ABSTRACT
Fascism, which was a unique syncretic ideology combining among other ideas antiMarxism, populist ultra-nationalism, syndicalism, corporatism and socialism, was bound to have major ambiguities. Fascist theoreticians fused extreme anti-modern traditionalism with a hyper-modern faith in technology and the future; irrational with rational philosophies. Writing in The New Statesman, Terry Eagleton highlights the ambiguities of fascism in relation to the Nazis’ Final Solution: “The Holocaust was both barbarism and the triumph of a ‘scientific’, full-bloodedly modern rationality. If it was a revolt against Enlightenment reason for some thinkers, it was the consummation of it for others” (Eagleton 2004). Eagleton insists that since “fascism is among other things a carnival of unreason, it would be odd to expect from it a coherent theoretical case” (Eagleton 2004). Contrary to Terry Eagleton’s claims, fascism’s “carnival of unreason” was based on a coherent, vitalist worldview defending violence, the sanctity of the nation and the pre-eminence of the state. However, Eagleton is correct to point to a major ambiguity between the fascist appeal to workers and their simultaneous defence of capitalism: “If fascism claimed to be radical, it was a bogus revolution that never once put its anti-capitalist rhetoric into practice. Instead, it set about efficiently exterminating the political left. For all their crafty appeals to lower-middle-class groups, fascist regimes left existing patterns of property and social class largely intact” (Eagleton 2004). Despite Fascist Italy’s corporatist orientation, one scholar argues that the regime had “complete control over the labour force but very little control of the nation’s economic structure” (Tannenbaum 1973, 100).
