The Meaning of Fascism

Abstract Harold Laski, a Jewish socialist intellectual closely associated with the British Labour Party, argued that there was a strong relationship between big business interests and the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship, and saw that business derived great benefit, initially at least, from the Nazi seizure of power. However, he argued against seeing the regime as a puppet of big business, recognizing that the regime enjoyed far more autonomy on the political plane than most Marxist contemporaries believed. Characterizing Fascism as a movement of ‘doctrineless nihilism·, he argues in this passage that the nature of the Nazi system itself contained contradictions which could only be resolved by recourse to war; while recognizing that the militaristic side of Nazism was one of innate destructiveness, his dismissal of the significance of ideology led Laski himself to understate the importance of anti-Semitism to the Nazi regime.