What is fascism?
2016Jeff Mackler 2016-04Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 7 →
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D the U.S. ruling class today has no need or desire espite the charged rhetoric of Trump and Co., to play the fascist card. Absent any significant work ing-class opposition to its policies and with a broad array of consciously constructed and/or controlled pro-Democratic Party “civil rights, immigrant rights and environmental NGO-type organizations” behind it, coupled with an ever-declining labor movement headed by the most hide-bound pro-capitalist and parasitic union bureaucracy ever, the ruling rich to day have little to fear, at least in the short term, from a mass working-class insurgency capable of challenging its rule.
Fascism, historically the most extreme political form of capitalist rule, is called into being only when the question of which class shall rule society—either the working class and its allies or the minority prop erty-owning elite—is sharply posed.
This was the case in Germany, Italy, and Spain in the 1920s and 1930s, where mass workers’ organi zations led by Communists and Socialists, and anar chists in Spain, had the power and mass support to paralyze capitalist society through massive mobiliza tions and general strikes.
Indeed, were it not for the Stalinist and reformist mis-leaders of these and other working-class parties, socialist revolution would have likely been on the im mediate order of the day. Only at this point did the divided and frightened capitalist classes employ the fascist option, which began with the physical annihi (continued from page 6: “The Politics of Deception Trump & Cruz vs. Sanders & Clinton”) ness. When it comes to profits, capitalists, whether Democrat or Republican, defend their own interests first, whether it be via free trade or protectionist poli cies.
The anti-immigrant racist Trump, for example, reg ularly employs low-wage, non-citizen Mexican immi grants in his Florida hotels and elsewhere, justifying this policy with the lie that in Florida white workers simply don’t want part-time (he neglects to add low-wage) jobs!
Sanders’ left populism is of the “democratic social ist” reformist variety, as with Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain and the various Scandinavian na tions that, in the past, maintained some comprehen sive social welfare programs, many of which have today been sharply curtained by these same “demo cratic socialist” capitalist governments.
Trump’s right-wing populist rhetoric is more akin to the neo-fascist or extreme-right populism in Europe, as in France with Marine LePen’s National Front or the recent rise of neo-fascist parties in Poland and Germany. All of these forces rail against immigrants’ taking local jobs and otherwise upsetting the “nation al culture and traditions”—racist code words indeed.
Sanders, like Trump, has chosen to be a player in the lation of the leadership of the mass workers’ parties and organizations.
Fascism arises only when, in the context of a deep economic crisis, society experiences a major class polarization characterized by broad struggles of radicalizing and class-conscious workers and their organizations on the one side—potentially capable of seizing power and ending capitalist rule—and a frightened, divided, and largely impotent minority capitalist class on the other.
Under these circumstances, armed fascist gangs, usually consisting of a threatened petty-bourgeois layer (middle class), accompanied by de-classed and alienated workers (the lumpen proletariat) and a small portion of misguided working-class elements, begin to take form under the tutelage of a “strong man” leader, usually trumpeting “left-sounding” pop ulist/nationalist language against the powers that be, while scapegoating the most oppressed layers of society.
Hitler and Mussolini, and Franco in Spain, initially organized and armed these disaffected elements to direct their anger and frustrations against the ma jor organizations of the working class as opposed to the ruling capitalist class. They routinely deployed armed thugs to break up union meetings and work ers’ protests.
These fascist-led forces operated outside the formal police and military institutions of the still “demo cratic” capitalist state, although with its increasing implicit approval. But when the beleaguered capital ist rulers came to realize that the deepening work now almost year-round electoral shenanigans that constitute today’s manufactured reality-TV America. Both understand in their different ways that U.S. presidents do not make any of the fundamental deci sions in capitalist society. These are most always in the exclusive purview of behind-the-scenes negotia tions between the real rulers, or more accurately, the direct professional unelected representatives of the tiny perhaps .001 percent who own and control the vast wealth of the nation and all associated institu tions that help them amass their wealth.
In this Machiavellian schema, everything—from the details of the tax codes, trade policies, war policies, the national budget, Federal Reserve monetary deci (Above) Pro-Nazis in 1938 cheer Hitler’s campaign to unite Germany and Austria.
ing-class mobilizations had the potential to challenge their rule, and at a time when even the ranks of the working-class-based bourgeois army were consid ered unreliable instruments to quell workers’ upris ings, they felt compelled to call on and/or accede to the now sizeable armed fascist forces to assume at least a share of the state power.
Adolph Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, for exam ple, was never elected as Chancellor of Germany. In January 1933 he was appointed to this post by Ger many’s President, Paul Von Hindenburg, ostensibly to keep Hitler’s forces “in check”—that is, to give the Nazi Party a piece of the state power to be wielded against an insurgent workers’ movement without posing a direct threat to Germany’s existing “demo cratic” capitalist parliamentary institutions. In short order however, Hitler employed his new “legitimacy” to physically smash, dismember, murder, or imprison the leading ranks of the mass parties of the working class—especially the Stalinist-led Communist Party, the largest in the world outside the Soviet Union, and the reformist Socialist Party.
Tragically, it was the refusal of the Stalinists to join forces with the Socialists in a workers united front to challenge Hitler and the capitalist state power itself that led to one of history’s most terrible working-class defeats, and, indeed, the most important event that opened the road to the Second World War, which cost the lives of 80 million people worldwide. n (Above) Cruz and Trump in a nose to nose race. sions, U.S. debt levels, and more—is honed to a level of precision that exceeds the human imagination.
Despite this ruling class “expertise,” however, the capitalist system’s inherent contradictions, long ago revealed by Karl Marx and as relevant today as ever, continually bring it to the point of crisis and near col lapse, invariably impelling it to “solutions” contrary to the interest of the vast majority, as we see every where in today’s world of never-ending wars and the brutal imposition of austerity measures.
Driven relentlessly by its profit-first imperative, for (continued on page 11, in “Labor Notes conference was big and diverse”)
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