Miguel Ángel | Unión Proletaria (Spain)
Today, no government or mass political party recognizes itself as fascist. But if we stick to the facts, the fascist nature of the Ukrainian regime and the Venezuelan extremist opposition is evident. On the other hand, there is a conservative, right-wing, or far-right wave that is manifesting itself with varying degrees of force across the globe and which shares, at least partially, the classic characteristics of fascism. It is so heterogeneous and contradictory that, for example, the alternative or “Trumpist” right supports Zionism and the violent opposition in Venezuela but does not support Zelensky’s government as much as the Democratic Party and social democracy do. It even seems to have some affinity with the Russian government, whose solid and strategic allies are the socialist states of China and Korea.
To guide the working class in the face of these contradictions, it is necessary to clarify the economic basis from which they arise. Today’s world is unfolding in the imperialist stage of capitalism. In this stage, imperialism is a consequence of the domination of monopoly and financial capital over the mode of production. The monopoly and financial oligarchy of the oldest and most developed capitalist countries dominates their own peoples and other nations, except for those that manage to free themselves from this domination.
Hence, “the political characteristics of imperialism” are not the freedom and progress of society, but “reaction across the board and the intensification of the national yoke.”[1] In both the oppressor and oppressed countries, political regimes may vary between liberal parliamentarianism and fascism, but all of them have the task of supporting the domination of a bourgeois class that has entered the reactionary stage of its existence and is subject to its monopolistic upper layer. The bourgeoisie, as a social class, has already fulfilled its progressive role of freeing producers from the fetters that the old forms of property imposed on the development of the productive forces; it has replaced them with its capitalist regime, and the domination of a handful of monopolists and financiers now hinders the further development of those productive forces, whose nature is immediately social. Consequently, their political regimes can no longer be liberating but, on the contrary, tend toward reaction and oppression.
Fascism is the extreme expression of this tendency. The Communist International defined it as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”[2] Throughout the modern imperialist stage, and even before that, the most liberal and republican capitalists have behaved in a reactionary, chauvinistic, and imperialist manner toward workers and the peoples they colonized. But what characterizes the fascists is that they turn these episodes into a systematic terrorist dictatorship of the most aggressive sector of finance capital.
This terrorist dictatorship is not a permanent ideal for the financial oligarchy because:
1. it hinders competition among commodity owners (which remains the basis of the mechanism by which it obtains its profits),
2. it hypertrophies the state bureaucracy, and
3. it minimizes its ability to dominate through deception, creating enemies even among the broad lower strata of its own class.
For these reasons, the financial oligarchy only resorts to fascism when its regime of domination and enrichment enters into a deep crisis—a crisis such as the current one, which forces it to move to a policy of war against sovereign nations, imposing it also on its own population. This is what the imperialist powers of North America and Europe are doing by attacking Russia, Venezuela, the Arab and Muslim peoples, etc., in order to dominate the world. We are witnessing an erosion of democratic rights in Western regimes, which is part of their process of fascistization, along with their falsification of the history of the anti-fascist Second World War and their more or less explicit support for Ukrainian, Israeli, Venezuelan, and other fascists.
Although the foundation of fascism lies in imperialism, the working class and the oppressed peoples should not always fight primarily against it. In 1935–45, the main task was to unite all possible forces—including liberal imperialists—against fascism, because fascism had conquered the state forces necessary to assault the only existing socialist country and to enslave peoples for the benefit of a few “races.” Victory in the anti-fascist world war was possible thanks to this tactic. And this result weakened imperialism as a whole to such an extent that socialism spread to a whole field of countries and the colonial system began to crumble.
Today, the situation is not the same as on the eve of the Second World War—at least not yet. Although there is still a difference between fascist bourgeois forces and more liberal or social-democratic ones, the collusion of all of them—under the iron command of the United States—against free nations now prevails (in addition, the imperialist powers still maintain some political rights that were inconceivable under fascist terror). In any case, we must not forget that, also in the 1930s, the Communist International first had to wage a frontal struggle against pro-capitalist and anti-communist social democracy in order for the broadest masses to understand the need for a united anti-fascist front. And even then, social democracy agreed to this popular demand only three years after Nazism had taken hold in Germany.
Right now, the main target of our struggle is the imperialist powers and their agents in other countries, not the political forces that merely share some reactionary traits with the fascists. In many cases, the worst warmongering comes from fascist parties, but there is one globally important case where this is not so: in the United States, it is the Democratic Party that most endangers the survival of humanity by provoking war against Russia, while the Republican Party—which is more fascist—prefers to strengthen Yankee imperialism first, at the cost of subjugating weaker countries.
Of course, these are only different tactics in the service of the same goal: to defeat and subjugate sovereign nations, especially China, which is most capable of preventing this. However, this tactical difference is very important at a historical moment when the imperialist powers are decomposing and independent nations are strengthening. The spontaneous course of events plays in our favor and, as the USSR did in the 1930s, it is in the interest of the proletariat and the peoples to postpone the collision between the great powers for as long as possible, developing the mass force of anti-imperialism, particularly in the oppressor countries (as is already happening through solidarity with Palestine).
There are also important contradictions within the anti-imperialist camp. The DPRK and China are socialist, while the Russian government is influenced by bourgeois nationalist forces that share interests and ideas with the pro-fascist right: idealization of the nation and the traditional family against the democratic rights of minorities, confessionalism, stigmatization of immigrants, rejection of the left and communism, etc.
The tactic of the working class must prioritize the unity of all those who fight against the imperialist powers and for a multipolar world, above other democratic issues.
Above all, we must reject a united front with that “left”—including social democracy—that supports the collective West, even though we may be closer to it on secondary democratic demands such as the reduction of economic inequalities, secularism, republicanism, civil rights, immigration, and progressive traditions. Furthermore, in order to continue serving monopoly capital by deceiving the working class, this imperialist “left” has promoted an irrational caricature of those democratic demands that distorts them (postmodern ideology, “wokeism,” etc.) and turns them into a mockery of fascist demagogy.
At the same time, we would betray our strategic objectives and engage in tactical opportunism if, from our class independence, we did not combat the reactionary features of other forces that claim to oppose Western imperialists. It is not true that the opposition between left and right, between progress and reaction, has disappeared. What is disappearing—because it was always more apparent than real—is the opposition between the right and the false left. We must strongly defend the cause of the true left, of democracy, and of socialism.
The formation of a united front with anti-Western forces that exhibit reactionary traits may be necessary within oppressed countries and on an international scale. However, it is not appropriate within oppressive countries, where the process of fascistization promoted by growing sectors of the financial oligarchy is aided by ultra-right forces that disguise themselves as patriots in order to meanly promote chauvinism, the ethnic division of workers, their submission to capitalists, corporatism, and, ultimately, the formation of cannon fodder for imperialist war.
In oppressor countries, joint actions with partially reactionary forces are admissible, but only on a case-by-case basis and for the main cause of confronting the imperialist bloc. Similarly, joint actions with the forces of the imperialist “left” are admissible only for other democratic causes that are secondary.
We must be fully aware that the fate of the anti-imperialist struggle does not depend on these forces but on the proletariat and the oppressed masses, who spontaneously tend toward democracy and socialism. To the extent that the false left dominates this desire, we communists must participate in their mass actions in a permanent and persistent manner, from a consistently democratic and socialist position, denouncing the opportunism of their leaders and prioritizing the need to confront the Western imperialist bloc. The united front needed in the dominant countries is one that brings together the forces that consistently fight for democracy—that is, concentrating their fire on the imperialism of the collective West.
In this way, we will be able to resolve the contradictions that confuse the masses and clarify the path to their liberation from fascism and imperialism.
