Mandel on Fascism

[Chegitz Guevara <mluziett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

        I'm suffering from a bout of depression right now, so I'm finding
it difficult to take care of my report on "The Struggle Against Fascism in
Germany," by Leon Trotsky. It's also keeping me from taking care of the
news on my web site, if anyone reads it. However, in liu of doing anything
original, I am going to transcribe to pieces from Mandel's introduction to
"SAFG," both of which I think are excellent. First is Mandel's view on
Trotsky's conception of fascism, the second (which I will post seperately),
is on other views of fascism. Hope you enjoy.

===========================================================================

Trotsky's theory of fascism is a unity of six elements. Each element
within this unity possess a certain autonomy, and each passes through a
certain development by virtue of its contradictions.  But the unity can
only be understood as a closed and dynamic totality in which these
elements, not in isolation but in their intrinsic connection with one
another, can explain the rise, victory, and fall of fascist dictatorship.

1. The rise of fascism is the expression of a severe social crisis of late
capitalism, a structural crisis which can, as in the years 1929 to 1933,
coincide with a crisis of overproduction, but which goes far beyond such
conjunctural fluctuations. Fundimentally, it is a crisis in the very
conditions of the production and realization of surplus value. It is the
impossibility of continuing a "natural" accumulation of capital under
given competitive conditions on the world market (i.e., with a given level
of real wages, labor productivity, and access to raw materials and
markets). The historical function of the fascist seizure of power is to
suddenly and violently change the conditions of the production and
realization of surplus value to the advantage of the decisive groups of
monopoly capitalism.

2. In the epoch of imperialism, and where the workers' movement has gone
through a long historical development, the bourgeoisie exercises its
political rule most advantageously, that is, with the lowest overhead,
through bourgeois parliamentary democracy. This form of rule has two great
advantages. It allows a periodic reduction of social antagonisms through
the granting of certain social reforms. And it permits an important
section of the bourgeoisie to participate directly in the exercise of
political power through the bourgeois parties, newspapers, universities,
employers' associations, municipal and regional governments, the summits
of the state apparatus, the central banking system, and so forth.

But this *form* of bourgeois rule -- which is by no means the only
historical one -- depends on the maintenance of a highly unstable
equilibrium of economic and social forces. When objective developments
disturb this equilibrium, the big bourgeoisie has hardly any alternative
but to try to establish a higher form of centralization of the state's
executive power in order to realize its historical interests, even at the
price of renouncing the immediate exercise of political power. Looked at
historically, fascism is both the realization and negation of monoploy
capital's tendency -- first noticed by Rudolf Hilferding -- to "organize"
in a totalitarian fashion the whole of social life in its interests.
Fascism is the realization of this tendency because in the last analysis
it has performed this historical function. It is the negation of this
tendency, because, contrary to Hilferding's expectation, fascism has only
been able to perform this function by the extensive political expropriation
of the bourgeoisie.

3. Given the conditions of modern industrial society and the immense
numerical disproportion between wage workers and big capitalists, it is
practically impossible to carry out such a violent centralization of power
purely by technical means. It is equally impossible by such means alone to
liquidate most, if not all, of the gains of the modern workers' movement,
including those "germs of proletarian democracy within the framework of
bourgeois democracy," as Trotsky correctly characterized the mass
organizations of the workers' movement.

Neither a military dictatorship nor a pure police state -- not to speak of
an absolute monarchy -- has sufficient capabilities to atomize and
demoralize for very long a conscious social class with millions of members
and thereby prevent the reappearance of even the elementary class
struggles that are periodically produced by the simple play of market
laws. To accomplish these ends, the big bourgeoisie needs a movement that
can set masses in motion on its side, that can wear down and demoralize
the more conscious parts of the proletariat by systematic mass terror and
street warfare, and that, after the seizure of power, can totally destroy
the proletarian mass organizations and thereby leave the conscious
elements not only atomized but also demoralized and resigned.

By appropriate methods adapted to the requirements of mass psychology,
such a mass movement can achieve a constant supervision of the masses of
class-conscious wage workers through an immense apparatus of block
wardens, street monitors, and factory cells (the Nationalsozialistische
Betriebsorganisation). It can also influence ideologically a part of the
less conscious workers, especially white-collar workers, and partially
integrate them into a functioning class colaboration.

4. Such a mass movement can only arise on the basis of the petty
bourgeoisie, capitalism's third social class, situated between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie. If this petty bourgeoisie is hit so hard
by inflation, bankruptcy of small firms, and mass unemployment of
university graduates, technicians and the higher salaried employees, that
it falls into despair, then a typical petty bourgeois movement, compounded
of ideological reminiscences and psychological resentment, will arise. It
will combine extreme nationalism and at least verbal anti-capitalist
demogoguery with the most intense hatred for the organized workers'
movement ("Against Marxism,""Against Communism"). At the moment this
movement begins physical attacks on the workers, their organizations, and
their actions, a fascist movement is born. After such a movement has
passed through a period of autonomous development, which it must do, if it
is to win mass influence, it comes to need the financial and political
support of important sections of monopoly capital if it is to carry
through to the seizure of power.

5. If the fascist dictatorship is to fulfill its historic role, the
workers' movement must be ground down and beaten back before the seizure
of power. But this is only possible if, prior to the seizure of power, the
scales have tipped decisively in favor of the fascist bands and against
the working class. The rise of the fascist movement is like an
institutionalization of civil war, in which *either* side, regarded
objectively, has a chance of success. (This is the reason, incidentally,
that it is only under very special, "abnormal" circumstances that the big
bourgeoisie favors and finances such experiments. From the outset there
is a definate risk in all-or-nothing politics>)

If the fascists succeed in paralyzing, demoralizing, and smashing the
enemy -- the organized workers -- their victory is certain. But if the
workers' movement strikes back successfully and seizes the initiative for
itself, then it can decisively defeat not only fascism but also the
capitalism that spawns it.

This is so for technical-political as well as social political and social
psychological reasons. At first the fascist bands will only organize the
most resolute and desperate parts of the petty bourgeoisie (the part "gone
mad"). The petty-bourgeois masses, as well as the unconscious and
unorganized part of the wage workers -- especially young workers and
white-collar youth -- will normally waver back and forth between both
camps. They will be inclined to join the side that demonstrates the
greater boldness and decisiveness. . . .

Historically considered, the victory of fascism expresses the inability of
the workers' movement to resolve the structural crisis of late capitalism
in its own interest and to its own ends. Such a crisis always at first
offers the workers' movement a chance at victory. Only if it does not take
advantage of this chance, because it is misled, split, and demoralized,
can the battle lead to the triumph of fascism.

6. If fascism succeeds "like a battering ram in smashing the workers'
movement," then it has done its duty from the standpoint of monoploy
capitalism. Its mass movement is bureaucratized and to a large extent
assimilated into the bourgeois state apparatus. This cannot occur unless
the most extreme forms of the plebian, petty-bourgeois demogoguery present
in the "goals of the movement" disappear from view and are removed from
the official ideology.

This development is by no means opposed to the continuing tendency of the
highly centralized state apparatus to become independent. For once the
workers' movement is vanquished, and the conditions for the production and
realization of surplus value have been decisively altered domestically to
the advantage of the big bourgeoisie, then efforts will necessarily be
concentrated on bringing about a similar change on the world market. The
all-or-nothing sphere politics of fascism are carried over from the
social-political sphere into the financial sphere; it encourages permanent
inflation and finally allows no alternative but foreign military
adventure. But this whole development brings with it deterioration rather
than improvement in the economic situation ( a consequence of the war
economy) and in the political position of the petty bourgeoisie -- with
the exception of that part which can be fed with the sinecures from the
increasingly independent state apparatus.  Instead of "liberation from
the coils of usury capital," a pronounced acceleration in the
concentration of capital and the proletarianization of the middle classes
takes place. This fact demonstrates the class character of the fascist
dictatorship, which does not correspond to that of the fascist mass
movement. The former represents the historical interests of monopoly
captital, not those of the petty bourgeoisie. Once this tendency becomes
predominant, the conscious and active mass base of fascism necessarily
shrinks. The fascist dictatorship has the tendency to undermine and
disintegrate its own mass base. The fascist bands become appendages of the
police. In he phase of its decline, fascism is transformed back into a
particular kind of Bonapartism.

These are the constituant elements of Trotsky's theory of fascism. On the
one hand, it is based on an analysis of the special conditions under which
the class struggle develops in highly industrialized countries duing the
late capitalist structural crisis (Trotsky spoke of the "epoch of
capitalist decay"). On the other hand, it flows from a particular way,
peculiar to Trotsky's Marism, of relating the objective and subjective
factors in the practical course of this class struggle and in the
theoretical interpretation of it.

Ernest Mandel, 1969

===========================================================================

Marc, "the Chegitz," Luzietti
personal homepage: http://shrike.depaul.edu/~mluziett
political homepage: http://shrike.depaul.edu/~mluziett/chegitz.html

A curse on the judges, the coppers and screws | Who tortured the
innocent, the wrongly accused, | For the price of promotion | And justice
to sell | May the judged be their judges when they rot down in hell

The Pogues, "Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six"




     --- from list marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---

     ------------------