nastyned wrote:
The point that seems to have been missed is that the problem in not actually combating fascism, it's the ideology of anti-fascism that means siding with the one side of the capitalist state against fascism.
To which Ocelot replied:
Thank you. This is the response I was fishing for.
This is a flat-out lie by the Bordgists. In reality it was (and is) the actual practice of fighting fascism that they attacked. The "ideology" argument is secondary, and simply the excuse they come up with when they get pinned in the corner. If you read the ICC's history of the Italian Communist Left, they document how the external Bordigist organisation in France sent delegates to the POUM's Karl Marx barracks to tell the POUM it was their proletarian duty to cease fighting against Franco (imperialist war, dontcha know).
Yes, there was a specific "anti-fascist" ideology that the post-war (and wartime, after Barbarossa) CPs pushed, in favour of the tactics of the Popular Front, "compromiso storico" and the rest, that justified alliances with "the progressive bourgeoisie" to develop the productive forces (Fordist/Keynesian productivity deal, that the operaisti defined themselves again), and so on. As Dauve talks about in Fascism/Antifascism (although he cant help himself throwing in a sickening bit of holocaust revisionism in passing, in homage to his previous maitre-a-penser, doubtless). But none of this is anything to do with the activity of fighting fascists. And yet, mention anti-fascist activity on these forums, and some of the less bright/devious Bordigists will immediately launch into shrill denouncements of the evils of anti-fascism. Nothing to do with the CP, Popular Fronts or productivity deals. Bait and switch, simple as.
Some points in response to ocelot:
1. If by the ‘Bordigists’ (a term which he never defines), ocelot means the Italian communist left, they certainly did not oppose responding to fascism on a class basis. In the early 20s, they were deeply involved in the physical defence of workers’ struggles and political meetings against attacks by the fascists. There’s a video of Bordiga himself talking about this http://libcom.org/forums/history-culture/amadeo-bordiga-video-translated-25112010. What the communist left opposed (and which was increasingly advocated by the right wing of the party) was the notion of allying with capitalist democracy against the fascists.
2. For the same reason the Italian Fraction in the 1930s supported the general strike and uprising of the workers of Barcelona in July 1936 against the Francoist putsch. They opposed the subsequent derailment of the workers’ struggle into an anti-fascist front dominated by bourgeois forces (liberal Republicans, Socialists, Stalinists etc) and argued that workers had to break from this front by returning to their own methods of struggle against both camps. This is why they also supported the workers’ uprising against the Republican/Stalinist power in May 1937 and tried to make contact with those anarchists who they saw as defending class positions against the betrayals of the ‘official’ CNT (such as Berneri. I am not sure if they were aware of the Friends of Durruti, but would certainly have seen them in a similar light).
3. In the 90s, in France, there was a big campaign initiated by the likes of Le Monde and supported by Liberation and other leftists, which tried to present Bordiga as the ‘father of negationism ‘ (ie holocaust denial). This was because certain elements in the ‘ultra left milieu’, who had been influenced by Bordiga and who were loosely organised around the publication La Vieille Taupe, had come to the defence of Robert Faurrison’s claims that there were no Nazi gas chambers. I don’t know to what extent Dauve, who was part of this milieu, allowed himself to be involved in this stupidity. But in the articles the ICC wrote at the time (links below) we denounced the whole false amalgam between Bordiga and holocaust denial, which was essentially aimed at discrediting the internationalist position on World War Two by identifying it with crypto-fascism (just as the Stalinists did during the war itself, to the point of murdering comrades of the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy and coming very close to murdering Marc Chirik of the Gauche Communiste de France). Bordiga’s pamphlet Auschwitz, the great alibi, which was singled out as proof of Bordiga’s negationism, was very clear in presenting the extermination of the Jews as a reality. What the left of capital didn’t like was that it argued that this was a product not simply of fascism but of capitalism. When ocelot says Dauve “cant help himself throwing in a sickening bit of holocaust revisionism in passing, in homage to his previous maitre-a-penser, doubtless”, he is lining himself up with this campaign of lies about Bordiga.
Sorry if this is seen as continuing a derailment of the platformism thread. But it’s not at all accidental that the question of anti-fascism should come up in a discussion about why some anarchist currents have been sucked up into the left wing of capital. It was precisely antifascism which drew a number of anarchist currents (such as parts of the CNT in Spain in the 30s and during the second world war) into abandoning internationalism, which is the fundamental dividing line between the proletarian movement and the left wing of capital.
http://en.internationalism.org/wr/197_slanders.htm
http://en.internationalism.org/ir/088_antisacsim_barbarity.html
OK, before I get to Alf's points, let's get the Dauvé thing out of the way. I mentioned, in passing:
The sections in question (from the English translation released as Fascism/Anti-Fascism)
Now this translation is taken from the original text, "« Bilan » Contre-Révolution en Espagne - Présentation", written in 1979 as an introduction to a book of collected articles from the left communist magazine "Bilan", which is up on the John Grey website here.
The original version goes:
The bits italicised above, were removed from later versions. The first is the link to Bordiga's "Auschwitz or the great alibi" as on this site in English translation here. Which I will get back to when dealing with Alf's point 3 above, in a subsequent post.
The second bit, is the reference to Pierre Rassinier's "The lie of Ulysses", one of the books in the "negationnist" cannon. Rassinier was a peculiar fish (to say the least), but to cut a long story short by the 1970s, he was the darling of the holocaust denial and revisionnist movement, doing speaking tours in Germany organised by ex-SS officers, and taking Maurice Bardeche (long-time fascist from 1930s onwards) as his publisher.
So, back in the 60s... In 1965 Dauvé originally joins J-F Lyotard's Pouvoir Ouvrier (Workers Power - the Lyotard split from Socialisme ou Barbarie, b. 1963 - d. 1969). In the same year the bookshop/publisher la Veille Taupe (Old Mole) is set up by ex-SouBer Pierre Guillaume and Jacques Baynac. la Veille Taupe is expelled from PO in 1967, but Dauvé later hooks up with them in the aftermath of May '68 (where a number of them are involved in the action committee in university of Paris-III aka Censier). The politics of the group are increasingly influenced by Bordgism and Cammatte. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of 1968, Pierre Guillaume also discovers Paul Rassinier's "Lie of Ulysses" and thinks it's the best thing since sliced bread. Baynac falls out with Guillaume in 1969 and buggers off, calling on the rest of the collective to do likewise. Dauvé and François Cerutti (aka François Martin, co-writer of Eclipse...) stick around and Rassinier's books are sold by the bookshop from 1970 onwards. Eventually the bookshop closes in 1972 and Dauvé and Cerutti go on to found the magazine le Mouvement Communiste, etc.
In 1978 Pierre Guillaume opens another bookshop/publishing house under the la Veille Taupe name, which becomes a central holocaust denial publisher, in league with Robert Faurisson etc. as the story is known (including that infamous Chomsky "introduction" scam). In 1980 the Mouvement Communiste group apparently splits over the question of whether to support Faurisson or not. Dauvé is on the "not" side and hooks up with Serge Quaddrupani to form la Banquise (and later le Brise-glace).
During the 1980s Jacques Baynac and a number of other old ultraleftists attack Guillaume and the revisionnist milieu through various publications and media articles.
Time ticks along until 1995 when Dauvé, a professional writer and translator, submits a fiction novel to a publisher that Quaddrupani has put him onto. Said publisher actually has Baynac on board who remembers Dauvé from the 70s and goes, "hang on, he's a bleeding revisionist". Meanwhile in the 1990s the rumbling spat over Guillaume, la Veille Taupe and revisionism is seized on by a certain Didier Daeninckx who likes a good witch hunt and is used by him for another round of the old extreme left = extreme right gag. In response, the anti-fascist magazine collective Reflex (who have contact with Quaddrupani, through the latter's work for No Pasaran) decide to put out a compendium of articles by old and ex-ultraleftists making a stand against revisionism and also defending the ultraleft against the Daeninckx calumny. The book is "Libertaires et "Ultra Gauche" contre le négationnisme." in which Dauvé's contribution is "Bilan et contre bilan", at the John Grey site here. However that later version is edited in one detail. The original version, (still available here [edit: link broken]) says:
This [*NOTE ...*] is removed from the John Grey version.
So, even Dauvé himself has admitted that there was something pretty damn problematic in his opening statement to the Bilan intro and the (later edited) note.
My position on the line taken in Fascism/Anti-fascism is that it is "revisionist" in the sense that it denies any specificity to genocide and reduces the event to a mere body-count. This is actually a favourite tactic of those on the Right, particularly in Germany, who wish to relativise away the "problem" of the Holocaust, by reducing it to a body count. By reducing the Holocaust to a body count, right-wing revisionnists can then compare the figure to those who died in the famines caused by Stalin and Mao and say that, numerically speaking, National Socialism is a lesser evil than Communism (as they designate it). That is what I mean by revisionist.
I will deal with point 3 of Alf's challenge above, next - relating as it does to the critique of Bordiga's "Auschwitz the great alibi". But in a while, as I have IRL commitments to attend to. I trust no-one's in a rush, as this isn't a real-time issue particularly.
edit: removed the link to the scanned version of the Reflexes text (http://www.vho. [link broken] org/aaargh/fran/arvs/bavarde/GDbilan.html) as on further inspection it appears this is actually a revisionist site. This version does differ from the John Grey version in other sections as well, but without putting my hands on a printed copy of the original Reflexes version, it is not possible to say further.