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finding either a conservative-bourgeois or a radical-socialist solu–
tion for the crisis of German capitalism-these blind historical
forces have pushed into power a band of adventurers, opportunist
to the core (and the Men for the Job precisely because they are
opportunist), who have played off one social class against another,
compromising and maneuvering between conflicting ideologies and
economic systems, manipulating every factor with the single aim of
maintaining themselves in power.
For the answer to question (2) I again refer the reader to my
article of last summer, where (pages 257-8) I list the enormous
difficulties facing Hitler
after
the conquest of the Continent, diffi–
culties which still are largely unsolved. A cardinal error made by
many bourgeois observers today is to overestimate the stability and
workability of Nazism. Economically, German fascism has serious
weaknesses of its own, typical of all such 'burelj.ucratic collectivist'
regimes. (There is no space to go into this important subject here;
for the moment, I can only refer the reader to two recent books
in
which these economic weaknesses are described in detail-forGer–
many, Guenter Reimann's
The Vampire Economy;
for Russia,
Freda Utley's
The Dream We Lost.)
Politically, also, Nazism faces
serious problems of its own, especially now that it has to control a
dozen subject nationalities on the Continent. The struggle for
national -- independence is once more on the agenda, and future
revolutionary movements may well take this form in the -beginning.
(The recent events in Yugoslavia, where the king and the army led
a
popular
nationalist
coup d'etat
against Nazi domination, offer a
case in point.·)* Finally,
the pemumence of fascism depends less
on the strength of fascism itself than on the strength of the mass
-revolutionary forces which will arise against
it.
In this, it differs
from the bourgeois revolution, which won and kept power on the
basis of a consistent positive program. Fascism is a negative doc·
trine, able to maintain itself through opportunistic manipulation
of the apparatus of State power in the vacuum left by the break-
*During the last war, Lenin wrote:
"If
the European proletariat does not take
power in the next twenty years, if this war ends with a victory like that of Napoleon
and with the enslavement of a series of nationally conscious states, if extra-European
imperialism {American and Japanese in particular) can maintain itself for twenty
years ... then a mighty national war will be possible in Europe." This development
Lenin felt to be "improbable" but "not impossible." "For," he added in words that
are pertinent today more than ever, "to believe that world history moves ever forward,
smoothly and uniformly, without occasional giant steps backward, is undialectic, unhis–
torical, theoretically incorrect."
