The Brooklyn Rail

At the start of the twentieth century, in the course of violent class conflicts birthed by the crisis of capitalism and its barbaric wars, the idea of a new world emerged within movements for equality. In opposition to this idea of a revolutionary break, two political currents, also new, came into existence: Fascism and National Socialism. The crushing of the social revolt in Italy and the defeat of the German revolution left the field free to these totalitarian organizations.

The present day is also marked by economic disequilibrium, the growth of class inequality, the collapse of the idea of social interest, the implosion of collectivities of the exploited. Once again, the horizon of capitalism is unclear. The old ideologies are shaky, insecurity and fear have the upper hand, the law of the strongest promises safety, even while the requirements of profit reduce the political space for “reforms.” Faced with the extent of the issues in question, the landmarks of the past lose their clarity as history is forgotten, and the field of confusion extends further. Political alliances and convergences gain strength by once again finding value in the old principle of authority. Only a conscious break with the order of profit will, it seems, be able to clarify ideas and open new perspectives. Meanwhile, clarifying the dark zones of the present by way of a better understanding of the past seems vital.

When they began, Fascism and National Socialism were confused positions mingling conservative values with modernist aspirations. Attracting violent voluntarist action, they began by being critical of the ruling classes, then achieved power by the parliamentary game of alliances and coalitions with other right-wing forces in order to put themselves openly at the service of the capitalist order. Before they became dominant, with a totalitarian ideology and model of governance, these currents went through stages marked by the period’s effervescence and the scope of events. They shared a strong desire to gain state power and constant political opportunism. One particular aspect interests me here: the link between the genesis and evolution of these new authoritarian formations and the crisis of social democracy, itself shaken by practices of self-organization and direct democracy by the subversive energy of the spontaneous movements of the period.

 

Preventive Counter-Revolution

The road taken by Italian Fascism is particularly illuminating. Angelo Tasca, who witnessed the period, emphasized the opportunist character of Fascism, which found “a means to satisfy at once the vague passions of the crowd and the precise interests of the capitalists, making use of the ambivalence of its formulas which was one of its great resources.”¹ Let us look broadly, in the historical context, at the key moments of the social movement involved in the formation of this political current and its ideological contortions.

The revolutionary wave in Europe at the end of World War I included Italy. At the beginning of 1919, strikes against the high cost of living broke out everywhere, and the movement for self-organization grew and acquired a subversive content. In the industrial centers, committees occupied city halls and organized the requisition and egalitarian distribution of essential goods. In the southern countryside, rural wage-workers, with the support of soldiers returned from the front, occupied landed property. Labor offices were transformed into centers for agitation: places where socialists, anarchists, and revolutionary syndicalists debated.² In some places, committees of action and expropriation took the name of soviets and the idea of factory councils spread, promoted by anarchists and Marxists, influenced by the Russian Revolution.³ Clashes became violent, and armed groups of “red guards” formed to defend the actions.

During the first half of 1920, strike action came to the large industries of the north. Factory occupations became general—actions of a new type in response to lockouts. Within the occupation committees, many delegates referred to the “Russian experience,” demanding a form of direct representation escaping the weight of the union bureaucracies. Overtaken, the Socialist Party and the union close to it—the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro (CGL)—held themselves apart from the movement, even if they recognized that it threatened the bourgeoisie.⁴ The Socialists thought of the strikers as leaderless, no longer to be taken seriously, their activity doomed to failure.⁵

The spontaneous nature of the movement called the Socialist project into question. For its ideologues, socialism was to progress, under their direction, by membership growth and by the strengthening of local groups, within the framework of the system. According to the Socialist Giacinto M. Serrati, the strikes were “beautiful but a grand illusion,” an immature movement without a program. At base, the Socialists doubted the revolutionary capacity of the workers. For them, the revolution could only be “the result of a mighty preparation accomplished through superhuman efforts and iron discipline.”⁶ The “maximalist” Antonio Gramsci⁷ wrote that “the Socialist Party is present as a spectator as events unfold, it expresses no opinions of its own. … [I]t never puts forward a slogan that the masses can take up, which could provide a real general orientation and unify revolutionary action.”⁸ For Tasca, the party’s attitude expressed “an absence of real revolutionary spirit.”⁹

Among pro-Bolshevik communists, a debate began about the political significance of the factory councils.¹⁰ In general, they were seen as a basis on which a communist party could be created and, eventually, as the foundation of a workers’ state. Important nuances emerged. Gramsci was at first a partisan of the autonomy of the councils in relation to the party and the unions, which led to his being treated as a “syndicalist,” and even an “anarchist” by those who opposed the dictatorship of the proletariat to rank-and-file workers’ democracy. Able to develop a response to events, he showed himself sensitive to the revolutionary spontaneity of these new organizations. In his writings of 1920, Gramsci analyzed the democracy which was developing in workplaces as having a nature different from the formal democracy of bourgeois society. Was it a simple extension of the formal democracy of the citizen, or a new type of democracy? He argued that “the factory council is the model of the workers’ state,” as a new system of representation.¹¹ This position was criticized by another faction, led by Amadeo Bordiga, which viewed the councils as a form of apolitical factory-based reformism, a possible obstacle to the formation of a communist party. Suspicious of internal democracy within the party, this faction thought that only the party could give a revolutionary content to the councils, since only councils created by the party could be revolutionary.

The anarcho-syndicalists recognized the difficulty of “the struggle of the pro-council comrades to open a breach in the old union mentality.”¹² But they too hesitated to see the councils as an autonomous force. They feared their transformation into “political soviets” susceptible of falling into the hands of “Marxist communists.” For some, the councils should be an influence on the union, bringing it closer to rank-and-file needs. From this point of view—close to that of the German and Austrian social-democratic left—the workers councils should revivify the union organizations. Certainly, the anarcho-syndicalists were in favor of all forms of self-organization, but they did not see the affirmation of new principles in these.

Pressured by the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI), the leadership of the CGL mobilized to restore the old order in the factories, beginning by integrating the organs of workers’ direct representation—the factory councils—into the unions. By September 1920, the occupation movement was confined to the factories of Turin, Milan, and Genoa, where the radicals, maximalists, Bolsheviks, and the anarcho-syndicalists of the Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI) supported the councils. But the growing isolation of the workers in the great factories of the north confirmed the reversal of the balance of forces. “However, it was at this moment and in these places that the councils took the reins of the movement, which explains why they have kept a fundamental importance in the imagination of Italian revolutionaries.”¹³ The anarchists and the revolutionary syndicalists continued to fight to enlarge the council movement, even if some of them thought that the struggles were no longer in the ascendant as in 1919, and though the revolutionaries now found themselves in a weak position. In 1922, the anarchist Errico Malatesta was no longer optimistic, and regretted that the occupations had been a missed opportunity:

All proletarian Italy trembled with revolutionary fever, and the movement rapidly changed in character. The workers thought that it was the moment to definitively take over the means of production. They armed themselves for defense, transforming many factories into regular fortresses, and they began to organize production for themselves. The bosses had been chased away or put under arrest … This was the de facto abolition of the right to property, the violation of the legal defense of capitalist exploitation.¹⁴

The bourgeoisie understood that a dangerous idea was spreading. The workers believed themselves able “to run the factories without capitalists or managers.”¹⁵ The political class at first held to the old recipe: it called on those close to the PSI and former revolutionary syndicalists like Arturo Labriola to govern.¹⁶ A disciple of Georges Sorel, Labriola embodied the confusion of ideas. “From before the war of 1914–18, the Sorelian syndicalists—later to become fascists—tied their revolutionary syndicalism to an increasingly accentuated nationalism.”¹⁷ Labriola also defended the idea of a distinction between productive capital and finance capital—speculative and parasitical—an idea which reappeared later in fascism.

In September 1920, the union leaderships supported by the PSI reformists signed an agreement with the bosses that was accepted by the strikers, who obtained improvements in wages and working conditions, decorated with a promise of “workers’ control”: the hollow phrase for union participation in management. The last occupations ended in an atmosphere of exhaustion and disappointment. The defeat of the egalitarian revolt left deep frustration and a feeling of weakness. Meanwhile, in response to the weakness of the state, the Italian bourgeoisie had used the 1920s to foment the organization of armed groups on the model of the German Freikorps. Financed by the big landed proprietors, they began by attacking peasant organizations of all ideological orientations (including Catholic ones). They then moved on to attack the organizations of the old labor movement where the workers’ energy was still palpable: peasant leagues, cooperatives, and union locals—publications and organs for self-education. The repression and killing of militants created an atmosphere of fear. The level of clashes was so high that one could speak of a period of real civil war between 1921–22. The Socialist leaders—whose major preoccupation was to avoid revolution—showed their legalism in calling on the state for protection, leaving to their own devices the radical minorities who had organized to meet the fascist violence, like the Arditi del Popolo. One retreat never being the only one, the leaders of the PSI sank to the most Christian spinelessness, counseling passivity to the proletarians: “Don’t react to provocations, don’t give them a pretext, and don’t react to abuse. Be good, be patient, be holy. You have been these things for a thousand years, stay that way. Tolerate, be sympathetic, and forgive.”¹⁸ The result was a series of submissions.

The contours of a counter-revolutionary current became clear during the 1926–33 period, when Mussolini’s model of the totalitarian state was put in place. Fascism stressed the need for a “revolution to save capitalism,” a revolution necessarily anti-democratic and anti-liberal, even anti-bourgeois. At the end of the road was a capitalist new order and war as alternatives to subversion, revolutionary disorder—a “preventive counter-revolution,” to use a happy expression.¹⁹

 

A Political Impressionist

In a few lines of a text written in 1927 for a publication in Chicago, the anarchist Camillo Berneri drew, with psychological finesse, a portrait of Mussolini that clarifies his personality. “Mussolini’s revolutionism was Blanquist. His Romagnol jacobinism led him neither to anarchism nor to revolutionary syndicalism. He did not define himself and could not do so because he remained a political impressionist. Thus he accepted, he even exalted individual action.”²⁰

Angelica Balabanova, who had moved from the PSI to Bolshevism in 1918 and later became secretary of the Third International, was in a good position to understand Mussolini’s development—having been personally and politically close to him—and to grasp the opportunist foundation of the Fascism.²¹ She thought that Mussolini, as a result of experience, grasped better than Hitler the laws of the capitalist economy and the class struggle.²² When Mussolini and his friends applauded the strikers of 1919–20, criticizing the “treason” of the Socialists and the unions, she had a presentiment of danger. A member of the left wing of the PSI since the revolts against the First World War, a supporter of the “red week” of June 1914, Mussolini had, during the factory occupations of 1919, urged the Socialist leaders to take the head of the most extremist class actions. During the riots against the high cost of living, the Fascists had a confusedly left-wing democratic electoral program. But they did not hesitate to launch the slogan, “Make the rich pay!”²³ In September 1920, they took up the demands for expropriation of land by rural workers: “It will be up to us to accomplish the only revolution possible in Italy, the agrarian revolution, which must give the land to those who work it.”²⁴

“Much impressed by the methods of the Bolsheviks in Russia, [Mussolini] wanted the same for the Italian working class, in nationalist terms rather than in Marxist ones.”²⁵ Balabanova herself respected the authority principle and did not question the necessity for the masses to be directed by leaders. But Fascism, whose militants were absent from the spontaneous struggles, progressed exactly on this terrain, proposing to replace the bad leaders who had “abandoned” the workers. Balabanova noted a major nuance: the question of nationalism, the defense of the national interest. The idea of socialism in a national framework here acquired a determining importance. Positions of international class solidarity—to which she referred when she spoke of “Marxist terms”—were set within parentheses as soon as in 1920, when the Communist International forced the Communist parties to submit to the national interests of the Russian state. Devoted to the principle of authoritarian socialism, the Bolsheviks labored to find a deep link between apparently inimical ideologies. If the role of the leader is the determining element, if the national framework limits the fascist project as well as the socialist one, we can understand that the lines dividing authoritarian political forces are not always very clear. Besides, the fascist program of 1919 remained sufficiently ambiguous that the representatives of the Russian state kept contact with the Italian Fascist party even after its violent seizure of power in 1922.²⁶

Mussolini continued to navigate the undefinable. Abandoning his anti-capitalist demagogy, he put his organization to the active service of the agrarian and industrial bourgeoisie. Gone was the anti-reformist exaltation of extremist action of 1919–20. In October 1922, he headed the King’s government, in coalition with various nationalists and with a liberal program.²⁷ Fascism laid out its path in ideological confusion and compromises of circumstance, emerging as a dynamic political force at the summit of the state. Sectors of the union and political bureaucracy were violently repressed, others went over to the Fascist party: a combative minority went underground. Four years later, the fascist project of seizing power was completed with the construction of the totalitarian state. The capitalist class—frightened by the crisis—had in a few years found support in a political force guided by state authoritarianism and nationalism.

At the end of the Second World War, the non-Leninist Marxist Anton Pannekoek analyzed this evolution:

In the fascist regime nationalism appears more openly than elsewhere as the dominant ideology; it in effect provides a concrete basis for the theory of state power and the practical use of it. The state is the incarnation of nationalism, the organ of its self-expression; the goal it seeks is national greatness. To increase its power is a necessity for every capitalism that wishes to participate in the struggle for world domination and, in numerous domains, fascism is better adapted to that task than the other political systems.

The Fascist state—which is under discussion here and which is what we mean when we use this term—was thus not the realization of a plan of the fascist movement from the beginning. It was the endpoint of an opportunist political practice, in some ways incoherent, which constantly tried to answer the questions raised by the crisis of capitalism and the incapacity of the other bourgeois currents to deal with it. It found its coherence in its capacity to keep state power in a centralized and concentrated form, by barbaric force if necessary.

 

Fascism and the Councils

A particularly unknown example of the opportunistic practice of Fascism can be seen in the approach Mussolini made to rank-and-file organizations born in struggle. Despite its short duration, the movement of occupations and councils marked the Fascist current at its start. Mussolini and his people started up their program after one of the first factory occupations, at Dalmine (Bergamo) in March 1919. In a patriotic speech, Mussolini described workers and entrepreneurs as equals (as “producers”) and defended “strikes that are not negative but creatively support the nation.”²⁸ This was the spirit of the Programma di San Sepolcro that defined Fascist corporatism, a revolutionary nationalist program with an anti-capitalist and anti-clerical rhetoric, demanding universal suffrage (including women), free education and healthcare, along with the creation of a system of social insurance. Finally, the Fascists proposed to reorganize the parliamentary system and the participation of “morally worthy” workers in managing enterprises. Mussolini thought the councils were important, “something he considered a ‘novelty’ of his program because they were mid-way between a parliament and the soviets, thanks to a system of direct representation of all interests.”²⁹ Taking up ideas of the Bavarian Independent Socialist Kurt Eisner, he employed the concept of a form of representation complementary to “decadent” parliamentarism, which he thought represented the different interests of different social classes. At the beginning of his own climb to power, Mussolini combined the wish to manage production expressed in the workers’ struggles with economic nationalism: “I demand that the factories produce at a higher level. If that is guaranteed by the workers in place of the industrialists, I have no difficulty in agreeing that the former have the right to take over from the latter.”³⁰ It hardly matters what part demagogy and opportunism played in these proposals, since “the program played only an expedient role in Fascism, a means serving immediate needs of political maneuvering.”³¹ What counted was to use to his advantage the sense of impotence felt by the workers after the defeat of their movement, to capitalize on their sense of betrayal by the Socialist and union leaders.

According to Mussolini, Fascism was a modern and revolutionary idea that could incorporate various elements of earlier doctrines but whose real novelty lay in the place given to the state. For “it is the state that gives the people … a will and consequently an effective existence.”³² More precisely, individuals and social groups are imaginable only within the framework of the state. As Enzo Traverso well summarizes the matter, it is the “vocation” of the Fascist state “to absorb civil society.”³³ The “people,” the “masses,” exist only because of the state, and the concept of the “producers” includes at once workers and entrepreneurs, denying the existence of classes. Fascism is the party of these “producers,” the party of the atomized workers organized by the state. Therefore Fascism denounced parliamentary democracy, which “gives the people the illusion of sovereignty, while in fact real sovereignty depends on other forces, sometimes secret and not held to account.”³⁴ Fascism refused the very idea of popular sovereignty and, a fortiori, it could not demand its direct exercise. For Fascism there was only the state, “the keystone of its doctrine.”³⁵ Social democracy had integrated the councils into its project of co-management of exploitation; the Fascists were interested in the councils as a form of which they could make use in forging the corporatist state. Both rejected the energy and the subversive spirit of the council movement, which implied a direct exercise of sovereignty by the exploited.

The partisans of direct democracy criticized the form of parliamentary representation as limiting popular sovereignty; Fascism brought everything back to the state as organizer of the national community. While direct democracy demands the exercise of sovereignty without mediation, Fascism is its direct negation. The thesis often advanced—that the two critiques of the representative system have something in common—is a gross manipulation, intending to legitimate representative democracy as the only possible form of sovereign power.

 

Socialism or Nationalist Barbarism

In Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften [The Man Without Qualities] (1930–43), Robert Musil evokes the need some felt to pull themselves up from a world in ruins after the First World War: “Thus [the intellectuals] were finally convinced that the epoch in which they were living was doomed to intellectual sterility and could be saved only by a quite exceptional event or person. … They were convinced that life would stop if a messiah did not arrive soon.”³⁶ In Germany after 1918, the Social Democrats were first of all preoccupied with breaking the force of the revolution and met this need by legitimating order and respect for the authority of leaders, utilizing a fragile political compromise between the reformist opposition to the revolution and an alliance with militarism. This improbable construction was the foundation of the Weimar Republic. In the shade of this conservative enterprise, nourishing itself on the frustration and wounds of the defeat of 1914–18, grew a new force—hating the Socialists, taking up the irrational values of the past, defending the health of the national economy in crisis: National Socialism. It tied the well-being of the workers not to the revolutionary struggle, but to the coming of a messiah and savior. In the confused jargon that characterized the early period of this political development, the ideologist of the Nazi left Gregor Strasser wrote: “We National Socialists have recognized that there is a destiny-sanctioned bond between the national freedom of our people and the economic liberation of the German working class.”³⁷ As Weimar’s legitimacy collapsed, an alternative came into view: a National Socialist government based on dictatorial power.

Rare were the left Socialists who noted the powerlessness the Social Democrats faced in the rise of Nazism. The Austrian Max Adler denounced the identification of democracy with parliamentarism and classed fascism as a bourgeois alternative to parliamentary democracy. On the eve of Hitler’s accession to power he wrote: [Reformism] does not understand or does not want to see that political democracy up till now has consisted precisely of exercising the dictatorship of the possessing classes by way of democracy and that if fascism has so many supporters these days it is because the anti-proletarian classes have lost their assurance that they can maintain their dictatorship “democratically.”³⁸

Ten years later, at the end of World War II, Anton Pannekoek said along the same lines, “All of political practice and all the social ideas of National Socialism had their basis in the character of its economic system. They rested on the organization of capitalism.”³⁹

By the repeated employment of the Freikorps against the revolutionaries, social democracy and the Weimar Republic helped to construct the paramilitary structure of National Socialism. They bent before the violence of the Nazis, with their aptitude to physically wipe out any opposition, a condition necessary for the creation of a “modern form of slavery in the framework of a state capitalism.”⁴⁰ The authoritarian evolution of Weimar—which began before the Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) loss of power in mid-1932—the use of class violence, and nationalist demands wove a fabric of continuity between “democratic authoritarianism” and the totalitarianism of the Third Reich. A few examples speak for themselves.

In 1929, the SPD passed a law authorizing the state to seize trade-union funds in case of wildcat strikes. On May 1 of that year, in the “red” neighborhoods of Berlin, a battle between the police and Communist demonstrators—forbidden by the Social-Democratic police prefect Zoergiebel—ended in a bloodbath: thirty dead and one thousand three hundred arrests. A year and a half before Hitler came to power, as the intellectual and anarchist militant Eric Mühsam wrote:

In July 1931, the Berlin police prefect, the Social Democrat Grzesinski, forbad publication of the anarchist magazine Fanal for four months. This was the month of bank failures … and the whole edifice of the business economy was so collapsed that the political methods in use up till then to assure capitalist domination were no longer sufficient. Enlarged and smoothed, the road to the fascist dictatorship was open; we were already on it. The growing poverty of the masses and the powerlessness of public institutions went along with the pretentions of the industrialists and the great landed proprietors. … And attempts to overcome the feeling of suffocation and despair, the remedies earnestly recommended by fascists and democrats, churchmen and socialists of the right or left, were all borrowed from the pharmacopeia of authority, each promoting its state, its will to power, its authoritarian system.⁴¹

In 1923, following the military occupation of the Ruhr,⁴² the Leninist German Communist Party (KPD) called for a “patriotic renaissance” of “oppressed Germany,” with a whiff of antisemitism. After 1926, when the KPD had fallen under the authority of the International, the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) accused it of being a “foreign party,” defending Moscow’s interests. However, during the 1930s, the two parties demanded, in parallel, the defense of German nationalism, and towards the end of 1932 the KPD called once more to “win over the proletarian and worker followers of National Socialism,” denouncing the role played by the NSDAP as an organ of “finance capital.”⁴³ In January 1934, analyzing the German situation, the International concluded that “the installation of open fascist dictatorship, by dissipating the democratic illusions of the masses and freeing them from the influence of the Social Democrats, is accelerating the march … towards the proletarian revolution.”⁴⁴ Following the logic of the worst, social democracy was assimilated to fascism, and the phrase “social fascism” became the magic word of Stalinist tactics. The confusion of positions, with its consequences for the political forces and on the militants who lost their bearings, announced the disaster to come. Setting himself apart from this ideological disorder, Trotsky made a clearer political analysis: He qualified the fascisms as forces capable of replacing social democracy in the task of maintaining social peace at a moment of deepening capitalist crisis.

According to Bolshevik dogma, the march to revolution follows those who lead the masses: the certitudes advanced by good leaders would overcome the illusions spread by the bad socialist leaders. But the new reactionary forces had also inculcated in the masses the same cult of the leader. Only the anarchists and the non-Leninist communists opposed it with the principles of self-organization and direct democracy. As we know, the defeat of social democracy by fascism destroyed no illusions, but left intact the subjection of the exploited to their leaders. And it was on the terrain of the defeat of self-organization and revolutionary desire that the Leninist and National Socialist organizations clashed. In 1933, when National Socialism was already in power, a book of Lenin’s from 1920 remained absent from the list of banned socialist writing: Left-Wing: Communism: An Infantile Disorder. This was not by mistake but by political choice: it was a text “on which the whole opposition between the Bolsheviks and the extreme left turned,”⁴⁵ a text opposed to any critique of reformist union and electoral activity, which contested the principles of direct action and representation, which praised the obedience of the “masses” to their leaders.

When it began, National Socialism did not particularly differentiate itself on the question of nationalism. From 1918 to 1921, with tactical ideological nuances, all the parties supported the defense of the German nation. Even a revolutionary party of a new type like the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD)—anti-parliamentary and anti-union—was for a moment confronted with the ideas of what was called “national bolshevism.”⁴⁶ This group supported the “patriotic renaissance” and the defense of “oppressed Germany.” It envisaged a “national revolutionary struggle against Western imperialism,” which would take on an internationalist dimension by converging with the interests of the Russian state. It called for the formation of a “proletarian Wehrmacht,” directed by the councils, and for a “proletarian Reich,” with the vocation of unifying a Bolshevik Europe. “Up to now national unity rested on constraint from above. The new system [of the councils] will organize the nation from the bottom up.”⁴⁷ These crazy nationalist ideas expressed the permeability that existed during the twenties among confused political circles. Confused individuals navigated between Communism and the SA, following circumstances and local situations. But individual cases do not make a general tendency. The Nazi Party was obsessed with the rejection of Marxist ideology; it hardly distinguished the SPD or the KAPD from the KPD. As in Italy, when the National Socialist Party transformed itself into a pretorian guard for capitalism this permeability disappeared. The rebellious proletarian fractions of the fascist parties were suppressed, integrated into the hierarchical, repressive institutions of the states.

Since the mid-thirties, taking into account historical circumstances, revolutionaries have sought to understand the link between the crisis of German social democracy and the advent of Hitler.

As it is action within the framework of capitalism, the workers’ organizations became concerned with capitalism’s profitability. The competitive national capitalistic rivalries were only verbally opposed. Although the movement was at first striving only for a “better fatherland,” and was later willing to defend what had already been gained, it soon reached the point where it was ready to defend the fatherland “as it is.”⁴⁸

Once in power, the Nazis unleashed violent repression and proclaimed themselves the new “natural” leaders of the nation. As in Italy, they took control of the institutions governing the lives of the workers from birth to death. People subordinated themselves, on the basis of nationalism and racism, to the powerful Nazi wave. Dictatorial forms took the place of democratic forms; the certitudes of which social democracy had been the carrier were replaced by the truths of brute violence. The principle of authority and obedience to leaders remained unchanged. The totalitarian government permitted a reorganization of production and exploitation, capable of escaping the capitalist crisis. Certain critics, however, saw a long-term weakness in the brutal constraint which intended to make uniform “mentalities and intellectual powers.”⁴⁹

If the cult of leadership was the school of authoritarianism, the thread between the capitulation of social democracy and the union sacrée of 1914–18 was never broken, continued by the bureaucratization of party communism and the rise of the fascisms. The revolution, on the contrary, carried the desire for innovation and originality, a constructive energy. Its crushing left the ground open to the destructive will of Nazism.⁵⁰ Workers councils without revolutionary content were given a legal place by the Weimar constitution “—but with it also the counter-revolution, and, finally, the Nazi dictatorship.”⁵¹ In 1933, National Socialism completed the process with a violent political break, the making of the totalitarian state. As in Fascist Italy, the workers became isolated individuals, atomized, without an autonomous collectivity.⁵²

The comparison that revolutionaries made in the early 1930s between the Bolshevik dictatorship and the Nazi regime can seem reductive. What is the basis of this comparison? Otto Rühle, a non-Leninist revolutionary who had warned of the terrible consequences of the Sacred Union of the First World War, dealt with the place that authoritarian socialism gave the individual in collective action. He wrote this about the Russian experiment:

To save people from intellectual enslavement, the poisoning of their will and the mental confusion meant little to Lenin. For him the profound and real task of the revolution was not to transform human mentality, to liberate people from the world of alienation or the abysses of their inhuman situation. … [There is] a stupefying resemblance between the fundamental character of the two systems, the doctrine of power, the principle of authority, the apparatus of dictatorship, the dynamic of normalization and the methods of physical constraint. … The [Bolshevik party’s] basic educational principles were: unconditional authority of the leader, strong centralization, iron discipline, continual control of opinions, combativity and devotion, complete disappearance of the individual personality in the interest of the party. … One class or stratum up above, formed to command, decided and prepared, and another class below, meant to follow, forced to obey and submit to an alien will. … The victory of fascism, [Ruhle concluded,] would not have been so easy had not the leaders of the parties and unions [both Social-Democratic and Bolshevik] so trained, emasculated, and corrupted the human material that it became prey consenting to its own subjection, for which it was educated over decades.⁵³