Fascism and its totalitarian nature
By: Rodrigo Peñaloza
Tags: Fascism, Totalitarianism, Communism

Painting: “Demolitions of the Borghi”, by Mario Mafai, 1939, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome.

The painting “Demolitions of the Borghi”, the Borgo Nuovo, by Mario Mafai, refers to Mussolini’s policy of deurbanization of the working class in the 1930’s. As pointed out by Diane Ghirardo, in her book Italy: Modern Architectures in History, chapter 3 (Architecture and the Fascist State: 1922–1943), page 98:

The Master Plan for Rome, the work of Marcello Piacentini and a committee of dignitaries in 1931, renders fascist ideas about urbanism abundantly clear in the manner in which it specified the construction of housing for government employees at all levels as well as for those in the public sector.

Each level of the bureaucratic hierarchy should be allocated to a specific urban spot. Despite the fact that such urban restructurings are common in Architecture, motivations may vary. Ghirardo goes on to say in the same chapter, pages 127–129:

T hroughout nearly the two decades of fascist rule, debates rages among traditionalists, Rationalists and Novecentisti (…) about the appropriate style for the new regime. In 1926 the Rationalist Gruppo 7 (…) vigorously attacked what they saw as a fascination with the newness for the sake of the newness, but it is difficult to identify the ways in which their own fascination with the avant-garde departed from the attitudes they attributed to their opponents (…). The formal choices of the three groups differed, but no social, political or cultural programme separated them. All laboured to varying degrees to convince regime officials that their aesthetic was the best expression of the Fascist state.

Though there was an attemptive balance between tradition and modernity, there was no doubt about the insistence on social, political and cultural hierarchies. Each urban subregion was to be allocated to a specific level of the bureaucratic service.

The painting which I chose to adorn this humble essay and, to some extent, to bring some beauty to the ugliness of the theme I am about to approach, illustrates not just the demolition of an architectonic structure, it rather illustrates the demolition of cultural heritage as an expression of freedom. By artificially shaping architecture, Mussolini’s intention was to destroy part of the cultural heritage and to devoid people from cultural values that were incompatible with Mussolini’s totalitarian ideals. All this is part of a broader aspect of totalitarian regimes. It is about these aspects, from an economic point of view, that I want to write and hopefully to highlight the importance of freedom, tradition and institutions to society. Architecture is but a facet. There are other facets, such as freedom of speech, preservation of cultural heritage and, mostly importantly, our fundamental liberties.

Mussolini, in the booklet Dottrina del Fascismo (1932), chapter 1 (Idee fondamentali), section 7 (in OPERA OMNIA di BENITO MUSSOLINI, vol. XXXIV, pp. 117–138), states that Fascism is entirely opposed to Liberalism (in the classical sense). His argument is basically as follows. Liberalism submits the state to the particular individual. Based on the philosophy of Giovanni Gentile, the philosopher of Fascism, Mussolini reverses the humanist focus of Liberalism and, like Gentile, reaffirms that the freedom of Man in Liberalism is a fantasy, since the true Man’s essence only have meaning within in Society, hence the truly free Man is the one who lives by and for the State. Gentile rhetorically appropriates Aristotle’s quote that man is a political animal and surreptitiously transfers the Greek πόλις to the totalitarian state that he and Mussolini envisioned: the fascist state. To understand Gentile’s political position and his support for fascism, it is necessary to understand his own idealist philosophy (of Hegelian origin), known as actualism, in reference to the thought exposed mainly in two of his works: The General Theory of the Spirit as Pure Act and the System of Logic. In the excerpt transcribed below, Mussolini states that Fascism is a totalitarian doctrine and, ipso facto, opposed to Liberalism.

In the interest of the private individual, liberalism denied the state; fascism, [on the contrary], reaffirms the state as the true reality of the individual. If freedom is to be taken as an attribute of the actual man, not of that abstract puppet as envisioned by the individualistic liberalism, fascism is for freedom. It is only for freedom that the issue of the freedom of the State and the individual in the State can be taken seriously, since, for the fascist, everything is in the State and nothing human or spiritual exists — let alone value — outside the State. In this sense, fascism is totalitarian and the fascist State is synthesis and unity of all values, it interprets, develops and empowers the entire life of the people. [Il liberalismo negava lo Stato nell’interesse dell’individuo particolare; il fascismo riafferma lo Stato come la realtà vera dell’individuo. E se la libertà dev’essere l’attributo dell’uomo reale, e non di quell’astratto fantoccio a cui pensava il liberalismo individualistico, il fascismo è per la libertà. È per la sola libertà che possa essere una cosa seria, la libertà dello Stato e dell’individuo nello Stato. Giacché, per il fascista, tutto è nello Stato, e nulla di umano o spirituale esiste, e tanto meno ha valore, fuori dello Stato. In tal senso il fascismo è totalitario, e lo Stato fascista, sintesi e unità di ogni valore, interpreta, sviluppa e potenzia tutta la vita del popolo.]

Mussolini, however, goes beyond denying the particular individual his essential freedom, he also denies it to groups of individuals. He overtly refers to parties, class associations and unions, only to assert that Fascism is against socialism. However, this opposition is not integral, as its opposition to Liberalism: it is punctual. Specifically, Mussolini (like Gentile) denies historical materialism and he clearly does so because Marxist historical materialism is one of the building blocks of the socialist idea of class struggle. Mussolini does not want the class struggle, but he admits that he shares with Socialism the idea of the ordering State. In section 8 of the same chapter, he writes:

Neither individuals outside the State, nor groups (political parties, associations, unions, classes). That is why fascism is against socialism, since it hardens the historical movement in the class struggle and ignores the state unity which classes fuse into a single economic and moral reality; similarly, it is against class syndicalism. However, in the orbit of the ordering State, Fascism wants the recognition of the real demands from which the socialist and syndicalist movement originates, in addition it enforces them in the corporative system of the interests reconciled in the unity of the State. [Né individui fuori dello Stato, né gruppi (partiti politici, associazioni, sindacati, classi). Perciò il fascismo è contro il socialismo che irrigidisce il movimento storico nella lotta di classe e ignora l’unità statale che le classi fond[ono] in una sola realtà economica e morale; e analogamente, è contro il sindacalismo classista. Ma nell’orbita dello Stato ordinatore, le reali esigenze da cui trasse origine il movimento socialista e sindacalista, il fascismo le vuole riconosciute e le fa valere nel sistema corporativo degli interessi conciliati nell’unità dello Stato.]

What I explained above about the denial of the historical materialism is supported by what Mussolini writes in chapter 2 (Dottrina politica e sociale), section 5:

“Such a conception of life leads Fascism to be the precise negation of that doctrine which constitutes the basis of scientific or Marxist socialism: the doctrine of the historical materialism.” [Una siffatta concezione della vita porta il fascismo a essere la negazione recisa di quella dottrina che costituì la base del socialismo cosiddetto scientifico o marxiano: la dottrina del materialismo storico.]

What is important, however, is the recognition of the power of the state. For Fascism, the state must be the queen bee for whom the entire hive lives and works. It is the absolute power of the state over the individual that also characterizes Nazism and that is why we sometimes mingle the two terms into one: Nazi-fascism.

With Marxist historical materialism removed, what is left of Socialism? Certainly, some of its fundamental pillars, such as the class struggle and the thesis of the final downfall of Capitalism, are overthrown. However, its political nuances remain undisputed, such as the totalitarianism of the single party, the superiority of the party’s political ideas over any other moral values expressed by the individuals — such as their faith and customs — and the natural diversity between individuals and groups of individuals. Therefore, Fascism is neither Liberalism nor Socialism, but it is much closer to Socialism in its most cruel aspect: the real experience of peoples living under the bondage of totalitarian regimes. In real life, both the historical materialism and the theory of labor value matter little: what matters is the loss of freedom and the deconstruction of values, even the affiliation to socialist parties. Fascism, Nazism and Communism differ on the grounds that justify them, but they have in common the fact that they are totalitarian doctrines. With different motivations, the result, however, is the same: annulment of the individual in the face of the state, violence and destruction. On the opposite side, there is the open, liberal, democratic and free market society.

In the ideological debate, the left versus right-wing division is a vague partition. The term “right” is equivocal, in the Aristotelian sense of the term, as it designates different things. Whether out of ignorance or acting in bad faith, the fact is that people, when they think of the term “right”, they refer to two things that are absolutely incompatible with each other. First, “right” is a term attributed to the position of those who advocate the free market, the democratic minimal state, as in the Hayek’s sense. On the other hand, “right” also designates the position of xenophobic nationalists and other adjectives of the kind. However, Liberalism has always defended the free movement of people ans the respect to the diversity of ideas. How, then, can one use the same term to designate such disparate ideas? How can a government be at the right when it works for the economic opening of the country, for the reduction of the state, for less interference by the state in private lives and for the transparency of public decisions? At the same time, how can it also be at the right if it, instead, is a totalitarian fascist state? How can someone who defends the cultural heritage of the people and who is, by definition, a conservative, be called a fascist, since fascism condenses all values into a single thing called “the state”? How a communist who defends the totalitarian state is called leftist and is not called, instead, a fascist? Secondly, the term left is also not to be confused with socialism or communism, as it can also designate those who are, today, in the Anglo-Saxon world, the so-called liberals, as opposed to conservatives. These last two terms are also ambiguous. This is why many people do not understand that a liberal in the Hayek’s sense can be a conservative. A liberal in Hayek’s sense may want to preserve his culture and institutions. Indeed, the stability of institutions is the result of the spontaneous order

These stereotypes attributed from one part of the ideological spectrum to the other and the equivocity of the terms are the fuel that ignites the fire of the sterile and empty discussions that we witness every day. Hayek, when writing about the differences between spontaneous order and deliberate order, showed that culture is an expression of spontaneous order and that society itself creates institutional mechanisms that preserve it. This spontaneous institutional stability (the culture experienced by the people) is crucial to an open society. So there is nothing anti-liberal in Hayek’s sense about being conservative. According to Roger Scruton, the nationalism of a conservative person is to be understood as a voluntary adherence to the culture of the people and not to be confused with fascist nationalism, which is the adherence to the ideology of the totalitarian state.

Faced with the confusion of terms specifically referring to Economics, such as communism, socialism, capitalism, etc., I prefer to rely on Armen Alchian, one of the greatest economists of the 20th century. The correct criterion is the extent of restrictions imposed by the state on the choices that individuals can make about how to use or transact their assets and resources. In a free market economy, individuals freely enjoy their property rights. They are also free to preserve their cultural heritage, as long as cultural heritage is essential to social stability. In a socialist economy, economic activities and exchange decisions are made partially through governmental political processes. In this sense, every society is a mixture between the private property system and the socialist system. This mix varies over time according to people’s attitudes towards risk, the degree of tolerance towards idiosyncratic behaviors, and according to the greater or lesser ease with which groups that compete with each other achieve power. See Armen Alchian & William Allen, University Economics, chapter 12. In a market economy, the scope of activities in which private property rights are freely transacted is much larger than that under the socialist regime. In socialism, political power and non-private right are used much more intensely. In a free market economy so defined, there is no place for fascism, as the individual’s political choice is part of his scope of choice over his goods and resources.

Contrary to what communists write in their economics books about capitalism, modern economic theory is not about physical goods and services that are produced and transacted, but about the conflicts inherent to individual processes of choice. Economics studies the competitive and cooperative behavior of people in resolving conflicts of interest due to scarcity. This definition by Alchian is the best one, it describes the entire modern view of economists on property rights, the role of institutions, the regulation of market failures, the role of informational asymmetries, contract theory, the economics of collective choice and much more.

Going back to the demolition of Borgo Nuovo and the fascist programme to fit architecture into an artificial social design, I cannot but mention Brasilia, designed by Lúcio Costa, who was deeply influenced not only by Le Corbusier, but also by his communist ideology. Brasilia’s self-sufficient residential super-blocks, its microsectors, antecede shortly Gutnov’s new elements of settlement, which emphasize the correspondence between urban structures and social relationships in the ideal communist city. As Elke Beyer highlights in her paper From “New Units of Settlement” to the old Arbat: the soviet NER (НЭР — Новый элемент расселения) group’s search for spaces of community, in Morávansky et alii (eds.): Re-Humanizing Architecture: New Forms of Community, 1950–1970, page 214:

T he primary housing unit within the NER provided individual family apartments for 1500 inhabitants in an area of 250x250 m (…) clustered around a green central courtyard (…).

In its initial planning, Brasilia’s superblocks were devised to segregate the various levels of the bureaucratic hierarchy of the federal government, just like the Master Plan for Rome. That absolutely does not mean that Lúcio Costa was ever inspired by the Italian architects of the 1930’s. The common element is the totalitarian view according to which a superior entity (be it the fascist state or the communist party) is rightly entitled to dictate how people should move and occupy the urban space, leaving, to some extent, no freedom of choice to the citizens.

The point, therefore, is more or less freedom of choice. It is not possible to separate freedom of economic choice from freedom of political choice, as political choices are not separated from the impacts they cause on the scope of economic choices. Either more socialism or more fascism means that the state determines more broadly what individuals can and cannot choose. More capitalism means more freedom of choice for individuals. It is that simple. After all, if our cultural heritage, our customs, our morality and basic freedoms are human and spiritual values, nothing of these is allowed in totalitarian states. As Mussolini once made clear, “nothing human or spiritual exists — let alone value — outside the State”.

Therefore, the ones who place the power of the state above individuals, striping them from their privacy, their tradition and cultural heritage, and who, in addition, attribute the epithet of fascist or nonprogressist to those who defend a smaller state, cultural tradition, and the expansion of political and economic freedoms should seriously review what they understand not only about the ideas they reject and criticize, but mainly about the very ideas they so fiercely defend.