Introduction by N.R.
Ludwig von Mises opens his 1925 article “Anti-Marxism” by stating that “In postwar Germany and Austria, a movement has been steadily gaining significance in politics and the social sciences that can best be described as Anti-Marxism.” The editor added: “In Germany, they later came to call themselves National Socialists, or Nazis.” Mises then sets out to discuss “scientific Anti-Marxism,” his term for the first fascist theorists. “The principal tie that unites them is their declaration of hostility toward Marxism,” he adds.
The title of the 1925 reply to this article by the Austrian Communist Fedor Kapelusz published in the Central Committee of the CPSU’s journal Bolshevik, “Professor Mises as a Theorist of Fascism,”1 can be read as an objective description, though there is also a double entendre. As Kapelusz writes: “Here we have right in front of us the so-called first theoretical attempt to provide a foundation for German fascism.”
One could justifiably change the title to “Mises as a Theorist of Anti-Marxism,” which would preempt the complaint of cheap usage of the label “fascist” and allow us some demarcation from the blunter approach of other critics of Mises. These critics, themselves often anti-Marxists (whether post-Keynesian or Proudhonian anarchist), correctly point to his positive utterances about “Fascism and similar movements” and his role as advisor to the Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss. The overlap between libertarianism and fascism is well-known. Let us just cite from the abstract of a chapter in Robert Leeson’s 2017 book Hayek: A Collaborative Biography: Part X: Eugenics, Cultural Evolution, and The Fatal Conceit: “Mises was a card-carrying Austro-Fascist and member of the official Fascist social club; and the tax-exempt Rothbard celebrated the first bombing of the World Trade Center. This chapter examines the influence of eugenics on Hayek, Mises, and Rothbard plus the similarities between ‘von Hayek V’ and the founder of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley, sixth Baronet.” Even the mainstream The Daily Beast in 2017 noticed the coincidence, though it spoke about libertarianism merely as a “gateway” to white supremacism.
Kapelusz’s article takes into account the fact that Mises himself criticizes the various fascist theorists. One can note that today the most verbally extreme “anti-fascists” are the libertarians (from the Tea Party to Trump), who for example carried posters equating Obama to Hitler. Kapelusz takes into account that Mises strategically favored a German foreign policy geared towards non-violence, much like a German fascist today can criticize Hitler for having lost the war. Such demagogic phrase-mongering about pacifism is a prominent feature of the libertarians today (which even some self-declared Leftists appear to have fallen for).
The article’s central point, it seems to me, is that Mises criticizes fascism from the right. Mises believes that fascism isn’t Anti-Marxist enough, that it is socialist. The latter outrageous claim is only a twist on the quite common refrain found among the libertarian movement that the Nazis were socialists (or even among liberals, who often claim that fascism and communism are two sides of the same coin). What Mises in effect is saying is that the only real objectionable thing about the Nazis is that they are socialists. So when libertarians complain about the government’s fascism and encroachment on freedoms (and they thus can appear as progressive defenders of liberal rights), they really are complaining about (alleged) socialism.
The anti-Marxism of Mises ran deep. In his memoirs, he wrote: “Upon entering the university, I too was an étatist2, through and through. I differed from my fellow students, however, in that I was consciously anti-Marxist. At the time I knew little of Marx’s writings but was acquainted with the most important works of Kautsky. I was an avid reader of the Neue Zeit, and had followed the revisionist debate with great attention. The platitudes of Marxist literature repelled me. I found Kautsky almost ridiculous.” What Kapelusz writes about Mises fits many an e-celeb rightwinger today: “Viennese professor Ludwig Mises is a very angry guy and he very strongly dislikes Marx and Marxism. Just speaking between us, he shouldn’t dislike it one bit. If not for Marxism, our professor would have to beg for handouts, since he has never managed to prove himself in science. Crushing Marxism, however, is a very profitable business.”
Notably absent is a mention of anti-semitism in the articles of Mises and Kapelusz about fascism. Of course, in 1925 there was not yet mass extermination of Jews (apart from the pogroms in Ukraine during the Russian civil war), but it also seems correct (I almost said – politically correct) to avoid a definition of fascism based exclusively, or at least centrally, on antisemitism, as is popularly held. Let us just cite the remark by the Italian Trotskyist Pietro Tresso in 1938:
“Fourteen senators appointed by Mussolini were Jewish. Under Fascism there were 203 Jewish professors … at Italian universities … All of them swore allegiance to the regime … Federico Camme – a Jew – laid the legal foundations for the reconciliation with the Vatican. Guido Jung – a Jew – was a member of Mussolini’s government as Minister of Finance … The only two biographers to whom the Duce granted his cooperation were the Italian Jew Margherita Sarfatti and the German Jew Emil Ludwig. An Italian Fascist has recently issued a book on Italy’s economic development after the country’s unification – the Storia di una nazione proletaria by the Jew H. Fraenkel … The General Confederation of Industry, which at the time of the “March on Rome” had the Jew Olivetti as its President, gave Mussolini some 20 millions [of liras]. All this filled the bourgeois Jews of the whole world with joy, and they all gave Italian Fascism their praises – and their money.”3
Relevant perhaps are some words about the author. Fedor Kapelusz (Odessa 1876 – Moscow 1945) was exiled from Russia in 1895 and lived in Vienna. In 1910 he wrote an article on the history of Austrian workers, participated in the Austrian 1918 revolution, and when in Soviet Russia wrote a book on Austria (1929). He was quite familiar with Austrian Social-Democracy and bourgeois culture. He knew Hilferding from his student days, and in fact even anticipated some of Hilferding’s topics already in an 1897 article-series on “Industry and Finance,” which incidentally was picked out by Bernstein for criticism.
As for Kapelusz’s role in the Austrian revolution, I have not found more details. It is clear that he stood on the opposite side of the barricades from Mises, who has quite an inflated view about his own role in convincing Otto Bauer to save Viennese culture from “[p]lundering hordes” and terror. For more writings by Kapelusz, see his reviews of Ostrogorski’s classical work of political science and his overview of Marxist literature on imperialism.
“Anti-Marxism”: Professor Mises as a Theorist of Fascism
Viennese professor Ludwig Mises is a very angry guy and he very strongly dislikes Marx and Marxism. Just speaking between us, he shouldn’t dislike it one bit. If not for Marxism, our professor would have to beg for handouts, since he has never managed to prove himself in science. Crushing Marxism, however, is a very profitable business.
“The science of the so-called Marxists,” states Mises, “can be no more than ‘scholasticism.’” Mises talks about “men and women who are in this business” with total disregard. They beat the air, live by canonized Marxian dogmas, with their writings mattering only because it helps their political careers; their “science” only pursues party goals; and the whole argument about revisionism and dictatorship is not scholarly, but is purely political. That’s how angrily Mises talks about Marxists. But further on Mises puts himself in a very unpleasant position. It happens to be that the leading figures of German bourgeois [social] science, the representatives of the Historical School in political economy and the so-called Socialists of the Chair, borrowed a lot from Marx. Mises doesn’t dare to criticize them.
With great sadness he quotes Professor Schmoller that Adam Smith’s school became “a doctrine of narrow class interests” and that “socialism can be denied neither its justification for existence nor that it has had some good effects.” With the same degree of sorrow Mises quotes Friedrich Engels, that Professor Wilhelm Lexis’s theory of interest merely presents the Marxist theory in different words.
But then Mises’s great anger falls on Schmoller’s students, the entire generation of the German bourgeois [social] science. He doesn’t mention names. “This generation had never been exposed to university lectures on theoretical economics. They knew the Classical economists by name only and were convinced that they had been vanquished by Schmoller. Very few had ever read or even seen the works of David Ricardo or John Stuart Mill. But they had to read Marx and Engels. Which became all the more necessary, as they had to cope with the growing social democracy. They were writing books in order to refute Marx. . . . They rejected the harshest political demands of Marx and Engels, but adopted the theories in milder form. . . . For this generation . . . Marx was the economic theorist par excellence.”
The angry professor continues to snort for a long while. But finally he finds satisfaction in the fact that the current generation, “some pupils of these pupils” [the students of Schmoller’s students], rejected Marx. Of course we are talking about bourgeois science. A new trend now appeared, anti-Marxism, which Mises talks about with such admiration. The Austrian school, Böhm-Bawerk and others, demonstrated “how petty and insignificant the role of Marx is in the history of political economy.” On his own behalf Mises also states that “those few possibly defensible thoughts” in Marx’s study of society have been analyzed much more deeply by Taine and Buckle; and his theory of the withering away of the state is “utterly insignificant for science.”(!) A poodle is barking at the elephant. Mises has not yet named the representatives of this school of “anti-Marxism.” But one should read between the lines: The professor is too modest to name himself.
What is the contribution of this school to science? What is Mises offering us? He is advocating “utilitarian sociology” and states that “the success that Marx’s study of society had in Germany is explained by the fact that utilitarian sociology of the eighteenth century was rejected by German [social] science.” That isn’t bad, is it? On the other hand, Mises – let’s do him justice – puts his own meaning (or meaninglessness) in this Stone Age “utilitarian sociology.” This meaning is – the harmony of interests. Society is founded on the division of labor, and because of this does not contain any conflicts of interest. This is a commonplace, and it is also an incorrect one. Mises, to push himself up, puts it into a Gelerterian4 abracadabra: “The utilitarian social doctrine does not engage in metaphysics, but takes as its point of departure the established fact that all living beings affirm their will to live and grow.” Isn’t that metaphysics? Here is a reference to Adam Smith, “even the weakness of men was not ‘without its utility,’” and all of it for the sake of the revelation that private property is in the interests of all the members of the society. Along the way, there is such childish ignorance as the statement that “wars, foreign and domestic, (revolutions, civil wars), are more likely to be avoided the closer the division of labor binds men.” But what about trade wars of capitalism? What about the whole history of capitalism?
Here is another pearl. “Why does the conflict occur between classes, and why not within the classes?” Mises is persuaded that here he has a trump card against Marx. If there is no conflict within a class, then there can be no conflicts outside of a class, i.e., between classes. “It is impossible to demonstrate a principle of association that exists within a collective group only, and that is inoperative beyond it.” Of course this is an absolute absurdity. Quite definite, specific interests connect the working class, and not by some cloudy principle of association. “Taken to its logical conclusion, class conflict is not a theory of society but a theory of unsociability, i.e., a conflict of each against all.” This masterpiece Mises borrows from Paul Barth.5 Now it is clear who are Mises’s spiritual associates in this “anti-Marxism”! One is worth as much as another. This Paul Barth has a quite deserved reputation as a desperately boring mediocrity.
And there is one more “scholar” of the same caliber and manner that our angry professor is quoting: Othmar Spann.6 This Spann is an absolutely open “scholar” of fascism, spiritual leader of “national socialism.” He is a branch on the same tree as the ignoramus Hitler and philologist- historian Oswald Spengler. Spann, whose very being is a telltale proof of the class character not just of the society as it is, but of the whole of [bourgeois] science as well, states that Marx gave no definition and delineation of the notion of a class, and that the terms “class interest,” “class status,” “class conflict,” “class ideology” are imprecise and indeterminate.
Mises adds that the third volume of [Marx’s] Das Kapital abruptly breaks off at the very place where there was to be an interpretation of the meaning of “classes.” Nevertheless, as Mises sadly remarks, “the concept of a class became the cornerstone of modern German sociology.” “Dependence on Marx is the special characteristic of German social sciences. Surely Marxism has left its traces as well on the social thinking of France, Great Britain, the United States, the Scandinavian countries, and the Netherlands.” That is how Mises complains. Obviously, the state of affairs of “anti-Marxism” does not look too bright. Mises, the spiritual gendarme of the bourgeoisie, having no arguments whatsoever, is simply appealing to the interests of the bourgeoisie. Sure! This is another obvious “refutation” of Marx’s analyses of classes.
But what “anti-Marxism” is challenging is “not socialism but only Marxism.” And after his “crushing” criticism Mises gives his positive analyses. He titles it “National (Anti-Marxian) Socialism.” So here are old acquaintances: “National Socialism,” and the “national-socialistic” trend of Hitler-types. Mises unifies all of this under the umbrella of the fascist movement.
Here we have right in front of us the so-called first theoretical attempt to provide a foundation for German fascism. As for right now, this attempt by Mises looks more like a mixture of tangled amusements and contradictions; but let’s see where this beginning takes him. Now we will see that the contradictions in which Mises is entangled are not just amusing, but in a certain sense also symptomatic and characteristic.
German “étatists” (that is how for some reason Mises chooses to label the representatives of German social sciences who were taken prisoner by Marx) “see in modern imperialism of the countries of Entente the same thing as do Marxists: the development of capitalist aspiration for expansion.” Mises obviously doesn’t like this. But only in the sense that he considers the primary factor to be national hatred. Mises, the theorist of fascism, elevates national hatred to the pearl of creation. Here is his “theory”: “The Marxian socialist proclaims: The conflict of classes but not the conflict of peoples, away with imperialistic war! But having proclaimed this he adds: but always (!) civil war, revolution. National Socialism proclaims: Unification of the people, class peace; but he adds to it, a war against the foreign enemy.” So the thunder of victory can be heard.
But the World War made a breach in this Gelerterian symmetrical construction. Mises advocates the sergeant-major, Hindenburg psychology of no defeat, but at the same time he would like to use the lessons of defeat. “German theory and practice could only proclaim the principle of force and struggle. Its application isolated the German nation from the world, and led to its defeat in the Great War.” Mises wants to have his cake and eat it, too. And now Mises admits, “for the German nation a violent solution to the problem is least satisfactory.” Mises thinks, though, that the same principle of self-determination of people cannot help in those areas where Germans live together with other people and represent the minority (among Danish, Lithuanians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Croats, Slovenians, and French).
Obviously, one has to seek allies and coalitions. So Mises comes to what for a fascist is an absolutely unexpected conclusion: “German anti-Marxism and Russian super-Marxism are not too far from the politics of mutual agreement and alliance…In such a situation Germany could find only one ally: Russia, which is facing the same hostility as Germany from Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians, and in some sense even Czechs, but nowhere stands in direct conflict with German interests.” Mises assures that “Bolshevist Russia, like czarist Russia, only knows force in dealing with other nations.”
This absurdity and slander is not Mises’s original concoction; the tales about our “Red imperialism” are blossoming in bourgeois Europe. But how he plans to combine, in this case, an alliance with Russia after he has just proclaimed the rejection of the politics of force, well, this remains Mises’s secret. The following is also amusing: The reconciliation of German “anti-Marxian nationalism” (which is fascism) with the anti-Marxian nationalism of so-called Fascist Italy, as well as with the awakening of Hungarian chauvinism, is not possible, according to Mises, because German national interests come into conflict with Italian interests in South Tyrol and Hungarian interests in western Hungary.
Even here in the arena of national politics Mises has his “theoretical” trump card against Marx. This is the problem of immigration. According to Mises, it is an essential question for the Germans, and he is indignant at the fact that in the entire pre-war German literature there is no published research analyzing the limitations and restrictions on immigration. “This silence, better than anything else, reveals the Marxian bias in social literature.” Mises also refers to the Congress of the Second International in Stuttgart in 1907, where there was passed the compromising resolution in reference to the immigration of colored workers. The Austrian representative stated that the majority of the Austrian Labor party is against such immigration. Mises keeps discussing the fact that the U. S. trade unions are undertaking “class conflict” not against their own employers but against European workers and Negroes. He conscientiously closes his eyes to the fact that those trade unions are yellow Gomperists, anti-Marxian, and that the Communist International makes as its cornerstone exactly the international solidarity of all workers and of all races, and gives special significance to the people of the Orient.
Mises presents the issue as if the whole social problem has its modern roots in the impossibility of free immigration, while in his own German fatherland everything is fine concerning this matter. In fact, immigration for Mises serves as a channel to fulfill the economic interests of the German bourgeoisie, though it wraps it in the cloths of “national socialism.” Marx irrefutably proved that the laws of the growth in population are dependent upon the economic system; the overpopulation of Germany, which makes the country seek colonies, is a pure capitalist population problem, the result of capitalist exploitation.
In this context, Mises’s argument has the purpose of hiding the real reasons: the wounding of the imperialist interests of the German bourgeoisie as a result of the World War. So, Mises’s “national socialism” is socialism without Marxism, and is nothing but a mask to cover the class interests of the bourgeoisie. Here, as before, “anti-Marxism” is one more confirmation of Marxism. By the way, to where did Mises’s much-praised “utilitarian sociology” disappear, his theoretical heavy artillery? It happens to be that his “harmony of interests” exists only in the national arena among the employers and workers of the same nation, but in the international arena even workers go against workers—that’s what Mises states based on the practice of the yellow unionism of Gompers (his “workers aristocracy”); this is the fruit of imperialism.
In one way or another, Mises assures that “a violent solution (of the national problem) is even less applicable today than it was in prewar Germany.” The fascist in the role of peacemaker, isn’t that a spectacle for the gods? But the solution is quite simple, and Mises shows his own cards. In Czechoslovakia the German minority has to fight for its democracy and freedom from state interference in economic life; the same as in other countries where Germans are in a minority. How can we, he openly admits, combine it with the politics of intervention in Germany itself!
Mises also finds shortcomings in the newest, but very anemic and weak, “anti-Marxism.” The representatives of anti-Marxism, Mises says, are satisfied with criticizing the political conclusions of Marxism, but they don’t challenge the sociological doctrine behind Marxism. Who are those representatives? Mises actually only mentions Spann. Forgive us this vulgar joke: The whole “Spanna”7 of the German fascists found their “theorist” in this one and only Spann. This Spann, believe it or not, attacks Marxism because Marxism is “a product of Western individualism, which is foreign to the German spirit.” (By the way, when did Germany become the East?) Mises suggests that this attack, and the fact that Spann identifies Marxism with liberalism and individualism, have purely political motives, resulting from Spann’s hostility toward liberalism.
“It is illogical,” says Mises, “to deduce a similarity of the two from an opposition to both.” Let’s put aside here the fact that Mises, in his turn, identifies social democracy with Marxism, and has not yet been persuaded that social democracy is completely harmless. But it is very characteristic that Mises aspires to make peace between democracy (liberalism) and fascism. We have partly observed and are still observing the similar process in Italy. Fascism, being purely a bourgeois movement, needs liberalism: scorpions for the workers, but liberalism for the bourgeoisie, since the bourgeoisie needs liberalism for protectionism and the internationalism of the state.
Mises and Werner Sombart are two aggressive warriors of “anti-Marxism”. But Mises is not happy with Sombart. He considers Sombart, who was the first “to introduce Marx to German science,” still to be a prisoner of Marx. It is very instructive that Mises talks about Sombart’s hidden sympathies that one can find when reading between the lines. It happens to be that Sombart dreams about the Middle Ages and an agrarian state. He is the enemy of modern industrialism, the enemy of “railroads and factories, steel furnaces and machines, telegraph wires and motorcycles, gramophones and airplanes, cinematography and power stations, cast iron and aniline colors.” Mises gives this quote from Sombart, as an enumeration of what the socialist critics “have not yet once accused capitalism.” It looks like cast iron and aniline colors didn’t please Sombart. . . . It is wonderful that for Spann, the leader of nationalistic anti-Marxism, the social ideal also is “a return to the Middle Ages.” This confession by Mises is very interesting. The state of affairs in Mises’s camp is very sad; the “theorists” of German fascism are probably simply not very healthy people. And Mises reproaches Sombart for “a sickly weakness of nerves,” in the inability to preserve spiritual stability even among gramophones and airplanes.
But Sombart and Spann are precisely those who advertise Teutonic strength and fortitude; Mises hits them at their weakest point. He hits them from the perspective of their own sergeant-major psychology, pointing to the fact that without steel furnaces and airplanes Germany will find itself helpless if confronted with the foreign enemy. Sombart is dreaming “pre-proletarian utopianism” with its “bucolic” character. Mises’s response to him is that with the establishment of a bucolic agrarian state in our own time they should kiss goodbye any dream of domination. The conservatism of Sombart and Spann reflects their retrograde ideal of a Prussian landlord – the diehard; Mises “corrects” this ideal on behalf of the bourgeoisie, with its imperialistic tendencies.
Mises accuses his colleague Sombart that in his two-volume book of one thousand pages on Proletarian Socialism (1924) he never gives “a precise definition of the concept of socialism.” Sombart interprets the argument about socialism not as a discussion about “economic technology” but as an argument either for God or for Satan. According to Sombart, socialism wishes to throw the source of all the evil in the world, money, “into the rain,” like the rings of Nibelungs. Those pitiful phrases that can impress a young fascist student makes Mises reproach Sombart bitterly for the fact that he does not speak against socialism as a whole, but only against proletarian socialism, against Marxism. But Mises himself is also a follower of “national socialism.”…This is too much of contradictions and confusions.
A little further on, Mises finds that Sombart admits that socialism is in accordance with the interests of the proletariat. The struggle against “proletarian socialism” appears to be a hopeless affair, and Sombart himself becomes an unconscious Marxist. This is what Mises, the keeper of anti- Marxian purity, asserts. Really, Sombart wants to overcome class conflict through ethics and religion; but in that case, according to Mises, Sombart is admitting that class conflict exists. As a result, Sombart has to appeal to God, which is more of a confession than a statement of science, and thus, as a result, provides no proof. That is how Mises dethrones Sombart in order to retain the laurels for himself as the only actual “anti-Marxist” and theorist of fascism.
- Can be found in the appendix of Selected Writings of Ludwig Von Mises Volume Two (2002)
- Also known as statist, refers to belief in government control and intervention.
- Casciola, Paolo 1994, “Pietro Tresso (Blasco) and the Early Years of Italian Trotskyism,” Revolutionary History, Vol. 5, No. 4.
- “Gelerterian” refers to a nineteenth-century Russian magician, Gelerter, who was well known for his sleight of hand.
- Paul Barth, German Sociologist, lived from 1858-1922.
- Othmar Spann, Professor at the University of Vienna who was a leading theorist of Austro-fascism who espoused an anti-Marxist collectivism and corporatist economy. Lived from 1878 – 1950.
- Russian word for teenage street gangs.