>>2108229>It is nationalism that gets people like yourself to call yourselves socialists and then conflate socialism with “civil war, famine, and the destruction of their home”. I mean, my man, "revolutionary Socialism" is in the name. While it can and
should be argued that the destruction of the Russian Civil War lies at the feet of a White Movement that made peaceful revolution impossible, let's not pretend that the Russian Civil War wasn't incredibly destructive. Some put the estimate at 10 million dead. That's a truly terrifying number. If a peaceable revolution were possible then I think there'd be less need for the dichotomy of reform vs revolution.
Regardless, I figure I should elaborate on what I wrote here
>>2108191 and provide some quotes from Mosley's biography so people can hear it straight from the Horse's mouth, rather than a summary. Here's some of the interesting stuff:
>"Marx had some reason to stress his proletarian revolution when society collapses, because the ruling class is riddled with the disease of error and indecision; in short, when it becomes decadent. A healthy people can then produce new leadership to replace the old clique which fails because it surrenders to overwhelming opportunity for self-indulgence, though in practice much of the leadership towards a new society comes from individuals with the character to resist the temptation of the old. This is particularly true of England, where an aristocracy with roots in the soil has hitherto provided at least sufficient leadership toward necessary reform to avert the bloody upheavals of lands which lack such quality in crisis. This aspect of the original Whig tradition is never well appreciated by the bourgeois Tory mind with its crude class divisions of the cities. When the tattered remnants of the Whig tradition taunted me from the tawdry ranks of Toryism with being a class traitor, because I had taken the side of the people in the Labour Party, my reply was simple: it is you, not I, who betray our very English heritage, when you take the part of reaction against the people."<-My Life, Oswald Mosley, Page 191So here I think you see that reformism I was talking about. He gives at least some credit to Marx's idea of Proletarian revolution (at least more than the typical right-winger who thinks of Marx like a scam artist that tried to manipulate people into giving him power) but claims that there's an English heritage of reform over revolution (liberalizing fairly peacefully compared to the chaos of the French Revolution) and then sees in some elitist manner the role of figures "of the old regime" to reform it into a new configuration. Which, to be frank, is a highly idealistic view of history. He also borrows the terms "reactionary" and "bourgeois" which, I mean, seems to fit his own understanding of Fascism as a kind of pseudo-Socialism
>"I must resist at this point the temptation to be drawn into more modern, controversial subjects, such as my argument in the 1950s that Labour was then behaving in precisely the fashion which Marx had predicted for a failing Capitalism. Their only policy was to discard into world markets the production which their international system did not permit their own people to consume, and their only hope—piously expressed by Labour leaders—was that America in the 20th century would take the place of Britain in the nineteenth century as the international moneylender of the financiers' system to which they are completely subject. Now at last certain facts are recognised; so let as many Englishmen as possible go together into an European economy which is insulated but not isolated."<-My Life, Oswald Mosley, p.g. 249-250Again Mosley expresses at least a passing familiarity with Marx. His writings here seem to be a critique of globalization and America's ascendancy to the chief hegemon of Capitalism (as Britain played in the 19th century). I think he's quite aware of the fact that Capitalism acts irrationally ("the international system did not permit their own people to consume") but his own personal hangups lead him to primarily blame "Bankers" and the Finance system, and while Finance Capital is an undeniable evil, one only needs to look at Nazi Germany to see that Fascism rarely revolts against the international financiers they rail against.
The Ideology of FascismOkay so for this part I figured I'd summarize several pages of Mosley's autobiography because I think here we get into the root of his opinions on Marxism. I'll be including quotes where I think there's an interesting possibility for discussion.
Mosley begins the chapter by explaining that he's never felt the appeal of "ideas" devoid of action and exclaims the importance of "men who both think and act" and here you see something approaching almost a kind of respect for Marxism, though peppered with slander on Mosley's part.
>"Communism today commands half the world. It rests on a combination of Marxian thinking and Communist Party action. If the idea had just rested behind the whiskers, would anything have happened? It was in fact carried forward to the conquest of half the globe by the most brutal, ruthless, and unscrupulous methods of action humanity has known"<Page 317In one hand I think there are plenty of Marxist thinkers that extolled the virtues of action ("praxis" in a word) but I find Mosley here to be an extreme hypocrite. Anyone reading what the Germans did in Eastern Europe, let alone the Holocaust, as well as the Ustase in Yugoslavia, will find it a hard sell to hear a Fascist decry Communists as using some of the most ruthless methods to achieve power known to man.
>"The superficial question may be raised whether the idea really had any relation to this kind of action, since not one in a hundred of Communist Party members understands Marxism, and not one in a million in the countries adhering to that creed has ever read Marx. Why should this abstruse and far from popular doctrine have anything to do with the achievement at all? […] no movement of the human mind and spirit goes far unless it is inspired by an idea which, for better or worse, is a reality. It may be as obscure and contorted as Marxian economic theory or as clear and simple as the Christian doctrine of love, but it must be a reality in the sense that it appeals to some deep feeling in human nature."<Page 317Beyond the humor of him mimicking leftypol in claiming most Marxists don't read Marx, he's basically playing off Sorel's ideas on revolutionary myths, whom he mentions on the next page in addition to other thinkers. He then goes on to compare Stalin to Socrates angrily saying Poets should be exiled, praises Lenin and Trotsky as both men of intense thought and action, and also mentions Mao's "million flowers" campaign as well as forming the red guards. He then goes on to insult Karl Popper, and claims that the violence that intellectuals shirked from but that his blackshirts engaged in would discipline a new class of intellectual, a kind of "warrior philosopher" as it were.
I've got to get going to work and sadly can't finish my summary of the chapter, I've got to get going to work, but around 328-329 he goes again into that discussion about determinism I mentioned in my prior post.
In short, I think this answer's OPs central question better than just mere speculating. Here you see about as close as an "intellectual" Fascist as Mosley can get to Marxism, before retreating from it for the reasons he outlined: a lot of idealism, I think.