What is Social Fascism?

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Not being able to hold his tongue, Manuilsky unexpectedly declared at the Sixteenth Congress, "The question of the nature of social fascism is a problem which has not yet been sufficiently worked out in the Communist International."

There you are! From the beginning they announced, confirmed, asserted, canonized, and cretinized, and now they are going to "work out" the question still more. Who, then, will deal with the "working out"? We have to propose Radek. Apart from him there is no one. Everyone else has taken off.

Radek must serve his novitiate. Toward this end he is writing verbose articles in Pravda on "the essence of social fascism." As Khemnitzer's philosopher once asked: "What is this, a rope?" And since the trouble is that the readers of the numerous articles on "social fascism" disastrously forget all the excellent arguments of the previous investigators, it is up to Radek to begin from the beginning. To begin from the beginning means to declare that Trotsky stands on the other side of the barricades. It is possible that Radek had to insert this sentence on the special request of the editorial board, as a moral honorarium for the publication of his article.

But all the same, what is the essence of social fascism? And how does it differ from true fascism? It appears that the difference (who would have thought it?) lies in the fact that social fascism is also "for carrying out the fascist policy, but in a democratic way." Radek explains in long Words why nothing remained for the German bourgeoisie but to carry out the fascistic policy through parliament "with an outward retention of democracy.'' So what is the point? Up until now Marxists have assumed that democracy is the outward disguise of the class dictatorship — one of its possible disguises. The political function of the contemporary social democracy is the creation of just such a democratic disguise. In no other way is it different from fascism which, with other methods, other ideology, in part also with another social base, organizes, insures, and protects the same dictatorship of imperialist capital.

But — Radek argues — it is possible to maintain decaying capitalism only with fascist measures. In the long run this is entirely correct. From this, however, does not flow the identity of social democracy and fascism, but merely the fact that the social democracy is obliged in the long run to clear the road for fascism, while the latter, coming to take its place, does not deny itself the pleasure of battering a considerable number of social democratic heads. Such objections, however, are declared by Radek in his article to be an "apology for the social democracy." This terrible revolutionary apparently thinks that to cover the bloody tracks of imperialism with the brush of democracy is a higher and more eminent mission than to defend the imperialist coffers with blackjack in hand.

Radek cannot deny that the social democracy clings to parliamentarism with all its feeble power, for all the sources of its influence and welfare are bound up with this artificial machine. But, protests the inventive Radek, "it is nowhere said that fascism requires the formal dispersal of parliament." Is that really the case? But it was precisely the political party that was called fascist that for the first time, in Italy, destroyed the parliamentary machine in the name of the praetorian guard of bourgeois class rule. This, it turns out, has no importance. The phenomenon of fascism is one thing and its essence is another. Radek finds that the destruction of parliamentarism does not require fascism, if this destruction is taken as a thing in itself. "What is this, a rope?"

But since he feels that this does not come off so smoothly, Radek adds with still greater ingenuity: "Even Italian fascism did not disperse the parliament right away [!].” What is true is true. And yet it did disperse it, without sparing even the social democracy, the finest flower in the parliamentary bouquet. According to Radek, it looks as though the social fascists dispersed the Italian parliament, only not right away but after reflection. We are afraid that Radek's theory does not quite explain to the Italian workers why the social fascists are now living in exile. The German workers, too, will not easily grasp who it really is in Germany that wants to disperse parliament: the fascists or the social democrats?

All of Radek's arguments, like those of his teachers, can be reduced to the fact that the social democracy in no way represents ideal democracy (i.e., evidently not the kind of democracy that Radek had rosy dreams about after his conciliatory embraces with Yaroslavsky). The profound and fertile theory of social fascism is not built on the foundation of a materialist analysis of the particular, specific function of the social democracy, but upon the basis of an abstract democratic criterion that is peculiar to the opportunists even when they want to or have to occupy a position on the most extreme wing of the most extreme barricade (during which time they turn their backs and their weapons the wrong way).

There is no class contradiction between the social democracy and fascism. Both fascism and the social democracy are bourgeois parties; not bourgeois in the general sense, but the sort that preserve a decaying capitalism that is ever less able to tolerate democratic forms or any fixed form of legality. This is precisely why the social democracy, notwithstanding the ebbs and flows of its fortunes, is condemned to extinction, giving way to one of two polar opposites: either fascism or communism.

The difference between blonds and brunets is not so great, at any rate substantially less than the difference between humans and apes. Anatomically and physiologically, blonds and brunets belong to one and the same species, may belong to one and the same nationality, one and the same family, and, finally, both may be one and the same scoundrel. Yet skin and hair color has a significance not only for state passports but in life generally. Radek, however, in order to earn the hearty applause of Yaroslavsky, wants to prove that the brunet is at bottom a blond, only with darker skin and black hair.

There are good theories in the world that serve to explain facts. But so far as the theory of social fascism is concerned, the only needs it serves are those of capitulators serving their novitiates.