Translated from Der Faschismus und seine demokratische Bewältigung, by Konrad Hecker (GegenStandpunkt Verlag, Munich: 1995) p. 305-26.
On the origins of East Germany’s anti-fascism:
The Communist International’s incorrect theory of fascism
Germany’s communists realized in the German Democratic Republic a project that had failed when it mattered, namely a powerful defensive front against fascism. Not a bad or wrong endeavor in its own right; but also only as correct as the concept of the enemy formed by the enemies of fascism and only as good as the arguments with which they won combatants. And unfortunately the German communists as well as their international umbrella organization were somewhat off target here.
They were quite sure about the “class nature” of fascism, that is, about its place in the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat:
“Comrades, fascism in power was correctly described by the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”[1]
This definition doesn’t want to hear anything about the political desire for law and order that came to power in fascism:
“Fascism is not a form of state power ‘standing above both classes -- the proletariat and the bourgeoisie,’ as Otto Bauer, for instance, has asserted.... No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia.”
The “organization of terrorist vengeance” against sections of the population who the communists counted as their sympathizers is undoubtedly an exercise of rule of a different sort than the expedient use of interest-bearing capital and the private power that the bourgeois state attaches to money. But the comrades didn’t want to differentiate any further between the – allegedly main – beneficiary of the fascist state power and its – political – subject. They thought they knew who needed fascist acts of repression and for what; and with that everything was clear to them:
“With the development of the very deep economic crisis, with the general crisis of capitalism becoming sharply accentuated and the mass of working people becoming revolutionized, fascism has embarked upon a wide offensive. The ruling bourgeoisie more and more seeks salvation in fascism, with the object of taking exceptional predatory measures against the working people, preparing for an imperialist war of plunder, attacking the Soviet Union, enslaving and partitioning China, and by all these means preventing revolution.”
This functionalism should not be conceived too naively:
“... the accession to power of fascism must not be conceived of in so simplified and smooth a form, as though some committee or other of finance capital decided on a certain date to set up a fascist dictatorship. In reality, fascism usually comes to power in the course of a mutual, and at times severe, struggle against the old bourgeois parties, or a definite section of these parties ...”
But that doesn’t change the fact that, ultimately, it is finance capital that is showing its teeth here, and this is the decisive point about the fascist way of running a state. Fascist terror is the offensive weapon of a bourgeoisie which can no longer – especially after the epic victory of the proletarian cause in the Soviet Union – assert its rule in any other way. On the one hand, it “expresses”
“the weakness of the bourgeoisie itself, afraid of the realization of a united struggle of the working class, afraid of revolution, and no longer in a position to maintain its dictatorship over the masses by the old methods of bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism.”
On the other hand, the bourgeoisie’s resort to fascist methods “bears witness” to
“the weakness of the proletariat, disorganized and paralyzed by the disruptive Social-Democratic policy of class collaboration with the bourgeoisie.”
– so one might think they would have stuck to their tried and tested method.... In any case, the overall image is of a back and forth struggle between a working class that is principally in the process of finding its class unity, rallying the progressive sections of the rest of the people around it, and thereby continuing the revolutionary victory of October 1917, and a capitalist class whose rule is increasingly contested and at the same time ever more predatory, concentrated in ever smaller and more extremist minorities, and consequently only sustained through naked terror.
This was the Communist International’s level of insight into fascism when it had already been successful in Italy and Germany. It had neither a correct conception of its sworn enemy nor an accurate awareness of the class it wanted to unite in a defensive struggle.
a) The proletariat: The good half of class society
The “proletarian class consciousness” in whose name the parties of the Communist International lined up was – absurdly for communist revolutionaries! – boundlessly affirmative. The class working for wages was seen by these friends of progress as the good side of capitalist society, as the force marching forward, that is, towards a future without exploitation and oppression – and they advocated this idealism with reference to Marx, of all people, who had explained that a proletarian revolution was necessary precisely because the wage system produces a working class as a functional part of capital, as a dependent variable in the hands of the moneyed class, and forces mature people to make the desperate calculation of relying on the usefulness of their own personhood for capital in order to survive and, as a result, damage themselves. That wages are a source of revenue intrinsic to capitalism, and indeed the worst one possible, which, by producing wealth, reproduces exclusion from it, i.e. poverty and dependence – from this Marxist finding, the advocates of the workers’ cause didn’t take the necessity of systematically abolishing the wage as a cost factor calculation, labor as a means of production, and the kind of wealth that exists abstractly in money; rather from this they drew the task of state power to forcibly improve the situation of the wage workers, and this went as far as the expropriation of the capitalists. For the radicals in the workers’ movement, the fact that wage workers, insofar as they have no alternative other than to make themselves suitable for the conditions of their source of income, are themselves a systemic part of capitalist society and the most miserable one at that, was not a convincing argument for abolishing the proletariat – i.e. the class state along with its creatures – but for them resembled the denial of a right that was to be provided by the true socialist people’s state to the toiling masses. When they spoke of revolution, what they meant was: justice for the class that does all the (wage) labor; and that’s a different thing than the radical abolition of the rules, including law and justice, by which humanity economically acts as a functionary of sums and flows of money and correspondingly separates itself into classes. So even the obvious fact that communist politics cannot consist in gathering together self-confident wage workers, but depends on their insight and desire to no longer be that, was alien to these communists. The finding that wage workers harm themselves, that is, that they make a crucial mistake when and as long as they rely on working for wages for a livelihood, was therefore not the prelude to attempting to agitate against this mistake, but quite the contrary: it justified the comforting certainty that the wage workers were basically already finished with the system of wage labor; they were its born opponents who just had not yet won their victory. The insight that it is solely the wage earning class that not only benefits from the overthrow of class society, but that the dependence of the capitalist accumulation process on its labor also gives them the means to abolish it, was for the champions of the workers’ movement not the reason to aim their revolutionary efforts at this class and against its fatal obedience, but a reason for joyful excitement about the power of a class that is basically already anti-capitalist and only needs to be brought together and used properly in order to achieve class victory. Every bit of proletarian status consciousness, even when clearly still nothing but a false understanding of the exploitation it puts up with, even pride in what it achieves in the service of others, signaled to them the natural human goodness of the social class they intended to lead “to victory”; the fact that this pride boiled down to being able to punctually and undauntedly endure something that is quite outrageous was taken by them – following Lenin – as clear proof of the revolutionary discipline of the masses, and the factory regime as the origin of the character aptitude for communism.
If communists want to overthrow capitalism, they have to, like it or not, start by agitating against the self-confidence with which workers make ends meet; but this was of no interest to these communists with their optimistically revised view of the class struggle. Instead, as their “task” in the service of “social progress,” they came up with the development, updated adaptation, and enactment of a tactic of class struggle that existed only in their concept of the proletariat as a class that is militantly anti-capitalist as it is. And this tactic boiled down to the wonderful maxim of “being in the vanguard” wherever there was a “struggle” and giving the struggle a “revolutionary perspective” that allows the results to be “correctly assessed” – usually optimistically, as a “concrete partial success,” even if the defeat could hardly be overlooked. In this way, any hint of a workers’ movement was endorsed in principle – in the name of goals that the participants did not even have and as a “stage” in the class struggle. Only struggles that were instigated under truly revolutionary “slogans” seemed problematic to them: These routinely “asked too much” of the masses, and communists had reason to criticize themselves for having misjudged “conditions”....
b) The class enemy and its factions: Monopolies versus Democracy
Logically, the image of the “class enemy” that was to be defeated with this tactic turned out to be just as wrong as the idea of their “own” class.
For all their polemics against “finance capital,” Dimitroff, Stalin, Pieck and their comrades had no useful knowledge to offer about the reason and substance of its power in capitalist society. They had noticed the fact that a great deal depends on decisions made by big banks and financial magnates; they were faced with the fact that strikes and other proletarian struggles – especially those they instigated – were crushed by police violence when they went too far; and from this they drew their conclusions: “Obviously,” at least ultimately, the big bankers commanded the state apparatus of repression – as if the bourgeois state power were nothing more than a kind of private army of the big corporations of the finance business. So again Marx had tried in vain to shed light on the strangely “objective” nature of capitalist class society and its relations of domination: that money is a sufficient means of private power, a means of command over social wealth and especially its production, because the state power, in caring for persons and property, makes all production and consumption dependent on money; so that, conversely, if everything depends on money and serves its capitalistic accumulation, the accumulation of capital is the objectively coercive law of social life and becomes recognized as the common good; finally: that the special power of the financial sector in capitalist business life is based on it having society’s money at its disposal and the freedom to create credit based on this, and simply consists in deciding over the business world’s access to its first and decisive means of business: money under the criterion of creditworthiness. The theorists of the Communist International wouldn’t have been all that wrong in their diagnosis that “finance capital” dominates capitalist class society – but not because it commands the police in addition to credit or by using its money, but because it commands over the economic means of life of this society as a whole and in all its parts and even includes its political authorities. The money capitalists demand that the state power does its work and forces all sections of class society to function in accordance with the system as a self-evident prerequisite; if they had to wage constant political struggles over this, then there couldn’t be any halfway functional class society, let alone a credit industry with the power to dominate the business scene.
For the militants of the Communist International, class society was exactly the opposite of class struggle; and in the same way that, in their worldview, the workers were not so much used for the benefit of capital as involved in struggles against evil capitalists, so too were the money capitalists less concerned with their credit business than with suppressing the working class, as well as with imperialist conquests, i.e. with defensive and offensive power struggles both internally and externally. They were engaged in the strategy and tactics of successful repression rather than in techniques of making money – and on top of that were also at odds with each other and with their borrowing customers. The communist theorists had their own view of this imaginary dispute and the stage it had reached in the 20th century, which they referred to with the accusatory label “monopoly capital.” This was not in fact the label for a diagnosis of economic competition and its results, with special attention to, for example, the conflict of interests between finance capital and companies in need of credit. Rather, “monopoly” stood for a bold theory of the decline of bourgeois democracy: It would have worked with its pluralism of bourgeois parties in the days when capitalist entrepreneurs, big and small, still competed with each other en masse; this free competitive struggle, which would have also given the workers’ parties the chance to legally get involved in the struggle for power, was said to have been brought to an end by the triumphant advance of the “monopolies”; their domination, because it belonged to a somewhat shrunken clique of major string pullers, could no longer be dealt with by parliamentary-pluralistic means, but only by class struggle tactics, and had even gotten rid of the political conventions of the majority of the bourgeoisie: In terms of interests, it was particularly imperialistic; in comparison with the – never existing – idyll of bourgeois democracy, it was particularly reactionary; in the attempt to make demands on the people, it was particularly chauvinistic. Trying to find an objective reason for this fascist tendency of finance capital that lies in the specific business interests of the credit industry would be quite out of place in this monopoly “theory”: the whole diagnosis of the contemporary bourgeoisie was that a very few wanted undivided power, and this told the militant communists everything. In particular, for their tactics; therein lay the meaning, i.e. the ideological reason, for this incorrect view of bourgeois affairs. Allegedly divergent and competing bourgeois techniques of struggle and strategies of rule were assigned to certain capitalist factions which were not actually distinguished economically, but by reference to their respective functions in the capitalist system and the corresponding range of interests, as if certain special positions in the class struggle resulted with objective necessity from the political economy of the respective industry; and the party’s theorists thought that this gave them a lever for their tactics. Namely, firstly, an unbeatable argument for their decision to lead the proletarian struggle for democracy, which they, as communists, at the same time proclaimed was an instrument of bourgeoisie rule only in good times; secondly, useful points of view for a political division of the opposing party, for partial alliances precisely in the name of defending “democratic gains,” for playing off one imagined subdivision of the enemy class against another, especially the losers of the competition against the “monopolies,” in order to weaken the opponent with divisiveness – according to the very same model with which they explained the weakness of their side in the class struggle.
The communist parties then used this battle tactic to define their political opponents: the enemy parties they had to deal with – not just in a democratic dispute of opinions, but in a very tangible way.
c) The Social Democrats: Labor traitors and allies
The fact that the bourgeoisie, among other things in the form of its political parties, fought back against the “revolutionary” proletariat with every permitted means of violence and unauthorized malice was clear to its communist leaders and not a problem – it was the enemy, so naturally evil in its own self-interest and – still – in possession of the state’s means of violence. What they could not understand, neither morally nor materially, was the politics of social democracy and the reformist labor unions. Because, according to their conception of class society as class struggle, the unquestionably good side, the militant proletariat, had organized itself in this party and its workers’ associations. However, the result was anything but a powerful front against the class enemy which was capable of including those who were still unorganized and some “wavering intermediate layers.” Instead, there was a – “only formal,” of course – democratic state apparatus which, with the decisive participation of socialist leaders, served the interests of capital well overall, but did not satisfy the desire for revolutionary progress and had even purged its communist vanguard; and the scene inside and outside the factories was dominated by a union movement that operated in an equally system-stabilizing way and contributed its share to the failure of the communist class struggle tactics.
What else – educated Marxists could have said to themselves: The leftist reformers organize the working class exactly as they find it, i.e. as it is needed, created, used, reproduced and impoverished by capital, namely as a crew of servants who rely on wages as their means of life and demand recognition from the national class state as an indispensable, honorable status. Their inevitable experience that wages are not suitable for a lifelong, let alone decent, livelihood, and that the nation state demands significantly more services from its masses than it provides, was constructively handled by social democracy and the unions in the only reaction that conforms with the system: supplementing wage labor with an additional struggle for fair wages and the demand for adequate state acknowledgement of the services rendered. Their program was not the abolition of the wage system, but – something Marx had already unsuccessfully criticized in the workers’ movement of his day – “a fair wages for a fair day’s work,” which the unions were to negotiate with the capitalists by honestly recognizing all business “needs” and interests; they sought “social security” for the existence of the insecure class from the superior force authority, the state power, which brings about all class antagonisms, keeps them under control, and perpetuates them through legal regulations. To succeed in being recognized as collective bargaining partners and participating in state power, unions and social democratic workers’ organizations gladly included in their program all the “reasonable demands” of the “employers’ side,” as well as the entire catalog of state regulatory tasks – including the suppression of any workers’ unrest that went against the system. They did not even see the latter as the price they had to pay for a share of power, but as a confirmation of the political maturity with which they had acquired a right to participate in political and economic affairs.
The communists deeply resented their “class comrades” for this shift to – when needed, militant – loyalty to the system, without understanding its reason and its logic. The insight that the policy of participating in the class state, right up to approving war loans and deploying police against insurgent workers, took advantage of nothing other than the proletariat’s wrongly affirmative class consciousness, would have seemed to them an outright break with the “workers’ cause,” a rejection of their own all-important appeal – and indeed it would have been. This also meant, of course, that these communist revolutionaries couldn’t have found anything particularly wrong with the content of the “class standpoint” as represented by social democrats and unionists – the desire for full legal and political recognition of wage workers. In any case, the demand of the “disenfranchised” for rights and justice was not criticized for submitting to conditions that dictate what each “estate” can claim as its good right according to its economic assignment; rather, they shared this demand – and considered their outrage at injustice to be the same as a desire for revolution. With the identical diagnosis of injustice, they located their opposition to the social democratic-reformist “renegades” not in the substance of their critique of capitalism – and then also, consequently, in their ideas about how to deal with this system – but rather in the merely quantitative difference that they were more radical in their revolt against “humiliation and insult” – just as the Social Democrats and union reformists saw themselves as more realistic and reasonable representatives of the workers’ cause. The supporters of Lenin’s October Revolution hurled the accusation at them that they were not pursuing their actually correct cause consistently enough. The intense debate over the alternatives of “reform or revolution” did not get beyond such fruitless arguments about the appropriate degree of radicalism. The debate, however, was conducted with the greatest moral bitterness – from the communist side, with the moral verdict that those who were fighting for a more pro-worker bourgeois state lacked loyalty to the common cause of the proletarians.
For “revolutionary tactics,” the most diverse practical consequences could be derived from this accusation, and the parties of the Communist International didn’t leave out any mistakes either. From rejecting the leadership of the opposing workers’ party, which had “betrayed the proletariat,” to offering alliances in favor of the “common cause,” for which the communists themselves “betrayed” their radicalism and accepted social democratic law and order policies; from attempting to create a split between the leaders of the Social Democrats, who were “bribed by the bourgeoisie,” and their base, who were to be filled with enthusiasm for a united struggle, to attacking the many “little Zörgiebels,” namely the Social Democratic rank and file who were allegedly no different from the SPD police chief of Berlin, the notorious organizer of the Berlin “Blood May”: Everything was tried, found ineffective, revised with moral (self-)accusations, sometimes against “social democratic cowards,” sometimes against “left wing radical sectarians” within their own ranks, the respective different line was followed until the next disappointment ... At the same time, the decisive, if not only, means of agitation used by the communist vanguardists always remained the same, regardless of whether it was a matter of shaming the Social Democrats as cowards, denouncing them as traitors, or winning them over as fellow militants: They were not critics, but presented themselves as the most resolute militants, as exemplars of strong character and courage in their commitment to “the workers’ cause,” as model proletarians in line with their ideology of natural-born progressive wage workers. There were a few poets who their strange bragging made an impression on. They were not able to form the united front with the Social Democrats, at least for the common fight against fascism – and this was not entirely their fault. Their mistake was that they were not able to bring about any other opposition to the Social Democrats than complaining that they were preventing the unity and solidarity of the proletariat, the necessity of which should be obvious to any true worker democrat – and their self-deceiving “revolutionary optimism” didn’t even lapse in the face of fascism’s political victories:
“Furthermore, the victory of fascism arouses the deep hatred and indignation of the masses, helps to revolutionize them, and provides a powerful stimulus for a united front of the proletariat against fascism.”
So that’s what their “theory” of the fascist enemy then looked like.
d) The fascists: Pied pipers with a model remedy
The communists found out firsthand in the “interwar” and wartime periods that the fascists represented the “cause of the class enemy.” For all their “scientific socialism,” the class warriors concerned were only interested in why they did in a very narrow moral sense. They were unwilling to even acknowledge a positive political program or anything like a civic consciousness and national creative drive in their main political enemy – even less than in their social democratic opponents, the diagnosis of whom was as good as finished with the labels “splitter” and “traitor.” Instead, the theorists of the Communist International asked themselves how a “movement” that went to work without any apparent profit interest of its own – after all, the fascists’ mass support was certainly not recruited from among a “jeunesse dorée” or other militant bourgeois! – could only be so wicked and evil as to finish off the militant workers’ movement by using every means, especially those that are illegal but neverless shamefully tolerated by the bourgeois state power. And as is often the case with such moral conundrums, the question itself was the answer: the fascist parties brought together the worst elements of a decaying capitalist society – just like the workers’ parties gather the good ones: lumpen who offered to do the bourgeoisie’s dirtiest business in exchange for a little share in its power and wealth.
Admittedly, this riffraff included a rank and file whose political leadership was actually claimed by the vanguard of the proletariat; that is, people from a “wavering intermediate strata” – peasants, employees, intellectuals – who a resolutely fighting working class would have to convince only had a future at its side in socialism; and even from the working class itself – not even the industrial workers in the narrowest sense were completely immune! – which was per se considered the born mass base of socialist progress. The communist class analysts could think of nothing better to say about these masses than about the supporters of social democracy: that if they refused allegiance to their true avant-garde, if they even let themselves be stirred up against their natural vanguard, they could only have been seduced. The fascists were therefore bitterly accused of fraudulently manipulating a people who inherently inclined toward good, namely by means of an “unprecedented demagogy.” That, however, was a very revealing accusation – not in regard to the agitational achievements of the Nazis; revealing, rather, of the political mistakes of this anti-fascism. The accusation of demagogy wants – and nothing more than this! – to rehabilitate the morals of the masses, which so obviously disgraces itself, that is, allows itself to be “abused” by the worst swindlers. They are accused of striking, with reprehensible intentions, the exact same tone that the revolutionary left still considered its unmistakable seal of approval. They are thus denied nothing more than the right to present themselves in the role of advocates for all the legitimate concerns of the good people, which after all would only be in good hands with the honest class fighters.
In his “great speech” at the VII Congress of the CI, Comrade Dimitroff exemplified this mistake in every detail:
“What is the source of the influence of fascism over the masses? Fascism is able to attract the masses because it demagogically appeals to their most urgent needs and demands. Fascism not only inflames prejudices that are deeply ingrained in the masses, but also plays on the better sentiments of the masses, on their sense of justice and sometimes even on their revolutionary traditions. Why do the German fascists, those lackeys of the bourgeoisie and mortal enemies of socialism, represent themselves to the masses as ‘Socialists,’ and depict their accession to power as a ‘revolution’? Because they try to exploit the faith in revolution and the urge towards socialism that lives in the hearts of the mass of working people in Germany.”
There is no criticism of the “demagogic” arguments with which the fascists actually “appealed” to the “needs” of the people. One waits in vain for a clear word against the völkisch community ideal with which representatives of a “national” concept of “socialism” promoted themselves. No suspicion was raised against the “sense of justice” of the masses, that most stubborn bad habit of perfect subjects who trust in the power of higher moral viewpoints. The leftist revolutionaries didn’t see any contradiction in their hopeful idea that revolution is a familiar and dear tradition for the German working people. They attested to their addressees’ good faith and “better sentiments,” even if this world of sentiments apparently led those who held them not only to confuse Hitler with the CP, but to even consider him the better representative of their hearts’ desire. Instead of bringing to mind the reason, which even a German proletariat has, that its interest must be asserted in opposition to the fascists, the leftist vanguard confirmed its belief in its image of the working man who believes in revolution and, although having the stigma of certain “deeply rooted prejudices,” otherwise proves his indestructibly better nature precisely in his devotion to false prophets, which the communists claimed as their exclusive point of contact with the masses. Their indignation was correspondingly great at the fact that the fascists drew an image of themselves in which the radical leftists thought they recognized their own smash hits of agitation:
“Fascism acts in the interests of the extreme imperialists, but it presents itself to the masses in the guise of champion of an ill-treated nation, and appeals to outraged national sentiments, as German fascism did, for instance, when it won the support of the masses of the petty bourgeoisie by the slogan ‘Down with the Versailles Treaty.’
Fascism aims at the most unbridled exploitation of the masses but it approaches them with the most artful anti-capitalist demagogy, taking advantage of the deep hatred of the working people against the plundering bourgeoisie, the banks, trusts and financial magnates, and advancing those slogans which at the given moment are most alluring to the politically immature masses. In Germany –‘The general welfare is higher than the welfare of the individual,’ in Italy – ‘Our state is not a capitalist, but a corporate state,’ in Japan – ‘For Japan without exploitation,’ in the United States – ‘Share the wealth,’ and so forth.
Fascism delivers up the people to be devoured by the most corrupt and venal elements, but comes before them with the demand for ‘an honest and incorruptible government.’ Speculating on the profound disillusionment of the masses in bourgeois-democratic governments, fascism hypocritically denounces corruption....
It is in the interests of the most reactionary circles of the bourgeoisie that fascism intercepts the disappointed masses who desert the old bourgeois parties. But it impresses these masses by the vehemence of its attacks on the bourgeois governments and its irreconcilable attitude to the old bourgeois parties.” And so on ...
Impressing the masses disappointed in bourgeois politics with radicalism, using the scandals of others to sharpen the image of one’s own team as an assembly of men of honor, denouncing the wealth of the few as theft by invoking the ideal of national solidarity, appealing to the patriotism of the people with inflammatory slogans: The fascists didn’t mean any of this honestly; for them, all this was only a masquerade, something that communists would evidently consider the opposite of imperialism, exploitation, and reaction if only meant seriously and honestly. This finding naturally raises the question why the fascists, with their mendacious masquerade and a “cynicism” that “eclipses all other varieties of bourgeois reaction,” were more popular with the mass public than the good people on the left, from whom the honest original was available. The answer is self-critical and consists of three steps of thought:
“One of the weakest aspects of the anti-fascist struggle of our Parties is that they react inadequately and too slowly to the demagogy of fascism, and to this day continue to neglect the problems of the struggle against fascist ideology. Many comrades did not believe that so reactionary a brand of bourgeois ideology as the ideology of fascism, which in its stupidity frequently reaches the point of lunacy, would be able to gain any mass influence. This was a serious mistake. The putrefaction of capitalism penetrates to the innermost core of its ideology and culture, while the desperate situation of wide masses of the people renders certain sections of them susceptible to infection from the ideological refuse of this putrefaction.”
The correct ideological defensive struggle therefore consisted in first of all insulting the fascist ideology with particularly derogatory metaphors, but secondly in developing an understanding for the masses who had let themselves be beguiled by the fascist odor of decay, according to the absurd maxim: If things are increasingly bad for the masses, one can’t blame them if they let their situation be explained to them in an increasingly incorrect way.[2] If this empathetic theory of impoverishment clarified the question of guilt in favor of the masses, who were ever more easily seduced, then it was thirdly clear what the true leaders of the masses had to do:
“Under no circumstances must we underrate fascism's power of ideological infection. On the contrary, we for our part must develop an extensive ideological struggle based on clear, popular arguments and a correct, well thought out approach to the peculiarities of the national psychology of the masses of the people.”
If fascists manage to manipulate an intellectually confused people with reprehensible tricks, then of course “we” as communist enlighteners must “for our part”.... Because anything that is an epidemic danger caused by putrefaction in relation to the fascist bacillus is, when leftists take it on, “national psychology.” And if Nazi criminals impress the people with their mendacious slogans, this then challenges the radical class warriors to use “clear” language. Because the fascists’ lead in terms of seducing the people had to be made up for by the calculated use of “popular arguments.” Of course, this is not just a style issue; the Communist International’s self-criticism was directed at a false political standpoint, namely at all the party members who had confused “proletarian internationalism” with a No to the nation state:
“Our comrades in Germany for a long time failed to fully reckon with the wounded national sentiments and the indignation of the masses against the Versailles Treaty … they were late in drawing up their program of social and national emancipation.”
Not even the militant nationalism of the fascists was able to convince these communists that the “liberation of the nation” is incompatible with class struggle; not even National Socialism taught them that “social” and “national liberation” go together only under a national sign violently abstracted from the class antagonism. On the contrary, they learned from the mass success of the fascists that, aside from the evil nationalism of the bourgeoisie which harnesses the people to its interests, there is also a good mass need for nationalism, because otherwise the Nazis could not have fraudulently exploited it. And a clear declaration was made on this by the International in Moscow:
“We Communists are the irreconcilable opponents, in principle, of bourgeois nationalism in all its forms. But we are not supporters of national nihilism, and should never act as such. The task of educating the workers and all working people in the spirit of proletarian internationalism is one of the fundamental tasks of every Communist Party. But anyone who thinks that this permits him, or even compels him, to sneer at all the national sentiments of the broad masses of working people is far from being a genuine Bolshevik, and has understood nothing of the teaching of Lenin on the national question.”
Why the affirmative position on the nationally marked off state coercive social bond of class society is supposed to be some better thing when it is not the bourgeoisie that practices it and demands it from the masses, but the working people who are declared capable of carrying it out because they actually manage to feel as nationally-cast legal subjects – the theorist of anti-fascism keeps this to himself. The fact that the revered masses harbor such feelings is reason enough for him not only not to fight this ideology, which has become a “deeply rooted prejudice,” but to honor it and set the following task for his party – according to the maxim, good for every step in a reactionary direction, that a leftist must not simply leave state brutality and civic madness to the political enemy:
“It goes without saying that it is necessary everywhere and on all occasions to expose before the masses and prove to them concretely that the fascist bourgeoisie, on the pretext of defending general national interests, is conducting its selfish policy of oppressing and exploiting its own people, as well as robbing and enslaving other nations. But we must not confine ourselves to this. We must at the same time prove by the very struggle of the working class and the actions of the Communist Parties that the proletariat, in rising against every manner of bondage and national oppression, is the only true fighter for national freedom and the independence of the people.”
For only if every nationalist is convinced that the cause of the class struggle serves the national good and in no way contradicts it; if the communists succeed in taking the national element away from the Nazis just as they stole faith in the revolution from the Marxists: only then can the broad battle front be established which is made more urgent than ever by the very success of the fascists. So much the worse, on the one hand, that – once again – the first interlocutor for such a policy, the Social Democrats, eluded the communist courtship; on the other hand, the policy of a national unity pact became all the more unavoidable and the willingness of the parties of the Communist International to compromise became all the more uncompromising. With their anti-fascism, they came to the conclusion that their entire communist-revolutionary objective had to be absorbed in the program of bringing about the great unifying alliance, without any ulterior motive:
“Precisely for the reason that for us the question of political unity is not a maneuver, as it is for many Social-Democratic leaders, we insist on the realization of unity of action as one of the most important stages in the struggle for political unity.”
e) Instead of communist activities: a popular front policy for peace with the Soviet state
Ultimately, the leaders and supporters of the Communist International were firmly convinced that this policy of unconditional alliance would inevitably serve to “revolutionize” the masses and lead to the victory of communism. Not because they had a few better arguments up their sleeve for the connection between national liberation and communist revolution or for the transition from self-denial in united action to leadership of the revolution; the imperative of adapting to the masses was and remained their whole “argument.” Their ultimate certainty that they were right, however, did not come from the reasons – whether wrong or right – for their anti-fascist struggle and its inevitably revolutionary quality, but from an external point of view: the success of the revolution in Russia and the vital interests of the Soviet Union that had evolved out of it. Here “the proletariat had triumphed”; the parties allied with the CPSU hastily concluded that the struggle of communists all over the world had to be measured by this victory and could no longer go wrong if it benefited the Soviet power.[3]
So – contrary to all official assurances – they were not really convinced that the victory in Russia had set the proletarian world revolution in motion and conquered a first solid bastion; otherwise the conclusion would have been to press ahead with the revolution in other nations. But that not all: the Moscow internationalists were also not prepared to accept that there was only one really effective means for the security of the Soviet power if it really was about securing the epochal victory of the revolutionary proletariat, namely successful communist revolutions in the great imperialist states which posed the main danger to the first “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Rather, the leaders and friends of the Soviet power in Russia translated the need to ensure the success of the October Revolution into a program of national self-assertion for which the proletarian revolutionary character of the new Moscow polity represented a bad condition on the one hand but a good one on the other: Bad because the Soviet state thereby incurred the hostility of the bourgeois world, threats of war and the danger of counter-revolutionary invasions from the outside; good because it could count on communists all over the world as active sympathizers opposed to anti-Soviet war policies.
Communist parties all over the world thus has a clear mission – albeit one that was no longer compatible with the aim of a complete overthrow of the nationally organized class society: instead of inciting the venerated masses against their authorities, the aim was now to influence social democratic and bourgeois governments, namely in the sense of a benevolent foreign policy toward the Soviet Union. This might occasionally take the form of the proletariat refusing to serve in the fight against the Soviet power; but it took a great deal of optimistic misinterpretation to present such actions as interim victories in the class struggle; because in any case their aim was not subversive at all, but subordinated to the cynicism of the foreign policy calculations of imperialist states. Communism was no longer propagated as a program to abolish war, namely by eliminating its subjects, the nation states with their supremely totalitarian “egoism,” but was rather spelled out as peace policy: as the anti-critical idealistic warning about the imperialist competition between states ultimately turning into the open use of violence; and this, above all, in the relation between one’s own respective nation and the Soviet Union. The communists outside Russia were forced to make the absurd decision of consensually helping to define the foreign policy interests of the state power to which they were in radical opposiiton under the “central slogan: struggle for peace and defense of the Soviet Union,” and indeed in such a way that they were in principle compatible with the security needs of a foreign power, namely the Soviet one – an absurdity, if not for the obedient communists who still imagined that they were putting the interests of the world revolution ahead of their interest in a national revolution, then certainly for every true patriot; he would actually be surrendering if he findamentally recognized the interests of a foreign nation as a premise for the claims of his own. In the eyes of normal citizens who understand politics as a competitive struggle between nations and take a correspondingly partisan view of it, the communists, with their shift to a pro-Soviet peace policy, only revealed themselves to be agents of a foreign power, in addition to their revolutionary hostility to the state; and not even unjustly by prevailing political standards. This could not be changed by the further, explicitly and definitively anti-revolutionary order to the sister parties of the CPSU to prove to themselves and with their entire national propaganda that their socialism, which had come to power in the Soviet Union, did not contradict a single national interest that social democratic and bourgeois governments and parties elsewhere were promoting: they gave up any opposition to the national consensus, submitted completely to the “cause of the nation” and nevertheless remained under suspicion of acting treasonously as the “fifth column” of the Soviet state.
The attack by fascist Germany on its neighbors in the east and west, its war for “living space” in the sphere of Soviet power and against the imperialist division of the world and hierarchy of nations, forced an anti-fascist alliance for a few years of war, one which could never have been achieved through the program of a pro-Soviet-anti-fascist peace policy that was open to unlimited cooperation and compromise, neither within the decisive nations nor internationally.
The leading authorities of the communist world movement nevertheless told the lie that the united war and victory was a resounding success of their anti-fascist alliance policy. They left it to their bourgeois partners to perceive that the alliance was “unnatural,” to denounce it and to terminate it after the fascist war machine had been defeated. And after that they were even less willing to give up the ingenious, admittedly completely futile, political trick of presenting their real socialism as an ongoing offer of peace and reconciliation to the imperialist world. The Soviet socialists reduced communist anti-imperialism to the absurd program of having an ennobling and pacifying effect on the competition of nations in order to save the existence of the “socialist camp.” Imperialism did not thank them for this either....
When the GDR was founded, Germany’s communists explicitly invoked continuity with the Communist International’s fight against the Nazis, staged the construction of their republic as a battle against the ghosts of the long disbanded NSDAP, and in doing so repeated all the mistakes of their anti-fascist do-gooderism. In particular, the mistake of spelling out socialism as the virtue of a just state system and recommending themselves as appointed leaders on the way to the true, namely proletarian, fatherland. As a counter-image to Nazi rule, their socialist state was to win the applause of the masses who had been disappointed by Hitler and win the moral competition against the West German Federal Republic for the honor of a more thoroughly reformed Germany – an offer to reformed members of the nation that really only comes to the minds of particularly reformed patriots.
[1] G. Dimitroff on August 2, 1935 at the VII Congress of the Communist International.
[2] The notion that socially caused misery almost automatically leads the people affected by it to fascist ideas or makes them “susceptible” to them, as if the mind were an organism and deviant thinking an infection, is by no means exclusive to the communist theorists of fascism. This idea was developed mostly by left-wing sociologists and psychologists into whole theoretical edifices about the “authoritarian character,” about the opposition between the food instinct, the suppression of which makes people revolutionary, and the sexual instinct, the negation of which leads to the desire for (self-)repression, about soil and handicrafts as a source of wrong thinking, about the petty bourgeoisie, which reflexively answers its proletarianization with hatred of the proletariat, and the like – some of this is worked out in the chapter on democratic theories of fascism in this book. In the meantime, the association of “social distress” and “right-wing radicalism” has become a fixed topos of civic thinking – and just as wrong as it was at the beginning. It ignores the intellectual effort that is also and especially needed among the victims of capitalist impoverishment to meet the experienced misery not with the question of its real causes, but with state-idealistic fantasies about allegedly lost privileges for native citizens. It is of course all too understandable that this make-shift error is not only not criticized, but is not even considered to be a criticizable basis for every transition from experiencing restrictions to nationalistic rebellion: to politically responsible citizens, a sense of right and wrong that is loyal to the state is never found to be the ideological mistake that it is. As one can see: not even the theorists of the Communist International realized this.
[3] This clarification was assigned to the Italian comrade Ercoli – pseudonym for P. Togliatti – at the VII Congress of the Cimmunist International.