Did Marx indirectly predict Nazism/Fascism?

[Comrade Qwatt]

As many will know, Chapter Three, section C of the Communist Manifesto deals with German or 'True' Socialism. Chapter 3 deals with the position of the proletariat to the various socialist and communist literature and ideas, and Marx goes through firstly the reactionary socialisms (feudal, petty-bourgeois and finally German 'True' socialism).


The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome “French one-sidedness” and of representing, not true requirements, but the requirements of Truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.

I think this area puts it quite nicely, and I can't but help to think of the nationalistic spiritualism which fascism puts 'The People', especially Nazi ideology, instead of a material construct of class they are elevated to an idealistic level.

It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model man, it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing the “brutally destructive” tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.

Again the German exclusivity, and the emerging class collaborationism and anti-communism which would become the NSDAP.

Thoughts?

[Morpheus]

Jack London's The Iron Heel was a much clearer prediction of fascism.

[Lenin II]

I'm glad someone posted this. When I read this section of the manifesto for the first time, I immediately thought of the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy. Marx probably didn't know it, but he captured the nationalist and "philistine" view of National Socialism and of the right in general perfectly with his remarks, particularly with his analysis of their thirsting for a populist and yet nationalist ideology, one that would at once strip the power of the bourgeoisie but bestow it upon the petty-bourgeoisie instead of the working class. As Marx says later in the text:

In Germany the petty-bourgeois class, a relic of the sixteenth century, and since then constantly cropping up again under various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state of things.Both Italy and Germany found this dream in fascism - a form of "socialism" that fought the "Jewish" bourgeoisie and "Jewish" Marxism but represented a reactionary interest, that of the petty-bourgeoisie.