BY JACK BARNES
The following selection is from the discussion following a
Nov. 7, 1992, talk on "The vote for Ross Perot and Patrick
Buchanan's `Culture War': What the 1992 elections revealed,"
by Jack Barnes, the national secretary of the Socialist
Workers Party. The entire talk and discussion period appear
as the final chapter in Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-
Class Politics at the Millennium. The book is copyright (c)
1999 Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings
are by the Militant.
COMMENT: In a talk you gave earlier this year on the fight against Buchananism you made the point that fascism is not a form of capitalist rule.1 I wonder if you could explain that, because I've always thought of fascism as being precisely a form of capitalist rule.
RESPONSE: The communist movement has written a great deal about "fascism, what it is and how to fight," to use the name of a very valuable pamphlet by Leon Trotsky that is published by Pathfinder. But the person from whom I learned the most about fascism concretely was Farrell Dobbs. Farrell was the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party from 1953 until 1972, and in the 1930s was a central leader of the strikes and over-the-road organizing campaigns that built the Teamsters in the upper Midwest into a fighting industrial union movement. I learned from Farrell both directly, in the course of our work together for nearly a quarter century until his death in 1983, and from his four-volume series on the Teamsters struggles published by Pathfinder.
In the third volume, Teamster Politics, Farrell explains how small fascist outfits began to grow in this country in response to the deep economic and social crisis and the rise of workers' struggles in the 1930s. "Clashes between capital and labor in times of social crisis tend to stimulate activity among political demagogues with a fascist mentality," he wrote. "They anticipate that intensification of the class struggle will cause sections of the ruling class to turn away from parliamentary democracy and its methods of rule, and resort to fascism as the way to hold on to state power and protect special privilege."2
Farrell understood that if workers are misled into believing there is some choice between capitalism as they know it and some qualitatively worse form of capitalism called fascism, then the argument to choose capitalism as it is - and even to fight to defend it under certain conditions - can appear strong. For decades, that is the way the Stalinists have miseducated working people, convincing them to subordinate their own class interests and organizations to various bourgeois parties and governments - to prevent something worse from happening. There are the "democratic capitalists" and the fascists, the Stalinists say, so workers must support the democratic capitalists in order to stop the fascists.
Fascism is bred by capitalism
But fascism is precisely a movement set in motion and
financed by sections of the ruling class in desperate
circumstances in order to maintain capitalist rule. It is not
an alternative to "democratic capitalism"; it is bred by
"democratic capitalism." When workers understand what fascism
really is, then the enormity of the responsibility to get rid
of capitalism - a task only the working class can organize
and lead - becomes that much clearer.
When we say that fascism is not a form of capitalist rule, but a way of maintaining capitalist rule, we do so in order to stress that fascism is not a way of organizing capitalism. Instead, it is a radical petty-bourgeois movement in the streets - the most horrible, malignant such movement in history. Banal, mediocre, figures - but ones adept at radical demagogy, nationalism, phrase-mongering, and organization - rise to leadership in these movements. Thugs rise among the cadres. The fascists ape much of the language of currents in the workers movement. "Nazi" was short for National Socialist German Workers Party.
These movements never begin with broad ruling-class support. At first, the rulers in their majority alternately scorn and fear this rowdy "rabble"; only handfuls of capitalists back them at the outset. But as the bourgeoisie become convinced they confront an irresolvable social crisis, and as the working class puts up an increasingly serious challenge to capitalist rule itself, growing layers of the exploiters start supporting, or tolerating, the fascists in order to try to smash the workers and their organizations. That is the job the fascists are finally enlisted to do by the bourgeoisie when the threat to capitalist rule reaches a certain threshold.
The fascists' stock of "ideas," encrusted with historical mystification, are borrowed from the sewers of the bourgeoisie's own views, values, and attitudes. The things the capitalist rulers say privately among themselves, the subtle and not-so-subtle bigotry they promote, are taken up as the banners of a radical mass movement. The demagogues use these banners to mobilize and channel the energies of radicalized layers of the frightened, resentful, and ruined middle classes in bourgeois society.
The fascists initially rail against "high finance" and the bankers, lacing their nationalist demagogy with anticapitalist rhetoric. When they come to power with support from weighty sectors of finance capital, however, the anticapitalist rhetoric slacks off quickly. That is what happened in Italy under Benito Mussolini in the early 1920s after il duce also became premier. That is what happened in Germany under Adolf Hitler a decade later after the fuhrer also became chancellor. Once these new regimes set about reviving industry, building roads, and preparing for war, radical diatribes against capital went into rapid decline....
A course to mobilize working class
The workers vanguard must chart a course to mobilize and
lead the working class and our allies to take power. Along
the way, the labor movement will have to defend our
organizations and those of other oppressed layers against
fascist thuggery and murderous violence.
Back in the early 1970s, at the height of the youth radicalization engendered by the Vietnamese resistance to U.S. imperialism, some petty-bourgeois ultraleft groups, in Europe especially, adopted a stance of "crushing fascism in the egg." But a small group of socialists cannot organize to physically smash equally tiny groups of fascists and think they have contributed to stopping fascism. In fact, they will have actually done the opposite by disorienting potentially valuable cadres within the communist youth movement, miseducating them to believe fascist movements can be defeated by small armed groups outside the main battalions of the workers movement. As we argued against ultraleft currents in our own movement at the time, "Our egg can't crush their egg."
Fascist movements will be bred and rebred by capitalism in crisis, and workers cannot defeat them by going "egg on egg." Nor -and this is the other side of the same coin -can fascist forces be defeated by calling on the bourgeois state to ban their speech and writings, or curtail their right to organize. At various times opportunist, centrist, and other petty-bourgeois currents in the workers movement all combine ultraleft adventures with a dependence on the cops, courts, and parties of the capitalist rulers in the name of the fight against fascism.
Communist workers defend our meetings, our meeting halls, our demonstrations and picket lines, as well as those of other workers and farmers who come under attack. But the workers movement will begin to deal devastating blows to the fascists only as experience is gained in real class combat, as picket squads are transformed into defense organizations, as we take the moral high ground in defense of all workers' rights, and as a mass communist party is forged in revolutionary struggle.
Fascism is nowhere close to conquering anywhere in the world right now. What we are seeing today - and this is new - is the development of nuclei of incipient fascist movements in more and more countries, including here in the United States. They are finding ways of legitimizing themselves in bourgeois politics. In parts of Europe, some of these fascist outfits have carried out violent mobilizations in the streets, especially against immigrants. Because of the nationalist, class-collaborationist character of the labor misleadership throughout the imperialist world, the workers movement has been blunted from effectively explaining the dangerous logic of these incipient fascist currents or responding in a timely and vigorous way to their reactionary acts. All this is part of the battle ahead of class-conscious workers.
Economic and social crisis accelerates
Before fascism triumphs anywhere, however, the capitalist
economic and social crisis must first have accelerated to the
point that intolerable pressures and tensions are hammering
broad sections of the middle classes in particular. And
before fascist organizations begin enlisting enraged petty-
bourgeois cadres by the tens and then hundreds of thousands,
the labor movement itself must be engaged in a sustained
fightback against assaults by the exploiters. The
revolutionary workers movement will already be rallying
masses of toilers and impoverished middle-class layers to our
banner and actually beginning to threaten capitalist rule.
Only then does the ruling class increasingly turn to the
fascist movement for help.
Under these conditions, the working class will have the opportunity once again - as on numerous occasions during the two decades between the first and second world wars - to stop the march toward fascism and war by taking power out of the hands of the capitalists. If proletarian combat parties have not been built that are capable of leading the workers and farmers in making a socialist revolution, however, then the effort will fail, horrible disappointment in the potential of the working-class movement will set in, and the fascists can and will make their own bid for power. Never in this century has a fascist movement conquered and taken the reins of government except under these conditions - after the working- class movement has first had a chance at victory and been defeated.
We are not currently at that stage in the class struggle anywhere in the world. But that is what communist workers must be preparing for right now, as we carry out our political work and develop the habits and discipline of proletarian functioning. Otherwise, labor will have no tested and competent revolutionary leadership as mass working-class combat begins to unfold -as it will, with explosive rhythms and a pace that neither we nor the exploiters can foresee.