Putrid Democracy Throws Itself into the Arms of Fascism

The fable they are spinning us almost everywhere is the same, taking advantage of the credulity and divisions within the ‘left’, and the inertia and apathy of ‘reasonable people’: a few unscrupulous demagogues, appealing to the deepest and worst instincts of the electorate and turning them into the so‑called ‘will of the people’ have managed, as is allowed by the rules of parliamentarism, to ascend to the heights of State power.

Once settled in their palaces in Washington, Rome, Westminster, Vienna, Budapest and elsewhere, with sleeves rolled up, these young men, arriving in power after all the swingeing cuts and fire sales of previous administrations, immediately set about changing things, by means of daily politically incorrect pronouncements that ignore economic reality and show complete disdain for ‘diplomatic niceties’ and feigned concern for the safety of the country’s finances, the savings of fellow citizens, and the sacrosanct and inviolable democratic rules they decide should continue to be observed (or ignored).

We need to unravel this horribly tangled muddle of ideas.

State power is essentially a material thing, about control of armaments and a disciplined hierarchy of armed men. This complex century’s old structure has at its apex a tier of top management, formed by the government. But this is organic in nature and it responds to the functions of the State: the defense of the interests of the social class from which it emanates. In modern times financial capital everywhere monopolizes the running of the State; it alone chooses government personnel, who govern, yes, but according to its directives.

That it is the electors who choose is just a cock-and-bull story: the whole of the mass media, which easily shapes so‑called ‘public opinion’, is owned and controlled by big capital, which uses it to spread their lies; and if they quarrel among themselves it is for show or due to internal conflicts within its colossal interest groups. Electoral campaigns now cost billions.

Those who really hold power – constituted by a system of consolidated personal relations with the leaders of those armed men, and certainly not by the will of the people, which like a weathercock can be, and is, turned this way and that. Grand coalitions, ‘supply and confidence agreements’, Trump’s hiring and firing, and even the bi‑cephalous vice-presidency bringing right and left together (an Italian masterpiece) entertain the revolting bourgeoisie and its media with their knockabout brawls, while the real business goes on as normal.

But behind every one of these spectacles – half comedy, half tragedy – there lurks a harsh reality: the material fact of the crisis, which is pushing the formerly consolidated domestic and international equilibriums to breaking point. Here the crisis is imminent, there less so, but it exists on a global scale. The schizophrenia and confusion just reflect the way things are. The time when it will be every-man-for-himself is fast approaching, and the floundering of those who are drowning never appears particularly rational, elegant or dignified.

It is also true that, if in the turnover of its personnel the ruling class is now putting forward individual nonentities, and not only in the parliamentary theatre but also among government representatives, it is because the war between its fractions is so bitter and irresolvable that it renders any stable solution or compromise impossible. The election of ‘populists’ such as Donald Trump is an indicator not of American capitalism’s strength and its will to be ‘great again’, but of the profundity of its crisis, and the ridiculous clowns doing their turns in the media circus are only there because the ruling class now finds it impossible to recruit anyone better. They are therefore a sign of the bourgeois class’s objective weakness, which the proletariat need neither complain about nor fear; indeed, it should celebrate and rejoice, not bothering too much about the eccentric threats and peculiar bragging from the ‘tough guy’.

To counter the bourgeois class, be they ‘tough guys’ or ‘pushovers’, the only way forward is through organization and proletarian class struggle.

In most countries, the bourgeoisie finds it useful to change its political mediators often. As far as inter-State relations goes, what better than to have a constant turnover of government personnel in order to maneuver around, try out new alliances, and, if necessary, return to the previous alliances on the following day. Or else it can speak in threatening tones to the European Union, like merchants do when haggling, to get a better compromise.

With actual war approaching, the commercial war continues apace; the shift in the respective sizes of the imperialist giants, with China tending to outstrip the others, is putting more and more strain on the old equilibriums. There are no more safe ports, and the storm may sever the moorings of the various national vessels, pushing them far and wide in search of a safe landing place. And the lousy national bourgeoisies of second-rate powers will certainly not hesitate to find a new boss; or if possible, more than one, while continuing to rant on about ‘sovereignty’. Witness, for example, the Brexiters’ groveling to Trump.

On the domestic level, on the other hand, what better than to create a huge uproar, to have a permanent revolving door of politicians to confuse and distract the working class, supposedly wanting to protect them from ‘immigrants’, from the ‘Brussels bureaucrats’, from ‘dishonest politicians’, ‘the Westminster bubble’ etc., etc. If there is any charity to be bestowed, they try to ensure that credit for it goes to the ‘right‑wing’ governments. If not, they rekindle antifascist frontism which, along with the mythical ‘specter of fascism’, diverts the working‑class struggle from its immediate and historic objectives to that of maintaining a characteristic fiction of bourgeois rule: democracy.

Because democracy is dead. So dead in fact that even professors in the bourgeois universities are sure of it; and when they are honest, they even rule out the possibility of reanimating it.

This is not actually very precise. If by democracy we mean power being shared between the ruling class and the ruled, such a democracy can never die because it never existed: even the most perfect democracy is a form designed to hide the fact that control is being exerted over the working class. If what they mean is, instead, a democracy of the bourgeoisie, the landowners, and the numerous petty‑bourgeois sub‑classes, we have to point out that the death certificate for this democracy was issued over a century ago, at the time when international imperialist and monopolist capitalism came of age.

Since then, although in different ways and at different times, the working classes, small tradesmen and farmers of city and countryside, merchants, intellectuals, professionals, etc., have been progressively excluded from any share in State power, and their political parties have either fallen apart or been transformed into agencies for social consensus that are dependent on the State and have their own paid staff.

The petty bourgeois strata, increasingly reduced from carrying out productive functions to simple micro‑rentiers, no longer have the energy to think or act, even to defend themselves. Incapable of equipping themselves with any corporative or political expression of their own and reduced to impotence and infamy, they implore the State to give them ‘more security’ against the ‘invasion’ of desperate proletarians from the south; penniless, but very much alive. In this vile and rancorous world, patriotism and nationalism are now used to negate, not affirm; to exclude, not to include. The first and fundamental ideal of the petty bourgeoisie has triumphed: individualism. And from on high, the loved (or reviled) Great Leader, craps on them with his endless tweets.

From time to time the petty bourgeoisie expresses its desperation by means of spontaneous and disorganized protests and rebellious actions, which, however, lack any kind of historical or immediate program (such as the gilets jaunes protests in France); it will always face the challenge of submitting to one of the only two solutions that history now has on offer: either the anti-proletarian dictatorship of big capital, and its parties, or the anti-capitalist dictatorship of the working class, and its party.

Thus, the democracy of the various petty-bourgeois sections ends up effectively voting against itself, committing suicide by willingly yielding to the Salvinis, Orbans, Bolsanaros, Trumps, Kaczynskis and the Putins… Who, on the other hand, are not wrong to declare themselves to be ‘super-democrats’, and that the ‘technocrats’ the ‘rich’ and the ‘global elite’ who criticize them, are ‘anti-democratic’ because nobody voted for them.

Nor can it be maintained, that the League (Italy) or the Brexit Party (Britain) or Fidesz (Hungary) are any ‘more fascist’ than the other parties, in the sense of being more anticommunist and anti-worker. Because fascism and democracy have merged the one into the other; they are just different forms, compatible with one another, of bourgeois State government.

So much is this so, that different forms of democracy alone conceal the uncontested dictatorship of capital over the whole of society. These, however, are now so threadbare that they no longer really work even as a cover. The recall to ancient unifying antifascist mythology, such as Italy and France’s ‘war‑time Resistance movement’, or Britain’s ‘Dunkirk spirit’ or for that matter Germany’s post‑war ‘reconstruction’ and ‘economic miracle’, has been giving Europe’s proletarians indigestion for more than 70 years; it has now gone stale and is increasingly seen as an insult to our intelligence, especially when faced with the chronic and extreme degeneracy of the phony parties, all the way from those formerly known to be Socialist, ‘Communist’ (i.e. Stalinist) or Labour, all of them identical in their inconsistency, to the ‘deplorable’ right wing parties.

We are paying today for the antifascist swindle. Due to the present weakness of our movement those with anti‑democratic sentiments within the proletariat are still being attracted not to communism, but to the ‘anti‑system’ parties, which are actually just as capitalist and just as aligned against the workers and communists as those of ‘the political establishment’.

A dictatorship, a one‑party regime, therefore, looms on the horizon. Do we dread it? No. Because this very regime, behind all the flapping around in the parliamentary henhouse, is already here! It is just that the big bourgeois class, just as it will sack a PR agency if it costs too much and produces too little, sometimes does likewise with the pseudo-parties gathered around it, consolidating its expenditure on just one. The ‘fascist peril’ does not therefore exist, because fascism is already rampant everywhere, thinly veiled by the ever more threadbare electoral rites.

With the alibi of the dictatorship of the majority behind it, capital, which always has the majority, can already get all of its abominations passed democratically, imposing on society its infamous superstitions and horrible vexations, which in themselves are often perfidiously oblique in their attack on the working class: the persecution of women, or religious, racial and national minorities etc. In an agonized paroxysm it has lost all material and ideal sense of direction: democracy/fascism, reality/spectacle, true/fake, man/woman, racism/globalization, nationalism/imperialism, agnosticism/piety… The one unifying point of reference remains the Gods of the Market and Profit. In its catastrophic collapse, capital’s lack of humanity is clearly visible in the obscene excesses of its high priests.

And is our liberating revolution, now that it has been condemned to minority status, therefore postponed indefinitely? The ABC of our historical materialism has taught us that there is a time for everything. The sharpening of the bourgeois global crisis at particular historical turning points obliges the proletariat to organize and rebel. But the vast bulk of proletarians will not know they are making a revolution, nor why they are doing it; no‑one will have voted for communism. Only a significant minority from within it will have gathered around the class party. The latter arrives from a distance, with its own doctrine, confirmed and refined by history and the only one truly free from all the errors, beliefs and prejudices imposed by class societies over thousands of years, the worst of these societies being the democratic one. This party alone can know, see, and predict for the class.

The ideological bankruptcy of the ex‑social democratic and pseudo-communist parties, their surrender to parties which are openly bourgeois, belligerent, chauvinist and racist, as well as being a kind of payback for all their old lies and hypocrisies, marks a step towards the global crisis of capital and therefore, through historical necessity, a step towards its forceful destruction by the communist revolution. It is bound to be an anti-democratic government that will try to bar the way to our revolution, after all democratic ones have failed to halt its advance. The ‘right‑wing’ face of Capital, the last class‑based society, is in fact its true face, and it is against it, and those who want to disguise and embellish it, that the working class will have to fight, and emerge victorious.