This is a review of the second of Morgan’s books on Fascist doctrine and ideology. His first book contained Codex 2 and 3. I read and covered that book back in Jan 2023.
This one covers three sections: codex 4, 5, and 6.
In this post I’ll cover codex 4, fascist doctrinal ideology, and codex 5, Integralism.
I started off reading fascist literature, as I explained previously, not because I’m a fascist myself, but because I, as a conservative, was hearing this term being used a lot, mainly as a general pejorative against people with whom one side had a political disagreement.
My thought at the time was, I doubt they have any idea what fascism really is. But when I thought about it, I realized I didn’t really know much about it myself. So I decided I should educate myself. I started off trying to find some books about it, which was helpful, but those books weren’t written by fascists themselves. I wanted to know how the fascists themselves came to think about the world, and how they arrived at fascism as the answer.
I imagine that most people, if asked what a fascist is, would probably say a racist/white nationalist, because the fascists they know of are Nazi Germany, and then they work backwards from there. But the Nazi’s, while doctrinally fascist in many respects, were kind of an offshoot too.
As I’ve come to find out through reading their own literature, that’s not really the case. So what follows is notes I took from the book, and on occasion, I make my own comments on the book.
Codex 4: Fascist Doctrinal Ideology
Introduction
In his introduction, H.R. Morgan explains that ideology and doctrine are different. Its ideology is the fundamental underpinnings, the doctrines are different from region to region due to differences in populations and cultures.
The hallmarks of Fascism are:
State Social Corporatism
Support of and Investment in social and cultural traditionalism
National syndicalist
Nationalism
Anti-liberalism
Concentration on betterment of all conditions of existence of the national population
Anti-Marxism
Against monopoly capitalism
Against liberal socialism
Conservative social values based on protection of family
Politically non-conservative and non-liberal
Anti-materialist
Socially spiritualistic
Extreme patriotism
National autarchy
Anti-plutocracy- anti-oligarchic
Pro creation of insulated national economy
Against international finance capitalism
Import/export policies of domestic economic protectionism
Fascism – Fascist Doctrinal Ideology
British Union- Oswald Mosley
Unity under control; the cooperation between a people morally and economically bound together for their mutual advantage and government that possesses the will and power to act for the common good.
From WWI they saw that four things were essential to winning the war: Authority in government; voluntary discipline of the people; self-sufficiency in resources; scientific weapons. This would become the blueprint for the way forward in all government.
“In 1922, there was a revolt against the class struggle of Marxism, to Fascism. The State is a condition of living, and not merely a form of government. The State is the life of the people taken as a whole.” While individuals differ, what we admire most is the man who is intellectually, morally, and physically fit. The British Union seeks to project this threefold order of perfection into the State.
From Mosley’s “A New Movement Needed”:
“We know that our resources are almost unlimited, we know that our power to produce is almost unlimited, and also that our power to consume is almost unlimited. This is because there are few men and women in the land who would not consume more had they the money to pay for what they want. The economic problem is, therefore, fundamentally one of money; that is, of the power to distribute things to the people who are in need of them.”
In tackling the problem, we have to shift from thinking that money is wealth. Life is wealth, since it enables us to work. The purpose of money isn’t to create wealth, but to distribute it. We advocate managed currency, that is flexible instead of a rigid system of exchange; a system fitted to conditions, and is consequently a common-sense system.
It is useless to suggest equality of incomes since there is no equality of talent. We want the end of usury and gambling in the money system. A common sense system of distribution is founded in work as wealth and not on money as wealth. This would end in the elimination of poverty.
The Right to Work
We propose a “Corporate State”. Since work is wealth, the state would be organized according to vocations, even currently unrecognized vocations such as motherhood. The trade unions and great industrial combines are the beginnings of this system. Under the Corporate System, each occupation will be organized int a guild of producers, distributors and consumers, according to size and importance. Members will elect one or more members of parliament to represent its interests. As such, the government will truly represent the people.
The Corporate State
The entire country will be organized as a national business, each corporation representing a department. Each corporation will elect its own representatives and, there being a common interest in each, he is likely to be an outstanding member whose qualifications are known to the whole electorate. Since there will be no parties to serve and fight for, talking will be reduced to a minimum. This will free the nation from the ‘dictatorship of party politics’.
But prosperity without contentedness is a blind alley, and since all men are different, and the creative power depends on self-expression, the key to this new way is freedom in cultural lives of one and all.
We don’t believe people are morally or intellectually free while they are economically shackled. Indeed, until people are economically free, they can’t truly be free.
We want people to be so well compensated for their work that they are free to enjoy the fruits of their labor. The end of work isn’t profit, but leisure, and the development of leisure as a creative joy-bringing force is the ultimate goal in our philosophy.
In the Corporate State, while work is planned, the cultural life of the people will be their own.
Falange- Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera (Spain)
Twenty-Six Point Program
Nation – Unity – Empire
1. The supreme reality of Spain is the goal: individual, group, and class interests must give way to achieve the goal.
2. Spain has a single destiny in the world. The current constitution hobbles it.
3. We determine to build an empire. We claim preeminence in Europe for Spain, and will tolerate no interference. Hispanic cultural countries in the Americas should be united under Spain, who will act as the spiritual axis to the Spanish-speaking world.
4. The armed forces must be built up to support our independence and goals.
5. Spain must become a great naval power.
State – Individual – Liberty
6. The State will be totalitarian in order to defend the integrity of the fatherland. All Spaniards will participate in this through family, municipal, and syndical roles.
7. Human dignity, integrity, and freedom are eternal, intangible values. But no one is free unless he is part of a strong and free nation. No one will be permitted to use his freedom against the nation, and rigorous discipline will be implemented against anyone working to disunite the Spanish people.
Economy – Labor – Class Struggle
9. Society will be organized corporately into syndicates, all working towards national economic unity.
10. We repudiate capitalism, which shows no understanding of the needs of the people; and Marxism; which divides society into class struggle.
11. National Syndicalism will eliminate the roots of class struggle by giving work to all towards the national unity.
12. The duty of wealth is to better the conditions of the people.
13. The State recognizes private property as a legitimate means of achieving individual, family, and social goals.
14. Nationalization of banks and public utilities will occur.
15. All Spaniards have the right to work.
16. All Spaniards have the duty to work, and those that don’t provide useful function will not be given the slightest consideration.
Land
17. We will raise the standard of living in the countryside.
18. Agricultural production will be enriched by: assuring minimum compensation, etc…
19. Social reforms in the field of agriculture will be achieved by redistributing arable land to revive family farms; and moving farm workers in bad conditions to better conditions.
20. Reforestation and livestock breeding will be undertaken, and those that resist will be severely punished.
21. The State may take lands of those who acquired them through exploitation.
22. Cultural patrimony of towns will be rebuilt
National Education – Religion
23. A strong, united national spirit will be rigorously disciplined. All men will be enrolled in the army.
24. Cultural life will be organized and all who merit it will be given higher education.
25. The Catholic Church and the State will coordinate respective powers so as to permit not interference or activity that may impair the dignity of the State or national integrity.
National Revolution
26. We’d like to do it peacefully, but if the current government won’t roll over, we call for revolution and overthrow.
Critique of Economic Liberalism
In a free society the first thing is labor, which is the sole source of wealth.
Then there is barter, which is the exchange of goods we produce for the things produced by others.
Then there is money- a commodity which we mutually agree will be accepted as an exchange medium.
Then finally there is capital- which the excess saved that we did not need to expend. This saved wealth is used to give life to fresh enterprises.
Capital makes industry possible. All this has happened without anyone needing to agree about any of it, and as Adam Smith says, the best thing is to leave it alone. It will produce best if left alone.
But, as we’ve seen in England, the fullest example of capitalism, the effect has been disastrous. It has seen the near annihilation of private property in its traditional forms. It has transformed man’s most direct link between himself and his goods into an instrument of power. Through the division of labor, man and his goods are increasingly distant, and finally, says Rivera, man is nothing more than an abstraction represented by slips of paper.
The worst stage is finance-capitalism, which Rivera states, is opposed to both the employers AND workmen. He asserts this because in order to get a loan, they charge huge interest. They make money without producing anything.
Rivera follows a classical Marxist approach to economic theory, in that he sees capitalism as necessarily leading to an inexorable concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, and greater exploitation of workers, until the proletarian is left with no other choice but revolution. Fascism’s goal then is to derail the capitalist system without recourse to the Marxist goal of the abolition of private property. Business is to be fostered, but finance capitalism, and particularly international finance capital, is to be forbidden. Syndicates will be organized to include every facet of labor that is needed for an autonomous state, and the State itself will work to see that the people’s needs are met by assuring that the capital produced in the nation is directed towards the entirety of the population, not just a few.
The basics of Rivera’s pitch are a unity of purpose for Spain, and social justice.
He derides political parties extensively. For example, on page 177, we read: “why should we require the intermediate and pernicious instrument of the political parties, which, in order to unite us in artificial groups, begin by disuniting us in the matter of genuine realities?”
Dave Notes:
Rivera treats political parties almost like separate agential entities that descend upon the population and force them into unnatural groups, rather than entities that are the result of portions of the population that agree on a set of points, and disagree with another portion of the population about those points, which then seek to convince the other side of the rightness of their points and gain power so they can implement their policies.
The wording about “uniting the population” without the parties is obfuscation for what they really want to do: eliminate individuals choice. The supremacy of individual rights is the essence of liberalism, and this of course, gets in the way of what the Fascists want to do, which is implement total control over the nation. So they mask individual freedom as disunity, which is what happens when you allow people free choice: they disagree about certain things.
That of course results in things not getting done in so orderly a manner, but the cost of undoing that is that all men must toe the line to whatever the small group in power wants. They can call it ‘unity’ but it is a coerced unity.
Rivera writes:
“The only way to solve the social question is by altering the economic organization from top to bottom. (those that don’t understand say the State will absorb the individual) It is precisely with the individual that the complete revolution, the complete reorganization of Europe, must begin, because the one who has suffered most from this dislocation, the one who has become a mere molecule, without personality, substance, content or existence, is the wretched individual, who has been the last to undergo any of the improvements of life. Is this ‘absorption by the State’? What happens is that the individual will have the same destiny as the State. The State will have two aims: one is to strengthen the Patria; two is to make a larger number of men happier and more human and give them more share in human life.”
Codex 5: Integralism
The Essence of the Spiritual
“It is not possible that there is a new State, a new community, or a new civilization without there first being a new kind of man, and because of this, Integralism preaches Inner Revolution, revolution of the spirit, change of attitude in the face of reality and of occurring issues and adversities, which must necessarily precede the outer revolution.” Plinio Salgado- Manifesto of Granabara
Morgan writes that the next chapter is concerned with the spirituality of Fascism, and particularly will demonstrate how fascism will differ from country to country. Two examples are presented: Brazil and England. Both have different forms, but are essentially fascist in approach.
Brazil
Manifesto of October 7, 1932
The sections are:
Conception of man and the universe
As we understand the Brazilian nation
The principle of Authority
Our Nationalism
Parties and Government
I’m going to quote part of this to illustrate the banal nature of these proclamations:
“We Brazilians from all provinces, propose to create a culture, a civilization, a genuinely Brazilian way of life. We want to create a public right, according to our realities and aspirations, a government that guarantees the unity of all the provinces, the harmony of all classes, the initiatives of all individuals, the supervision of the State, and national construction.”
What we think of conspiracies and politicking groups and factions
Social question as regards Brazilian Integralism
The Family and Nation
Integralist Guidelines
XXI- Once organized the Integral State cannot allow to form, outside of their circle of action, any forces of a socio-political or economic order that could threaten its program; in these spheres of national life, everything must be controlled and supervised by the State.
This is a relatively rare honest admission of what must happen with any totalitarian system. They’ll claim they aren’t authoritarian, but it can’t be otherwise. Maybe in their minds, they imaging that everyone is just going to voluntarily accept their program. But that isn’t reality, and its pure hubris to imagine that they have all the answers.
They go on to say:
Today the majority of countries have what is called representative democracy, or republicanism- This is not true democracy. Democracy is rule by the citizens. Representativism is a farce performed for the benefit of the public.
Dave note:
Well, ok, we know that we have republicanism right now. Because those that established our government were wise enough to understand the problem with direct, true, democracy: it’s another name for mob rule.
The writer goes on to advocate: “Let the people vote on… [then lists a variety of issues] – let the people decide on the proposed new laws of the land. This is true democracy – this is direct democracy: this is Fascism.”
Putting aside how unwieldy it would be to literally bring every proposed law before the people as a direct vote, do the fascists propose that? Hell, NO. What we are told instead is that once they get power, EVERYTHING must be controlled by the State. And in point of fact, how else could it possibly be? How can they allow popular votes when they need absolute control to effectively implement their policies? The fact is that the people will have a very limited scope of movement, and only within prescribed boundaries. This is the opposite of democracy.
The reason for republicanism is to avoid the problems of mob rule. The idea is to put a layer between the mob, and the ability to change things on a whim. And even then, the constitution must be followed so that measures contrary to the existing law can’t be easily passed.
But what I find particularly galling is that the fascists are portraying themselves as ‘ the party of the people’ on one hand- true advocates of direct democracy in order to more closely serve ‘the needs of the people’, when the very system they propose putting in place is one that must exclude the majority and be designed and administered by a small few.
Control: Making Good Citizens
This chapter was by Lawrence Dennis.
He speaks about the issue of control, particularly in the area of education, indoctrination, and inculcation of right attitudes. The first place we think about when we think of education is the school system, which is true. But the church, the press, the theatre, movies, radio, etc do more educating than schools, if for no other reason than they do so through the entire life of a citizen. For the fascist, the institutional formation of the character, mind, social attitudes and opinions with a social purpose must harmonize with, and not be antagonistic to, the larger purposes of the national plan.
It’s impossible to list all the offenses which purposive education can commit against the national interest.
Dennis has a particular problem with the liberal system in that institutions like the church, or the press, form people’s minds and social attitudes with definite purposes formed by those in charge of the institutions, and that worse, some of those in institutions are controlled by powerful people or economic interests for private ends which are not consistent with the public ends. Fascism wants to institute a social discipline in the name of a given ideal of national interest.
Liberal freedom in practice means freedom for powerful economic interests to manipulate public opinion, and the social attitudes of the masses, to suit selfish private or corporate ends.
Dennis acknowledges that the question really is: WHO shall manipulate the opinions, feelings, and attitudes of the masses? For manipulated they must and will be in a civilization as complex and highly organized as ours. It is preferable to have mass opinions, feelings, and social attitudes manipulated by powerful private interests for personal or minority group ends, or to have mass opinions guided by a national State in the pursuit of some idealized plan of social well-being and order?
He states that with manipulation by private or corporate interests, the manipulators have no concern with, or responsibility for, public order. Whereas the State, or those in charge of government, can “never act with such irresponsibility, for after all, it is those in charge of government – not those in charge of finance houses – who, in a crisis, must deal with the hungry and unemployed mob and must ensure the trains run and the banks reopen”.
Dave Note:
Now this seems disingenuous to me, since the argument is that government won’t act badly since it is responsible for dealing with anything that goes wrong. But the entire reason for fascism is that governments are so unresponsive to the people NOW. How can such an argument possibly seem reasonable when we consider even single autocratic rule, like monarchies, that can be utterly unresponsive to the messes they’ve made?
And the problem the founders recognized is that once all the power has been given to the rulers, as the fascists themselves are demanding, then the people have no recourse to redress of grievances. They can petition the government, but the fascist will just treat the aggrieved as agitators and ‘enemies of the people’ because the aggrieved have dared to oppose whatever plan the fascists have declared is for ‘the good of the country’.
At least with private interests, they have to try and convince us… or ‘manipulate’ us, as Dennis puts it.
While there may certainly be people that are uninterested in the greater good, there can also be plenty of other people who would put forth decent arguments for why promoting their particular interest is actually better for the people than not. The beauty of the liberal system is that it allows anyone to have a say. That of course means that unscrupulous actors get a say too.
But the problem in trying to deny unscrupulous actors a say, is that such a system ends up denying nearly everyone a say. It vests too much power in the hands of a few, and that level of power will prove irresistible to the unscrupulous anyway, who will do anything possible to get their hands on it.
But I guess the most appalling thing about Dennis’ argument is his insistence that government must be responsive to the citizens in a way that private interests don’t, while also decrying the fact that governments aren’t responsive to the people at all and are run by special interests.
Phases –Oswald Mosley (1932-40)
Mosley explains the phases necessary for a fascist takeover in Britain.
Phase 0
The stated task is to completely overturn the current political system. The masses can’t be appealed to since masses can’t be the holders of an idea, they are responders. The pitch must be developed for those that will act as agents for social change; people who are already nationalists. He says fascists will never speak for all the people, only believers- the message is an invitation to join the movement, or get out of the way.
Phase 1
They accept that the people will never openly support a ‘fascist’ movement, if for no other reason that masses, even when they do rise up, are never full members of a group. People are passive and active participation requires an active mind. History is made by minority groups that have come to embody the will of the people as a whole. Understanding the masses can’t be appealed to- recognize the movement will be feared up until the time it achieves power, executes it’s plans, and the people are won over by the brilliance of the new system. Propaganda will be necessary in the promotion of ideas. Ideas need to be promoted… not organizations. The fascists will be installing a new set of beliefs, which will be like a political religion. It IS a religion in the sense that it will be carried out with the same fanatical belief that a genuinely religious person has, but founded in rationalized political ideology.
There is a distinction between followers, who are willing to go along when it is in their convenience, and members, fully integrated believers. Followers shouldn’t be pressured. They don’t need to be forced, just let them follow in their own way. This is because it is absolutely essential to keep the members- the fighting element- pure.
The fascists don’t need intellectuals, they need brutes who can form hard lines, take and dish out punishment, and can rise above fear.
Phase 2
Once a new type of fighting organization is formed, it needs to be established as the main opposition to the system. But if the fight is between the system and the organization, the organization will almost certainly lose, so they need to make so that the people take most of the lash. This will move them off the sidelines and onto the organization’s side. There will be both a small percentage of true believers, and an equal percentage of true haters. The middle majority are basically cattle. They are capable of understanding, and they can get pissed over issues, but they basically want to be left alone.
Here they are taking from the Marxist playbook that they want the middle ground to bottom out- for things to get way worse so that the system burns its bridges. When this happens, the displaced are ripe for joining revolutions.