Revolution from the Right: Fascism - School of Arts and Humanities ...

ight, however, even at its most radical, is widely seen as wanting to put a stop to such progress
by creating a modern state whose real purpose is to preserve the traditional class system and its
values, or even put the clock back by invoking the ancient qualities of the race as the basis of
contemporary society.
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Assumptions of this kind have meant that fascism’s own claims to be a revolutionary
force have been widely rejected by its opponents. Marxists, for example, are committed to the
belief that the capitalist world order will eventually be overthrown and give way to one in which
systemic inhumanity and exploitation will finally cease. They are thus predisposed to assume
that anything which tends to postpone the advent of socialism is ‘reactionary’, whilst the radical
transformation of society in an anti-socialist direction pursued by fascism makes it ‘counter-
revolutionary’. By the same logic, fascist talk of a rejuvenated national community in which class
conflicts will dissolve is axiomatically treated by Marxists as an elaborate exercise in ‘false
consciousness’, or using ideas and values which conceal the true intentions. Inter-war fascism
was the product of a crisis of capitalism, threatened from within by the breakdown of the
financial, social, and political structures which maintained it, and from without by revolutionary
socialism.
This pincer movement, so Marxists believe, caused it to drop its liberal disguise which
made it appear rational and humanistic, and resort to an openly authoritarian, terroristic form of
state government. Fascism was either directly generated by bourgeois elements or cynically
manipulated by them to defend the capitalist state, often with the direct collaboration of residual
feudal forces such as the Church and aristocracy. Its main ploy was to pretend to destroy the
system so that it could divert the subversive energies of the masses into serving a belligerently