256
PARTISAN REVIEW
(4) From all this follows .the most striking characteristic of
this new form of political rule: its opportunism. The Nazis have
maneuvered about between social groups in Germany, now playing
a "left" game and now swinging over to the Junkers and generals,
with one aim: to maintain their control by playing one social group
against another. (So, too, Stalin used the Bukharinist right to
crush the Trotskyist left, and then broke with the right and init·
iated the Five Year Plan, for advocating which Trotsky had been
sent into exile.) In the fields of foreign policy, it is the same: the
Berlin-Moscow axis is the grand monument. Also in ideology, as
any one knows who tries to find a consistent thread in Nazi propa·
ganda over a period of years. These bureaucracies live from hand
to mouth, adopting whatever political and ideological line happens
to meet the problem of the moment.
0 BRAVE
NEW WORLD?
What is the nature of the beast, then? Trotsky
insists it is no more nor less than the familiar
phenomenon of Bonapartism, in which a
clique maintains itself in power by playing one class off against
another, thus giving the state power a temporary autonomous char·
acter. But these modern totalitarian regimes are not temporary
affairs: they have already changed the underlying economic and
social structure, not only manipulating the old forms but also
destroying their inner vitality.
Is the Nazi bureaucracy a new ruling class, then, and
fascism a new form of society, comparable to capitalism? This
doesn't seem to be true either. The bourgeoisie came into power
with a consistent ideology, based on a new form of economy which
broke sharply with feudalism and involved a total reorganization
of society. The Nazi ideology is a patchwork of old concepts–
mediaeval anti-Semitism and "blood thinking," nineteenth century
chauvinism, Machiavellian power cynicism, etc.-which have no
consistency and no aim beyond the utility of the moment. Fascist
economy preserves the forms of capitalism while destroying their
meaning. The extreme difficulty which one has in clru.sifying this
strange monster comes from the fact that fascism has destroyed
the profit-and-property motor force of the old bourgeois economy,
without evolving any general rationale, any new dynamism to
replace it. Fascism has closed the door on the old world, but it
