Fascism/Antifascism (1)
| TOTALITARIANISM & FASCISM |
| The horrors of fascism were not the first of their kind, nor were they the last. Nor were they the worst, no matter what anyone says [1]. These horrors were no worse than "normal" massacres due to wars, famines, etc. For the proletarians, it was a more systematic version of the terrors experienced in 1832, 1848, 1871, 1919, .... However, fascism occupies a special place in the spectacle of horrors. This time around, indeed, some capitalists and a good part of the political class were repressed, along with the leadership and even the rank-and-file of the official working class organizations. For the bourgeoisie and the petit bourgeoisie, fascism was an abnormal phenomenon, a degradation of democratic values explicable only by recourse to psychological explanations. Liberal anti-fascism treated fascism as a perversion of Western civilization, thereby generating an obverse effect: the sado-masochistic fascination with fascism as manifested by the collection of Nazi bric-a-brac. Western humanism never understood that the swastikas worn by the Hell's Angels reflected the inverted image of its own vision of fascism. The logic of this attitude can be summed up: if fascism is the ultimate Evil, then let's choose evil, let's invert all the values. This phenomenon is typical of a disoriented age. |
| The usual Marxist analysis certainly doesn't get bogged down in psychology. The interpretation of fascism as an instrument of big business has been classic since Daniel Guerin [2]. But the seriousness of his analysis conceals a central error. Most of the "marxist" studies maintain the idea that, in spite of everything, fascism was avoidable in 1922 or 1933. Fascism is reduced to a weapon used by capitalism at a certain moment. According to these studies capitalism would not have turned to fascism if the workers' movement had exercised sufficient pressure rather than displaying its sectarianism. Of course we wouldn't have had a "revolution," but at least Europe would have been spared Nazism, the camps, etc. Despite some very accurate observations on social classes, the State, and the connection between fascism and big business, this perspective succeeds in missing the point that fascism was the product of a double failure; the defeat of the revolutionaries who were crushed by the social democrats and their liberal allies; followed by the failure of the liberals and social democrats to manage Capital effectively. The nature of fascism and its rise to power remain incomprehensible without studying the class struggles of the preceding period and their limitations. One cannot be understood without the other. It's not by accident that Guerin is mistaken not only about the significance of fascism, but also about the French Popular Front, which he regards as a "missed revolution." |
| Paradoxically, the essence of antifascist mystification is that the democrats conceal the nature of fascism as much as possible while they display an apparent radicalism in denouncing it here, there, and everywhere. This has been going on for fifty years now. |
| Boris Souvarine wrote in 1925 [3] : |
| "Fascism here, fascism there. Action Française - that's fascism. The National Bloc - that's fascism.... Every day for the last six months, Humanité serves up a new fascist surprise. One day an enormous headline six columns wide trumpets: SENATE FASCIST TO THE CORE. Another time, a publisher refusing to print a communist newspaper is denounced: FASCIST BLOW.... |
| "There exists today in France neither Bolshevism nor fascism, any more than Kerenskyism. Liberté and Humanité are blowing hot air: the Fascism they conjure up for us is not viable, the objective conditions for its existence are not yet realized.... |
| "One cannot leave the field free to reaction. But it is unnecessary to baptise this reaction as fascism in order to fight it. " |
| In a time of verbal inflation, "fascism" is just a buzz word used by leftists to demonstrate their radicalism. But its use indicates both a confusion and a theoretical concession to the State and to Capital. The essence of antifascism consists of struggling against fascism while supporting democracy; in other words, of struggling not for the destruction of capitalism, but to force capitalism to renounce its totalitarian form. Socialism being identified with total democracy, and capitalism with the growth of fascism, the opposition proletariat/Capital, communism/wage labour, proletariat/State, is shunted aside in favour of the opposition "democracy"/"Fascism", presented as the quintessence of the revolutionary perspective. Antifascism succeeds only in mixing two phenomena: "fascism" properly so-called, and the evolution of Capital and the State towards totalitarianism. In confusing these two phenomena, in substituting the part for the whole, the cause of fascism and totalitarianism is mystified and one ends up reinforcing what one seeks to combat. |
| We cannot come to grips with the evolution Of capital and its totalitarian forms by denouncing "latent fascism", fascism was a particular episode in the evolution of Capital towards totalitarianism, an evolution in which democracy has played and still plays a role as counter-revolutionary as that of fascism. It is a misuse of language to speak today of a non-violent, "friendly" fascism which would leave intact the traditional organs of the workers' movement. Fascism was a movement limited in time and space. The situation in Europe after 1918 gave it its original characteristics which will never recur. |
| Basically, fascism was associated with the economic and political unification of Capital, a tendency which has become general since 1914. Fascism was a particular way of realizing this goal in certain countries - Italy and Germany - where the State proved itself incapable of establishing order (as it is understood by the bourgeoisie), even though the revolution had been crushed. Fascism has the following characteristics: |
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| Fascism was a solution to a crisis of the State during the transition to the total domination of Capital over society. Workers' organizations of a certain type were necessary in order to subdue the revolution; next fascism was required in order to put an end to the subsequent disorder. The crisis was never really overcome by fascism: the fascist State was effective only in a superficial way, because it rested on the systematic exclusion of the working class from social life . This crisis has been more successfully overcome by the State in our own times. The democratic State uses all the tools of fascism, in fact, more, because it integrates the workers' organizations without annihilating them. Social unification goes beyond that brought about by fascism, but fascism as a specific movement has disappeared. It corresponded to the forced discipline of the bourgeoisie under the pressure of the State in a truly unique situation. |
| The bourgeoisie actually borrowed the name "fascism" from workers' organizations in Italy which often called themselves "fasces". It's significant that fascism defined itself first as a form of organisation and not as a program. Its only program was to unite everyone into fasces, to force together all the elements making up society: |
| "Fascism steals from the proletariat its secret: organization.... Liberalism is all ideology with no organization; fascism is all organization with no ideology." (Bordiga) |
| Dictatorship is not a weapon of Capital, but rather a tendency of Capital which materializes whenever necessary. To return to parliamentary democracy after a period of dictatorship, as in Germany after 1945, signifies only that dictatorship is useless (until the next time) for integrating the masses into the State. We are not denying that democracy assures a gentler exploitation than dictatorship: anyone would rather be exploited like a Swede than like a Brazilian. But do we have a CHOICE? Democracy will transform itself into dictatorship as soon as it is necessary. The State can have only one function which it can fulfil either democratically or dictatorially. One might prefer the first mode to the second, but one cannot bend the State to force it to remain democratic. The political forms which Capital gives itself do not depend on the action of the working class any more than they depend on the intentions of the bourgeoisie. The Weimar Republic capitulated before Hitler, in fact, it welcomed him with open arms. And the Popular Front in France did not "prevent fascism" because France in 1936 did not need to unify its Capital or reduce its middle classes. Such transformations do not require any political choice on the part of the proletariat. |
| Hitler is disparaged for retaining from the Viennese social democracy of his youth only its methods of propaganda. So what? The "essence" of socialism was more to be found in these methods than In the distinguished writings of Austro-Marxism. The common problem of social democracy and Nazism was how to organise the masses and, if necessary, repress them. It was the socialists and not the Nazis who crushed the proletarian insurrections. (This does not inhibit the current S.P.D., in power again as in 1919, from publishing a postage stamp in honour of Rosa Luxemburg whom it had murdered in 1919.) The dictatorship always comes after the proletarians have been defeated by democracy with the help of the unions and the parties of the Left. On the other hand, both socialism and Nazism have contributed to an improvement (temporary) in the standard of living. Like the S.P.D, Hitler became the instrument of a social movement the content of which escaped him. Like the S.P.D, he fought for power, for the right to mediate between the workers and Capital. And both Hitler and the S.P.D became the tools of Capital and were discarded once their respective tasks had been accomplished. |
| [1] Public opinion does not condemn Nazism so much for its horrors, because since then other States - in fact the capitalist organization of the world economy - have proven to be just as destructive of human life, through wars and artificial famines, as the Nazis. Rather Nazism is condemned because it acted deliberately, because it was conscously willed, because it decided to exterminate the Jews. No one is responsible for famines which decimate whole peoples, but the Nazis - they wanted to exterminate. In order to eradicate this absurd moralism, one must have a materialist conception of the concentration camps. They were not the product of a world gone mad. On the contrary, they obeyed normal capitalist logic applied in special circumstances. Both in their origin and in their operation, the camps belonged to the capitalist world... |
| [2] Daniel Guérin, Fascism and Big Business, New York (1973). |
| [3] Bulletin communiste, Nov. 27, 1925. Boris Souvarine was born in Kiev in 1895 but emigrated to France at an early age. A self-educated worker, he was one of the founders of the Comintern and the PCF, but was expelled from both organizations in 1924 for leftist deviations. |