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Fascists did not face the problem of class division by championing one class over all others. It sought to subsume all of the classes into one large, organic entity: the state. Mussolini, the former socialist, put it this way: "Fascism is opposed to Socialism, which confines the movement of history within the class struggle and ignores the unity of classes established in one economic and moral reality in the State."(1) Similarly, Hitler argued that economic classes are simply units of a larger State totality, though he viewed this in more racial terms than his Italian counterpart: [W]ith us in Germany where everyone who is a German at all has the same blood, has the same eyes, and speaks the same language, here there can be no class, here there can be only a single people and beyond that nothing else. Certainly, we recognize, just as anyone must recognize, that there are different 'occupations' and 'professions' [Stände] - there is the Stand of the watchmakers, the Stand of the common laborers, the Stand of the painters or technicians, the Stand of the engineers, officials, etc. Stände there can be. But in the struggles which these Stände have amongst themselves for the equalization of their economic conditions, the conflict and the division must never be so great as to sunder the ties of race. (2) Thus, the extreme right strove to unify its classes (e.g. workers and owners) rather than exalt one class over another. On the other hand, this was not an equal, classless society - there was still hierarchy, after all. Instead, there was a fanatical emphasis on national and racial solidarity which allowed people from very different walks of life to feel a common bond and a common purpose. In the stamp set above (Scott #B59 to B67), we see representations of (male) workers from a variety of blue and white-collar occupations. From bricklayers to judges, all occupations are depicted as unified elements of a larger Nazi state.
(1) Mussolini, Benito. "The Doctrine of Fascism." Communism, Fascism and Democracy, 3rd Ed. Toronto:McGraw-Hill, 1997. (2) Hitler, Adolph. Speech, 1921: http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111hit1.html |