Facism Is coming to USA…
- This topic has 67 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 1 month ago by
.
-
Posts
-
“There is no fascism, and there are no fascists; therefore, the struggle against fascism is only an illusion, as well as the struggle against communism is also an illusion, because it has never existed”
Nothing to see here. Move on. Do not interfere with the free speech of the masked men bundling people into the back of the van.
“There is no fascism, and there are no fascists; therefore, the struggle against fascism is only an illusion, as well as the struggle against communism is also an illusion, because it has never existed”
That’s one of the most shameful things I’ve ever seen posted on this forum. Talk about burying your head in the sand and hoping it will all go away. And as for the struggle against ‘communism’ (state capitalist Bolshevism) has never existed? This Party has opposed it and always will.
“There is no fascism, and there are no fascists; therefore, the struggle against fascism is only an illusion, as well as the struggle against communism is also an illusion, because it has never existed”
That’s one of the most shameful things I’ve ever seen posted on this forum. Talk about burying your head in the sand and hoping it will all go away. And as for the struggle against ‘communism’ (state capitalist Bolshevism), has it never existed? This Party has opposed it and always will.
——————————————————-What is shameful about this? It is not a moral issue; it is a socio-economic issue. Fascism does not exist, and the groups that are fighting against fascism are just fighting against a phantom. It did exist in Italy and Germany, but it does not exist at present, and at present, it will not be established in either country.
We have several articles indicating why it can not take place, but probably you believe that fascism exists, and it can be established again. Capitalism has adopted other forms, and populism is one of them. And they have large support within the working class, and in some countries that were governed by left-wingers, they have taken total control, and the leftists have been wiped out completely, and some of their political parties do not qualify to be registered again because their membership has declined.
The so-called antifa do not even know what fascism really is, and for them, any opposition to their beliefs is called fascism. Some of them support anarcho capitalism, and some support both sides of the Ukrainian conflict, and they are as violent as the neo nazis groups. I am not burying my head in the sand; I can see the actual reality of our world.
We do have an article indicating that in a society based on advanced, established capitalism and based on limited bourgeois democracy, with a multiplicity of political parties, it would be difficult to establish a personal dictatorship, and one of the distinctions of fascism is the dictatorship of one single political party. Is that shameful, too? , do not think so. It is a well-established analysis of our actual reality, and in another article, it is said that the rulers do not need fascism any longer when they have large support, and they can use the election system.
Regarding communism, I am not talking about state capitalism because most people who are against the so-called communism do not know anything about state capitalism; on the contrary, they think that state capitalism does not exist, and for them communism did exist in the soviet union, and the sov,iet did not say that they were in the process of establishing a communist society, and the anti communist do not know the real concept of communism.
The socialist party does know the concept of state capitalism because it knows the real definition of socialism/communism, and it has never separated them, and its struggle is different to the capitalist groups who have distorted the concept of communism. That is what I am talking about
The real struggle is not against fascism, Nazism, liberalism, populism, kings, or Trumpism; the real struggle is against capitalism, market capitalism, or state capitalism, and anti-imperialism, and anti fascism is not anti-capitalism
I agree with your main idea: the real struggle isn’t against fascism, populism, or Trumpism — it’s against capitalism in all its forms, whether market-based or state-controlled. Anti-fascism that doesn’t challenge capitalism only scratches the surface. What’s needed is a class-conscious socialist movement that tackles the economic roots of exploitation and division.
This is a book review made by the Socialist Party on Fascism.
Misreading fascism
‘Fighting Fascism’. By Carla Zetkin, (edited by Mike Taber and John Riddell. Haymarket, £10.99)
This booklet reproduces two main writings of Zetkin on fascism: her report and resolution presented at the Third Enlarged Plenum of the Communist International’s Executive Committee in June 1923, and her speech to the German Reichstag in 1932.
Carla Zetkin was an iconic left-wing German Marxist and close friend of Rosa Luxemburg, who opted for the political line taken by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, becoming a champion of the Third International. She stayed on the side of the Third International, although not without some regrets, even during the rise and ‘splendour’ of Stalinism.
To appreciate the historical and political relevance of Zetkin’s analysis, the reader should consider that this came less than one year after the report (Rapporto sul Fascismo) presented by the then leader of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I), Amadeo Bordiga. His report at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International came a few days after Mussolini had come to power. The fascists’ Marcia su Roma had taken place while the Italian delegates were away at that congress. This is not a negligible detail if we consider that eight days after Bordiga’s Report on Fascism the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party sent a letter to the Italian delegation, signed by Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek and Bukharin to impose the fusion between the PCd’I and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), from which the PCd’I had split only a little less than two years earlier. Bordiga was a tenacious opponent of the reunification imposed by the International in the name of the ‘united front’. This tactic and the interpretation and attitude toward fascism were very much interlinked. So in June 1923, while Bordiga was in jail, and the change of guard at the leadership of the Italian Party – its Bolshevisation – was coming about, an adjusted interpretation of fascism would strengthen and justify the new direction. This re-interpretation was in fact Zetkin’s report and resolution.To be fair, Zetkin’s interpretation of fascism, and Italian fascism in particular, is in many respects truthful and in line with Bordiga’s report. However, her version is studded with assumptions and convictions that served the political plan of discrediting Bordiga’s ‘infantile’ position (e.g. of no compromises with social-democrats and Massimalists), and winning the new leadership under Antonio Gramsci over to the united front story. For Zetkin, Fascism arrives … as punishment because the proletariat has not carried and driven forward the revolution, and that ‘Fascism [is] an expression of decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy… bourgeois state’s dissolution’. ‘The weaknesses of the Communist Party [of Italy] also played a role here… policy error in viewing fascism solely as a military phenomenon and overlooking its ideological and political side’. According to Zetkin’s view, the violent struggle against fascism would allow the proletariat to ‘grow conscious, stronger, and more purposeful’. Thus, ‘To the masses! … but maintaining Communist Ideology… Meet violence with violence.
Fascism did not arrive as a punishment because the workers and their leaders shied away from revolution. As already pointed out by Bordiga in his report, fascism was adopted by the industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie to violently physically repress the workers who occupied factories and fields in the turmoil following WWI. Looking a bit closer, one can see that fascism was, in fact, generated by the bourgeoisie itself. Money for Mussolini’s journal and the creation of his pseudo-anti-parliamentary-pro-worker patriotic movement (Fasci Italiani di Combattimento) came mainly from the Italian bourgeoisie.
Nor was fascism an expression of capitalist economic disintegration. Italy was thrown into the First World War completely unprepared, by a secret pact involving the king, Vittorio Emanuele III, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Sidney Sonnino and Prime Minister Antonio Salandra, representing the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie, hoping for easy spoils. By 1922, the country had already covered 79 billion lira of war costs without borrowing anything from other countries.
When reading Bordiga’s report, it is also clear that the Italian Party did not see fascism as a mere military phenomenon.
1919 was, in fact, a bad year for fascism, still stuck with patriotic demagogy. At the end of the war, the liberals had some difficulty in keeping control over the army generals. This was evident when the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, from whom Mussolini later stole completely his style and propaganda, managed to get several generals on his side to occupy the Italian-speaking city of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia), which, according to the secret negotiations between Sonnino and the Entente, was to go to Yugoslavia.
The old fox Giovanni Giolitti also thought he could use Mussolini’s fascists to get rid of the D’Annunzio movement, which was destabilising the army’s hierarchy, and to reduce the spread of working-class organisations in particularly in rural areas. He was looking for a political entity to go into coalition with. At the end of 1920, with government backing, the fascist ‘punitive expeditions’ started to terrorise the rural north of Italy. At the election of 1921, the fascists finally entered parliament. They were not enough to serve Giolitti’s plans, who now had PSI and Popolari (Catholics) against him.
Thus, Mussolini’s fascists gained strength when the agrarian bourgeoisie, mainly of Emilia, Lombardy and Tuscany, first, and the industrial bourgeoisie of big industrial cities such as Turin and Milan, saw in the fascists’ aversion towards working-class organisations a viable anti-working-class weapon, even more effective than the Guardia Regia that up to then had violently repressed any insurrection. The advantage of using paramilitary fascist squadrons was that they could physically eliminate the leaders of the working-class institutions, like the Mafia was doing in Sicily. The demobilisation of the army helped the fascists to recruit veterans who no longer fitted into society. Nevertheless, as we just mentioned, the fascist violence in the country as well as in the urban areas had always been tolerated, if not facilitated, by the police forces.
When Mussolini took power in 1922, against Giolitti’s calculations, the king did not enforce the state of siege ordered by the then Prime Minister, and permitted this. Hardly a coup d’etat when the Head of State gives his blessing.
Contrary to Zetkin’s, Zinoviev’s and other Third Internationalists’ expectations, Italy was not ready to conduct a successful working class revolution, ‘like in Russia’. This was acknowledged in Bordiga’s report. Instead of being an ‘expression of decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy, my’ fascism was an authoritarian adaptation of the political representation of capital’s interests.
The risk in adopting Zetkin’s view is to accept the false notion that fighting exclusively against fascism would automatically result in the emancipation of the working class. The danger today is that the ‘fight against fascism’ becomes a fight only against Trumpism, just because his bombastic ego may resemble Mussolini’s. Or that the victory against ISIS (a typical paramilitary ideological movement) is seen as a liberation of the working class in the Middle East from capitalism. The fight against fascism must not become a ‘moral question’. It is a class struggle question just as much as a fight against any other form of representation of capital’s interest is a class struggle question.
CESCO
“the real struggle isn’t against fascism, populism, or Trumpism — it’s against capitalism in all its forms”
There’s a word missing here, “just”. Of course we are against fascism, populism, and Trumpism. But it’s more than just that. We are also for socialism. And you can’t get that while fascism, populism, or Trumpism are significant ideological influence within the working class.
I don’t think the tick box approach to ideologies is particularly useful. Eg something must have x features before we call it “fascism”. Ideologies and conceptual competents that make them are fluid and interchangeable. Ideologies are more like “family resemblances”. Eg we all know what a game is, but it’s impossible to come up with a check list that would encompass all games.
“Lost in Ideology” is an excellent recent popular book on ideologies and ideology critique. I highly recommend it.
Ideology. However, a non-socialist author on the subject would say that we follow an ideology, and are no different from other followers of ideologies. Which is why all are welcome to witness our manifold and often harsh clashes of opinion with each other, which are not tolerated in leader and follower organisations.
In the descriptive sense of the word socialism is an ideology. There’s nothing wrong with saying that. Ideology critique isn’t a type of realtivism. Is about analysing which ideologies (or political theories) are internally coherent and fit with our current best understanding of the empirical sciences.
You have to apply the methods you use for analysing other people’s thought to your own.
My understanding is that we are against all ideologies. Marx defined ideology as a distortion of reality, and Engels defined it as false consciousness.
In the communist manifesto, they indicated that the prevailing ideas in any class society are the ideas of the ruling class; therefore, the working class does not have an ideology; it has adopted the ideology of another class.
The real influence within the working class is the bourgeois ideology, and that is the reason why their analysis of our society and their reality has been distorted.
Socialism will not come through an ideology; it will come through the understanding and desire of a new society by all members of the working class.
Fascism, populism and other ideological forms, real or unreal, that exist in our time, or existed before our time, are part of the bourgeois ideology, and they are forms that capitalism has adopted to manage its own crisis.
All ideologies are INTERNALLY coherent, in that they all possess their own logic.
For instance, objectively Orthodox Christianity is a compilation of nonsenses, but subjectively and internally it possesses its own logic.
An Orthodox Christian polemicist has a logical response to any theological critique, but all theology is irrational in the light of modern scientific knowledge. But whether one is born and raised in Orthodox Christianity or has consented to enter and be a follower of its ideology, one is introduced to and indoctrinated into a construct that has its own logic and trains its followers in it. The same with all religions and also state ideologies.
But the Socialist Party asks for no followers and has no leaders.
Indeed, it insists that would-be members arrive at common conclusions through individual reasoning and understanding.capitalist ideology
“All ideologies are INTERNALLY coherent, in that they all possess their own logic.”
I don’t think so. Think about the fusion of conservativism with free market “libertarianism”.
Religions and ideologies are different beasts. We are talking about conservatism versus liberalism. Not Christianity versus Islam.
Socialist understanding is the key
Religions too are coherent systems and compilations of doctrine.
Maoism too. It is small wonder that state ideologies like Maoism felt it had to either crush religion or drag it into service. There could be no God other than The Leader.
In Europe the Italian and Spanish Fascists were supported by the Catholic Church, so conflict was minimal. In Nazi Germany too, the Protestant churches did not oppose the Nazis, although both Catholic and Protestant individual rebels did. Hitler was not comfortable with Pétain’s ruralist Catholicism, however, but tolerated it. Himmler set up a neo-pagan Germanist religious structure for the SS, but it was limited to his inner circle of cranks. It too was an ideology with its own internal structure for followers to imbibe.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.