Fascism and Antifascism

Our view that “the most damaging thing produced by fascism was having provided the justification for antifascism” is well-known.

Marxism interprets the word ‘Fascism’ as denoting a form of government which capitalism adopts when it finds itself in particular difficulties. It is adopted when the proletariat becomes a real threat to the very existence of capital; when the bourgeoisie has to set aside and bury its differences, temporarily abandoning the mask of democracy; and indeed, the function of parliament has only ever been to represent the various factions of the dominant classes. When needs must, in order to protect their class as a whole, the cruel and ruthless executioners of the working class are unleashed to have their day.

The tendency of Capital is to become ever more concentrated, and a new form of government is adopted in conformity with the gigantic and destructive capitalist machine which results. The two things are connected: concentration is a response to the falling rate of profit, and is implemented through successive mergers although profits continue to decline. The inevitable result is an ever increasing pressure on the whole of society, and this is exerted both directly by organising an increased exploitation of the workers, and through the fact of the existence of the millions of unemployed expelled from the productive apparatus.

It is under these circumstances that the latest forms of nationalism and racism have developed. The emergency bourgeois government – the fascist government – demands unquestioning faith in the nation (with the latter having become a paltry substitute for the true global community) and at a terrible cost to those who don’t come up to the required standards of national and racial “purity”. As far back as the 18th century Dr Johnson would write that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”. Today that is still undeniable, although we’d prefer to say it is the last refuge of the defenders of capitalism… and of its wars. More and more the nation is becoming an institution whose one aim is to imprison and oppress the proletariat within its borders. Meanwhile, the business dealings of capitalism know no frontiers. It is known, for instance, that many influential English capitalists had shares in Krupps during the 2nd World War, a fact which some say caused even more damage to the country than the actual German bombs themselves. Where-ever there is money to be had, and surplus value to extract, there will we find capitalism.

Indeed, what better way to make proletarians forget they belong to an international class than to disguise bourgeois States as ‘nations’? The workers are lined up on the war fronts, and then they slaughter each other in their millions. War is capitalism’s drastic solution to the problem of over-population, capitalism’s way of regulating population.

The workers in the trenches have often recognised the soldiers in the enemy trenches as being exploited just like themselves, and to such an extent that episodes of fraternisation have occurred despite rigidly enforced war censorship. But bourgeois propaganda continues to terrify us with the German, Arab, Jewish, and fascist menace, or indeed the “communist” or “bourgeois” menace, describing the violent atrocities of which the enemy is capable.

In opposition to this annihilation of international class power the Bolsheviks responded by offering immediate peace terms and withdrawing workers from the front during the 1st World War, even at the expense of territorial loss.

The anti-fascist movements played their part in this anti-revolutionary operation by providing the banner under which the 2nd World War would be fought, in the name of which millions of proletarians were massacred. Even the so-called left parties and trade-unions, which claimed to be representing the working class, declared themselves to be democratic and anti-fascist. But despite what they said, these movements were entirely directed towards dispersing the potential inherent in the class and getting it to directly support capitalism by supporting the principle and practice of democracy, since the latter is inseparable from capitalism.

It is an ignorance of dialectics which prevents them from understanding that both fascism and democracy are forms of bourgeois government, proper to different periods and places, and responding to diverse contingent necessities of capitalism. This is shown by historical evolution which sees the spread of the fascist model, even if it is dissimulated under a democratic veneer. Meanwhile democracy itself actually becomes the dictatorship of one party, or several parties with the same identical anti-proletarian, conservative programme. All that remains of democracy is just financial investments in the electoral circus

If we are asking the workers to desert the anti-fascist movements it isn’t because we deny the necessity of responding to the cowardly violence of fascism, but because we believe that the latter’s real power resides not in its thuggish ‘squads’ but in the real and continuous protection which democracy and the alliance of all the bourgeois fractions are prepared to give it. The proletariat doesn’t have the option of “choosing” between democracy and fascism because they are the same thing: fascism is the unscrupulous and extra-legal armed wing of democracy, and democracy is the “velvet glove” of fascism.

In any case, the living conditions workers have to endure are no better under the democratic regimes: they are no more secure on a day to day basis and their tomorrow is just as uncertain, they are just as worried about being evicted from their homes, just as liable to fall prey to spiralling debts and having to work longer and longer hours to pay them off. The proletariat in this society has one choice before it: either submission, or engaging in the struggle for its own class objectives, separate from and opposed to each and every bourgeois and petty-bourgeois faction.
 
 

(Originally appeared in Italian in Il Partito Comunista, No. 206, December 1992).