The first thesis, limited to explaining the origins of fascist parties and their initial accession to power, is well supported in the deliberations of the scholars who are reported in the Woolf volume. Some alternative, non-Marxist theories about Fascism in power are: (1) that the economies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were centrally-directed, Statified mechanisms in which private ownership was displaced in favour of the decrees of Party and bureaucratic management (this is one version of the ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ case) (2) that the central feature of fascist structures is their ‘totalitarianism’, in the sense of guidance by an all-constraining ideological drive towards world-transformation, which subordinates to its ambition all sectors of the society, including the economy as one among many. The second concerns the character of a fascist regime which is actually in power: this, according to pronouncements by the Comintern leaders, by Trotsky and by such independent Marxist scholars as Franz Neumann ( Behemoth) and Daniel Guerin ( Fascism and Big Business) is the untrammelled and perfected dictatorship of capital, acting in the furtherance of business interests without reference to working-class demands, which are now brutally deprived of all expression. The first thesis, deriving from Trotsky and now widely circulated by academic writers, states that the rise of a fascist movement is the expression of despairing masses of petty-bourgeois, exploited by demagogues and utilised by the big bourgeoisie at a time opportune for the crushing of the labour movement. Marxist theory has produced two important propositions about the phenomenon of Fascism: they are not of equal worth. Political Violence and Public Order, Robert Benewick, Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 63s Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Peter Sedgwick, The Problem of Fascism, International Socialism (1st series), No.42, February-March 1970, pp.31-34. Peter Sedgwick The Problem of Fascism (February/March 1970) Peter Sedgwick: The Problem of Fascism (1970)

The mass psychology of fascism