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

capitalist in the sense of being in principle opposed to private property and privately owned
business. However, contrary to what Marxists assume, fascists were radically opposed to the
individualist and materialist spirit or ethos of capitalism, especially international capitalism. They
wanted to replace it by a pervasive sense of loyalty to the nation which would imbue people’s
lives with a spiritual quality which they held was lacking in a consumerist society.
Fascism’s objective revolution
The stress I have placed on the subjective dimension of the Fascist revolution should not,
however, detract attention from the changes which both regimes sought to bring about in external
reality. For example, while neither the Fascist nor Nazi state wanted to abolish capitalist
economics and private property, they had no scruples about involving themselves with the
economy on a scale unprecedented in any liberal state except in wartime, whether through the
corporative system as in Italy, or through cartelization and huge state industries as in Germany.
In the build-up to the Second World War both regimes also pursued the goal of self-sufficiency
(autarky), the Nazis to the point of creating a vast European empire whose material and human
resources (i.e. foreign workers and concentration camp inmates by the million) were ruthlessly
exploited for the good of the Third Reich. When large industrial firms such as Krupp, Daimler
Benz, or IG Farben made high-tech products with slave labour it was hardly business as usual
for capitalism.
22
Both regimes also indulged in a massive programme of social engineering which involved
creating mass organizations for every social grouping, retooling the educational system,
symbolically appropriating all aspects of leisure, sport, culture, and technology, whether by