Fascism debate continues
Communist Students members have continued to be at the forefront of a debate over the nature of fascism; whether the BNP is fascist; and which anti-fascist tactics are most applicable in this period. This debate was recently one of the main topics for discussion at a CPGB members aggregate, and has continued to be fought out in the pages of the Weekly Worker. Here we highlight the two most recent articles from CS members on opposing sides of this debate.
‘Facing up to the fascists’ (Weekly Worker 709, February 21 2008)
Jim Grant and Dave Isaacson take issue with Jack Conrad on anti-fascist strategy: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/709/facingup.html
‘Getting real about the BNP’ (Weekly Worker 713, March 20 2008)
Benjamin Klein takes issue with comrades Jim Grant and Dave Isaacson on the nature of the far right and the threat it poses: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/713/getreal.html
This debate is set to continue and we invite other comrades to join in the discussion on this blog and by sending letters to the Weekly Worker.
I find it interesting that a communist web-site can have such contempt for Fascism given their obvious similarities and similar origins. The far left is far more fascist inclined than anyone on the true (libertarian) right. If you bother to do any research into Fascism, which I suppose is far too much to ask of anyone on the far left who love to make ridiculous claims that transcend all evidence, you will notice how collectivist it is. Gentile famous quote “everything for the state; nothing against the state, nothing outside the state” seems particularly similar to communist ideals if you only replace the word state with collective. It really shouldn’t surprise you to learn that Mussolini was a socialist before he became a fascist, as was Oswald Mosely (former member of a labour government) and the Nazi party was the National SOCIALIST German WORKERS Party for a reason. Most of the most despicable totalitarian regimes in the world are or were explicitly or formally left wing; Stalin who killed several million, Moa who killed approximately 30 million, Pol Pot who killed about a third of his population, Ho Chi Min, Kim Jung Ill, Mugabe and Castro (who you all presumably love despite his human rights abuses and 5,000 (on a conservative estimate) murders), this is a far from conclusive list. Still keep telling yourself communism works and that its really in our nature, if that what keeps you happy then I’m happy for you to believe it (despite the fact that it is horribly deluded), after all that’s was libertarianism is about, just don’t try an impose your ludicrous delusion on the rest of us, because, like the rest of your ideologues found out, the only way you could make something this obviously wrong work, is to kill a hell of a lot of people on the way.
Well, ‘libertrian’ (if that is your real name), I suppose you’ve got us there. I mean, it’s not like one couldn’t paste absolutely anything in the place of the word ‘state’ in Mussolini’s famous dictum (everything for the individual…). And that’s a really detailed bit of historical analysis there, analysing the semantics of NSDAP, marred only slightly by the fact that it’s completely wrong. The reason the DAP’s in there is because it came out of a previous party called the German Workers’ party; the reason ‘socialist’ is in there is because there really was a bizarre sort of socialist tendency which existed in the Nazi party, around the Strassers and Rohm, who were comprehensively purged on the famous night of the long knives. Just because socialist is in the party name doesn’t mean that they actually believe in socialism. You’d think, at least, that if they were so bloody similar to the Communists and Social Democrats, they maybe, oh i dunno, wouldn’t have sent them to Dachau?
If you’d at all bothered to actually look at the situation, you’d realise that the Nazi vote was spread nice and evenly across the class spectrum after 1929, and overwhelmingly concentrated in the middle classes before that. After the Nazis came to power, furthermore, the actual resistance to them came from the Communists and Social Democrats. The capitalists were quite happy to take the new business generated by re-armament, and IG Farben were very pleased at all these orders for this new ‘Zyklon B’ that was all the rage in Poland.
Your last bit is particularly absurd, because if you’re happy for us to believe it, then you cannot, ipso facto, be unhappy for us to try to implement it. I mean, what the fuck else are we going to do with our beliefs? In reality, you are not at all happy for anybody to believe these things. When people like you have faced a mass, democratic demand for socialist advance, you have mewled in the most pathetic manner about the rights of capitalists to deny that demand, and looked to ‘gentle giants’ of the Pinochet type to enforce them. In these situations it comes down to: the right of the majority or the right of the minority? Picking the first is infinitely more difficult for a “libertarian” (misnomer of the century) than the second.
The other hilarious thing is that, even if it does necessarily take a huge amount of deaths to bring in communism (and it will probably take a few, although a lot more of us will die than the ruling class – but then, it took deaths to overthrow the old feudal system, too, and it takes a few million deaths a year to keep the markets ticking over at all as well), no amount of deaths or any other unit of effectivity will implement the libertarian programme, because the entire capitalist system is predicated on state interference. If a strike tries to “coerce” some poor capitalist out of another 25p an hour, only the state can “interfere” and crush it – thus riding roughshod over all those rights of free association and so on. Conversely, if a company becomes immensely rich, who is going to stop it bribing the state – the State itself? Corporate charters and so on, far from being some aberration of government interference in the natural affairs of the market, is itself a natural outgrowth of organising production in this way. Libertarianism asks the capitalists to bey their self interest in the same breath that it demands they fulfil their moral duty to defend individual rights. Seriously, it would be funny if there weren’t so many of you morons cluttering the body politic.
And instead of declaring that we all “presumably love” Castro, why don’t you flex your clearly excellent intellectual faculties and check? Why, the various mean things I wrote about Castro recently got me in trouble from his British fan club, but still I am declared to be somehow riding the man’s nuts simply because some Randroid flame-warrior can’t be bothered to do recon on the victims of his condescending interventions.
Thats all very well saying that Jimbo, but do you condone the actions of Pol Pot in his quest for a socialist utopia?
It should be fairly obvious that we wouldn’t. Do we have to go through every single so-called ‘socialist’ regime individually? Try reading our political platform, which is very clear on what we mean by socialism and communism.
Of course Stalin, Castro, Mao etc said they were presiding over socialism. And of course the Western media had no problems concurring with them; if THAT was socialism, you don’t want that, do you? Of course not. The concept that -shock- people lie and things are not always what they appear is something we all learn as children. Why people suddenly find it so hard to apply in the case of ‘socialist’ regimes, I can’t imagine! Well, I can… in 2008, a lot of the ‘ooh, but what about the USSR? Gotcha!’ type comments are borne from a desperate psychological need to avoid the question of any real alternative, and thereby avoid any hard thinking or personal responsibility.
As stated in our platform, revolution has to go international and global if socialism is to succeed. If it does not it will be defeated by counter-revolution, everytime.