Fascism as a Depoliticized Mass Movement

Abstract

1. The principles quoted above describe the parameters within which a critical analysis of fascism must begin. While the objective content of fascism was the maintenance of the arbitrary regulation and preservation of the functioning of the capitalist socio-economic systems during periods of crisis, fascism assumed political and public shape as an anti-democratic and at the same time anticapitalist and anti-Marxist mass movement and as a neutralized popular movement of depoliticized masses, at least until the 1934 crisis of the NS-government. Beginning with such questions pertaining to what mobilized the masses before the seizure of power and how they were continually kept in line, one must focus on one pole of fascist rule, the mass movement, before investigating the connections between political system, economic interests and mass mobilization. From this perspective the controversial question of the primacy of politics or economics is of less concern than the specifically fascist admixture of public and anti-public organizational forms, in which the hopes, expectations and prejudices of broad masses of employees and workers were concentrated and directed against the traditional programs and actions of the proletarian movement. The question is whether the concept of a fascist public sphere can better grasp the inner relations and external effects of the fascist mass movement than other