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No existen autobuses gratuitos ( Socialist Standard 11/25 )
The economic reality is going to show him and his followers that a leader can not change the economic base of any class society, and that there is nothing free within the capitalist society. That reform has been tried in other places, and they have failed. Some universities had free transportation for their students, and some were forced to eliminate the program
“Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend”. Mao. That expression of Mao applies to all the Trotskyist sects; every day, a new one emerges, and all of them compete against each other. The main problem of those groups is the concept of leadership; they are followers of leaders
Many scientific conceptions came through Paganism, and some scientists were pagans because religion and science were still together. After all, natural sciences have evolved by themselves, and both have separated. Medicine was not born with the Greeks; it was born in Africa and among the Egyptians. The merits of the Greeks are that they explained that diseases were produced by natural causes instead of divine intervention. Hippocrates was also a philosopher and a scientist. Many scientists, biologists and mathematicians were philosophers
Adam Smith was also a philosopher and an economist, and he wrote about ethics and morality. Robert Owen was also a philosopher, and Saint Simon was a philosopher. Engels indicated that England was the birthplace of modern materialism, although philosophy evolved with the Indian ( from India ) and the Greek
Stalin and the Russian orthodox church became allied during the period of World War 2, and each benefited from that alliance.
The church obtained certain properties back again, and they were used to propagate patriotism and to motivate the peasants to fight against the devil known as Nazism among the vast majority of the russian population who were religious people, even though the state propagated atheism, responded to the patriotic call of the state and the church.
The Catholic Church in several countries around the world signed Concordatos with dictators, and both benefited from those agreements.
The church supported the dictatorship and avoided the rebellion of peasants and religious believers. When the dictators disagreed with the church, they supported movements to overthrow them.
They obtained monetary contributions from the national production, and Catholicism became the official religion of the nation.
And catholicism was part of the educational system at that time. The dictators were placed by god in power, and the dictators benefited themselves by avoiding rebellion and discontent among the population.
It is a combination of religious ideology and capitalist ideology; it is similar to syncretism.
Many writers who oppose the Socialist Party are saying that we are too simplistic because we do not write extensive articles, but the thing is that the socialist party has been able to explain complicated terms and concepts in a very simple way. The socialist party has also indicated that most of its members are simple members of the working class, and some are not intellectuals
Socialist understanding is the key
capitalist ideology
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.
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
“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
To expand a little more about sects and divisions among the left :
A participant wrote :That people (not just us) refer to Trotskyist groups as “sects” will be because there are so many groups claiming to be Trotskyist, even to be the legitimate continuation of the “Fourth International” that Trotsky set up in 1938 (there are at least four of them), with the differences between them unclear to outsiders. The comparison will be with the array of non-conformist Protestant sects from the 17th century onward, each claiming to be the true Christians.
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Leon Trotsky’s wife, Natalia Sedova Trotsky, left the Trotskyist movement in the early 1950s. She resigned due to her disagreement with the Fourth International’s political positions, particularly their acceptance of the Stalinist states in Eastern Europe as “deformed workers’ states” and their support for the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong.
Sedova believed the Fourth International was persisting in errors and making concessions to Stalinism. She felt that defending the Stalinist regime of “barbarous oppression” was a betrayal of socialist principles.
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Key issues for her included the movement’s decision to categorise Soviet-dominated Eastern European countries as “deformed workers’ states” and their support for the Stalinist governments of China and North Korea. She made her break public in a letter to the leadership of the Fourth International and the U.S. Socialist Workers Party in May 1951.https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2009/no-1263-november-2009/workers-state-pull-other-one/ Workers state? Pull another one
Despite leaving the political movement, she continued to advocate for the rehabilitation of her husband’s reputation in the Soviet Union.
She never mentioned that her husband was killed by an ex-Trotskyist who had access to the fortress where he was living in Mexico, and he became a KGB agent, and then he became an exile in Cuba, and several Trotskyist sects supported the so-called Cuban Revolution, and before the 1959 Castroist revolt, the CPC had provided support to the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
The concept of a deformed workers’ state also created a huge division among the Trotskyist movement.
In Argentina, where there are many Trotskyist groups, the movement has suffered many crises and internal divisions.
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The Maoist movement suffered a great division in Latin America when the Chinese government started to support the Chilean dictatorship and the Albanian tendency for themselves, a big chunk of the Maoist movement under the banner of anti-revisionism
All those internal struggles and divisions created several sects similar to the divisions within the evangelical churches and groups. In every neighbourhood, there is one church claiming to be the real Christian or the followers of Jesus, and the pastors are worshipped like divine gods.
Apparently, she also accepts the concept that the Soviet Union was a state capitalist economy, but she did not abandon Leninism and Trotskyism, similar to the stand of CLR James, who rejected Lenin’s vanguard party and the concept of state capitalism, but he did not reject Leninism.
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There was a Marxist Leninist organization that was dissolved by their own members in a national congress when they started to question Lenin, Stalin, Enver Hoxha, Mao and their own Leninist principles, there was not an agreement in the congress decided to disolve the organization, most Leninist groups are in disagreement before they start to be formed and internal they always have disagreement based on leadership and worshipping of personality.At the SPGB, we have raised criticisms against individuals, and it has not been dissolved. Since we do not have leadership, we do not have conflict over who is or must be the boss; its own members democratically govern it, and we do not have a central committee, although some outsiders have claimed that the executive committee is like a central committee.
And then, they are claiming that we are a sect, as I told a Leninist, to shoot the gun at yourself, not toward us.
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
