MLM
Conception of Fascism (Conclusion)
Massline.org
www.massline.org/Politics/ScottH/Fascism-MLM-Conception.doc
The
Ninth Principle: Bourgeois democracy is unstable and periods of fascism are virtually
inevitable—especially as the bourgeoisie faces a major crisis or nears its
overthrow.
This is a simple corollary of the basic
fact that even bourgeois democracy is a form of the dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie. “The scientific term ‘dictatorship’”, says Lenin, “means nothing
more nor less than authority untrammeled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted
by any rules whatsoever, and based directly on force.”[i]
The ruling class will certainly have
many laws in place, and will generally operate in accordance with those laws
most of the time. But when it needs to
ignore them it will almost always do so! No matter what the law books say,
no matter what the constitution says, the capitalist ruling class will always try
to protect its continued rule by whatever means it takes.
The United States, for example, has a
constitution that “guarantees” the rights of free assembly, free speech and
freedom of the press. But during World War I, and even more so during the “Red
Scare” after that war, the U.S. government arrested thousands of people
peacefully protesting the war or working for socialism (most of them naively via
the ballot box!), banned Socialist Party meetings and gatherings, and even
closed down the extensive Socialist press of the day. The fact that the “law of
the land” prohibited such actions in no way stopped the ruling class from
carrying them out when they felt the necessity of doing so.
The entire reformist German
Social-Democratic movement was caught off guard by the advent of fascism in
Germany in 1933. The socialists had assumed that their hard won rights to
belong to labor unions, form a political party to work for reforms, to publicly
gather and protest, to have a socialist press, and so forth, were all
permanently secure. They were fatally wrong. All such “rights” were suddenly
stripped away.
Those who do not understand that bourgeois
democracy is unstable in historical terms, and is extremely prone to being
replaced with fascism during times of serious crisis, can only mislead the
people and leave them totally unprepared to deal with full-scale fascism when
it arrives.
The
Tenth Principle: Struggling against fascist laws and policies of the government
in a bourgeois democracy is a struggle for reforms.
Yes it is! Even if you win the particular
struggle you are still stuck with basically the same system, the
capitalist-imperialist system and the class dictatorship of the ruling
bourgeoisie. We should never forget this fact, or start to confine our work mostly (let alone only) to the struggle for a purer form of bourgeois democracy. That
would turn us from communists into bourgeois democrats.
On the other hand, there are some
infantile “Leftists” who are totally against all struggles for reforms, and who
even think that by engaging in any struggle at all against fascist laws or in
favor of democratic rights under this system, we thereby automatically become
“reformists” or bourgeois democrats. That is just not the case. These “Lefts”
do not know how to reason, as Lenin remarked. (Participation in the struggles
for reforms is not necessarily reformism
in the Marxist sense, unless that is all
that you are doing, or the major part of what you are doing!)
First, we must struggle along with the
masses for aims which they see as important. Most people do see democratic
rights as important, and are willing to struggle for them. By being in the
midst of mass struggles, even those around reforms, we thereby win the ears of
the masses so that we can explain that while reforms are well and good, what we
really need most of all is socialist revolution and getting rid of capitalism
entirely. Second, the struggle for reforms around democratic rights (as opposed
to say wages and job conditions), puts people more directly up against the
state, and can be in itself a very useful education. And third, struggles
against fascist laws and policies, if won (for a time), can help give us a
freer hand to further explain the necessity of revolution to the masses. These
are all quite valuable things.
Comintern
and Revisionist Errors with Respect to Fascism in the 1930s and Later
This essay is meant to be focused on explicating
the concept of fascism from the MLM
point of view, and we cannot delve into the historical development of that
conception, let alone the various erroneous views about fascism and politics which
have developed in Marxist circles over the decades. However, any modern Marxist
work on fascism (even if fairly short) must condemn and divorce itself from the
theories and actions in this regard of the Comintern and many revisionist
parties during the 1930s and afterwards.
What happened, briefly, is that the
Communist Party of Germany, under the direction of Stalin and the Comintern,
did not seek to build a tactical united front to prevent the Nazis from coming
to power in Germany. They were right to see the Social Democrats (SPD) as also a
bourgeois party, to struggle against it generally, and so forth. But they were
wrong not to see the importance of a temporary, broad, tactical alliance in
1933 (including the SPD) as a means of keeping the Nazis from power. That was
already a major error, involving mechanical (undialectical) reasoning on their
part. But then, after the Nazis did come to power, Stalin and the Comintern and
(at their direction) the CP of Germany and most of the other CPs, overreacted
to their initial error and made an even greater, much more widespread and more
prolonged error in the opposite direction.
The “United Front Against Fascism” which they
promoted for years on end called on the masses and the CPs in all countries to closely
ally themselves with social democrats and reformists (pretty much regardless of
local conditions, negligible local fascist threats, etc.), and—in effect—to
become mere social democrats and reformists themselves. In most areas
independent communist revolutionary work was almost eliminated or totally
submerged into electoral “popular fronts” and the like. The entire thrust of
this new direction was to cut the revolutionary heart out of much of the world
communist movement and shift it strongly into reformism. Later as World War II
loomed and then began, the Comintern and CPs went even further, and called for
the people of the world to unite with and support the “democratic”
countries—such as the U.S. and Britain—which were actually, of course,
imperialist countries and also the
enemies of the people of the world. This line pretty much limited the world
struggle to simply defeating fascism and restoring
bourgeois democracy in the fascist countries.
This un-Marxist glorification of bourgeois
democracy corrupted the international communist movement from within, and
especially in Europe and the U.S. it led to the complete revisionist
degeneration of the various existing “Communist Parties”, which they never
recovered from. In the immediate post-WWII world the possibilities of socialist
revolution in countries such as France, Italy and Greece were tossed away. (The
excessive fear by Stalin and the CPSU of a new war with the West was also a
major factor here.)
It was only in Asia, and especially in the
case of the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong, that a proper Marxist
course of turning an anti-imperialist/anti-fascist war into an outright
revolutionary war was seriously attempted and successfully carried out. That
put to shame the pathetic performance by the so-called “Communist Parties” in
Western Europe and the U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s.
Revisionism
in Power is “Social-Fascism” (i.e., Plain Old Fascism)
After the overthrow of socialism in the
USSR by Khrushchev and his fellow revisionists, Mao labeled that country as
“social-imperialist” and “social-fascist”. He explained that these terms meant
that while the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was still “socialist” in name, in reality it had become an
imperialist and fascist country.
For many decades, however, many Marxists
(including many dedicated followers of Mao) have been curiously shy about
outright calling the revisionist Soviet Union as an imperialist or fascist
country. They have sometimes used Mao’s terms (“social-imperialist” and
“social-fascist”) as if they meant something less severe than “imperialism” and
“fascism”. The fact is that the revisionist Soviet Union was a fascist and imperialist country, and we should not only admit
this, we should insist on it. On our
MLM conception of fascism, for example, there is just no doubt whatsoever about
it.[ii]
Some
Additional Comments about Fascism and How the Term has been Used
It is sometimes argued that Leftists are
too free and easy with the word ‘fascist’, to the point where it has become
little more than a term of abuse for any person or government action or law
that they don’t like. Supposedly communists in particular are guilty of terrible
sins such as calling people “fascists” even if they are not actually members of
any recognized fascist party (such as the Nazis).
Personally I think these complaints are
mostly off base. It is true that ‘left’-liberals, especially, have often used
the term ‘fascist’ in exaggerated ways in light
of the common bourgeois conception of what fascism is. But there is also
this revolutionary Marxist conception of the term which I have been trying to
explicate here. And on that conception, I really don’t see that most of the
uses of the term which people complain about are really that far off the mark.
To start with, doesn’t it seem rather reasonable
to call someone a “fascist” if they systematically or frequently promote fascist
laws and actions, even if they are not actually a member of an organization
that might be correctly called “fascist”? What reason is there for restricting
the term only to members of certain organizations?
However, if someone’s promotion of some
particular fascist law or action is instead deemed an aberration, then it would
seem to be at least “impolitic” to label that person as an outright fascist,
though it would certainly still be correct to label the law or action itself
for what it is, a fascist one, and to strongly argue with or condemn the person
for supporting it. “Do you really want to be promoting laws of the sort that
Hitler and Mussolini implemented against the working class?”
We do have to remember that a country
which has some fascist laws is not necessarily correctly called a fascist
country (overall), and in the same way a person who favors a particular law or
action which is appropriately termed fascist, may not systemically approve of
fascist laws in general. In that case it would be wrong to call the person a
fascist. But such a person must still be strenuously struggled with, and/or
condemned!
If we don’t view fascism as something
which must necessarily parallel Nazi Germany in every respect, but rather just as
a regime where the basic democratic rights of the working class are grossly
restricted or almost entirely absent, then the scope for the very proper and
appropriate labeling of such a regime as fascist
greatly increases.
Thus to argue that the term ‘fascism’ is
being grossly overused on the left often is strongly suggestive that the person
claiming this has a bourgeois
conception of what fascism is, and not a proletarian revolutionary conception.
They might well still be a Marxist or revolutionary in general! After all, even
we individual Marxists virtually always have some bourgeois ideas too, mixed in with our more genuinely Marxist
ideas. Nobody’s worldview is absolutely pure and perfect. So when I suggest
that those who think that the term ‘fascism’ is being grossly overused likely
have a bourgeois conception of fascism, that by no means implies that I view
them as bourgeois ideologists, let alone the enemy! It is merely a way of
strongly criticizing that one element of their conceptions.
Short
Case Study #1: The United States and Fascism
The United States is not a fascist
country, though there have been periods when it has moved in that direction and
at least one brief period when it came quite close. (I’m referring to the “Red
Scare” period after World War I, when the government suppressed the Socialist and
Communist parties and their press.) The fact that bourgeois elections continued
during that period is not the main thing for us; the real point is that the
freedoms to speak, assemble, publish and organize were severely restricted for
the working class and the revolutionary movement during that period. However,
even during the “Red Scare” most unions were not suppressed, not all workers’
political organizations were suppressed, not all speech was suppressed, and so
forth. Moreover, the period was rather short, and what might be considered a
close brush with fascism was not consolidated and made permanent. A somewhat
less serious flirtation with fascism occurred during the McCarthy Era in the
late 1940s and early 1950s.
But the U.S. today does have many fascist
laws, and they have been tightened up in recent years. For example, while the
“freedom to assemble” is officially still on the books, it is often so
restricted as to become close to meaningless. You may still gather to protest
“at” a Republican or Democratic national convention, for example, but you
probably won’t be allowed to do so within actual sight or sound of it, no matter
how peaceful you are. Existing rights and freedoms are generally being more and
more circumscribed, though there has not yet been any wholesale extinction of
them.
In addition to this, there have been some major
new fascist laws and policies instituted in the U.S., most notably the “Patriot
Act” in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Some of the aspects of that
law have so far been directed at ethnic Arabs and Muslims mostly, but they
could be extended to anybody the government doesn’t like and gets concerned
about. We revolutionary Marxists, for example, might at some point be labeled
as “terrorists” and be rounded up, even though we strenuously oppose terrorist
tactics and actions, and condemn them as counter-productive.
It is fair to say that while the U.S. is
still a bourgeois democracy overall, it nevertheless has numerous fascist laws
and policies, and the trend certainly seems to be gradually in the direction of
having more such fascist laws and policies. If there is another major 9/11 type
event, the capitalist state may well take the opportunity to take another significant
step in the direction of fascism.
A brief word about the fears of many that
we are on the verge of some sort of spontaneous “Christian fascism” in the U.S.:
This is a notion that has also been strongly promoted by the Bob Avakian Cultists
(the RCP), who seemed to be predicting that it would come down while George W.
Bush was still in office. Avakian now talks about the Republican Party in the
U.S. as having a “fascist social base”, which I guess must on that theory make
the Republican Party a fascist party or about to become one.[iii]
While the country has in fact become much more polarized over the past decade,
and a rabid ultra-rightwing trend has become more prominent, outright Christian
fascism is only one fairly small part of that. If and when outright fascism is
instituted someday in this country, it will no doubt have a significant
Christian-fascist coloration. But I don’t see either the necessity or the panic
on the part of the ruling class that would possibly make them take such a major
and very risky overall leap at this time. It would be politically foolish on
their part to do so, and I think the vast majority of those in control understand
this.
It is much more likely that the ruling
class will someday take it into its heads to round up a few of us revolutionary
Marxists who are sticking our necks out (even though we are certainly no real imminent
threat to them at this point), and/or close down our websites, and such, than
that they will go for any full-blown fascism at this point—“Christian” or
otherwise. But if revolutionaries are systematically
arrested (even without having committed any overt illegal actions of any kind),
if all real revolutionary literature is banned, and if all revolutionary
organizations are proscribed, that would from our perspective surely count as fascism.
This is almost inevitable someday,
but I see no reason to expect it soon in this country.
Short
Case Study #2: Growing Fascism in Contemporary India
What about a country like India, which is
still part of what is loosely termed the “Third World”? India is often called
(especially by the ruling class in India itself) “the world’s largest
democracy”—for the usual superficial reason that there are many political
parties, most of which are allowed to participate in periodic elections,
elections which—there as elsewhere—are manipulated and largely controlled by
the bourgeois media and the general indoctrination of the people.
But in India, as in any other country, for
us the key question is how the state treats revolutionaries and militant mass
movements working in the people’s interests. And when you look at the situation
in India today it is easy to see that many revolutionaries are being hounded
and arrested, and even frequently murdered in cold blood in what are known as
“fake encounters”. (These are cases where the police arrest some
revolutionaries, torture and murder them while in custody, and then claim that
those people were killed in shoot-outs or “encounters” with the police.) The
foremost revolutionary party in India, the Communist Party of India (Maoist),
has been proscribed, its publications are illegal, and people have even been
arrested for simply possessing magazines sympathetic to the CPI(Maoist) or to mass
struggles such as those of the adivasis (“tribals”)
in which the CPI(Maoist) has been playing a leading and organizing role. For
the CPI (Maoist) itself, there is no question but that they are operating in a
completely fascist environment.
It is true, of course, that the Maoists
have themselves been killing police officers who have been sent to arrest or
kill them. But the illegal actions they have been taking would not have been
necessary and would not have happened if there were any effective legal and
peaceful means for them to continue to organize and support the masses in their
struggles for their own interests. It is the reactionary bourgeois/feudal
authorities who are fully responsible for the revolutionary war that has broken
out, and for the necessity for such a war.
There are many other at least nominally
revolutionary parties and organizations in India, most of which have not been
proscribed. As long as they do not actually join with the masses to interfere
in any major way with the continued exploitation and oppression of the Indian people
which are promoted and protected by the laws and the police, these
organizations are still allowed to exist, distribute literature and so forth.
So these groups are mostly operating in what could be called a bourgeois
democratic environment. The question here, however, is whether most of these
groups are really genuine revolutionary organizations in the first place! They
do generally work in the interests of the masses, but mostly around low-level
reformist issues, labor strikes, and so forth, most of which are legal only because
they are largely ineffective in advancing the major interests of the masses.
There have been a whole series of special
fascist laws enacted in India which are directed against those the government
calls “terrorists”, and especially the Maoists, as well as against the mass
movements led by the Maoists. At present, the most draconian of these laws is
the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 2008 (UAPA). Under this law anyone
arrested can be kept in jail for 180 days without any trial and can undergo as
much police interrogation as the authorities wish. It is virtually impossible
to be released on bail if you are arrested under the provisions of this act.
Instead of being presumed innocent until proven guilty, those arrested are
assumed to be guilty and must instead prove their own innocence! If those
arrested under the UAPA are unwilling to become police informers, they are
considered guilty of a further crime; there is no right to remain silent. Under
this act every person is a “terrorist” suspect, and the police are routinely
and almost automatically granted the right to search anyone’s home at any time
of the day or night. Any article, essay, report, documentary film, or public
speech may be judged by the police as “intending to aid terrorism”, and the writers,
speakers, artists or even media persons who write or present them may be
arrested for this reason alone. In other words, free speech in support of
anything the government labels as “terrorism” (and that can be anything at all!)
no longer exists. Those arrested can be tried in secret courts, with the names
of the accusers and witnesses not being made public (presumably even to the
accused!).[iv]
Some people are even being arrested—not for publishing literature supporting adivasi
struggles and/or the CPI (Maoist), but even for possessing literature which supports these struggles. Even
protesting the arrest of others under
this law makes those who protest subject to arrest! If the UAPA is not a
fascist law, I don’t know what is!
That’s the legal part of the UAPA. In addition there is the widespread torture
and murder that police and paramilitary forces routinely inflict under the de
facto protection of this law. As draconian as the UAPA itself is, the extremely
limited legal restrictions on the police that this and other laws provide are
ignored pretty much whenever the police and the government wish to ignore them.
Torture and extra-judicial killings (murders) are now common by the police in
India.
The UAPA is now also the formal cover for
full-scale wars being waged against the Indian masses by the government. The
latest of these is what is known as “Operation Green Hunt”, directed against
the adivasi people in the hilly forested areas of central India so that giant
mining corporations and others can steal their land, and especially against the
Maoists who are leading the adivasis in the resistance struggle against this
theft and oppression.[v]
The ruling class in India has also set up
numerous private armies in the rural areas to suppress the masses. One of the
most notorious of these is the Salwa Judum in
Chhattisgarh state, which functions as a right-wing death squad. The state and
national governments participated in building the Salwa Judum, and train and
elevate many of its members to the status of “Special Police Officers”.[vi]
There are similar paramilitary death squad groups in other areas, such as the Ranvir Sena in
Bihar state, which enforces the dictates of the landlord Bhumihar caste.
As if all this were not bad enough, there
are regions of India which are under martial law, most notably the
Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, but also parts of the minority
nationality areas in the northeast corner of the country (Nagalim, Manipur,
Asom, etc.). Operation Green Hunt is turning much of the adivasi areas in
central India into regions of martial law as well. As we mentioned above,
martial law is one form of openly fascist rule, and can’t count as bourgeois
democracy on anybody’s definition.
So, how then should we sum up the overall
situation in India? Certainly there are many large regions under outright,
full-scale fascist rule today. The Communist Party of India (Maoist) is
operating under what can only be described as fascist conditions throughout the
entire country. However, in the cities, there still remains some considerable
degree of freedoms of association, protest, freedoms of speech and of the press,
and so forth, for the proletariat—as long as they submit to all the bourgeois
laws and regulations. So in these areas the situation is closer to bourgeois
democracy for now, except of course for the CPI(Maoist) or for anybody else who
has the audacity to support mass uprisings such as those of the adivasis in the
Jangalmahal.
Consequently, as a rough estimate, we
might say that India today is still mostly a bourgeois democracy in the urban
areas, but mostly a fascist country in large parts (and ever growing parts) of
the rural areas and in some entire regions (such as Kashmir and the Jangalmahal).
The country as a whole should perhaps be considered a semi-fascist country at the present time, but with the trend toward
more and more fascism over more and more areas. If it is overall “only” a
semi-fascist country now, it is nevertheless rapidly developing in the direction of more complete fascism.[vii]
Conclusion
Large areas of the world are already
appropriately called fascist from the
proletarian revolutionary point of view. Even in countries and areas where
bourgeois democracy still exists, there are often new fascist laws and policies
being implemented, and frequently there is at least a slow trend in the
direction of fascism. As the world capitalist economic crisis continues to
intensify over the next decade and beyond there will almost certainly be a
further impetus toward fascism in a growing number of countries. This is something
we need to recognize, prepare for, and resist with all our might.
If something really is fascist on our own
definition, then we should not shrink from calling it fascist. That’s my
opinion.
—Scott
H.
(Dec. 1, 2009; with revisions on 12/11/09, 12/12/09
and 12/13/09.)
[ii]
What about countries such
as post-Mao China, and contemporary Vietnam, North Korea or Cuba? In my own
view (though I’m sure not all my comrades will agree on this) all of these countries are also fascist
countries, to one degree or another. They are not socialist countries, so they are
capitalist countries. They are not bourgeois democracies, so they are fascist
countries. Straightforward logic.
In
each of these countries the working class and masses have no or very limited
rights of speech, press, assembly, protest, independent organization, and all
the other things that serve to distinguish bourgeois democracy from fascism. No
revolutionaries are permitted to speak or to organize the masses to change
society.
Of
course these countries differ tremendously in how the masses are treated. The
worst by far is North Korea which cannot sensibly be described as a socialist
country by any stretch of the imagination. It is not even “barracks socialism”,
the sort of nightmare that Marx mentioned in passing. It is state capitalism of
perhaps the most extreme type in history, with an exceedingly tiny privileged
elite and a country of totally impoverished, virtually enslaved masses. It
gives me the shivers when I hear fellow revolutionaries refer to it as a
socialist country. It is definitely not what Marx meant by socialism, or what I
mean.
Contemporary
China and Vietnam have largely shifted away from state capitalism to
Western-style monopoly capitalism. The material life of tens of millions of
people has much improved in these two countries, though it has worsened for
probably many hundreds of millions more. It is a very soft form of fascism, but
it is still fascism. Democratic rights hardly exist at all for the masses.
Cuba
is the most interesting case, because it is a strongly paternalistic country
run by the national bourgeoisie still mostly
for the benefit of the masses (though quite ineptly). There is the somewhat
privileged ruling class, but as long as Fidel Castro is alive they are
constrained in their growing desires to enrich themselves. Once Castro is gone,
the regime will either fall apart completely or else the national bourgeoisie
will transform it gradually from a mostly state capitalist economy into yet
another Western-style capitalist country, once again firmly under the U.S.
imperialist thumb. People are misled by the impressive health and educational
facilities for the masses. The real issues are who is running the country?, and is the country being transformed from state capitalism into socialism
and then communism? (It isn’t
being thus transformed.) So Cuba too is a soft form of fascism. Perhaps the
most gentle form there has ever been. But it’s not socialism, and the masses do
not even have the limited democratic rights that exist under U.S. bourgeois
democracy.
[iii]
In his recent talk,
“Unresolved Contradictions, Driving Forces for Revolution”, Fall 2009, online
at http://www.rwor.org/avakian/driving/index.html#toc08
, Avakian says (emphasis added):
These
right-wing politicians (generally grouped within the Republican Party) can,
will, and do actively mobilize this
essentially fascist social base (and, even while they keep it on something
of a leash, it's a long leash) yet, on the other side, the sections of the
ruling class that are more generally represented by the Democratic Party are
very reluctant to, and in fact resistant to, mobilizing their social base…
So
you have on the one side (the "left" side, to use that term) a
significant amount of paralysis, whereby the objective of the ruling class
politicians is in fact to pacify and demobilize the people whom they
appeal to to vote for them (their "social base" in that sense),
whereas on the other side there is a very active orientation toward unleashing,
revving up and mobilizing, in a very passionate and active way, the fascist social base that the
Republican, right-wing part of the ruling class sees as its social base, or
sees as a force it relies on among the population.
[iv] See: Prof. Amit Bhattacharyya,
“Democracy and Ban Cannot Go Together”, November 2009. Online at:
[v]
For much more about
“Operation Green Hunt” see the articles and news reports listed on http://www.bannedthought.net/India/MilitaryCampaigns/index.htm
[vi] For an extensive exposure of the
Salwa Judum written the Chhattisgarh State Committee of the CPI(Maoist), see:
[vii]
My friend “Ted” prefers to
put it this way: “I would hesitate to call India ‘semi-fascist.’ I think it’s
better to describe it as an unstable mix of bourgeois democracy and military
rule/fascism which is moving in the direction of more openly fascist/military
rule.” However, I’m not clear on what the real difference is here between that
and what I call “semi-fascism”!
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