Through this conception of life Fascism becomes the emphatic negation
of that doctrine which constituted the basis of the so-called
scientific Socialism or Marxism: the doctrine of historical
materialism, according to which the story of human civilisation is to
be explained only by the conflict of interests between the various
social groups and by the change of the means and instruments of
production.
That the economic vicissitudes--discovery of prime or raw materials,
new methods of labour, scientific inventions--have their particular
importance, is denied by none, but that they suffice to explain human
history, excluding other factors from it, is absurd: Fascism still
believes in sanctity and in heroism, that is to say in acts in which
no economic motive, immediate or remote, operates.
Fascism having denied historical materialism, by which men are only
puppets in history, appearing and disappearing on the surface of the
tides while in the depths the real directive forces act and labour, it
also denies the immutable and irreparable class warfare, which is the
natural filiation of such an economistic conception of history: and it
denies above all that class warfare is the preponderating agent of
social transformation.
Being defeated on these two capital points of its doctrine, nothing
remains of Socialism save the sentimental aspiration--as old as
humanity--to achieve a community of social life in which the
sufferings and hardships of the humblest classes are alleviated. But
here Fascism repudiates the concept of an economic "happiness" which
is to be--at a given moment in the evolution of economy--socialistically
and almost automatically realised by assuring to all the maximum of
well-being.
Fascism denies the possibilities of the materialistic concept of
"happiness"--it leaves that to the economists of the first half
of the Seventeenth Century; that is, it denies the equation
"well-being-happiness," which reduces man to the state of the animals,
mindful of only one thing--that of being fed and fattened; reduced, in
fact, to a pure and simple vegetative existence.