Fascism, Anti-Fascism, Democracy, Stalinism, Popular Fronts and the ‘Inevitable War’ (1933–9)
chapter 8 Towards State-Capitalism: Fascism, Anti-Fascism, Democracy, Stalinism, Popular Fronts and the ‘Inevitable War’ (1933–9)
In 1933 a major debate developed in the international council-communist movement, aimed at determining what course historical events were taking. Was the global economic crisis just a passing phenomenon, or a lasting one? Would economic collapse inevitably lead to a new wave of revolutionary strug- gles, or, on the contrary, to the consolidation of capitalism in a totalitarian form? Would fascism collapse, or grow stronger? Was the fascist phenomenon limited to a few particular countries, or was it a universal expression of the dec- adent capitalist mode of production? Was there a general tendency towards state-capitalism, of which fascism and Stalinism were particular expressions? Was ‘classical’ democracy a different form of state-capitalism, and was it pro- gressive in relation to fascism? Or should the proletariat fight against it, just as it had to fight against Stalinism and fascism? What should be the attitude of the council-communist movement towards the popular fronts and anti-fascism? These were the burning political questions that obliged the gic to go beyond the general debates it had been having for years on the unions and workers’ councils. The responses to these questions from the Dutch and German lefts or from Mattick’s group were not fundamentally different to those given by the Italian communist left around Bilan.1 But, given the fragmentation and isolation of the communist left’s various components, this identity of political and theoretical standpoints rarely gave rise to any joint statements of position. In a tragic period, the different internationalist groups found themselves in a tragic state of political isolation.
1 The Theories of Capitalist Collapse
Up until 1932–3, when the gic published a pamphlet specifically devoted to the economic crisis, the Dutch groups had only dealt with crisis theory in
1 The view of the Italian communist left was based on the experience of the Russian Revolution and on the theory of the decadence of capitalism.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004325937_011 towards state-capitalism 381 passing.2 But when the gic was drawn into a polemic with the German and American council-communists, it began to place this question at the centre of its intervention.3 After 1932, each issue of the Persdienst (pic)4 defined its objective as follows:
The development of capitalism leads to increasingly more violent crises which are expressed by increasingly higher unemployment and an in- creasingly greater dislocation of the productive apparatus, such that mil- lions of workers are put out of work and threatened by starvation. Fur- thermore, the antagonisms between the different capitalist states are sharpening to the point where economic war will lead to a new world-war. The growing uncertainty of its survival is compelling the working class to fight for a communist mode of production …5
It is worth noting that the line as to the inevitability of world-war was soon withdrawn. Convinced that war was inevitable, especially after 1935, the gic nonetheless refused to succumb to a fatalistic vision, as long as the resources of the working class had not been exhausted. This conception, which relied on the factor of will in the class-struggle, appeared in the gic’s economic theory, which rejected the idea of an ‘automatic’ collapse of capitalism leading no less ‘automatically’ to revolution. Here the gic rejected certain ‘fatalistic’ interpretations which had grown up amongst the German communist left, but also rejected Rosa Luxemburg’s conception of the decadence of capitalism.
1.1 Theoretical Differences in the Council-Communist Movement It is highly significant that the gic rejected the theory of capitalism’s ‘mortal crisis’, which had been the cornerstone of the whole German left-communist movement. Here, it was simply following Pannekoek, who had from the out- set criticised Rosa Luxemburg’s theory set out in The Accumulation of Capi-
2 Sijes 1932. 3 ‘De economische crisis’, pic, No. 23, October 1929. 4 Before 1932, the titles of the gic’s periodical was Persmateriaal (‘Press-Material’) of the Internationalist Communists (pic); the title then changed to Persdienst (‘Press-Service’). These politically very ‘neutral’ titles indicated the activity of a discussion-circle, rather than of a political group. pic was distributed free of charge, supported by voluntary contributions from militants and readers. This changed in 1938 with the publication of Radencommunisme: the periodical was sold. This had been the case with Räte-Korrespondenz since 1934. 5 pic, No. 18, November 1932. The paragraph on the inevitability of war only appeared in this issue and was cut out in the next one, without the slightest explanation.