Fascism -- The Last Stage of Social Democracy

    In the late 19th century, the emergence of monopoly capitalism and the barbaric invasions of the European imperialists brought the whole world under the chains of imperialism – the highest stage of capitalism. The oppressed masses rose up throughout the colonies and dealt blow after blow to the imperialists and ended their pipe-dream of world domination. The world proletariat’s tremendous victory in the October Revolution spread Marxism-Leninism around the world and engulfed the imperialists with the tide of national liberation and proletarian revolutions. In response, the imperialist bourgeoisie too evolved their strategy of class struggle against the oppressed. By uniting with the opportunist sections of the oppressed classes, the imperialists made fascism and its moderate wing – Social-Democracy its new weapon.

    Capitalism-imperialism and its division of the world has its main political basis in nations and national oppression. The nation first began as the progressive movement of bourgeois democratic revolutions. Early bourgeoisie revolutionaries formed the vanguard of the struggle against feudalism and united the masses under a common national culture and language. The democratic nation liberated the disparate feudal localities and allowed commerce, industry, culture, and capitalism to develop. The simultaneous development of different societies in the world meant this process unfolded unevenly everywhere. In our world, it was on the European continent that capitalism first matured. Under imperialism, the bourgeoisie turned the nation into their instrument for national oppression. Far from playing the progressive role of the early bourgeoisie, the imperialists took advantage of the greater social cohesion of their own nations to conquer and plunder pre-capitalist societies all over the world. The divergent interests of the landed nobility and isolated localities of feudalism in the imperialized societies made them vulnerable to divide and conquer and impeded the resistance against imperialism. The imperialists sabotaged the national development of oppressed people by plundering their wealth, destroying their productive forces, and allying with the feudal oppressors. The imperialists especially suppress the rising nationalism in the colonies to keep the colonized societies fractured and underdeveloped. This way, the imperialists can continue to take advantage of the weakness of oppressed nations and impose their own national interests over the oppressed nations, subjecting them to limitless exploitation and genocide. The more impoverished and behind the oppressed nations are, the richer the imperialists become. Imperialist nations no longer bare any resemblance to the nations consituted as a democratic community of people. They have instead fully become the vehicles of monopoly capitalists to use to enslave the entire world’s people under the dictatorship of oppressor nations.

    While capitalism paved way for imperialism to grow, it also created the gravediggers of imperialism in Europe and its colonies. The development of capitalism continuously expropriated pre-capitalist sections of society and threw millions of people into the heavily oppressed proletariat. The proletariat, deprived of all property, was forced by the bourgeoisie to sell their labor to subsist. The bourgeoisie desperately relies on all forms of oppression to keep the proletariat down and prevent revolution, while the proletariat’s class interest is the complete opposite. Only communism could liberate the proletariat by abolishing all forms of oppression, including national oppression. The proletariat gave birth to Marxism and the proclamation at the conclusion of the Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the World, Unite!”.¹ With capitalism’s rapid growth in Europe, the proletariat developed its own organizations to struggle against the bourgeoisie. First, trade unions emerged to conduct the economic struggle against the bourgeoisie for higher wages. The economic struggle advanced to political struggle with the Social-Democratic movement rising across Europe. The pride of the European social democratic movement, the SPD(Social-Democratic Party of Germany), ran thousands of clubs, organizations, and sports teams across Germany, even winning seats in parliament. The Social-Democrats established the Socialist International(Second International) to further the worker’s movement in European countries.

    In response to the unprecedented threat of proletarian uprisings in Europe, the imperialists developed the new political strategy of social bribery. As the first imperialist nation to advance to the monopoly capitalist stage, England pioneered its use. Lenin noted that England’s monopoly allowed it to “devote a part (and not a small one, at that!) of these superprofits to bribe their own workers, to create something like an alliance (recall the celebrated “alliances” described by the Webbs of English trade unions and employers) between the workers of the given nation and their capitalists against the other countries.”² As the rest of Europe entered into monopoly capitalism, this became the prevailing strategy amongst all European imperialist powers. With the world-scale of Capitalism-Imperialism, the European bourgeoisie can plunder more wealth from the colonies to set aside superprofits to bribe the European proletariat. Social bribery was not merely completed through raising the wages of the proletariat. It was part of a multipronged political offensive to pacify and divide the proletariat with economic benefits as one of its means, combined with propaganda and violence. In their campaign, the most important ally of the bourgeoisie was the economist tendency within the Social-Democratic movement itself. The economists emphasized improving the economic conditions of workers above the overthrow of capitalism and were happy to collaborate with the bourgeoisie. With the backing of the bourgeoisie, economism and opportunism rapidly grew within the mainstream Social-Democratic parties and the Second International, while the radical sections of the proletariat was attacked by the state and marginalized by the opportunists. The opportunist Social-Democrats helped the bourgeoisie push ahead with class-collaborationist social reforms and stabilized the domestic front of the imperialists. In return, the bourgeoisie shared its spoils of war with the opportunist sections of the proletariat. The new privileged sections of the working class became more and more a petty bourgeoisie that relies on its collaboration with the imperialists and the deepening of national oppression to collect its own share of the spoils of war, rather than the proletariat Marx described as relying solely on the sale of their labor-power to the capitalist to survive.

    The Second International and the Social-Democratic movement decisively betrayed the world proletariat after the outbreak of World War I. In each nation, the Social-Democratic parties supposedly representing workers did completely dropped their anti-militaristic pretensions and fully supported the imperialist war efforts of the bourgeoisie in their respective countries. With the backing of the “socialists”, the imperialists sent millions and millions of proletarians to a gruesome death in the trenches in what was one of the deadliest wars in human history. On the other hand, the anti-war sections of the proletariat broke away from the Social-Democrats to continue fighting against the imperialists. The Bolsheviks in Russia conisistently opposed Russia’s own imperialist war efforts and won the support of the masses. Under Lenin’s leadership, the proletariat overthrew the bourgeoisie government in the October Revolution and ended Russia’s participation in the war for good. The proletariat in Europe effectively split into two opposing sides – the pro-imperialist, opportunist side of Social-Democracy and the anti-imperialist, internationalist side of revolutionary Marxism. The Bolsheviks established the Communist International and became the vanguard of the world proletariat in the sweeping anti-imperialist struggle around the world, while The Social-Democrats degenerated further into the vicious junior partners of the imperialists and cemented their place as traitors to the world proletariat.

    In the political turmoil of post-WWI Europe, monopoly capitalism fused with Social-Democracy to grow into their final stage – fascism. After Germany’s defeat in WWI, the authority of the weakend state crumbled, and the bourgeoisie could no longer maintain their authority over the indignant proletariat. The sailors uprising in Kiel pushed the open rebellion of the proletariat to a boiling point. In these pivotal moments, it was none other than the Social-Democrats who came to the rescue of the bourgeoisie. With the support of the big bourgeoisie, Frederick Ebert became the first SPD president of Germany and proclaimed a new “socialist” republic over the fallen German Empire. The new SPD government signed the Stinnes-Legien Agreement with the big bourgeoisie, introducing a series of reforms such as the eight-hour workday, collective bargaining, and even workers’ councils for joint management of factories.³ Such reforms were nothing but distractions to placate the workers, calm the rebellions, and buy time for the bourgeoisie. At the same time, the SPD government commanded the freikorps to massacre the revolutionary workers and assasinate the leaders of the uprisings – Karl Liebnechkt and Rosa Luxemburg. The SPD’s combination of pacification and violence ultimately crushed the German revolution and restored bourgeois power.

    By then, Social-Democracy had completed its journey from a revolutionary Marxist movement to a reactionary fascist movement. Stalin and the Communist International correctly recognized Social-Democracy as the moderate wing of fascism and fiercely struggled against all forms of fascism.⁴ Fascism is not only a more total and violent form of bourgeois dictatorship in the ever-intensifying class struggle of capitalism-imperialism, it also introduces “pacifist” class collaborationist policies through its moderate wing to expand its support base. Social-Democracy’s subsumption under fascism is at the same time the imperialist labor aristocracy’s subsumption under finance capital. This unholy alliance is the class basis for the continuation of imperialism and fascism from 1918 to the present.

    Today, the US imperialists run on the same system of fascism with the same class basis. Whatever democracy they claim to have is only democracy for the imperialist-supporting classes. To the oppressed masses, the imperialists do not hesitate a single second to imprison and assasinate revolutionaries with the largest ever military, police, prisons, and intelligence apparatus in human history. The decline of US imperialism has driven the imperialist petty bourgeoisie’s fascist organizing to new heights. The social fascist wing of US imperialism has especially grown in recent years. With billions and billions of dollars of contributed by the finance capitalists, NGOs and universities endlessly churn out cadre to spread propaganda and do damage-control(“harm reduction” or “mutual aid”) for the ever-more violent onsluaght of imperialism. However much they pretend to be horrified by the crimes of US imperialism, their only goal is to mislead and disarm the oppressed masses to buy time for their fascist paramilitaries to mobilize. With the intensification of capitalist crisis, the imperialist bourgeoisie eagerly seeks to use the oppressed masses as cannon fodder for their fascist project. We must foil their aims and instead organize for proletarian internationalism. Join with the struggle of the world proletariat! Down with US imperialism!

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Further Readings:

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by V. I. Lenin, January-June, 1916. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/imperialism.pdf

Fascism and Social Revolution by R. Palme Dutt, 1935. https://www.marxists.org/archive/dutt/1935/fascism-social-revolution-2.pdf

Theses and Decisions of the Executive Committee Communist International, March, 1934. https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/13th-plenum/13th-plenum-theses.pdf

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