Table Of ContentMarxism, Fascism, and
Totalitarianism
Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism
A. James Gregor
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University All
rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gregor, A. James (Anthony James).
Marxism, fascism, and totalitarianism : chapters in the intellectual history of
radicalism / A. James Gregor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
9780804769990
ISBN 978-0-8047-6034-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Totalitarianism—History—20th
century. 2. Communism—Europe—History—20th century. 3. Fascism—Europe
—History—20th century. I. Title.
JC480.G74 2009
320.53094—dc22
2008022443
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/13 Galliard
This work is dedicated to Renzo Morera,
and all those like him,
who paid with courage and dignity
the price of the twentieth century.
Acknowledgments
The author of any book owes an incalculable debt to an inordinate number of
persons who have consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly,
assisted in its production. In terms of the assistance I have received over a
lifetime, I have been particularly blessed. I have lived long enough, and been
given sufficient opportunity, to have spoken with some of the principal
protagonists in the story before the reader. Sidney Hook was exceedingly kind to
me. He spoke of the ideological disputes that characterized his relationship with
some of the major Marxist theoreticians he knew. Giuseppe Prezzolini told me of
his experiences with the early syndicalists and the first Fascists. He spoke of his
exchanges with the young Benito Mussolini, long before Mussolini was master
of Italy. And there have been professors, Russian, Italian, and German, who
remembered times, long before the Second World War, when all the issues,
joined in the account before the reader, were still current—and moved persons to
political action.
To Dr. Renzo Morera, I am grateful for the account of his life, which, to me,
conveys something of the dignity and honor with which many paid the price
exacted by the political ideologies to which this book is dedicated. The
ideologies of the twentieth century made very serious demands on those over
whom they exercised influence.
To all those good people, staff and students, who assist all the faculty
members of all the universities where I have been fortunate enough to practice
my profession—I wish to extend my heartfelt thanks. To the editors of scholarly
books—particularly Mr. Norris Pope of Stanford University Press on this
occasion—I am more than grateful. It is they who make possible the free flow of
ideas in an environment where that flow is essential.
To my wife and sure companion, Professor Maria Hsia Chang, and to all those
loving creatures with whom she has surrounded us—my unqualified gratitude.
By her example, she has taught me to write with more clarity than otherwise
would have been the case.
I wish to publicly acknowledge my gratitude to all these persons. They are
responsible for anything that may be good in the work before the reader—I am
solely responsible for anything that is not.
A. James Gregor Berkeley, California
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Preface
CHAPTER ONE - Introduction
CHAPTER TWO - The Roots of Revolutionary Ideology
CHAPTER THREE - The Heterodox Marxism of Ludwig Woltmann
CHAPTER FOUR - The Heterodox Marxism of Georges Sorel
CHAPTER FIVE - The Heterodox Marxism of V.I. Lenin
CHAPTER SIX - The Heterodox Marxism of Benito Mussolini
CHAPTER SEVEN - The National Question and Marxist Orthodoxy
CHAPTER EIGHT - Revolutionary Syndicalism and Nationalism
CHAPTER NINE - The Great War and the Response of Revolutionary
Marxists
CHAPTER TEN - The Great War, Revolution, and Leninism
CHAPTER ELEVEN - The Great War, Revolution, and Fascism
CHAPTER TWELVE - Conclusions
Notes
Index
Preface
The present work constitutes an effort to better understand the origins of the
major revolutionary ideologies of the twentieth century. It attempts to reconstruct
the evolution of those ideologies from their initial source in the heritage left by
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—to the rationale for totalitarianism they were to
become. Basically, it seeks to track that evolution into Leninism and Italian
Fascism.
Some years ago, Zeev Sternhell traced the Fascist ideas of Benito Mussolini to
late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century revolutionary ideas in France. At the
same time, he made allusion to sources in the specifically Marxist tradition—and
spoke of a “second main component” of Fascist ideology as a peculiar “revision”
of the Marxism it inherited.a
The present study attempts to trace the influences that shaped that revision—
for it will be argued that much, if not all, revolutionary thought in the twentieth
century was shaped by just such revisions of traditional Marxism. The tracing is
often difficult. There are innumerable asides amidst the attempts by authors, in
the revolutionary traditions of Europe at the time, to address and resolve a clutch
of critical questions that turned on complex epistemological, normative, and
scientific concerns left unresolved by the founders of “historical materialism.”
It was left to Marxism’s intellectual heirs to address the question of how
materialism, as ontology and epistemology, was to be understood. There was the
notion of “inevitabilities” and the “logic” of history—and the question of just
how human choice might function in a deterministic universe. And there was the
problem of the place of Darwinism, the struggle for existence, and the influence
of biology in all of that. With Engels’s passing in 1895, all this was bequeathed
to the good offices of Marxists who varied in their gifts and perspectives.
Even before the death of Engels, “revisionisms” began to gather on the
horizon. Most of the revisionism that was to follow was the result of the efforts
made to address all those problems left unsettled by the founders of Marxism. It
is to those revisionisms that the present work will direct the reader’s attention.
The exposition attempts to fill in some of the intellectual space that separates
classical Marxism from its revolutionary variants, and the totalitarian forms to
which those variants ultimately committed themselves. It will selectively follow
the development of all these variants into political totalitarianism—that peculiar
institutionalization that ultimately came to typify their collective goal culture,
and profoundly shape the history of the last century.
One might have expected that intellectual historians would make it a priority
to explain why totalitarianism was fostered and sustained by both the
revolutionary “left” as well as their counterparts on the “right.” In fact,
remarkably little has been done in that regard.
Martin Malia, for his part, spoke of the “conceptual poverty” associated with
Western efforts to come to grips with the reality of “communist”
totalitarianism.* I would suggest that much of its failure stems from the opacity
that surrounds the ideological discussions that arose out of the very uncertainty
of the philosophic and social science claims made by Marx and Engels in the
nineteenth century. The present account attempts to outline some of the tortured
discussions that collected around those claims. As will be argued, those
discussions ultimately shaped the totalitarianism that emerged out of the putative
liberality and humanity of classical Marxism.
It is hoped that the present effort will contribute to our understanding of the
twentieth century—the century that long will be remembered as perhaps the
most destructive in human history. It is something of a cautionary tale, addressed
to those who insist on reading revolutionary radicalism as the solitary hope
available to the modern world. To the rest of us, it is intended as information, as
part of an attempt to settle our accounts with the twentieth century.
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
As we move further and further into the twenty-first century, the twentieth takes
on more and more an air of unreality. In one sense, its features recede, and in
another, some of those same features become caricatures of themselves. Our
memories have become uncertain. Mussolini’s Fascism becomes a burlesque,1
and Lenin’s Bolshevism the antechamber of gulags and killing fields.2 One is left
with a feeling of disquiet, as though one does not understand any of it.
For a very long time the twentieth century seemed to make sense. The planet
was caught up in a Manichean struggle of light against darkness. Marxism,
embodying all the values of the Enlightenment, found itself opposed by the
irrational evil of reactionary and counterrevolutionary fascism. Fascism,
ignominiously struck down in the course of the Second World War, quickly lost
whatever cachet it briefly enjoyed among some intellectuals in the West, to be
reduced to little more than a public expression of private pathologies.3 For the
nations of the world, antifascism became a compulsory patrimony.
FASCISM AND COMMUNISM
Until the coming of the Second World War, both Mussolini’s Fascism and
generic fascism had been the subjects of passionate debate. There had been
perfectly rational and objective discussion of their respective merits and deficits.
Mussolini’s Fascism, for example, could be spoken of as possessed of a
“complete philosophy” articulated by a number of “young intellectuals” fully
competent to argue in defense of their positions. Economists could speak of the
“gains and losses” of Fascist economic policy and affirm that “the mass of
Italians sympathize with Fascism and, on the whole, support the regime.”4
After the war, none of that was possible any longer. Antifascism became the
negation that unified the capitalist, democratic West and the socialist,
nondemocratic East. Fascists were banished from humanity. They became the
unprecedented objects of general reprobation. Their very essence was deemed
