Fascism born out of capitalist crisis

Without understanding what fascism is, workers are disarmed in figuring out how to fight it. It is an inevitable product of the crisis of capitalism. Regardless of anyone's individual intentions, fascism is bred by the workings of the capitalist system. That is what happened in the 1920s and 1930s, and that is what we see the initial seeds of today.

A rising fascist movement will divide the bourgeoisie. Some capitalists and bourgeois politicians will be slower than others to throw their backing behind fascist movements; some never will. Revolutionary-minded workers will fight alongside anyone, including bourgeois forces, in concrete actions to resist particular fascist assaults on democratic rights and to defend workers' space to organize and practice politics. But anybody who tells workers we can stop fascism by giving political support to one or another wing of the capitalists is setting our class up for the slaughter--that is the lesson from the class struggle in this century. Crisis-ridden capitalism will generate victorious fascist movements if the working class does not organize to stop it by advancing along a line of march aimed uncompromisingly at making a socialist revolution and overturning capitalist rule.

That is why the workers movement must offer a fighting perspective, present clear political answers that radically break with the capitalist status quo, and set a courageous example for farmers and others outside the working class who become radicalized by the capitalist crisis. We will compete with the fascists for the allegiance of millions of toilers and people of modest means in the middle layers who are being crushed under the pressures of capitalism in decay.

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.  
 

How to fight fascism

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.

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.  
 
 
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