This week, when people who should know better were marking the birth of modern Communism’s founder, his socialist heirs were flinging the standard slur that conservatives are ‘Nazis’. To find the Austrian Corporal’s real legatees they should look much closer to home.
May 5 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx, author of Das Kapital and the spiritual leader of Communism, a totalitarian ideology that killed more than 100 million people in the 20th century alone. We should expect the European Union oligarchs to show a bit more respect for the innocent victims of Communism. And yet, Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the European Commission attended the celebration marking the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth in Trier and openly declared that he was ‘celebrating the father of Communism’. The media also reports that the EU President defended Marx by arguing that he is not “responsible” for mistakes and atrocities committed in his name after his death. He delivered ‘an impassioned speech praising the legacy of the German philosopher’.[1]
The celebration of Marx by the European Commission President is particularly appalling for the European countries which suffered for decades under Communist dictatorships. And yet, Marx is not just the ‘father of Communism’. He is also the ‘mother’ of Nazi-Fascism, another ideology that claimed millions of lives in that continent. Indeed, all the intellectual frontrunners of Nazi-Fascism were radical Marxists at some stage of their lives. Like Marx, the early fascists condemned economic freedom and individual liberty. Above all, they agreed with Marx that capitalism should be eliminated because it supposedly favour only the ‘unproductive classes’ of industrialists at the expense of the working class.
Marxist Roots of Nazi Fascism
The Fascist movement was introduced in Italy after the World War I by Benito Mussolini. Raised by a Marxist mother, at the age of 29 Mussolini managed to become ‘one of the most effective and widely read socialist journalists in Europe’.[2] In 1912, he was elected the head of the Italian Socialist Party at the Congress of Reggio Emilia, opposing ‘bourgeois’ parliaments and proposing that Italy should be thoroughly Marxist. ‘Marx’, wrote Mussolini, ‘is the father and teacher … He is the magnificent philosopher of working-class violence’.[3] Of his own political aspiration, Mussolini remarked: ‘I wish to prepare my country and accustom it to war for the day of the greatest bloodbath of all, when the two basic hostile classes will clash in the supreme trial’.[4]
According to French historian François Furet, ‘Communism and Fascism grew up on the same soil, the soil of Italian socialism’. As Furet also explains, ‘Mussolini was a member of the revolutionary wing of the Socialist movement prior to supporting Italy’s entry into the Great War; then, immediately afterward, he found himself in violent conflict with the Bolshevik-leaning leaders of his former party’.[5] On the eve of that war, Mussolini predicted: ‘With the unleashing of a mighty clash of peoples, the bourgeoisie is playing its last card and calls forth on the world scene that which Karl Marx called the sixth great power: the socialist revolution’.[6]
However, the coming of that war coupled with his determination to bring Italy into it resulted in Mussolini losing his official position within the Italian Socialist Party.[7] As a result, on March 23, 1919, he was forced to create the Fascist Movement which promised, among other things, the partial seizure of all finance capital; the control over the national economy by corporative economic councils; the confiscation of church lands; and agrarian reform.[8] And yet, Lenin’s economic failures in the Soviet Union had turned Mussolini away from direct expropriation of industry. Still, Mussolini’s greatest aspiration was to establish a socialist utopia that should dictate how private business would be allowed to operate.[9] According to the British historian, Paul Johnson,
Mussolini now wanted to use and exploit capitalism rather than destroy it. But his was to be a radical revolution nonetheless, rooted in the pre-war ‘vanguard élite’ Marxism and syndicalism (workers’ rule) which was to remain to his death the most important single element in his politics.[10]
