Fascism as the Consequence of Class Struggle

129If the effort to interpret the rise, trajectory, and fall of Fascism in terms of the “intrusion” into history of “amorphous masses” is flawed by its apparent indisposition to recognize the influence of relatively rational group and class calculation, this cannot be said of the account that conceives the entire complex sequence to be the product of “class struggle.” While the general interpretation of Fascism as the consequence of class struggle does afford room for the irrational and brutal “mass behaviors” that constitute the core of the account provided by authors like Emil Lederer, Hannah Arendt, and William Kornhauser, the principal determinants of the entire interconnected series of events are identified as rational, if mutually exclusive, class interests. However much “mass behaviors” may have influenced the surface features of events, the historic sequence is understood to have been the consequence of the rational calculation of identifiable interest groups. At critical junctures in such an account, the “propertied classes,” the “bourgeoisie,” or the “big capitalists” are understood to have “invoked,” “subventionized,” “used,” and “directed” Fascism in the service of their calculated self-interest. As early as 1923, for example, Julius Deutsch insisted that Fascism was a political movement that mobilized and “fanaticized” petty bourgeois and adolescent population elements (with the “dark mysticism” so compatible with “Latin psychology”) in the service of “profit-mad capitalist reaction.” ¹ Whatever variations the next fifty years were to bring in their train, the cast of characters and the plot-line were to remain substantially the same.