One of the rarer of blogging pleasures is, for me at any rate, provoking a reader to write a comment. Apart from family and friends, I have only one such reader – who happens to be a fellow-blogger, Arthur Bough, aka Boffy – an economist whose blog contains detailed Marxist exegesis and an excellent leftist blogroll.
He’s been good enough to include me in his blogroll on which he clearly keeps an eagle eye – ever ready to join battle. My last post on Paul Mason’s latest book on Fascism struck a nerve – with Boffy’s opening shot being an accusation that the Ukraine War seems to have revealed Mason in his true colours as a strong supporter of NATO. As an old supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament this was (bad) news to me.
But I take the line that we shouldn’t allow our prejudices about authors to interfere with our judgement on the coherence of a book’s argument (eg I have enjoyed Niall Ferguson’s recent books). And I find Mason consistently worth reading – not least for the breadth of his reading and the way he integrates useful references into the body of his text.
And, further, my post had actually been about Mason’s most recent book on Fascism – not his earlier one on PostCommunism which Boffy had critiqued extensively (in a series) to which Boffy refers again in his comments
Boffy’s basic argument seems to be that Mason’s support these days for a Popular Front is hypocritical as Stalin and the Comintern held the line so strongly against any common front with Socialists (although Mason reveals that, for some reason, Stalin conceded to Georgy Dmitrov when the Bulgarian leader told him to his face that this was unacceptable). But Mason was, of course, a Trotskyite and, as such, always opposed to Stalinism. As always happens in leftist disputes, I am therefore left a tad confused.
And this is perhaps the point at which I should come totally clean - and confess that I have always had an inclination toward the liberal rather than radical side of social democracy. I may have been a regular reader of New Left Review from its very first edition in 1960 but, when push came to shove, it was Gaitskell and Crosland I supported in the struggles for the soul of the Labour Party – although, in 1979, I appeared on platforms with Tony Benn and never shared the popular vilification of Jeremy Corbyn – whose 2017 electoral platform electrified me. Perhaps I’m simply becoming more radical as I grow older – but the way Corbyn was vilified by the UK media (including The Guardian) and put under military and MI5 surveillance proves to me that UK democracy is non-existent. This is a revealing and harrowing hour-long interview with Corbyn about that experience from Declassified UK which has attracted 1400 views – so much are voters starved of basic political power. How can a country imagine it’s democratic when the duly elected leader of the Opposition Party is the subject of sustained abuse from the country’s newspapers? Basically the message is
“we allow you to vote every 4-5 years – but only if we agree with the harmless remedies your party supports”
If I had my time again, I would return to the spirit I showed in 1977 when I penned a thoroughly critical long article exposing the fragile foundations on which democracy was built.
Fascism Resource
Why do I get the feeling that Fascism is pigeon-holed academically? There seems to be something deviant about people who show interest in the field – is this unfair?
Interview with Paul Mason on his latest book
Three Faces of Fascism; Ernst Nolte (1966) This book by a German historian about French, German and Italian fascism attracted a lot of criticism at the time – for being too sympathetic
The regime model of fascism (2000) a long academic article which compares Austrian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian and Spanish forms of Fascism.
The Anatomy of Fascism Robert Paxton (2004) as the title says
Studying Fascism in a post-Fascist Age Roger Griffin (2011) a fairly personal article about the academic field written a decade ago
Visualising Fascism – the 20th century rise of the global right ed J Thomas and G Eley (2020) A curious book co- edited by an historian who has specialised in Germany which focuses more on the aesthetic side of the subject.
Ronald,
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I don't think you have grasped the nature of my critique of Paul Mason's position. To understand that, properly, you would need to read the various series of posts I have written on Paul's position going back several years, long before his current pro-NATO stance. I think you also misunderstand my critique of the PF itself, as well as the history of the Stalinist position in regard to fighting fascism.
My critique of Paul's position goes back several years, to 2019/20, when, having been in the Corbyn camp, he switched to support Starmer. At the same time, he advocated that the Left in the LP, basically disown all of its positions, liquidate itself, in order to join in an alliance with Starmer, and his supporters against the Right inside the LP, and also, thereby, to secure a Labour government, necessary he argued to prevent a Tory government, which he associates with the creeping fascism across the globe, e.g. BJ's associations with Trump, and Trump's association with Putin et al.
I wrote (A New Leadership?) a series of posts setting out why this was a repeat of the position adopted in the early 1980's, of the soft left in the LP in support of Kinnock, as I had experienced it. It was disastrous. The Left shrank, the soft Left moved ever further Right in search of its desired alliance with the LP centre, whilst Kinnock expelled thousands, closed CLP's, and after all that still failed to win the elections in 1987 and 1992, with the party moving even further Right under Blair. I saw no reason why it would work this time, and it hasn't.
Was that a reason for Marxists like me to cut ourselves adrift from the LP as the Militant had done, as the SWP and others had always advocated? No. In fact, at the time, I wrote a critique of such sectarian positions in respect of the LP, and set out my own feelings at the time I was elected as a Labour County Councillor (with 60% of the poll) in 1997, on the same day that Blair also walked into No.10. What it did mean was that those of us on the Left, particularly Marxists, should not stop arguing our critique of the positions of the Labour Party as a whole, and of its Right and centre in particular. Though a look at my blog will show I also have plenty of criticism of many of the positions of the Left itself, whose statism I think is a severe limitation, and contrary to the ideas of Marx. Since I have been setting out that critique of statism it has also found some resonance, for example the WW, now makes arguments in favour of cooperatives that, in the past, it would not have done, and, although he's just another individual blogger, Sraid Marx has arrived at very similar positions to mine.
The reason I arrived at this analysis, and position is precisely because of following the existing Marxist analysis going back to 1848, and the conclusion of adopting the position of the United Front, unity in action of workers of different persuasions, as against the Popular Front, electoral and parliamentary alliances of workers with the liberal bourgeoisie to defeat reactionary opponents – landed aristocracy in 1848, fascism in the 20th century. The history of the Popular Front is always that it requires socialists/workers to subordinate their politics/interests to those of the bourgeoisie, because, unless they do, the bourgeoisie/liberals will not participate, and the whole point of it is to obtain that participation. That is true of popular frontist (not a popular front in the sense of being an electoral or governing pact, but of being a cross class organisation designed to campaign on a specific topic) such as CND, ANL and so on, too.
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ReplyDeleteOn each occasion, these PF's have been disastrous. In 1848, the liberal bourgeoisie, having obtained its own demands sought to stop the revolution, before the workers pushed their own agenda. They ended up aligning with the old ruling class, and that old ruling class then took its revenge. I have set out in my previous comments how that would have happened again in 1917, had not Lenin demanded the Bolsheviks remain independent, and how, in the 1920's after Lenin had died, and Trotsky expelled, Stalin reverted to his earlier position of the PF, resulting in the defeat of the Chinese Revolution, the British General Strike and so on. He then took the Comintern in the opposite direction of the Third Period, of refusing any joint action with other non-CP workers organisations, facilitating the victory of Hitler, before again turning about face to promote the Popular Front position across the globe, including disastrously in Spain, leading to the defeat of the Spanish Revolution.
My objection to Paul's PF position is not that its hypocritical, but that it is simply wrong, and contrary to the Marxist position. The Marxist position, as set out by Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, was always that we do not oppose a common front, IN ACTION, against an immediate common enemy, but we do NOT support any electoral or governmental alliance for that purpose that requires us to hide or subordinate our own political agenda, or our own organisational independence. I do not buy Paul's account that Dimitrov told Stalin to his face that the Third Period sectarian position was wrong. Such action would have seen Dimitrov facing a show trial, or simply assassinated, as with Trotsky and others. Stalin had himself chosen to revert to his previous PF strategy because the disaster of his Third period strategy in Germany could no longer be denied, and as the USSR faced the anti-Comintern Alliance, along with the potential for a new period of intervention by Britain, France and the US, he became desperate to forge an alliance with “democratic imperialism” against fascist imperialism.
As far as the LP, and other such parties, SDP, US Democrats et al, are concerned, they are already PF's, or what are today, in political science, called “catch-all parties”. Lenin described the LP as a bourgeois-workers party, because it is made up largely of workers, tied to workers organisations, such as the unions, and is the party workers look to to support their interests, but its ideology – like that of the unions – is itself bourgeois, and its leadership and bureaucracy is bourgeois. The LP inherited the bourgeois/social-democratic ideology of the Liberal Party, out of which it emerged. Its agenda, like that of the unions is not Socialism – deliberately excluded from its constitution – but simply an amelioration of workers position within existing capitalist society, and consequently, always subordinated to the needs of that society for profits and capital accumulation. They undoubtedly are cross class formations, containing on the one hand open representatives of the interests of the bourgeoisie, like Blair, as well as social-democrats who desire the above amelioration, and reformist socialists who do have some vague desire for socialism, but only to be achieved gradually over a long period of reforms. But, today's LP, because it has become so careerist, dominated by the PLP, is also characterised by an agenda that is none of the above, but is itself outright reactionary nationalist, as seen by its adoption of support for Brexit, and the constant cringing wrapping itself in the flag, singing the racist national anthem, and so on, all in search of the votes of reactionaries to put Starmer in Downing Street!
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ReplyDeleteMarxists like me have to work inside such a party, for the reason that Trotsky set out, in the 1930's, with the so called French Turn, simply because our forces are so diminutive. It is the same position that Marx and Engels found themselves in in 1848, which is that with such small numbers, the need to “gain the ear” of workers, requires us to join these parties, and to then be able to present our ideas to workers, on a daily basis, as we go through the process with them, and gradually show the inadequacy of the politics of these existing parties. If, as in Germany, in the 1920's and 30's, we had a Marxist Party comprised of millions of workers, and getting the votes of millions more, we clearly would not need to do that, and whilst we would propose confronting the fascists on the streets, standing alongside the members of other workers parties (United Front), we certainly would not propose forming electoral or governmental pacts with such parties (Popular Front), which is why in 1917, the Bolsheviks refused to join the Provisional Government, and be required to support its anti-worker positions, and also demanded that the other workers and peasants parties, within it, throw out the capitalist ministers from the bourgeois parties.
As far as Paul's analysis of fascism is concerned, I have dealt with that in various series of posts too, as well as having posted my own material on fascism, totalitarianism and mass society. The trouble with Paul's analysis of fascism is concerned, as I have set out, its basically irrelevant, even if sociologically interesting. As I have set out, its necessary to distinguish between fascism and NAZISM, and other similar forms of Bonapartism. Fascism is a movement of the petty-bourgeois (small business class. Self-employed), and its periphery, as well as lumpen elements – basically the same elements that Marx describes in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that supported him, and his coup in 1848. Its why, such movements often use “anti-capitalist” rhetoric, and draw in former petty-bourgeois socialist elements – such as Pilsudski, Mussolini, Moseley. Their “anti-capitalism”, is only anti the progressive large scale forms of capital, which spell doom to that petty-bourgeoisie, but which forms the material basis of the emerging socialist society. Its notable that Starmer also adopts this position in his rhetoric for windfall taxes against multinationals, and so on. The Stalinists, in their strategy of forming alliances with petty-bourgeois liberals, also propose/d “anti-monopoly alliances”. In this, they share the agenda of petty-bourgeois liberals/libertarians like Mises/Hayek, which is why the latter, in the 1930's, supported the Austrian clerical fascists, opening the door to Hitler. In the German Nazi party, this ideology was most clearly represented by Strasserism.
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ReplyDeleteBut, whatever the actual issues around which this alliance is formed (always nationalism, often racism, but in the 1920's, Italian fascism did not utilise anti-Semitism, and Mussolini's Finance Minister was a Jewish banker) the only way that such movements can seize power is if the state supports them. The capitalist state, as the state of the global ruling class, whose wealth and power depends upon the development of that very large scale capital that the petty-bourgeoisie abhor, is not going to support fascists, whatever their sociological peculiarities, unless the ruling class is so scared for its future, in the face of a proletarian challenge, that it is forced to resort to it. Louis Bonaparte, and Bismark, both implemented policies that ensured more rapid capitalist development. Hitler eliminated the Strasserites in the Night of The Long Knives. In short, fascism is always a movement of the petty-bourgeoisie, and is used as a paramilitary force, alongside the capitalist state to physically smash workers organisations and resistance, whenever it poses a serious challenge to large scale capital, but, having done that, in government, it is always led to act in the interests of large-scale capital, because it is that upon which the fortunes of the state itself depend.
Those interests, in the 1930's, in Europe, meant the need to create a single European state, able to have the size etc. to compete with the US, and that is what Hitler set out to do, as the Kaiser had set out before him. Petty-bourgeois liberals (Libertarians) like Rees-Mogg occupy a similar place to their mentors Mises and Hayek, and ended up supporting BJ, who is more in the vein of Hitler, as actually a proponent for large scale capital, despite his adopted Brexit stance. And, its notable that, in practice, they had to go for Brexit in name only, abiding by EU rules and regulations, and so on, because otherwise, the British economy would have been even more screwed.
The ruling class only adopt this option as a last resort, precisely because they do not have the same control over the state that bourgeois-democracy allows them, and as with military juntas, such regimes are inefficient and bureaucratic, soaking up surplus value that otherwise would go as capital accumulation, or as dividends/interest to capitalists. Paul can set out whatever sociological analysis and description of fascism today he likes – in fact, little of it is actually fascist, in that there is little evidence of it being used to systematically break up workers organisations and so on – but the reality is that without the support of the state, its going nowhere, hence the difference between January 6th. and the role of actual fascists from the Azov Batallion, within the Ukrainina state.
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