HERALDS OF FASCISM?
NOMAD, MAX
WRITERS AND WRITING THE NEW LEADER LITERARY SECTION Heralds of Fascism? LIBERALISM AND THE CHALLENGE OF FASCISM. By J. Salwyn Schapiro. McGraw-Hill Book Company. 421 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by MAX...
...The Communist MarJjesto, for example, recommends the establishment of industrial armies...
...But most of us live in fear—are we, automatically, criminals or potent tial criminals...
...By Hall Ellson...
...but the author draws some far-fetched comparisons . between their anti-liberalism and modern fascism...
...Demands which the author himself, in unconscious selfrefutation, calls the "small mouse which emerged from that enormous mountain that rumbled so ominously...
...The author gives the impression of probing real deep by constantly referring to Duke's nightmares and daytime terrors...
...We admire those who try to improve life across the tracks, but why burden art with monotonous repetition of the miseries of that life...
...His hero, Duke, a wretched'little gangleader, dgperunner, pimp and general parasite, is—we are asked to believe— basically motivated by having been born black and with small, feminine hands...
...Witness the absence of official antiSemitism fn Italy until 1938...
...We are told that Carlyle's writings were "translated and widely circulated in Fascist Italy," and that a prominent Fascist writer claimed that none of fascism's precursors "had expressed as clearly as did Carlyle the principles and ideas that were later adopted by leaders of Fascism...
...That idea was in the air prior to 1848 when it was professed by many radical opponents of capitalism...
...Millions of Negroes are upright citizens...
...WHILE THERE ARE similarities between fascism and certain aspects of the Second Empire, there is no basic likeness between totalitarianism and either Proudhon or Carlyle...
...THE ESSENTIAL FEATURE of fascism is not so much its chauvinist, racist, anti-Semitic and generally obscurantist verbiage — which have frequently been used by non-fascists — but its championship of the non-capitalist lower middle class educated "outs"—groups like the declassed professionals, Intellectuals and semi-intellectuals of prewar Italy and Germany^ the underpaid, power-hungry clergy and army officers of clerico-fascist Austria, Portugal and Slovakia...
...Like the fascists, Napoleon III also tried to consolidate his regime by promoting reforms in behalf of the underdog — a task in which he was assisted by Saint-Simonian socialists, just as Mussolini was at,the outset joined by renegades from Socialism, Anarchism and Communism...
...and the democratic philosophy which, as reflected in John Stuart Mill, represents a bridge to democratic socialism...
...Carlyle's "Aristocracy of Nature," consisting, as Professor Schapiro says, "of the elite among the capitalists and the elite among the aristocrats," was not at all like the fascist elite...
...But the author's claim that Carlyle was a totalitarian — which would qualify him as a sort of proto-fascist — stands on a very weak foundation...
...Few have given a more lucid presentation of the two phases of nineteenth century liberalism: laissez faire, which became the ideology of rising capitalism...
...But what tripe...
...170 pp...
...Ellson reveal what particular fears (along with a host of other factors) made his hero the ugly tmVig he is...
...THE CHAPTER ON CARLYLE gives a brilliant condensation of the reactionary views—rather, hates—of that master of invective, some of whose diatribes read like an anticipation of the earner H L. Mencken's Nietzschecoated snobbish vulgarities about the underprivileged...
...This would seem to exonerate Proudhon from the charge of fascism or proto-fascism, for totalitarianism is the essence of fascism—including its original Leninist inspiration...
...If Mr...
...The "father of Anarchism" and the glorifler of ancient Prussianism both had prejudices which endeared them to fascists half a century later...
...Moreover, Carlyle adjured the old oligarchy to "take command of the innumerable Foolish," while the fascists flatter and seek the support of the common man...
...Professor Schapiro admits that there was "no hint of the totalitarian corporative state in Proudhon's writings...
...and doubtless, although I have no statistics to support this, many men with small hands have put them to large use...
...It was hardly due to France's economic backwardness, for Mussolini's Italy was industrially retarded too, but rather to this fact: Napoleon III was not saddled with an enormous following of educated, job-hungry dec-losses which makes necessary the creation of a bureaucratic spoils system like totalitarianism...
...Hitler latterly expressed regret that, unlike Lenin and Stalin, he had not entirely exterminated Germany's old ruling class...
...says the author, "has been I to emphasize the great and lasting values that bourgeois liberalism gave to democracy and to 'its way of life.'" Hardly a work in the English language has fulfilled this task better...
...2.75...
...But anti-Semitism, contempt for Negroes, and chauvinism in general, were quite common among early nineteenth century radicals, including Marx and Bakunjn...
...Moreover, at the base of fascism is the totalitarian organization of the state, which parades as being "above class," and which gives unlimited power to its newly-enthroned, officeholding upstarts...
...In other words, Carlyle, far from being a totalitarian who would subject the entire fabric of the nation to the rule of a new officeholding elite, was simply a medievalist, a "Dixiecrat" and a "New Dealer" all rolled into one...
...Nor is the author's explanation for the crowned adventurer's failure to "coordinate" French political, economic and social life at all convincing...
...A student of the French Revolution, frightened at the possibility that some of its horrors might be repeated in England, he was anxious to keep the underdog permanently in his place...
...Some of the writing in Mr...
...Despite my admiration for Professor Schapiro's brilliant scholarship, I must take exception to the three chapters forming the last hundred pages of his book — "Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Statesman,!' "Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Revolutionist" and 'Thomas Carlyle, Prophet" — which characterize those men as "heralds of fascism...
...That difference explains Proudhon's "anarchist" hostility to a voracious, ubiquitous and allpowerful bureaucracy, which was the direct antithesis of fascist deification of the job-dispensing state...
...Modern fascists are hostile both to the landowning aristocracy and the' industrial plutocracy, for either of which they want to substitute their own elite...
...Carlyle," he admits, "had only a glimpse, not a full view of totalitarianism, which required for its application a far greater concentration of industry than that which existed in Victorian England...
...To achieve this end he desired — as Bertrand Russell put it in History of Western Civilization — "their [the wage-earners'] subjection to the kind of masters they had in the Middle Ages...
...Whose interests did these three "heralds of fascism" champion, and were their aims and views basically totalitarian...
...Reviewed by MAX NOMAD "ri** HE PRIME OBJECT OF THIS BOOK...
...There is nothing wrong with the way their ideas are presented...
...The author forgets that there is a great difference between the old middle and lower middle class of small entrepreneurs who needed the cheap credit advocated by Proudhon, and the new middle and lower middle class of educated job-aspirants who constituted the backbone of the Mussolini-Hitler movements...
...Ellson, like other social workersturned-novelist, dabbles too in phony psychology—only this time, thank God, without the usual professional jargon...
...Today many conservatives and reactionaries are as much opposed to trade unionism as were Proudhon and Carlyle, but it would be wrong to call them fascist...
...mostly, it is bad photography...
...The author is wrong again when he speaks of the "startlingly fascist note heard in Carlyle's plan for the militarization of labor...
...Max Nomad is the author of "Apostles of Revolution...
...WHY MUST SOCIAL WORKERS add to the poverty of contemporary literature by jimmying "novels" out of their filing cabinets...
...Ell son's ill-conceived odyssey of an adolescent tramp is good impressionism...
...Such a claim does not necessarily make of Carlyle a fascist or proto-fascist...
...D. J...
...To some extent Napoleon Ill's regime was, like those of Hitler and Mussolini, "above class"—for it robbed all strata of society in the interest of a parasitic, budget-plundering crowd of jobholders, army officers and their hangers-on among the criminal and semi-criminal underworld...
...Slumming Again...
...They are typical of any rabid believer in a benevolent (or not so benevolent) despotism — whether the frankly . aristocratic despotism of a reactionary elite preached by Tsarism's oMi¦ cial philosopher, Pobyedonostsev...
...Surely the case history of the urban slum is sufficiently advertised in newspapers, police and social agency reports...
...Similar claims were staked out by Mussolini and his disciples on the graves of Machiavelli, William James, Nietzsche, Sorel, Pareto, and even Babeuf and Blanqui...
...Contrarily, most of the educated declasses of the post-1948 period expected salvation from a democratic overturn that would end rule by the oldtime officeholding "ins" arid the blackcoated gentry supporting Bonaparte...
...All that Carlyle proposed, in his rabid and somewhat "fascisf'-sounding denunciation of laissez faire liberalism, was nothing more than—to quota Professor Schapiro — "government regulation of working hours and working conditions, factory and housing reforrri, government directed emigration of workers to the colonies, and compulsory education...
...or the crypto-aristocratic despotism of the revolutionary elite of Blanqui's teacher, Philippe Buonarroti...
...Carlyle's anti-democratic attitudes, hit objection* to universal suffrage, and his low opinion of the masses, are not necessarily proof of his "essentially fascist mentality...
...There was only one flaw in Louis Napoleon's alleged proto-f ascism, namely that, in Professor Schapiro's words, "it did not include totalitarianism...
...To this list the Nazis have added Fichte and Hegel, who — for reasons equally as legitimate — have also been placed among the intellectual sires of Marx • and Engels...
...Ellson just had to serve up his bulging case histories of delinquent juveniles as "fiction," he might have had the charity to compress them into a 4,000-word short story...
...and the concessions the Nazis made to racial unorthodoxy when they entered into alliances with the non-"Aryan" Hungarians, Arabs and Japanese...
...This actually shows that Carlyle did not envisage totalitarianism at all, for again, Mussolini's Italy — which practiced full-fledged totalitarianism— was far more backward than Victorian England...
...At no time does Mr...
...Duke, we are thus told, is an aggressor because he, is frightened...
...and the militarists (and their civilian underlings) of Japan, Turkey and Argentina...
...Charles Scibnefs Sons...
...As it is, at the end of Duke one is tempted to exclaim impatierltly, So what...
...What is left in the fascist ideology is a lot of propagandists hot air that can be turned on or off at will...
...Professor Schapiro thinks he has discovered the key to Proudhon's "fascism" when he points out that, like modern fascists, Proudhon championed the middle class against both capitalism and socialism...
...DUKE...
...But this cancels out at least fifty percent of Louis Napoleon's "fascism...
Vol. 32 • July 1949 • No. 29
