Posted on

Letter from a French Prison by Antonin Bernanos

This essay, written by anti-fascist militant Antonin Bernanos while in a French prison, provides an important perspective on the relation between the state and organized fascism in France. Bernanos was arrested in April 2019 and released mid-November. Translation and introduction by Joe Hayns. 

In the last weeks of April, protests against police violence again erupted across France’s quartiers populaires, compounding with crises of health, work, even food. 

Following the police’s ‘severely injuring’ a motorcycle rider in the Parisian suburb of Villeneuve-la-Garenne, rapper Dosseh said: ‘Don’t be surprised if it starts again like 2005’. 

But if features of the recent riots are indeed similar to those of 2005 – a month of unrest across poorer working-class neighborhoods after a police chase resulted in the death of two teenagers – we might ask, how has the state itself changed? Are they more or less restrained, more or less empowered? How have successive waves of opposition – student protests, rail workers’ strikes, the Gilets Jaunes movement, et cetera, and only since Macron’s 2017 presidential win – fortified its repressive apparatus? 

Below is an analysis of state revanchism in France, with a focus on the collaborations between the police and far-right forces against those progressive movements. It was written last summer by the anti-fascist activist Antonin Bernanos whilst held in the notorious La Santé prison – as he explains, less a legitimate sentence than evidence itself of such collaboration. 

We thank the editors of Contretemps, and congratulate Bernanos on his freedom. 

Bernanos upon release from prison.

I am writing to you from la Santé, where I have been incarcerated following a legal process begun on 18 April against several people, after a confrontation between anti-fascists and far-right militants. 

That makes it nearly six months that I’ve been imprisoned; six months through which I’ve suffered numerous pressures from both the judiciary and the prison administration. I was initially jailed in Fresnes prison, in Paris, where the management kept me solitary confinement for being a member of “radical and violent circles of the far-left”. Then, while in overnight transit to a secure establishment outside the Île-de-France region – according to the prison authorities I might have benefited from “outside support that could harm the security of establishments of greater Paris” – I was transferred here, to La Santé.

Two months ago the judge in charge of my case ordered the end of my provisional detention and for me to be freed – a decision that was annulled in an appeal court by order of the Paris prosecutor, who used his judicial powers to block my liberation. Such determination – fairly typical of the courts and penitential administration – is exercised against me when all others incriminated in the case have been freed and placed under license, and when there’s nothing in the case linking me in any way with the confrontation. 

Nothing, except the word of an identitarian militant, Antoine Oziol de Pignol: a Kop de Boulogne hooligan with the Paris Militia, active with Génération Identitaire (GI), and close to the small nationalist group Zouaves Paris, who he was with at the time of the confrontation [Kop de Boulogne, the Paris Saint-Germain ultra’s terrace]. Pignol has lodged a complaint, and as plaintiff has claimed to recognize anti-fascist militants amongst the perpetrators of the violence he was victim to. He has declared that I was part of the group that routed him and his comrades on the evening in question. 

At first glance, the fact that far-right militants, as members of these violent groups and themselves perpetrators of numerous attacks over the last months – from GI, against veiled women, migrants, and the youth of the Lycée autogéré (Self-Run High-School); from the Zouaves Paris again the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste rally during the Gilets Jaunes’ Act 11 – could collaborate so straightforwardly with the police and repressive agencies may seem surprising. It helps though to place this phenomenon in a wider frame, in the context of the social revolt and the generalized repression that we have seen since the struggle against the 2016 Labour Law and throughout the Gilets Jaunes’ movement. 

Indeed, even if the links between the far-right and the police need little further demonstration – see the case of Claude Hermant (customs inspector, arms dealer, GI member), or the strange lack of interest in far-right leader Serge Ayoubm’s role in the 2013 murder of leftist Clément Méric – we should look closer into the specific melding of such groups and the police.

Génération identitaire has always positioned itself as the state’s helpmate – its occupying of mosques, as Islamophobic policies proliferate; the ‘Defend Europe’ campaign to stop migrants at the Alps and the Mediterranean, as European migration policies radicalize, and thousands of men, women, and children lose their lives crossing; and most recently, their occupation of the Caisse d’allocations familiales (family welfare) office in Bobigny, northeast of Paris, at a time of unrestrained repression against the largest movement in decades against precarity. 

On the Zouaves Paris, we should recall their multiple attacks against students and militants during the 2018 university shut-downs and occupations against the Student Orientation and Achievement (OAS) Law.

It is also the Zouaves who on 1 May 2018 attempted to ratonner (‘rat-hunt’) demonstrators at the Place de la Contrescarpe (a central Paris square), at the very moment when Alexander Benalla and his heavies were beating those people refusing to leave – and this following a day of furious police violence against an international demonstration of workers. 

If this event was emblematic of the articulation between the violence of the police, the violence of armed state groups such as Benalla’s, and the violence of far-right groups, it is amongst the movement of the Gilets Jaunes that we can see this shared strategy deployed and consolidated.

Though far-right groups have finally been chased from the movement at the national level, recall that during the first weeks their presence was very real – and remember especially the repeated discourse in the mass media, according to which the violence against the forces of order was committed by nationalist groups who had ‘infiltrated’ the movement.

If it is true that certain far-right groups such as the Zouaves and their Bastion Social clique participated in confrontations with the forces of order from the beginning, we should understand this fact and its media representation in the context of a larger strategy, one beneficial to the state. It was necessary to develop a moral repression, stigmatizing the Gilets Jaunes as of the violent far-right, which made possible the ferocious police repression that we would come to see.

The presence of far-right groups was thus established, maintained, and instrumentalized in order to legitimize, in the eyes of the public, the huge number of arrests, the expedited courts and sentencing, the imprisonments, the violence, and the mutilations. Maintaining the presence of the far-right – and its publicity – was the means for the state to render a movement, followed by a large majority of the population, illegitimate. 

Yet another attempt at manipulation of public opinion, which was deployed to its maximal extent during the polemics surrounding the ‘assault’ of right-wing media personality Alain Finkielkraut, and the ‘antisemitism of the Gilets Jaunes’. To be clear: This is not to deny the antisemitism and conspiratorial thinking that was able to spread throughout the movement but to reveal the state’s tools of moral repression – and to understand that fascism and its ideas are amongst the most important.

Antisemitism, of which the state boasts itself the staunchest opponent, must be understood as a tool: as a reality deliberately maintained. If the notoriously antisemitic theses of (far-right author) Alain Soral have been able to spread through the movement via the militants and auxiliaries of the far-right, it is because they have been hugely exacerbated and relayed by the mass media and the government. And if this is the case, it is because these supposedly “anti-systemic” theses are, in reality, at that system’s service, and are mobilized according to its methods. 

From the outside, the state uses it to delegitimize the movement in the eyes of the public. From the inside, the theses on ‘Jewish finance’, or the Rothschilds, allows real enemies – such as finance in a broader sense, and capitalism as a system of domination and exploitation – to be isolated off, to be brushed aside. The target becomes an alleged part of the problem, not the problem itself: and, yet again, the state’s repressive aim and the fascist strategy are as one against the social movement. 

To return to the movement. The presence of far-right groups such as Zouaves Paris amongst the Gilets Jaunes was not merely a regime scarecrow. The group was there to hunt antifascists, and autonomist and revolutionary militants; to attack those people already targeted by police forces, due to their giving logistical and strategic support to the movement both during demonstrations and economic blockades and as an active self-defense force against the police. 

Part of the far-right’s military strategy was the attempt at infiltration of the services d’ordre (stewards), as revealed by the presence of infamous identitarian militant Victor Lenta as self-proclaimed member of the ‘Zouaves de service’. Once again, the fascist strategy plainly echoed a strategy for maintaining order. The far-right had to cohere the leading parts of the movement in order to attack antifascist groups, and impose an authoritarian framework onto demonstrations – in order to repress any and all outbursts, and muzzle those new forms of offensive struggle specific to the Gilets Jaunes, as they surged across the political field. 

This was the last real organizational effort of the fascist forces. By staking out an antifascist terrain, militants and anti-racist Gilets Jaunes chased out the far-right in Paris, Lyon, and elsewhere: their presence was unacceptable and non-negotiable. Through becoming an actor within the movement, ignoring injunctions to boycott it – often coming from ‘militants’ in our own camp, fooled by the state’s formula: ‘Gilets Jaunes equals Far-Right’ – our everyday efforts paid off. 

The struggle every Saturday over numerous weeks would not have happened without our close collaboration with groups of Gilets Jaunes at the local and national level – it did not only involve street clashes with fascist militants. Autonomous activists and antifascists placed themselves at the service of the movement, both strategically and logistically, accepting the numerous contradictions it involved, transforming and accepting being transformed, thereby breaking away from sclerotic forms of political contestation. 

For this mobilization, it was necessary to use new strategies and new forms of struggle: Physically confronting far-right groups, organizing the protection of their targets, and starting party and anti-racist rallies, and also participating in local general assemblies, being present on roundabouts and the blockades, mobilizing our skills and knowledge to organize anti-arrest groups, and protecting the rallies against the violence of forces of order. 

All of this was made possible thanks to the collaboration between comrades with often very different political horizons and, most importantly, thanks to our alliances with Gilets Jaunes at the local level, particularly the young gilets of Rungi in the south Paris region, without whom the successes of Paris would not have been possible. And it is precisely these alliances, these encounters, this political work that is targeted by the judicial process that has led to me being incarcerated today, and which places autonomous antifascism itself in the dock: a shared strategy of the far-right and the repressive institutions which via the law aims to attack the movement and its different protagonists. 

What I have written above is nothing new. For decades the French state and the far-right have been intimately linked in the defense of neo-colonial capitalism – since the Algerian war and the inauguration of the first state of emergency, which was again utilized to quell the revolts of the popular neighborhoods in 2005, and again against Muslims under the pretext of anti-terrorism. Now it is wielded against a social movement and society as a whole, following the constitutionalization of the emergency prerogatives used following the November 2015 attacks. 

If the convergence between working-class neighborhoods and the Gilets Jaunes remains, for the moment, in an embryonic state, we must remember that the state’s violence has for a long time linked the inhabitants of the banlieues with the fringes of the popular classes, as currently organized through the Gilets Jaunes, making them now prime targets. 

The violence falling on the Gilets Jaunes movement has been developed over many decades. The doctrine of ‘maintaining order’ was elaborated first during the repression of people struggling for freedom in the former French colonies – the BRAVs (mobile police units) are simply the successors of the BAC, as created to punish the internally-colonized people after the war for Algeria. The flash-balls and stun grenades that have so mutilated the Gilet Jaunes are instruments perfected over the years in the great cities’ banlieues. 

And behind all this violence, fascism watches, always ready to mobilize as an instrument of the same violence. Since the Organisation armée secrète1 the far-right has recruited amongst the police and military to commit attacks against Algerians. Since the 1980s – when fascist groups ‘rat-hunted’ foreigners – the baton has been handed to the forces of order, who simply retook the monopoly of racist violence – and now we see everyday police aggressions, which continue to humiliate, mutilate and kill the residents of working-class neighborhoods, because they are poor, black, Arabs, or Muslims. 

For a long time then, the police and fascist groups have shared this racist violence, and today it is this same violence, co-built by the far-right and the forces of order, which is mobilized against the Gilets Jaunes movement and its different actors. The police and the far-right collaborate on a shared project: to quash the popular revolts and defend the capitalist system. 

The last weeks have offered a concentrated spectacle of this process, one that never ceases to amaze. The police, radicalizing without restraint, increasingly act as an autonomous force: We think of Steve Canico of Nantes, killed during a music festival; of the illegal demonstration outside the HQ of La France Insoumise, as called by the far-right group Alliance; and, most recently, of the police’s questioning of Assa Traoré2 for holding a children’s self-defense event – yet another insult, in a trial without apparent end. At each step, the police get the unqualified support of the government; with each new crime, they can count on its systematic protection. 

Over the same period, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen3 and far-right commentator Éric Zemmour have competed over the viciousness of their rhetoric, and call without embarrassment – on television, watched by millions of French people – for pogroms against Muslims. 

And Macron, who did well presenting himself as a bulwark against the far-right, hasn’t only been content to blindly follow an unleashed police force, but has also decided to launch an anti-migrant campaign, using the literal words of the far-right.

The proper position is not, as passive, scared social-democrats think, to see the symptoms of some shadowy future, the stirrings of some coming fascism, against which the only defense is trust in self-described “progressives” and other defenders of a “republican front”. The situation before us is quite the contrary: fascism is not on the horizon, but a material tendency developing in the present, amongst even official institutions – and one that Macronism, far from serving as a bulwark against, is itself accelerating. 

It is with this authoritarian mutation of the state that the nascent social movements – in their tentative alliances and reciprocal reinforcement – will be confronted. 

I am not therefore only claiming my own freedom and the dropping of charges against the accused antifascists. Even if it is one of the fronts of struggle before us, it would be sterile and sectarian to remain centered only on ourselves – to ensure only the defense of our own forces – when the repression is crashing against the fringes, larger and larger, of the popular classes. If one of the great strengths of the state is the art of deception, of the deconstruction of truth, of the manipulation of facts and their mediatized rewriting, own our role as antifascists is to reaffirm the real, fundamental link which unites these current struggles, from antiracism to the struggles against precarity. 

We must not forget the Gilets Jaunes wounded and imprisoned in the jails of the state. I have come across many of them behind the bars, so often isolated, forgotten, destitute of any political support; and we must not forget all those who dwell in French prisons, locked up for what they are, for what they represent. If it is to be, all revolutionary struggle will be anti-carceral. 

We must not forget that all these things are linked in a project that we must fight, but also, and above all, we must not forget that all the words, all the texts, all the principled postures mean nothing if they are not concluded with acts. The sequence of emerging struggles must come from the alliances wove, from common fronts built over the years – for a popular self-defense of all revolts. 

Posted on

Degrees of Kevin Bacon from the PKK

Remi and Guy, a multi-tour volunteer foreign fighter in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, sit down for an extended interview around the history, political and economic structure, military situation, and future outlook for the project in Rojava.

Addressed are the most pressing critiques of the political structure adopted by the peoples of the region, with an eye toward marginalized ethnic and political groups, the relationship of the multitude of factions to one another and the population at large, and where things go from here. With the abrupt withdrawal of US forces and the attendant shift in the uneasy balance of forces in Syria, Turkey has invaded, Russia has vacillated between intervention and aloofness, and the fate of NES may lie in the balance.

Since recording, events have developed quickly. We will release an update interview in the coming days.

Posted on

Criticism and Self-Criticism: Red Guards or Iron Guards?

As socialists, we need to have each other’s backs. We all have our differences and they are often of a serious nature. Yet in the end, we should aim to be on the same side of the barricades. The task of building a better world leaves no time for the narcissism of small differences endlessly dividing our own camp. But who exactly is in our own camp? What happens when a group crosses the line and ends up on the other side of the barricades? An example of a group that has done this is the combination of front groups and collectives associated with the organization Red Guards Austin, or Committee for the Reconstitution of the Communist Party USA. Konstantin Sverdlov argues that groups like the Red Guards have fully crossed the line to the point where they deserve to be treated as if they are class enemies just like fascists. By violently attacking other leftist organizations the Red Guards have joined the camp of the class enemy. We must point our guns at the enemy, not at those who fight at our side, even if they use methods we find ineffective or ideologies we find misguided. Yesterday was the anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. John Brown knew to take aim at the slaveocracy, not the moderate Republicans with reformist views. In this sense, we must be like John Brown. 

In the past, I was an outspoken defender of the organization known as Red Guards Austin (RGA) from state repression.  Despite many differences with them, I believed that they were genuine revolutionaries who stood on the side of the working class. As of October 12th, 2019, this current can no longer be considered anything but an anti-working class organization bent on the subversion of the class struggle. The Kansas City affiliate of the Red Guards, moving beyond their usual disruptive and sectarian tactics, physically assaulted and hospitalized an anti-war disabled veteran and socialist during an event highlighting indigenous resistance to the United States. Communists, socialists, and anyone who fights for the life and liberty of the oppressed need to be prepared to physically defend themselves against this force that is, from the perspective of the working class, indistinguishable from fascism. Defending the Red Guards and their members is equivalent to defending Patriot Prayer and its members. No genuine communist would ever lose sleep over Joey Gibson facing repression because he, like the Red Guards, in practice serves the state and capitalist interests. That isn’t to say we should support the state repressing them or anyone. We should not. The state is a principal enemy. But we should treat conflicts between the state and these groups as a contradiction between our enemies. Though writing this places a target on my back, I believe it’s my duty to rectify the errors of my previous position. 

Why is it necessary to talk about the Red Guards? To many on the left, they seem like a cartoonishly irrelevant sect of LARPers. But to those who have dealt with them for an extended period, they are a worryingly dangerous problem. Even though their numbers are small, the Red Guards have the potential to play an outsized role in suppressing the communist movement in the United States. Our movement is only now rebounding after decades of defeat and decline. It remains fragile. While alone a group like the Red Guards could not hope to stem the tide of genuine communist organizing, they have the state and fascist as comrades-in-arms in their goal of liquidating all other communist groups. In their eyes, anyone on the left who is not a Red Guard is a social fascist who is misleading the workers, when in fact it is their own sect whose tactics place them on the same road as actual fascist organizations. All socialist organizations, regardless of how much we disagree with each other’s lines, must stand together to defend themselves. The Red Guards once seemed to be in that camp, but have instead thrown their lot in with the interests of the FBI. By looking at what led the Red Guards to this position we can understand why we must stand up to them and how.  

The Red Guards were founded in Austin, Texas, in 2015. They formed from a split in a previous Maoist party-building attempt, the history of which is not relevant. Their initial organizational work consisted of “serve the people” charity and transgender rights activism through their front Revolutionary Alliance of Trans People Against Capitalism — ATX. They quickly gained popularity by denouncing the much-hated but hegemonic International Socialist Organization among activists in Austin. By taking a radical posture in both polemic and street theater, RGA was able to metastasize throughout the country, mainly by splitting pre-existing small Maoist collectives. These efforts included grooming members of rival groups at a cadre training camp and sending them back with orders to co-opt the organization or, failing that, split and wreck it. Meanwhile, RGA took to denouncing and harassing any other socialist organization that came onto their radar, from the Party of Socialism and Liberation and the former Austin Socialist Collective to the Democratic Socialists of America. Their affiliates like Red Guards LA have disrupted tenant organizing efforts because they occurred on what they consider to be their “turf,” and in St. Louis have left dead animals on the doorsteps of rival Maoists and have attempted to jump them. Eventually, they would come to abandon their militantly pro-trans line in favor of a semi-transphobic position where gender-based oppression is entirely rooted in how “female” someone looks, rebranding  RATPAC-ATX first as Stonewall Militant Front, and then the Popular Women’s Movement. This corresponded with taking the side of a transphobic split from the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada. Their coup de grace at this point was placing pig heads around their city in a misguided anti-electoral stunt. The litany of absurd, pathetic, and deranged actions carried out by this current is too long to list here, but there is no reason to think they will stop. The Red Guards believe that they are creating a “new power” that stands as a pole against capitalist society by adopting what are essentially street gang tactics to build influence from neighborhood to neighborhood. Even as this strategy is unlikely to win them significant gains against capitalist society, it has put them on a collision course with any communist who organizes in any area the Red Guards consider theirs.    

As much as they paint themselves as on the bleeding edge of revolutionary politics, the tactics of the Red Guards are nothing new. Many erstwhile communist organizations began their descent into reaction along this well-worn sectarian road. Any hope that they will reverse course and return to the fold of genuine revolutionary organizations is misplaced. It’s easy to bandy about words like “cult” to describe the Red Guards, but, as accurate as it may be, it’s necessary to look at the history of organizations that have engaged in similar praxis to see where the RG network will end up. We can’t just use a tidy little term to avoid thinking deeply about this threat facing anyone who fights for the working class wherever it exists. 

The forebearer of the Red Guards is the Peruvian Communist Party, popularly known as the Shining Path. The Red Guards and many other Maoists uphold this organization as the pinnacle of “revolutionary science” and seek to emulate it despite its failure to overthrow the Peruvian government. Chaired by Abimael Guzmán, who the party called Presidente Gonzalo, the PCP left a deep scar across the face of Peruvian society. Responsible for atrocities against indigenous people, rival communists, and urban civilians, the Pathists rapidly fell apart when their leader was captured in a government raid. The Peruvian Communist Party began as a movement of students who went into the countryside and began a struggle on behalf of the peasants against the tyrannical government. This won them considerable popular support and loyalty, at least initially, but they were unable to make inroads with the labor movement or many pre-existing indigenous organizations. Because they had a Manichean view that said if you weren’t with them, you were against them, they began a campaign of murder and terror against socialists and indigenous leaders who would not submit to Presidente Gonazalo. This included the mass killing and torture of villagers in Lucanamarca on April 3rd, 1983, the assassination of Marxist union leaders, and the use of slave labor. To be sure, the violence of the Shining Path paled in comparison to that of the fascist Fujimori government, which often blamed its own atrocities on the Pathists, but this does not erase the actions of the PCP. At the end of the day, despite struggling against the bourgeois state, the PCP’s actions supported its survival. 

Why do the Red Guards look to this organization for guidance? It can’t be for a successful model revolution since all of the territorial gains the Shining Path made were erased. Even within the Maoist movement, the Communist Party of the Philippines has successfully maintained itself against the bourgeois state much longer, as have the Indian Naxalites, while the Nepalese Communists were able to successfully overthrow a reactionary monarchy. It is because the Red Guards confuse violence in itself with revolution. The Red Guards posture with guns at protests and resort to beating up socialist rivals because they believe that “power grows from the barrel of a gun.” They also believe that “correct ideas” are what determines class character rather than material forces, which then justifies their belief that so-called “revisionists” are an existential threat to the working class. This idealist philosophy is rooted in Mao’s self-justification for the failure of the Peoples’ Republic of China to move beyond bureaucratic capitalist forms. Mao blamed the degeneration of the revolution on a struggle between two sets of ideas — the “socialist road” and the “capitalist road” — because he couldn’t recognize that the organizing class he was a member of had, in itself, competing material interests with the working class. Elevating the struggle of ideas within the socialist movement to an armed principle means the Red Guards will only intensify their degree of violence until anyone they perceive as a misleader of the workers submits or dies. 

Like Peru, Japan had its own violent and destructive Maoist movement. The Japanese United Red Army  (URA) focused its violence principally on its own membership, though a cadre that grew to 40 members continued a sustained international terror campaign against civilians (in alliance with the PFLP). Established on July 15, 1971, the United Red Army was a merger of the terrorist Japanese Red Army Faction and an ultra-left split from the Japanese Communist Party. Beginning with 29 members, the URA would come to murder 12 of them within a year of their founding during a military-style training retreat. Most were killed for lacking sufficient revolutionary discipline, or as the URA called it, “death by defeatism.” Some were killed for questioning the ideas of the organization’s leaders. They faced violent “struggle sessions” where the dissenter was beaten and verbally abused until they gave a satisfactory “self-criticism” for their wrong ideas. The corpses of several members were found tied to posts with evidence of beating. It’s not an exaggeration to compare the Red Guards with this group given they espouse essentially the same rhetoric, have a proven history of violence towards leftists with “wrong ideas,” and engage in similar adventurist “military” exercises. Though there is no known instance of a Red Guards organization murdering its own members, the dynamics that exist within their collectives are the ideal breeding ground for such outcomes. 

Though radically differing in ideological content, another group with a similar trajectory to the Red Guards is the now-fascistic LaRouche movement. Slightly bloodier than their Maoist counterparts, the LaRouche movement, which began in the National Caucus of Labor Committees (a split from the Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party), has its own sordid history of torture, sectarian violence, and destructive behavior. Believing that they were the only true Marxists and that all other socialist groups, like the Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party and the Progressive Labor Party, were trash that needed to be swept aside, the NCLC organized a campaign of violent assaults they called Operation Mop-Up. They hoped to win command of the radical student movement, centered around the Students for a Democratic Society, and earnestly saw their several-hundred member strong organization as the true vanguard of the working class poised to lead the workers’ movement to the rapid overthrow of the US government. As they grew more isolated from mainstream socialist organizations and class-conscious workers, the organization began to degenerate. Seeing international assassination plots around every corner, their leader Lyndon LaRouche organized brainwashing sessions to root out alleged mental conditioning and prepare the minds of members to accept a new socialist consciousness. These sessions were not unlike the struggle sessions Shining Path–inspired Marxist-Leninist-Maoists conduct in form. The LaRouche movement would come to ally with a branch of the Klu Klux Klan, pro-life activists, and right-wing Black Nationalists, eventually settling on becoming a front for the Trump movement. Although the LaRouche movement doesn’t share Maoist roots with the Red Guards, there are Maoist groups that have followed a similar trajectory. For instance, the Angolan Maoist party UNITA since has evolved into a rightist conservative nationalist party after having allied itself to the United States and pro-apartheid forces for the sake of defeating the pro-Soviet and pro-Cuban Marxist-Leninist MPLA. 

To compare the Red Guards to fascists is no light thing, and could easily be mistaken for the fascist-jacking their network does to justify their attacks. But if one examines the actual history of fascism, it’s impossible to not see striking parallels. The term fascist is now near-universally used to describe far-right authoritarian-nationalist movements whose concrete politics are often completely at odds with each other. However, the origins of fascism lie in the left. There are many antecedents of fascism, like the Yellow Socialists who embraced chauvinistic and reactionary positions while claiming to represent the working class, but it is not until the crisis of the First World War that the movement truly emerged, where a split between the anti-war socialists and pro-war socialists gave birth to fascism. Drawing on the theories of French Marxist  and syndicalist theorist Georges Sorel, the prominent German Marxist intellectual Werner Sombart, the Romantic social corporatist Gabriele D’Annunzio, and many others, a mix of anarchists, left-wing socialists, young reactionary hooligans, and others coalesced into a new movement. Above all else, the fundamental principle of fascism was the glory and purity of violence. It was a movement that was at once hyper-modernist, nostalgic, proletarian, petty-bourgeois, anti-democratic, mass-democratic, misogynistic, feminist, liberal, illiberal, and so on. Above all, the worship of the gun united them. In 1919, the Fascist Party was a left-wing organization that stood for worker participation in industry, a generous welfare state, the abolition of the monarchy, anti-clericalism and so on as the first step to an ostensibly socialist transformation of society.  By 1922, the party was a far-right organization bent on the suppression of trade unions, allied with the Church, and in the pocket of the bourgeoisie. Likewise, other interwar fascist organizations like Romania’s Iron Guards promoted themselves as anti-capitalist and uniquely hostile to the socialist parties. They claimed to fight for “The People” rather than the working class, which in the context of a non-oppressed nation like Romania or the United States can only express reactionary content. Maoists would object to being compared to the universally despised fascists, but beyond their shared fetishism of violence, they have a common intellectual history as well. The founder of MLM, Gonzalo, the so-called Fourth Sword of Marxism, was profoundly influenced by Georges Sorel. It is from Sorel that Gonzalo got his embrace of the cult of personality, his fixation on the power of violence for purification, and voluntarist attitudes toward revolution. And it isn’t as though having “correct” (Maoist) ideas prevents an organization from capitulation to the bourgeoisie. The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) followed the long and distinguished tradition that unites the Marxist-Leninist AKEL of Cyprus, the former Marxist Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) of Spain, the German Social Democratic Party, Italian fascists, and many others in capitulating to the bourgeoisie when they took power. It isn’t a question of tactics or ideas, it is a question of who your guns are pointed at: the boss, or your fellow workers. This does not mean the Red Guards are fascist, at least not yet, but they are fellow travelers with fascism.

In saying that ideology and tactics don’t matter in this context we should not make the mistake of falling into economism. Much might be made of the predominantly student makeup of the Red Guards, but such a composition is common among leftist sects who pose no threat to anyone at all, be they other communists or the capitalist system. It is also important to note that Maoism contains within it the seeds of other trajectories that are either genuinely communist or right-opportunist. The Rainbow Coalition, the Communist Party of Nepal, RCP-USA, and many other Maoist groups became reformists and social democrats in actual practice while speaking the same theoretical language as the Red Guards. Likewise, the Black Panther Party and Communist Party of the Philippines stuck with a proletarian communist orientation. The reason the RGs, like the LaRouchites, have degenerated into, at best, unwitting agents of the bourgeoisie is the emergent logic created by sociological factors. These factors were established by ideological imperatives — criticism and self-criticism’s elevation to a ritual beyond its practical use, the fetishism of the gun, and dogmatism — but the same tendencies can be induced by many other causes. During the Third Period, the CPUSA had members like the black poet Richard Wright beaten up for failing to denounce Trotsky quickly and eagerly enough and sent members to die in Russia under Stalin. But unlike the CPUSA, which faced enormous external pressures both from the American bourgeois dictatorship and from the Stalinist Comintern, the Red Guards have created such dynamics all on their own and lack countervailing currents like a strong democratic internal culture or a real connection to a working-class base. Where the CP could course-correct, the Red Guards cannot. 

If historical materialism is our guide, we can see that the tragedies of past movements manifest themselves again in the farce that is the Red Guards. But no amount of laughter and mockery will insulate the workers’ movement from physical threats. The Red Guards along with their various above- and below-ground organizations are functionally no different from fascist organizations like Patriot Prayer who seek to bust up any socialist organizing regardless of its strategy. On the same day that Red Guards Kansas City beat up a reformist, an unidentified assailant murdered an anarchist with a car in Portland. Tomorrow it might be a Trotskyist, syndicalist, or non-Gonzaloist Maoist who is beaten up or even murdered. Though many of us might not fear death for ourselves, our families, comrades, and fellow workers are under the same shadow. Fighters for liberty have no choice but to stand together across tendencies, even with people we might personally detest, in solidarity from these threats. The Red Guards of the USA are nothing like their namesake: militant students who fought against an increasingly bureaucratic state. Instead, they are following in the footsteps of the Iron Guard as they do the dirty work of the bourgeoisie. These are our Years of Lead, and regardless of our actions, tensions will only intensify. In practical terms, this means reaching out to other members of the movement, across organizations, and building ties of solidarity and agreements of mutual defense. To defend against the dual threat of fascists and their pseudo-revolutionary fellow travelers, the working-class movement will have to put aside its differences and form a united front. Wobblies, Democratic Socialists, Leninists in the Marxist Center, Trotskyists and so on all have differences, but will all be on the same side of the barricades. And the barricades may be going up sooner than many perhaps expected. 

 

Posted on

Why Define Fascism?: In Defence of Making Distinctions

Jacob Smith argues that if the left wishes to take fascism seriously we shouldn’t use the term lightly but with precision. 

Italian dictator and Prime Minister Benito Mussolini reviews troops, 29 October 1937

Some weeks ago Natasha Lennard, Intercept correspondent and author of a forthcoming book from Verso, Being Numerous: Essays On Non-Fascist Life, was making the rounds on lefty podcasts. While fascism was the topic of her conversations, Lennard pointedly declined to ever define the term or engage with the debate over its meaning and application. She seemed opposed, as a matter of principle, to narrow down a definition past mere linguistic descriptivism—treating “fascism” as “that which is called fascism”. I’m not sure what to make of a political writer who refuses to define her terms, and I am uncertain why anything that follows from that refusal should be taken seriously, but it would be a mistake to see her distaste for making distinctions merely as a personal idiosyncrasy. Declining to define the term “fascism” or defining it in extremely broad and all-encompassing ways has become common from the liberal center to the radical fringe.

Few political labels are as evocative or incendiary as “fascism.” Within some circles, it approaches being a generic derogatory term. Historically, however, the term is highly specific. It came out of a post-World War One, right-wing Italian nationalist movement, and the word itself refers to ancient Roman symbolism. Because of the close political alliance between the Fascist government of Italy and the Nazi party of Germany, “fascism” became a general term for violent far-right movements in Europe after WWI, usually including the governments of Hungary, Spain, and occasionally collaborationist states like Vichy France. The resemblance between these far-right movements emerged from similar circumstances: massive social upheaval and, most importantly, defeated workers’ revolutions. The historical markers of fascism include heavily armed paramilitary forces seizing state power and imposing brutal, anti-labor, anti-communist, and usually racist and sexist, regimes. Anti-semitism was common in historical fascist states but not ubiquitous and not limited to those fascist states.

In order for the term “fascism” to be useful, it cannot demand the exact replication of the historical circumstances of the 1920s and 30s, but it also cannot be so broad that it includes any and every violent, repressive, right-wing state. The term cannot be useful if it applies equally to Italy under Benito Mussolini, Germany under Otto von Bismarck, and India under the British Empire. It does not enhance our political theory to have a catch-all term for every form of capitalism that rejects liberal democracy.

Highly authoritarian governments with violent police forces are common in historical fascism, colonial empires, and military dictatorships. Brutally violent law enforcement and authoritarian dictatorship are far too common to be considered a mark of fascism. To include under the banner of “fascism” both Brazil under Michel Temer and the French Empire under Napoleon makes the term incoherent and meaningless. More importantly, it ignores the well-trod history of both liberal democracy and republicanism producing authoritarian police states, as in Brazil, and dictatorships producing otherwise progressive and liberal regimes, as in France. Just as there is no contradiction between police violence and capitalist liberal democracy, authoritarian dictatorships have not always had the other repressive and reactionary features associated with fascism.

The same is true of extreme, state-sanctioned, racism and sexism. In recent years China has carried out a project of ethnic replacement in Tibet and Xinjiang. Women are formal second-class citizens in the Gulf States. Legal segregation remained in full effect in the American South during Roosevelt’s New Deal. There is no form of political rule under class society that has not, at one time or another, produced a brutally racist and sexist state.

Although antisemitism is often considered a marker of fascism and most self-described fascists today are viciously anti-semitic, anti-semitism was actually the particular focus of only one historical fascist state, Germany, and prior to their defeat and the publicization of their crimes, anti-semitism was completely mainstream in European and American society. In order to understand the role that anti-semitism played in Nazi Germany, we have to have a deeper historical understanding of anti-semitism. Although it is often considered a form of racial or ethnic bias, the long history of anti-semitism in European society shows that it is not just a generic animus. Jewish people were not just shunned or ostracized as an underclass in the manner of racial minorities in the US or Dalits in India, they were feared and hated as an internal enemy of Christian Europe. This made Jewish people an ideal scapegoat for the far-right, as they could be attacked both as outsiders, subversive others, and as a fifth column, undermining the nation from within. Nazi ideology made anti-semitism one of its central components, but the ideas that underlie it and made the Holocaust possible were widespread, as evidenced by Jewish refugees being turned away from Britain, the US, and Canada, on explicitly anti-semitic grounds.

Although ethnic nationalism is not exclusive to fascism, a unique form of it is present in all varieties of fascism–from the 20th century through to today. Fascism in Germany and Italy held up “the nation” or “the people” as the right-wing answer to communist internationalism. By erasing the differences in interests between classes and proposing other antagonisms, ethnic or national, forming a political identity around the nation state allows for the creation of powerful and durable cross-class alliances. For the Nazis, this was an alliance between Germany’s industrial capitalists and middle class of shopkeepers, army officers, middle managers and government bureaucrats– an alliance that was able to crush the German labor movement and their political parties, the Social Democrats and Communists.

Against the internationalism of the Soviet Union and the German Communist Party, the Nazis constructed a radical nationalism, and the rest of Nazi ideology follows that pattern. With prominent Jewish leaders like Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky, communism was smeared as a Jewish plot, and the Nazis came to see the fight against communism and the fight against the Jewish population of central Europe as synonymous. In response to the radical egalitarianism of communism, Nazism became obsessed with societal hierarchies, which had both a racial component, the superiority of “Aryan” Germans to other races, and a sexual component, reinforcing the traditional societal roles of men and women and attempting to exterminate all sexual preferences and gender presentations that did not conform to those roles.

Repressive right-wing governments throughout modern history have displayed this kind of generic, across-the-board, reactionary, revanchist conservatism. What is unique about historical fascism is the class of people enacting it. In both Germany and Italy, the industrial capitalists materially and politically backed fascist movements, but the actual tool that expressed fascism’s power was the armed militias, the street-fighting formations that broke up the workers’ movement and forced the abdication of the liberal democratic governments. This is a different social force which results in a different political system than superficially similar projects enacted by military dictatorships and traditional capitalist parties.

Understanding fascism as an insurgent middle-class response to the threat of workers’ revolution helps explain the revival of fascism today. What we see is not a fully formed “fascist” movement, but glimmers of the same reactionary middle-class energy that animated the Blackshirts and the Brownshirts. To some extent this is a conscious development: organizations like the Proud Boys and the patriot militias look back to a time when their class defended a bourgeois order too “decadent and decayed”, to defend itself from the communist threat. Today, we do not see a fully developed fascist movement, just as we do not see a revolutionary workers’ movement, but both exist in embryonic form. The fascist organizations that do exist are fractious, tiny, and weak and they should not be conflated with the much larger, and less politically developed, right-wing populist movement that sees a democratic road to their objectives.

This is why it is a mistake to see Donald Trump and other far-right Republicans as “fascists.” They give cover to fascists, fascists are members of their coalition, but they are still happy to rely primarily on the owners of American capital, just as their supposed opponents, the Democrats, do. Trump was put in office by white, affluent, middle-class American homeowners voting for him, not by 200,000 armed militants marching on Washington DC. A political analysis that refuses to differentiate between those two things will lead to absurd and disastrous conclusions.

I have been involved in several attempts to form anti-fascist coalitions in my area and each has come to nothing as we were unable to agree, and barely even able to discuss, what the current threat of fascism consists of. There is a natural desire to unite in the face of our enemies, but political practices flow from political theory. If we do not carefully define “fascism” we cannot understand it, predict its development, and defeat it before it becomes the boot heel on our necks. If “fascism” is in power today, then the appropriate tactics are to organize workers’ militias and community self-defense organizations, bring together heavily armed and disciplined cadres, and directly assault fascists wherever we find them. If a real, fully developed, fascist movement is on the march, then socialists, communists, anarchists, and all other class-conscious workers are in a street war. This is objectively not the situation we face, but many dedicated anti-fascists act as if it is, and then express confusion and disdain when a different evaluation of contemporary fascism produces different tactics.

This is not to say that street mobilizations against fascists are unimportant. Public fascist organizing should be shut down, or at least meaningfully opposed, whenever possible. But even in these counter-demonstrations, our analysis of fascism is vital. Because the goal of these demonstrations is ultimately more propagandistic than combative, the opponent is “fascist ideas,” not “these particular fascists,” small bands of autonomous militants ready to punch some Nazis are far less valuable than masses of discipline demonstrators.

The real threat of fascism today—with the return of inter-imperial rivalries and the world economic situation continuing to teeter on the edge of a major collapse—is fascist ideas and organizations gaining a mass following. The threat is not that bands of reactionaries are off in the hills practicing marksmanship, but that the working class remains unprepared to act in its own interests. We lack mass workers’ parties, militant unions, or anything approaching mass revolutionary consciousness, and building those parties, those unions, and that consciousness is the best way to fight fascism today.

 

Posted on

Brick by Brick: An Appeal to Strength

CLR Gainz argues that the left needs physical as well as mental strength if we are going to be victorious in making revolution and defeating reaction. 

Soviet Cosmonauts in training

Our world is one governed not only by social but physical forces; this is a lesson reinforced by the experience of class struggle. Because enough ink continues to be spilled on the topic of social forces, the purpose of this article is to address the more overlooked aspect of physical force, or strength, that is, our primary means of mediating with nature. In the early chapters of volume one of Marx’s Capital, we learn that what makes humanity essentially different from the animal kingdom is that we are not only able to formulate complex ideas and models in their minds, but also apply these designs physically. Labor in this way could be described as that kinetic chain of applied strength involving the full cooperation of our central nervous system which recruits our joints, ligaments, and muscles to literally materialize the world around us. It is no wonder that throughout the latter half of the 19th century in Czarist Russia, both the early socialists and liberals paid significant attention not only to humanity’s mental development but its physical faculties as well. Sadly, it remains less of a wonder—perhaps more of a frustration—as to why we modern-day socialists are apt to neglect the development of our bodies. Three brief themes will be touched upon as an appeal to get readers to consider strength training as a political activity, its historic importance, and its lost legacy in the Soviet Union.

Strength training is not only a significant means of becoming healthier but, by reorganizing the composition of bodies to make them less fat to more muscle, also represents the physical manifestation of a disciplined person. One of the important principles I’ve taken from my involvement as an organizer and party socialist into strength training and bodybuilding has been a willingness to accept the shortcomings of my analyses and actions. In bodybuilding in particular, in order to tack on lean mass, you have to come to grips with your muscular deficiencies and train hard until you reach the correct size and proportions. The sport also requires you to be patient with yourself and have the humility to ask others what they think you’re lacking. Building muscle is achieved by the correct execution of form in every exercise for the purposes of causing micro-tears in the fibers of the targeted muscle group; you train through your own exhaustion—especially when it begins to hurt the most. The same approach goes for the struggle over correct political lines as we commit ourselves to understand dense German texts.  Any socialist who has made the journey through the volumes of Marx’s Capital can recall how much our heads hurt and the number of times we had to occasionally put down Volume II to rub our eyes, but we nevertheless got through them by sheer force of will grounded in the desire to comprehend the world around us. We mastered it until we were able to communicate all of its nuances in a direct manner for the purpose of becoming better organizers and better comrades. Had we let our frustrations overwhelm us, we would never have been able to grow intellectually. The same goes for training, as the failure to be consistent will simply leave our muscles to atrophy. A disciplined mind will work best with a disciplined body. We should begin to balance our desire to read Marx and Engels with a similar aggressiveness when we train.

Little is written by Marx, Engels, and Lenin on the importance of physical strength. There are several passages written by Marx which decry the ways in which the labor process depletes the physical health of the worker, but that’s about it. As previously mentioned, an existing Russian fascination with physical development did exist, which lent itself to the presence of “indigenous” forms of Russian strength training. Interestingly, these Russian exercises were molded in some ways as a response against the more synchronic movements on display in Western European gymnasiums (think CrossFit). Yet ultimately some of these Western methods and styles of training did penetrate Czarist lands. Russian bourgeois society, however, generally frowned upon strength training and gymnastics as “unproductive” activities, and thus discouraged Russian youth from participating in them. Kinesiology and strength theory quickly fell into the domain of subversive activity in the years leading up to the 1905 Revolution. One of the chief founders of theoretical anatomy, Piotr Franzevich Lesgaft, whose Society for the Encouragement of the Physical Development of Student Youth (est. 1892) engaged in outreach and recruitment of the children of the poor to strength training and gymnastics. The Society’s working-class orientation allowed it to make strong inroads in the industrial centers of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Odessa where it also began to cross-fertilize with socialist ideas. Eventually, Czarist authorities targeted the Society and banned it after unrest began to emanate from its floors. Lesgaftian theories and practices, however, were rehabilitated and found acceptance among Bolsheviks, especially when it came to the importance of the defense of the early Soviet state under siege from external and internal enemies.

When Leon Trotsky organized the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army through the Narkom of the Ministry of War in 1918, he did so with the understanding that the defectors from the Czarist military apparatus would not be sufficient to actually win the Civil War. He thus drew upon the tens of thousands of industrial workers and peasants to comprise the Red Army’s main fighting force, allowing much of the thin layer of previous WWI draftees to take command, in addition to former White officers. A working-class base that was ritually brutalized in the streets, as well as in factories and at home, degraded by excessive alcohol consumption, disease, and so on, were able to muster the moral and physical strength to defeat the invading imperialist forces and the Whites. In the years following the decisive Red Army victory, Lenin would stress the importance of the physical health of the working class at times as a passing metaphor. But make no mistake: sabotaged infrastructure, maligned cities, and so on, required the total physical investment of all inhabitants of Soviet territory, not simply its working class.

While much of Soviet society from the 1930s onward were rife with the assorted horrors of Stalinism, there were also some impressive periods of research in the field of kinesiology and exercise science. Beginning in the 1960s but especially in the 1970s, Soviet kinesiologists developed groundbreaking theories and protocols on the biomechanics of the human body. Particularly focusing on the body in its kinetic state in the sport of Olympic-style weightlifting, AS Medvedyev, Pavel Tsatsouline, YV Verkhoshansky, AN Vorbeyev, among others, extensively researched the most efficient ways in which the human body could create explosive dynamic movement in transporting weight from a resting state and over the head. What is arguably more interesting, however, was the dialectical-like system of adaptation to strength gains and recovery. What the Soviets did that was so innovative was to view lifting in the long-term, seeing the body as an organism which requires adequate rest and recovery. In an almost spiral-like pattern, the heaviest lift was quickly proceeded by weeks of building up ground strength by lifting small weights and more of them, until one worked up to what is known as a one-rep max, or one repetition of a lifter’s maximum load. Today, virtually all protocols in the sports of Olympic weightlifting and powerlifting use some variant of these Soviet methods. In contrast, Western-based strength protocols were reflective of a linear progression model which most of us who frequent the gym are familiar with, where a lifter gradually stacks heavier and heavier weights with every workout. Needless to say, there was never much of a science behind it. The Soviets began to quickly surpass their American counterparts in all strength sports due to their scientific approach towards lifting.

Without physical strength, we are powerless against reaction.

It was not until American lifters like Andrew Charniga and later Louie Simmons began to adopt these methods for Anglophone audiences beginning in the 1980s, and with great success. Today, Louie Simmons’ Westside Barbell, based in Columbus, Ohio, is billed as the world’s strongest gym—all due to Simmons’s study of and improvement on the Soviet breakthroughs in human biomechanics. Yet unsurprisingly, Simmons and others were not necessarily apt to take in much of the politics of their Soviet predecessors and colleagues at the time, merely borrowing their methods for the sake of making American athletes more competitive. The irony couldn’t be clearer: groundbreaking strength theories that developed in a state with historic roots in a socialist revolution have been popularized and taken far more seriously by the American far-right than the radical left.

Where does this “strength gap” leave us in the here and now? It is more than just that we have completely ignored the achievements of Soviet science in the realm of strength training, an eminently practical field; we have also deprioritized the enormous potential of untapped strength which lies in our genes. One of the biggest wake-up calls I can remember happened several years again in Queens, NY, when several activists coming out of an event at night were savagely attacked and beaten by one fascist. I wondered then as I do now: how was it possible that three or four people were defeated by one fascist? I was angry, not just for what happened, but at our movement, for not emphasizing training and defense. In times where large numbers of us take the streets to protest, we can’t guarantee the safety of ourselves or our comrades if we refuse to train and adapt our bodies to become stronger than they presently are. Building a strong socialist force ought not to simply be a passing metaphor for successful organizing; it must be interpreted quite literally. For if we’re ever going to hold the red flag over parliaments and congresses worldwide, then we better possess the actual strength to do so.

Posted on

Fighting Fascism: Communist Resistance to the Nazis, 1928-1933

The failure of the German left to unite against Hitler is often used as a warning to those who fail to build unity with liberals in order to stop the far-right. Why did the German Communists and Social-Democrats not unite against the Nazis? John K argues not all blame can be placed on the Communists for their failure to build a proper united front, as their uneasy relationship with the Social-Democrats was based on the treacherous behavior of the Social-Democrats themselves. We publish this despite believing that the reductionist and ultra-left politics promoted by the Stalin-dominated Comintern deserve heavy critique and that ultimately the party made major strategic and political errors in leading the working class with its lack of democratic flexibility and exercise. 

Meeting of the Roter Frontkämpferbund, or Red Front, a Communist paramilitary group in Berlin 1928.

On the night of February 27th, 1933 in Nazi Germany, not even one month after Adolf Hitler became Reich Chancellor, the Reichstag, home of Germany’s parliament, was destroyed in a fire. This fire, an act of arson, was a pivotal and tragic moment for the German left. In Hitler’s “Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State,” issued the following day “as a defensive measure against Communist Acts of violence endangering the state,” the Communists were blamed for the terrorist act.1

With this decree, Hitler began a process that effectively crushed any and all potential political resistance to the Nazi regime. The left, not just the German Communist Party, but also the German Socialist Party which had enjoyed national prominence during the Weimar Republic years, was silenced. In a matter of months following the decree, Germany’s political left was assaulted by the Nazi state, and its leaders sent to Concentration Camps or into exile. In the months and years leading up to the Nazi triumph over the left, a unified right developed in Germany while the left remained divided. In particular, the Communists ( the Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) was never willing to work in an alliance with the Social-Democrats ( the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD). While both parties drew on Marxism for their ideological platform, the more radical KPD considered the SPD to be a social fascist enemy. Thus, while the right was unifying behind the Nazis during the 1928-1933 period, the KPD devoted its resources to fighting both the Social-Democrats and the Nazis.

Why did the KPD adopt such a course of action? Many scholars, such as Beatrix Herlemann argue that the KPD had evolved, by the late 1920s, into a Stalinist party whose interests were subservient to the orders of the Communist International. As Herlemann argues, the KPD “followed without reservation the Comintern’s political line – namely the “social fascism” thesis launched in 1928 to 1929, by which the KPD directed its entire force toward the fight against social democracy and enormously neglected the growing danger of National Socialism.”2 The view taken by Herlemann is not without merit. The KPD leadership did advocate action against the SPD, and even reached out to Nazi rank-and-file workers for an alliance against the SPD Union leadership.3 

It is wrong, however, to assume that the KPD devoted all of its resources to a fight against the SPD and neglected the Nazi threat. On the contrary, most of the political violence practiced by the KPD during 1928-1933 was directed against the Nazis, not the Socialists. It is also incorrect to assume that the divide between the KPD and the SPD was entirely motivated by the orders of the Comintern. Certainly, the Comintern heavily influenced the KPD’s course of action, but deep divisions had existed between the KPD and the SPD from the very day that the KPD became a political entity. Further, the differences between the two parties were not merely ideological. KPD and SPD membership came from different economic spheres, they lived in different neighborhoods, and they experienced the Weimar Republic in different ways. The SPD, for much of the Republic’s existence, was one of the main parties of government. When the KPD accused the SPD of Social Fascism, they were not targeting another radical left party; they were focusing their criticisms on one of the most powerful political entities in the Republic. Related to this, the SPD had in its position of power pursued repressive tactics against the KPD. Thus, the KPD’s view of the SPD as social fascists was not merely the result of ideological dogmatism but was in fact shaped by the actual experience of the KPD in the Weimar Republic.

To fully understand the schism between the KPD and the SPD, one must turn to the fall of Imperial Germany at the end of the First World War in 1918, and the revolutionary period that followed, before turning to the formation of the Weimar Republic in 1919. Before the First World War, the Marxist left was united as the SPD. By the time the Great War began, the SPD was the most popular political party in Germany and had gained more seats than any other political party in the Reichstag. The unified SPD, however, was internally divided between those who wanted to achieve the party’s ideological goals through participation in the government and those who wanted to actively pursue Revolution. The tension between these two groups erupted after SPD delegates to the Reichstag, representing the more moderate wing of the party, voted unanimously in favor of Germany entering the First World War. The more radical elements of the party that opposed this action, who were eventually cast out of the SPD in 1917, became the genesis for the KPD.

As Revolution erupted in Germany once it became clear that the war was lost, the more radical group of Marxists, calling themselves Spartacus League, issued their November 26th Manifesto declaring that “the revolution has made its entry into Germany. The masses of the soldier, who for four years were driven to the slaughterhouse… and the masses of workers… have revolted.”4 While the Spartacus League declared a revolution, the majority of the SPD continued to work with the crumbling German State. The split between Germany’s left, apparent with the issuance of the Spartacus Leagues Manifesto, became final when Marxist leader Rosa Luxemburg authored the “Founding Manifesto of the Communist Party of Germany, [KPD].” In the manifesto, Luxemburg declared “that it is time to shake ourselves [the KPD] free of the views that have guided the official policy of the German social democracy down to our own day, of the views that share responsibility for what happened on August 4, 1914.”5 Luxemburg further asserted that “what passed officially for Marxism [in the SPD] became a cloak for all possible kinds of opportunism, for persistent shirking of the revolutionary class struggle, for every conceivable half measure.”6

As can be seen, it was not simply the orders of the Communist International that spurred the KPD into opposing the SPD. The Party’s very birth came as a result of profound disagreements within the German left: disagreements that were not simply theoretical, but deeply political in the form of the more moderate elements of the SPD’s support for German involvement in the First World War. During the revolutionary period and the early Weimar Republic years, the KPD also experienced oppression and violence as a result of SPD actions. Historian Eve Rosenhaft notes that after the Weimar Republic was established, the radical left, including the KPD revolted, “demanding… socialist programmes…. Freikorps and paramilitary police under Social Democratic administration put down the disturbances in two months of bloody fighting.”7 Historian Eric D. Weitz similarly notes that “the SPD’s alliance with the police, the army, and the employers undermined its popular support, which redounded in part to the benefit of the KPD.”8 Of equal importance is Rosenhaft’s assessment that “the political division between the Communists and the Social Democrats that had emerged between 1917 and 1919 was reinforced by increasing divergences between the interests of different sections of the working class.” 9 The wealthier, more skilled proletariat joined the SPD while semi-skilled laborers became the rank-and-file members of the KPD. Thus, when one examines the later actions of the KPD’s declaration of the SPD as Social Fascists, one must understand that the reasoning did not suddenly develop as a result of the Comintern’s policy directives, but that the KPD had actually experienced oppression from the SPD. The KPD had evidence of the SPD working with the right and conceding fundamental goals of socialism, whereas it had yet to experience the far more brutal repression of the Nazis.

The 1929 Program of the Communist International, issued as the Nazis were beginning to gain significant national prominence, outlined the Social Fascism concept that would prevent the KPD from uniting with the SPD in opposition to the Nazis. The program detailed the attempts of the Proletariat to ferment revolution in the wake of the First World War, which led to the creation of the USSR but also the defeat of the Communist left in a number of other countries, such as Germany. The program declared that “these defeats were primarily due to the treacherous tactics of the social democratic and reformist trade union leaders” as well as the fact that Communism was just starting to become a popular political ideology.10 The Comintern further argued that “Fascism strives to permeate the working class by recruiting the most backward strata of workers to its ranks by playing upon their discontent, by taking advantage of the inaction of social democracy.”11 The Comintern also asserted that “in the process of development social democracy reveals fascist tendencies which, however does not prevent it…[in other situations from operating as] an opposition party [to the bourgeois].”12

To further understand the position taken by the KPD against the SPD, Ernst Thälmann’s 1932 speech “The SPD and NSDAP are Twins” reveals how the KPD leadership envisioned its struggle against fascism in all forms. Thälmann’s incendiary speech declared that “joint negotiations between the KPD and the SPD… there are none! There will be none!.” 13 This was not to say that the KPD did not recognize the Nazi threat, as Thälmann articulated that “KPD strategy directs the main blow against social democracy, without thereby weakening the struggle against Hitler’s fascism; [KPD] strategy creates the very preconditions of an effective opposition to Hitler’s fascism precisely in its direction of the main blow against social democracy.”14 It is imperative to recognize, though, that the KPD only advocated the blow against the SPD leadership. As Thälmann argued, The KPD’s policy envisioned, the creation of a “revolutionary United Front policy… [that mobilized the masses from below through] the systematic, patient and comradely persuasion of the Social Democratic, Christian and even National Socialist workers to forsake their traitorous leaders.”15

KPD leader Ernst Thälmann gives a speech.

Thus, KPD invective was not aimed at the average member of the SPD, but at its leaders. The KPD was also not devoting resources to fighting Social Democracy instead of fighting Nazism. Rather, it was pursuing a strategy in which it believed that the defeat of Fascism would only be possible through the unification of the proletariat into one Revolutionary mass. This helps explains the KPD leadership’s focus on attacking the SPD rather than completely focusing its energies on Hitler. The KPD believed that what it viewed as a socially fascist SPD was dangerous because it claimed to advocate socialist policies while in reality, it subsumed a large portion of the proletariat into supporting a political entity that actually benefitted the bourgeois. This prevented the proletarian class from achieving true Marxist socialism. KPD leadership devoted its energies to attacking the SPD more so than the NSDAP because the Nazis were an overtly fascist group, whereas the SPD, in the KPD’s view, furthered fascism under the auspices of a claimed leftist ideology. To the KPD, the SPD was an insidious threat that needed to be exposed to all of the working class to see. The KPD did, in fact, want a united left or unified front to fight the fascists. It just did not want to unite with the leaders of the leftist parties. Instead it envisioned a United Front of the masses that would seek revolution to secure the goals of the proletariat, also termed a “united front from below”.

While the KPD leadership devoted much of its rhetorical attack towards the SPD rather than the Nazis, the same can not be said of the actions of the rank-and-file party membership. Between 1928-1933 the party primarily practiced non-violent opposition towards the SPD while political violence was reserved for the NSDAP and its paramilitary SA stormtroopers. Thus, Hearlmann’s contention that the KPD neglected the growing threat of Nazism only holds true if one relegates themselves to examining the documents of the KPD leadership and the Comintern. The reality is that during the 1928-1933 time period, as Eve Rosenhaft shows in her study of the KPD’s use of political violence during this period, the KPD pursued a “wehrhafter Kampf [against the SA] as a fight to maintain or recover actual power in the neighborhoods.”16 As stated before, the KPD and the SPD attracted different groups amongst the proletariat. In the harsh final years of the Depression-era Weimar, though, the Nazis and the KPD were fighting for the hearts and minds of the unemployed and unskilled segments of the proletariat. In cities such as Berlin, this translated to street-fighting between the KPD and SA over control of the neighborhoods these segments of the working class lived in. As Rosenhaft so eloquently puts it, “the terror of the SA… [was] a threat specifically directed against working-class radicalism, [that] evoked a response with the weapons familiar to the neighborhood [violence].”17 Historian Dirk Schumann largely concurs with Rosenhaft’s assessment of the KPD’s use of political violence, noting that “while Communists and Social Democrat’s hardly ever clashed in physical confrontations, both appeared on the scene as enemies of the right-wing groups.”18 Thus, while the KPD leadership advocated opposition to the SPD and the Nazis. The reality on the streets, where political violence served as a potent form of expression for the proletariat, was that the left devoted its energies to fighting the right rather than each other.

In the end, the policies of the KPD failed. What came about in 1933 was not the revolution of the proletarian masses, but rather the Nazi seizure of power and the twelve-year reign of Adolf Hitler. The united revolutionary front against the fascists never materialized and the KPD, along with the rest of the German left, was subjected to repression, exile, and imprisonment. Ernst Thälmann, when he gave his “The SDP and the NSDAP are twins” speech in 1932, did not have the benefit of knowing that twelve years later he would die in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, the KPD leadership and the Comintern that helped shape its ideology and actions were unaware of what would soon occur. What the KPD did have, however, was the memory of its experiences during the Revolutionary period following Imperial Germany’s collapse, the everyday experience of an SPD that did not pursue revolutionary Marxist goals, and a party membership that was suffering under the hardships of the Weimar Republic, particularly during the depression years.

KPD propaganda poster. Reads “Only Communism saves you”

In hindsight, the Nazis were clearly the greater threat, but the KPD had experienced more than a decade of an SPD that had, from the Communist’s perspective, disregarded and undermined the Revolutionary goals of the party. The KPD may have made a terrible miscalculation in identifying its threats, but that miscalculation was not the result of ideological dogmatism, but rather experience. The idea that the KPD could have simply pursued a unified front with SPD leadership ignores the very circumstances and reasons for the party’s existence in the first place. Furthermore, the KPD did not devote all of its energy to combatting social fascism while ignoring the threat of the Nazis. The reality of the political violence experienced during the Weimar Republics final years demonstrates that the KPD and the SPD practiced violence, not against each other, but against the Nazis and the right.

Ultimately, the one form of political opposition -violence- which both the SPD and the KPD used against the NSDAP, in part led to the destabilization of the Weimar Republic, which allowed for the Nazis to be elected into office. As Dirk Schuman notes, “National Socialism stood in a tradition of bourgeois-national opposition to the Weimar Republic, which it radicalized so successfully against the backdrop of crisis that voters flocked to it in large numbers.”19 If the KPD and the SPD had presented a united front, would it have made much difference in the end? It was not the division between the left that caused the Depression or spurred the political violence of the SA. In light of the fact that both of these conditions would have existed even if the SPD and KPD had presented a truly united front against Nazism, it is worth questioning what this united front would have achieved. After all, the Nazis did not come to power in a violent revolution. Though violence surrounded their rise, the Nazis were democratically elected into office. Because of their ideology, the KPD and the SPD were permanently parties of the working class. A united left might have allowed for the KPD to devote its full energies to attacking Nazism, but in the end, the only ones that would have listened would have been the proletariat. Would this really have prevented the Nazi electoral victory?

In light of all this, how should KPD actions during 1928-1933 be judged? In terms of preventing fascism, the policy was an unequivocal failure. With regards to the KPD’s fight against what it perceived to be the social fascism of the SPD, though, the evidence suggests that this policy should not be judged too harshly. While it failed to recognize the events that would eventually occur, it was grounded in the KPD experience in Germany and was not simply the result of the dictates of the Comintern. KPD resistance to the SPD was elemental to the very existence of the party. Not only that, but the KPD had actually experienced repression from the SPD. Thus, while the policy failed to recognize the true threat of the Nazis, it should not be viewed as patently ridiculous. The failure of the left to form a United Front also did not prevent the KPD and the SPD from actively fighting the Nazis in the streets. While this political violence only increased electoral support for the Nazis, it was amongst groups such as the Bourgeois-Nationalists, that actively despised the left and everything it stood for.