Abstract
A recent trend in the historiography of European fascism in the 1930s suggests that fascist ideology contained significant “anti-capitalist,” “left-wing,” and even “quasi-socialist” elements. This paper challenges such claims by critically examining British fascist economic discourse. There is no denying, of course, that Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) deployed a populist critique of what it frequently denounced as “anarchic” and “chaotic” capitalism, and promoted its own alternative of “practical collectivism,” including a fascist version of “national planning” and a promise to build a “classless society” in Britain. Such language has been relied on by scholars to identify British fascism as “anti-capitalist” and “left wing.” However, no political language may be read at face value, and this is particularly so in the case of fascism, which proposed to use the powers of the state for an entirely different set of goals from those on the left of the ideological spectrum. When BUF economic rhetoric is deconstructed more critically, it becomes apparent that fascist “collectivism” would have relied on compulsory labour enforced by a regime of internment camps; “classless society” would have meant, not social or economic equality, but the requirement of universal service to the authoritarian fascist state; and fascist “anti-capitalism” would have been an assault, not on “capitalism” as a system of private capital and wage labor, but on “Jewish finance capitalism” as part of an alleged international conspiracy against Britain’s economy and empire. My analysis relies on Quentin Skinner’s contextualism and Ruth Wodak’s critical discourse analysis.
Presenters
Daniel RitschelAssociate Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland, Maryland, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Fascism, Ideology, Capitalism, Critical, Discourse, Analysis, Anti-semitism
