ABSTRACT
Most of the well-known Marxist luminaries in inter-war Europe initially saw fascism as the ‘death rattle’ of senescent capitalism, as a ‘pre-emptive strike’ against the Marxist left and the proletariat, or as a drastic last-ditch response to the long-awaited (and supposedly ‘terminal’) crisis of ‘decaying’ or ‘moribund’ monopolistic ‘finance capitalism’. This momentous crisis had begun with the First World War and its tempestuous aftermath, lifted slightly during the mid-1920s economic recovery and deepened dramatically with the onset of the 1930s Depression. The First World War had substantially expanded the size, reduced the deference and obedience, and raised the political and class consciousness of Europe’s industrial proletariat, as the war industries drew in millions of new (usually unskilled) recruits. Millions of former soldiers and munition workers became unemployed in 1919-20. But in the turbulent wake of the First World War Europe’s toiling masses were less docile and less tractable than they had been in the late nineteenth century (although the contrast with the very unsettled years between 1900 and 1914 was less marked). There was very widespread unrest in Europe’s countryside as well as in urban areas, but it was more tightly orchestrated in the towns. In both town and country, none the less, there were frequent strikes, boycotts and ‘sit-ins’, and employers experienced great difficulty in restoring labour discipline, the profitability of their enterprises and ‘management’s right to manage’ (i.e. high-handed autocratic styles of management, giving no ‘say’ to hired workers). Therefore employers widely resorted to lock-outs, harassment and aggressive strong-arm tactics against organized labour, often with the full backing of European governments, which since the 1890s had become increasingly vigorous and heavy-handed in the ‘labour taming’ methods they employed, even in the ‘liberal’ democracies. On the political front, old-fashioned governments and ‘liberal’ politicians had been accustomed to the very limited popular participation in political life before the 1914-18 war, even in the parliamentary states. They found it exceedingly difficult to cope with the recently enfranchised, increasingly educated, more and more unionized and politically ‘mobilized’ working class and peasant voters. Popular discontents and increasingly insistent demands accelerated the rise of the new mass parties of both the left and the illiberal-nationalist right, who in turn ‘gatecrashed’ many formerly sedate and patrician political institutions. Europe’s ‘oiks’ and ‘riff-raff gained access to its gentlemen’s clubs. In the face of this social upheaval, European governments all too readily resorted to repression, police harassment and other forms of aggressive suppression or dispersal of general strikes, ‘sit-ins’, marches and mass protests, whether in Britain, France, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria or eastern Europe. Acute labour unrest and the repressive responses it evoked from governments, industrialists and landowners were part of a Europe-wide confrontation between ‘property’ and ‘labour’, between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’.
