquisite demonstration that the era of reform has come to an end, and has given way to an age of punishment. The punishment is complete and all-embracing. The population is thrown into the dungeon of medieval practice. It is compelled by methods of the Inquisition to swear to superstitious creeds, and mystic vagaries, and utopian schema. Like a scorpion which strikes its own head with its tail, humanity is being knocked senseless by the physical tortures meted out to it by the rotting dregs and social scum fascism raises to power. The d’eclass’es are taking their revenge on the classes. The narcotic, the homosexual, the paranoiac, the sadist, the syphilitic, are enthroned in power. Fascism is not genius become insane but mediocrity become mad.
In the nineteenth century, capitalism had adopted a philosophy of Meliorism, of the world’s becoming better and better day by day, and had reinforced this philosophy with a system of social reforms to improve the lot of the masses and to wean them from revolution. The drain of reform upon the State was not proportionately costly in a period of growing markets. Today the situation has completely changed; capitalism is no longer on the rise, but is declining in a precipitous spiral. The costs of social insurance and reform have become infinitely enlarged, so much so that, unless they are reduced or abolished, the entire system is threatened with bankruptcy. For this reason the socialist parties are dismissed with violence by the propertied rulers; not because the socialist parties advocate revolution or will not defend capitalism—the contrary has been amply proven—but because the cost of maintaining the socialists is bringing bankruptcy and revolution in its train.
Paradoxically, the socialists win their point only to lose it. They had declared that gradually, by a series of reforms, the capitalist State could be transformed into socialism. The effect of these series of reforms is indeed as serious as the socialists visioned, but in a way entirely unanticipated by them. Precisely the accumulation of these secondary reforms has so induced the breakdown of the financial structure of the capitalist system as to lead towards socialism, not peacefully and gradually, but through revolution. Far from reform’s having staved off revolution, social reform only has weakened the ruling class and strengthened the workers. When the benefits of the social reforms no longer can be paid out to the masses habituated to them, resentment becomes sharper, revolution nearer.
The mere existence of world wars, revolutions, and perpetual turmoil proves that capitalism has reached the final stage of its existence; its constructive abilities have been superseded by destruction. Today capitalism no longer can support even social reforms. The ruling group no longer can harmonize class interests by means of concessions and bribes, but is forced to resort to crushing the workers by open violence. From Meliorism, the bourgeoisie embraces anti-reform; or, to put it another way, finding itself on the verge of bankruptcy and death, capitalism undertakes its own reforms under the rubric of fascism. Fascism is the re-forming of the capitalist system so as to permit the beneficiaries to profit a bit longer. Frightened by the handwriting on the wall, the rulers now begin to comprehend that reform, instead of preventing revolution, has compelled revolution; that is to say, evolution does not preclude revolution, but rather fosters it.
It would seem that the socialists at least would struggle to maintain their social reforms, but this is to reckon without their servility. Once the intimate connection between reform and revolution clearly is understood, the socialists, in order to prevent revolution, are quite prepared to give up the fight for reforms. Thus the Socialist Party in Germany could tell the workers to vote for Hindenburg in order to check Hitler, although the vote for Hindenburg was not only an abandonment of the demand for social reform, but actually brought in Hitler. Thus the socialists, in giving up the struggle for social reform, become transformed into mere bourgeois Radicals.
In this period, too, there is exposed the utter ridiculousness of those sectarian revolutionists who refused to participate in immediate struggles of the masses for reform on the ground that this would divert them from the path of revolution. Today these day-to-day struggles have become increasingly revolutionary in portent and are so understood both by the capitalists and by the workers. The fascists can not permit even minor struggles to appear in the social system.
Nor is there any further need for the Blanquist philosophy which calls for a conspiratorial coup d’e’tat of the few in the present period when the masses as a whole are ripe for struggle, and the inevitable direction of that struggle must be the seizure of State power.
History has made the views of both the opportunist Right and the sectarian Left a laughing matter. What was tragic has become comic. In this happy way, mankind breaks from the past and shows it is ready for the new problems.
Precisely for the reason that the day for social reform, for social Liberalism and social democracy has passed, revolutionists must participate more than ever in the struggle for reform; not because reform can be granted to block the revolution of the masses, but, on the contrary, because it cannot be granted, because capitalism more and more becomes anti-reform, anti-humanitarian, anti-social.
In the struggle for the reform which capitalism cannot sustain, the revolution is won. In the battle for a Constituent Assembly, the Russian masses give all power to the soviets-and then the Constituent Assembly is no longer needed.
Among the revolutionists in the nineteenth century, the period of reform always was conceived as separate from that of revolution. Democracy was pictured as distinct from the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Today, these two periods intertwine, are the immediate cause and effect,means and end of each other. The United States, for instance, before it has wholly emerged into its period of social reform, must already enter its period of revolution.
As the fascists drive the reformist socialists out of power, some of the latter try to fight back, belatedly believing that they can continue to struggle for reform without going the way of revolution. (*1) These socialists form a new school of Centrists comically holding on to old methods, blind to the lessons of the new times.
In the nineteenth century, the struggle for social reforms was placed in the realm of “tactics” by the old socialists, while at the same time, tactics and program were kept entirely divorced each from the other. Today, the tactics must be connected intimately with the program, and the revolutionist must so work in the immediate field of tactical reform as to be able to seize that link in the chain of events which can move the whole forward and realize his program.
As the socialists completely disintegrate even as a reformist body, and become mere liberals, the communists also capitulate in the struggle against fascism and degenerate into mere social reformists. The victory of fascism moves every organized element among the workers backward one degree. Left Wing communists become Right Wing communists; communists become socialists; socialists become laborites; laborites become liberals; liberals turn to fascism.
What eliminates the socialist movement even as a counter-revolutionary force becomes fatal to the reformist trade unions as well. As in the case of the socialists, it is not that the trade union leadership does not wish to remain the savior of capitalist society; it is rather that the capitalists find these saviors too costly and whip them out of office, to substitute their own dependable management.
In the nineteenth century, trade unions were permitted as a part of the functioning of democracy and social reform. Competitive and democratic capitalism also had room for a free labor movement. In fact, though developing as a reaction and protest against capitalism, the labor movement was itself part of the capitalistic system. A capitalism which was allied with liberalism and democracy needed a certain degree of opposition for its functioning. For over a hundred years this fact was the basis of a socio-political system which allowed opposition as a legal and constructive factor in its organization. The political party, the trade union, the cooperative movement, the socialist movement, were all part of a dynamic system which predicated itself upon the idea of progress as a continuous movement toward higher political forms and higher standards of living and which allowed a certain degree of questioning of its own foundations and a certain degree of modification in its component institutions.
“The present trends in economics and politics are seemingly in the opposite direction… . Politically, the development of social groups with conflicting interests free to carry on their struggles unhindered is likely to result in a continued reaction against representative democracy and in a tendency toward executive forms of government for the purpose of overcoming friction and making speedy action possible.” (*2)
Today the organization of trade unions cannot remain part of a general gradual scheme of reform. The employers must fight trade unionism every inch of the way. The workers to be effective must organize in industrial unions nationally, must carry on general strikes against the State, must take in the masses of unskilled who have now become matured enough to understand their interests and their revolutionary destiny. A hundred years ago the Liberal elements could organize trade unions; today Liberalism has passed out; it could not organize effective unions if it wanted to.
This is true even in the United States. Should the workers try to build national militant industrial unions in the present period, so great would be the resistance of the employers, so severe would be the action of the government that labor would be compelled to take over the power of the State itself. just as the struggle for unemployment insurance must develop into the struggle for workers’ control over production, just as generally the struggle for reform leads them to revolution, so must the struggle for unionism march them to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
In other words, we may say that the United States is bound to skip the whole period of social reform. The mobilization of classes will lead to a violent revolutionary struggle; this is how the law of combined development works out in the United States. For this reason, the violent social conflicts that take place in the United States appear, not as open class struggles of a political nature, but as battles to prevent the birth of class formations. Whereas in Europe the fight rages between classes, in America class war has been waged to prevent the open formation of class alignments or of class ideology. Hence the fierce struggle in the United States to prevent the formation of trade unions.
Not that the employers of this country cannot afford to do what the employers in Europe found profitable. The capitalists of America are far more thoroughly organized and far too powerfully entrenched not to be able to yield the few concessions demanded of them by trade unions. If, then, the employers are so determined in their open shop campaigns to prevent the rise of unionism, it is because, interpreting the experiences of their brethren in Europe, they understand full well the connection of reform to revolution, of unions to the class struggle. The class struggle must fight to be born; the fiercest battle is in the prenatal period! The way to prevent the workers from entering into the political sphere, the way to stop them from organizing as a class, is to crush them even when they fight on the economic sphere in the form of trade unions. The way to prevent revolution is not to permit the workers to wrest any reforms whatsoever.
A good illustration of this law of combined development in the United States can be found in the struggle of the coal miners immediately after the War. In West Virginia, the coal operators refused to allow any union organizer to come into Logan County to organize a local of the United Mine Workers. In order to present their demands for this petty reform, namely, the right to organize members into the conservative A. F. of L., the miners were compelled to marshal a veritable army of over five thousand men with arms in their hands. Even then they were unable to win their point.
At the border of Logan County they were met, not only by a legion of private bullies, gunmen, and detectives hired by the companies, not only by the National Guard, the State Militia, and sheriffs’ deputies of the County and the State, but by the United States Army as well. This army informed the miners that unless they dispersed immediately they would be considered as engaging in rebellion against the republic. The miners hastily broke ranks and dispersed; they were unable to accomplish even the miserable reform of obtaining the abstract right of free speech and assemblage in one county of the Union.
Under such circumstances, which must become more typical as capitalism grows more desperate, it is impossible to suppose that the Liberal business-minded labor bureaucrats of the A. F. of L. could possibly carry out the task of organizing the thirty-six million unorganized workers in the United States today. To imagine their entering the turpentine camps of the South, agitating the agricultural laborers in the cotton fields, winning the Negro toilers, or organizing militant unions without the sharpest possible kind of struggle, is to believe in miracles. The same situation prevails in the trustified industries. To meet the terrific obstacles which the employers place in the way of the organization of labor, there must be at the head of the organized movement not the soft, fat-bellied, highly-paid, specially privileged labor business man, but rather the tried and tested revolutionary fighters, men who are willing daily to risk death or lynching. It would be necessary to have a highly coordinated nationally organized staff that could throw the support of all labor behind this task of organizing the workers. There would also be necessary a determination on the part of the labor movement to engage in the most militant general strike movement, even to the point of taking control over the factories, to support this kind of campaign. To accomplish these reforms, it would soon become apparent that the workers themselves would have to take over the government.
American labor will not endure a long process of laborism, as in England. It should be borne in mind that the chief battles between capital and labor have been, not in the political, but in the economic field. Here is the traditional battle-ground for physical struggle. Economic battles in America have been as bloody and brutal as political demonstrations in Europe. The worker has traditionally met his employer openly, face to face.
For this reason, the economic struggle in America can quickly and directly become a struggle for power, the workers not being concerned primarily with parliamentary activity, rule of the Supreme Court, suffrage rights, etc. Hence, too, the employers fear bitterly the economic struggle, and strive desperately to prevent the organization of the masses of workers on the economic field. This is another way of saying that once the American workers are able to comprehend the A B C of the class struggle, they will quickly learn the X Y Z, and realize the necessity of taking over the whole system for themselves.
Added to this is the fact that the employers in this country have neither the standing nor the stability of the ruling classes of Europe. Everyone is thoroughly acquainted with the despicable and unscrupulous methods by which American business tycoons have amassed their wealth and obtained their power. It is no accident that they hold that power only through the violence of their large private armies and that there is scarcely any difference between the ruthless activities of so-called legitimate big business and the criminal operations of the racketeer.
From all of these considerations we must draw the conclusion that the chief struggle in the United States will include the question of trade union organization. From this two further corollaries arise: on the one hand is the law that no one can be considered a revolutionist who does not engage in the struggle of the unorganized, the success of which depends upon him alone; on the other hand lies the comprehension that the A. F. of L. never can organize large masses of unskilled. Either the revolutionary forces will achieve such organization, or the masses will not be organized in labor unions at all—or they will be organized only in company unions or compulsory fascist organizations.
This struggle to prevent the open formation of class alignments in the United States explains in part the numerous lynching’s of Negroes. The philosophy of America is to tolerate no hard and fast caste lines. Such rigidity would imply that America is as decadent as Europe. Yet the American Negro is shut out precisely by such lines. Marked by the color of his skin, he cannot escape. Nor can it be denied that the Negro represents labor and practically only labor. Thus, the caste formations that separate the Negro from the rest of the population are formations that separate labor from others, but this is labor in an unconscious form. The fight against labor is here seen as a struggle against the Negro and is put on a chauvinist basis.
This obscures the class character of the lynching, since on the surface there is no sign that labor is being lynched when the Negro is burned at the stake or mutilated before hanging. On the other hand, the unconscious is the only form that the class struggle can take in America. Hatred of the Negro is the hatred that the ruling group feels against any element that maintains a group cohesiveness and that stands as the living refutation of America’s credo of individualism and equal opportunity for all. The Negro is lynched really because he is the black foreshadower of the awful class formations and struggles that are to come in America. The torture of the Negro is a warning to all labor of what will happen to it in the South or elsewhere should it dare to become organized in rigid class lines, denying the basic tenets of bourgeois Americanism.
2
Under the conditions generated by capitalism, such intense contradictions have developed as to make the whole epoch of imperialism one of wars and revolutions. With the World War and the revolutionary strife that followed in its wake, the era of imperialism entered a new stage qualitatively different from the previous one, 1900-1914. Distinctive of this new phase, manifesting that imperialism has now entered definitely upon its period of decline, are the following situations: First, the proletarian revolution becomes victorious in the Soviet Union and snatches away one-sixth of the territory of the globe from the capitalist system. Second, no matter how much capitalism tries, it cannot regain its pre-war stability; its disintegration cannot be halted. All the attempts at stabilization become desperate efforts merely to slacken the tempo of the break-down and of the international revolution. During all this time, revolutionary outbreaks of various degrees constantly occur in all parts of the world, some being temporarily liquidated, others remaining festering sores, symptoms of the all-consuming fever within, with new ones erupting. After the first revolutionary wave subsides, with the defeat in Germany in 1923, revolutionary situations break out in Bulgaria and Estonia in 1924, in China 1925-27, in England 1926, in Austria 1927, in India, China, Indo-China, Spain 1930, in Cuba 1933, in Austria, Germany, France, etc., etc.
For such revolutionary situations to appear there had to be certain objective changes in the internal relations of capitalist countries. First of all, the ranks of the bourgeoisie and ruling groups generally had to be broken and their power lessened. Secondly, the sufferings of the masses had to become unbearably intense, leading to an unusually great activity of the people. For these factors to mature into actual insurrections there had to be added a subjective element, the ability of the revolutionary classes to carry out mass action strong enough to break or to undermine the old government. This ability would have to be crystallized into the organization of communist parties.
The rise of the communist soviets in Russia made international imperialism bend every effort to drown them in blood and to check their extension. This it was not able to do, the battle ending in a draw. The foreign capitalists failed to overthrow the soviets; the communist forces were unable to win in any territory except that which had been dominated formerly by the Czar. As this territory represented only 4 per cent of world economy, its loss to the capitalist markets was not great enough to produce in the entire capitalist world immediate death convulsions.
The basic causes for the failure of capitalism to overthrow the soviets were: First, the enormous and inaccessible territory of the country and its economic self-sufficiency as far as food was concerned. Second, the numerical and moral strength of the population led by an exceedingly toughened Communist Party. Third, the revolution having broken out in the midst of a World War, the international capitalists were unable to unite their forces in time. They had to wait a whole year until the termination of the War, before they could move against the communists. This fact provided the latter with an invaluable breathing space. Further, by the time the World War was ended, the international bourgeoisie had become extremely weak, not only because of its exhaustion from war, but because of the revolutionary movements of the masses, who, threatening revolution at home and refusing to fight the soviets, manifested considerable international working class solidarity.
As the capitalists thus exposed their inherent weakness and failed to crush the Soviet Union, in turn the communism represented by Russian Bolshevism achieved a rapid growth all over the world, stimulating and organizing revolutionary movements everywhere, and threatening to destroy capitalism in countries other than Russia.
The workers’ republic was unable to defeat the capitalists internationally because, first, the United States lent its whole might to strengthen and rehabilitate the European bourgeoisie, and, secondly, the communist movement was still too weak to support Russia by seizing and holding power elsewhere. Russia herself was exhausted. This prevented the Russian communists from routing the Polish army and joining hands with the German revolutionists. The Soviets were thrown back at the gates of Warsaw.
Fascism was the direct reaction to this internationalist communist movement. Historically, fascism appeared as a dominant movement in those countries which, next to the Soviet Union, were the weakest links in the imperialist chain which the masses were breaking. Fascism is thus a post- war movement basically directed against communism and formed by the bourgeoisie to liquidate the proletarian revolution threatening its power.
For fascism to take hold in a country, the internal relation of classes must show the following characteristics: first, a breakdown and instability of capitalist relationships; second, a considerable number of declassed social elements such as ex-soldiers and officers; third, a pauperization of the city middle class and professional elements; fourth, a deep crisis among the peasantry; fifth, and most important, a proletarian movement threatening to seize and to hold State power.
Fascism first arose in countries predominantly agrarian, but also containing a well developed industry and commerce. The highest expression of this type of fascism has occurred in Italy, although foreshadowing’s of the Italian movement could be seen in semi-fascist Poland under Pilsudski, and in Hungary under Horthy. From the victory of National Socialism in Germany and its great growth in the major industrial countries of the world, however, it is plain that fascism has moved from the secondary to the primary countries, from the limbs and periphery to the heart and center of European capitalism. Seemingly able to suppress the threat to communism, fascism has fashioned only new crises and has sharpened all antagonisms to monstrous proportions paving the way for new revolutions in the future.
Fascism is the open Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie with the aid of the petty bourgeoisie against the workers. It comes at a time when capitalism has no further use for classical parliamentarism and when democracy as a bourgeois class state has become thoroughly exposed to the masses. Fascism boldly replaces the democratic shibboleths of liberty, equality, and fraternity, with slogans of responsibility, hierarchy, discipline. For the peaceful and legal action of the majority as acclaimed by liberalism, fascism substitutes the direct violence of the minority.
In wiping out the proletarian and all other dissident parties, fascism unites all the elements of the bourgeoisie under one flag. The economic possibility of such a fusion is inherent in the domination of all competition by the Big Business monopolist. The supersedure of entrepreneur capital by interest-bearing capital coordinated by the monopolist financier is the decisive factor to whip all propertied classes into line. As the trust wipes out competition in economics, their Party of Fascists attempts to do likewise in politics.
The desperate crisis within the ruling class and the prime necessity for taking advantage of the breathing space afforded it by the blunders of the proletariat also play their part in the formation of fascism. Fascism comes to power not only through the desperation of the bourgeoisie, but also because of the inadequate and muddled attempts of the working class. Fascism is the punishment the workers must suffer for their opportunist sins. As the communists sow confusion and the employers determinedly end all their conflicting interests temporarily to unite against the proletarian enemy, the layers of the petty bourgeoisie which support that side which is at the moment the strongest, swing to fascism and decide the issue.
Fascism, unable to return to the bankruptcy of private industry, accelerates that growth of State capitalism which had demonstrated its efficiency especially during the war. Once established, the trend towards the erection of public property and State interests grew extensively in all countries. The war had emphasized the complete inadequacy of private industry. Fascism violently continues the development of corporate and State capitalism, creating its own governmental forms.
The era of competition, with its many oppositions, independent parties, and everlasting debates, could tolerate a democratic system of checks and balances. Parliament was a convenient mechanism by which competitive industry could discover, without redress to civil war and within the framework of law and order, just what were the relations of forces, and which group most fundamentally represented the interests of the nation and therefore should be given a leading role. In America in the period before the Civil War, so nearly matched were the opposing forces, since the slave and free states had an equal representation in the Senate, that debate and oratory developed to an exceedingly fine point.
With the rise of monopoly capitalism, which had oppressed many petty industrialists and forced them with its heavy hand to abide by the regulations laid down by the trust, parliament no longer was a necessary mechanism. A mutual tolerance of many parties had lost its progressive role. Tolerance is possible only when the State is stable; it is impossible when the breakdown is near, and the old order must fight for its life. Those in control of Big Business, who dominate in the economic field and who surreptitiously control the political machinery of democracy, cannot but mock and deride the “talking shop” parliament with its interminable gab-fest and bombast.
In each country, fascism takes on particular colorations to fit the national needs of the capitalists. The Italians popularize their State as corporative, the Germans as totalitarian; Italy uses the term “Fascism,” Germany “National Socialism"; the former stresses “empire,” the latter “race"; in the South there is little anti-Semitism; in the North it is extremely marked; Italy praises finance capital, Germany flays the usurer; Italy is Catholic, Germany abhors Catholicism; all these differences are but due to the differing basic needs of each nationalist capitalist group. Similarly with the Austrian fascist movement, torn between the aims of the German and those of the Italian, and with the British fascist movement, which tries to synthesize the features of both Italian and German fascism and to utilize their experiences.
Despite these differences, all of the fascism’s now in power are similar in that they have built up a complete theory of the nationalization of capital and of the dictatorial corporate or totalitarian State. They all stress the significant place of religion in State and social life. They have established compulsory class collaboration with the prohibition of strikes, the murder of militant workers, and the annihilation of all workers’ organizations.
The sectarian and opportunist socialists of the Second International could not but play into the hands of the fascists who, in many cases, adopted parts of their programs to destroy the labor organizations. As the movements of the skilled workers turned into counter-revolutionary channels, it was seen that fascism, on the one side, and socialism (and syndicalism), on the other side, were but Right and Left arms of the same capitalist trunk.
Reformist social-democracy prepared the ground for and abetted fascism in innumerable ways. The socialists’ attacks on Soviet Russia and on communism, their practices of class collaboration, their nationalism, their active support of all sorts of rationalization schemes and methods of compulsory arbitration, their theories of State socialism with compensation to owners—all such programs and policies prepared the ideological and practical bases for fascism. Depending upon the given needs of the hour, the bourgeoisie could use now social-democracy, now fascism to defeat the revolution.
Between the two, there was a well-recognized subdivision of labor. Each movement had a distinct function making impossible their actual fusion, although later, after the victory of fascism, certain socialists were to go over to the fascist point of view with the specious theory that socialism could come about only through fascism. These people could be called Socialist-Fascists; (*3) they tried to prove that their previous programs were well on the road to being realized by the fascists or national socialists. They formed part of the Left Wing of the fascist movement and become important as gears to connect fascism to the motors of the working class.
Both the fascists and the socialists wanted class peace and the end of revolution. The role of social-democracy was to forestall revolution from below, demoralizing the ranks of the workers by organizing them into a movement essentially pacifist and reformist. The fascists supplemented the socialist activity by organizing specially selected minority combat groups outside of the working class for extremely violent measures against the revolutionists.
In the period of the first revolutionary wave, when the capitalist class was forced to turn to the socialists to save the day, fascism also had to borrow its political program and social demagogy from the socialist ranks. The ruling class, through the fascists, in their desperate efforts to secure time at any cost, were willing to promise everything. A good example of this demagogy can be seen in Mussolini’s original 1919 platform (*4) which stood, among other things, for a republic, for universal suffrage for men and women, proportional representation, reduction of the age of deputies, abolition of the Senate, economic councils with legislative groups, management of industries by workers’ organizations which proved capable of it (that is, some form of workers’ control over production), eight-hour day by law, nationalization of munition plants, heavy capital levy, confiscation of certain church property and abolition of certain clerical privileges, heavy inheritance tax, seizure of war profits, and revision of military contracts. The sophistical slogan was issued: “Class peace in production, class war in distribution.”
In their tactics, too, the fascists demonstrated the same demagogic flexibility. They gave special place to the ex-soldier. They pretended to lead some strikes and to aid the peasantry in confiscating large landed estates. In Italy, leading fascists, after the seizure of power, proposed national employment bureaus, denial of the right of employers to discharge workers after a trial, an improved classification of workers, a minimum wage, standard hourly wage rates, and a complete system of social insurance to cover sickness, death, and unemployment, and other matters of a similar nature.
In the same way, fascism borrowed considerably from the syndicalist and trade union movements. (*5) The fascists demagogically raised the slogan of “No politics in the union,” to prevent the unions from attacking the State. They advocated federalism and local autonomy, and the reduction to zero of the salaries of officials. These ideas were used to break up the workers’ organization, separate the bureaucracy from the members, and paralyze the unions from fighting effectively in central formation. Once the fascists had seized power, however, they soon created their own centralized "unions" which really were not unions at all, but strike-breaking agencies similar to “company unions,” except that they were national industrial bodies. Under fascism, regimentation of the workers became complete. The "unions" now were connected with the State and their contracts recognized by law.
Footnotes
1. This is the position of the Spanish Socialists today.
2. L. L. Lorwin: The American Federation of Labor, pp. 461-462.
3. This must not be confused with the Stalinist theory of social-fascism, for which see below: Book VI, part on “Stalinism.”
4. For the 1919 program see F. Nitti: Bolshevism, Fascism and Democracy, pp. 214-215.
5. Compare H. W. Schneider: Making the Fascist State, Ch. IV.