Antifascism: Instrument Of Capitalism

Bullets, machine guns, prisons, this is how the Popular Front replies to the workers of Barcelona who have dared to resist the capitalist attack.

Bilan

Juan García Oliver then spoke and characterized the debate and the decision that had to be made as a choice between an “absurd” anarchist dictatorship or collaboration with the other antifascist forces in the Central Committee of Militias to continue the struggle against fascism.

[…] The alternatives that were thus posed were false: it was not about winning the war first and then carrying out the revolution (the Stalinist proposal), or even of fighting the war and carrying out the revolution at the same time (the POUM and libertarian thesis), but of abandoning the methods and the goals of the proletariat. The Popular Militias of July 21-25 were authentic proletarian Militias; the Militias of October 1936, militarized or not, were already an army of workers in a war directed by the bourgeoisie (whether fascist or republican) in the service of the bourgeoisie (whether democratic or fascist).

Agustín Guillamón

Political reactionaries are naturally even more hostile to my film. Thus an apprentice bureaucrat claims to admire my audacity in “making a political film not by telling a story, but by directly filming a theory.” Unfortunately, he does not like my theory. He senses that despite my apparent “uncompromising leftism,” I am actually shifting toward the right because I systematically attack “the men of the United Left.” The cretin’s mouth is full of such inflated terminology. What union? What Left? What men?

The “United Left” is, of course, nothing other than the current alliance of the Stalinists with other enemies of the proletariat. Each of the partners knows the others well. They clumsily plot against each other and stridently denounce each other every week. But they have now come together in an effort to sabotage the revolutionary initiatives of the workers, in order — as they themselves admit — to maintain at least the essentials of capitalism if they can’t save all the details. They are the same type of bureaucrats as those who are repressing workers’ “counterrevolutionary strikes” in Portugal, just as they did in Budapest not so long ago; the same as those who aspire to take part in a “Historic Compromise” in Italy; the same as those who called themselves “Popular Front governments” when they broke the French strikes of 1936 and sabotaged the Spanish revolution.

The United Left is only a minor defensive hoax of spectacular society, a temporary expedient that the system only occasionally needs to resort to. I only evoked it in passing in my film, though I naturally attacked it with all the contempt it deserves — just as we have since attacked it in Portugal on a broader and more beautiful terrain.

A journalist close to that same Left, who has since achieved a certain notoriety by invoking “freedom of the press” in order to defend his publication of an implausibly faked document, exhibited a similarly clumsy falsification by insinuating that I failed to attack the bureaucrats of Beijing as sharply as the other ruling classes. He also regrets that a mind of my quality has limited its expression to a “cinema ghetto” where the masses will have little chance to see it. This argument does not convince me. I prefer to remain in obscurity with these masses, rather than to consent to harangue them under the artificial floodlights manipulated by their hypnotizers.

Guy Debord – Refutation of All Judgments

Fascism and democracy have always been complementary political systems serving the interests of capital. When democracy cannot contain the proletarian upsurge, capital resorts to more brutal forms of domination. Italian fascism emerged in the heat of the workers’ struggles in northern Italy; German Nazism in response to the insurrections in the twenties, and in Spain, the military uprising that would become Francoism was the reaction to a clear pre-revolutionary situation. In any case Social Democracy (the socialist and “communist” parties) paved the way for repression or openly collaborated with it, fighting thus its genuine enemy: the revolution… Antifascism as a political option is a farce and the politicking and press conference self-proclaimed antifascists are nothing else than the remains of an extra-parliamentary, bureaucratic and groupuscule left which moved over into citizenism and neo-democracy, in search of young and rebellious supporters. We don’t want anybody to sell us the antifa motto, the problem is not the right or the left, it is capitalism, and it is democracy.

ANTIFASCISTS: JUST A LITTLE MORE EFFORT TO BE REVOLUTIONARIES. (Communists for anarchy. Madrid)

The defeats suffered by the proletariat during its attempts to structure itself as an historical party in the struggle for communism taught us that the bourgeois forces which are supposed to quarrel for their interests, in addition to demobilize us, led us to the slaughter of world wars. The proletariat can only learn from those same defeats and reach the following conclusion: historically the ground of antifascism is the ground of the bourgeoisie and therefore of the counterrevolution (the most paradigmatic example of this is arguably the so-called “Spanish revolution” in 1936-37), so that it’s an imminent and compelling, an historical and current necessity for the revolutionary proletariat to break with this ideology to fight for social revolution and bury forever the democratic dictatorship of capital over the proletarianized humanity and the planet. What is reactionary or counterrevolutionary in antifascism is that it is useful for capital because it encourages the democratic illusion in comparison with the dictatorship, throwing the proletariat into a false antagonism between fascism and democracy, when in reality democracy is the dictatorship of capital and the only genuine historical antagonism has always been, is and will be between capitalism and communism, capitalist counterrevolution versus proletarian revolution.

We know beforehand the noise caused by a premise of such a magnitude to those who are familiar and who identify to this ideology: i.e. to associate antifascism with a reactionary movement that has hindered the revolutionary struggle, and on the other hand, has only favored the democratic dictatorship of capital. This statement may sound a simple nonsense invented by people who flirts with the right and fascism, or also by infantilists who comfortably criticize what they have failed to achieve. Nothing is more false [1].

The criticism of antifascism made since decades by revolutionary nucleuses has its basis in the historical events dating back to the context of the brutal World War II, where the imperialist powers that fought against Germany, Italy and Japan, used the premise “All united to stop fascism”, successfully getting the proletariat of various countries – including the militant proletariat of socialist, communist and anarchist organizations and groups –to enlist and sacrifice in the front line of the battle, seeking all in all to destroy the German threat that rapidly expanded around the world.

But who paid the price of the victory of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin? Nothing more and nothing less than the proletariat with its blood.

While Hitler during his ascent massacred the rebellious proletariat and the revolutionary groups in Germany and Poland, Stalin made a deal and signed a strategic truce with him. While Franco massacred the proletariat in Spain, Stalin hand in hand with the Popular Front contributed to the killing and eradication of the revolutionaries who opposed and denounced the trickery of the republican government which made a pact with France and England, while exhorting to remove the barricades and to disarm the workers.

Neither the Republic nor Stalinism nor any antifascist block, may it be before, during or after the war, called for the destruction of private property and the national State. Anti-fascism didn’t denounce Britain, France and the USSR as capitalist and imperialist forces; it never pointed out the Popular Front as a total class collaborationist organ.

The proletariat, during the war in Spain in 1936, defeated the rebel military but didn’t destroy the capitalist State (composed of Republicans, Stalinists and treacherous anarchist leaders who volunteered for becoming ministers) and instead, it chose to agree on an alliance under the premise of the Antifascist Unity. The counterbalance led to the fact that the following year, from the politburo, the leaders who formed committees and organs of the government of the Republic decreed the disarming of the revolutionaries on the barricades, exerting fierce retaliation (torture, imprisonment and murders) against those who disobeyed to submit to the regular army which served the Republic.

The immediate result was that the proletariat which succeeded on July 19th, 1936 to endow itself with its class autonomy and to become a revolutionary force, although making compromises and struggling for the defense and cooperation with the Republic (which two years earlier had massacred an uprising of workers in the province of Asturias), surrendered to its executioners who led to its defeat and paved the way for the victory of Franco and the Falange whose he took over the leadership.

Currently, the Stalinist conglomerate cynically denounces the republic, not for its reactionary essence, but for not trusting enough the USSR and believing more in England and France. They will say also that the groups which during the war of Spain called for fighting for the destruction of the capitalist State were “petty bourgeois infantilists without a future” and even other more disparaging terms. The truth is that all the ideological contraption that Stalin and his supporters called historical materialism, and they claimed to be their source of analysis and understanding of the reality, is nothing but a vulgar and totally counterrevolutionary amorphous mass of ideology based on a personality cult and a conspiracy and paranoiac lie, which ultimately is used for hiding the whole series of atrocities committed against the revolutionary proletariat. Therefore, antifascism was one of the main weapons of the counterrevolution in the twentieth century.

Today as yesterday, all the a-historic speech of the self-proclaimed antifascists tries to throw us into the swamp of lies, illusions and the defeat of the proletariat, the revolution. The actions of those who today are framed under the flag of antifascism act as real support that helps Kremlin’s imperialism for more than 60 years. Stalin gave rise to make deal with heads of State, while in his maneuvers he conceived the slaughter of Polish and Spanish proletarians (and years later he had no problem for agreeing with Churchill and Roosevelt). Today, in the same way, Putin, who approves and applauds the work of the people’s republics in Eastern Ukraine, has been responsible for the killing of the proletariat in his area, in Georgia, in the Caucasus as well as in the repression of revolutionaries in Russia.

It is not futile to emphasize the fact that the current Platforms and Fronts of an antifascist nature inherit the same counterrevolutionary tradition that only serves to lead the proletariat to wander in the reformist mud, as it is discussed in an article published in the review Ekintza Zuzena No.23:

“Since then antifascist groups demand state and legal measures by way of retaliation against fascism: laws against Nazi groups, greater police action, long prison sentences, etc. The implementation of such measures is hardly in our favor rather the opposite. Thus the role of the State at the repressive level is strengthened and its power is strengthened. It’s always surprising and alarming that in our ranks some are giving weapons to our most significant enemy: the State. As well as considering that its laws could protect us, against those who are no more nor less their accomplices: the fascists.”

There’s nothing strange that now many MEPs, separatists and other Social Democratic filth are waving the flag of antifascism. But more serious and disastrous is that in the Ukraine “antifascism shows its entire counterrevolutionary force and despite the wearing out suffered in the past, it remains one of the ideologies that have the greatest power of framing over the proletariat” [2] there and everywhere.

It is clear therefore that the break with all bourgeois ideology and reformist channeling necessarily goes through a total and radical break with antifascism, in practical terms concretely and nowadays, in and facing the “Ukrainian” issue (and likewise facing the “Kurdish” issue).

Let’s repeat and conclude consequently: neither “antifascism” nor “republic”, neither “anti-imperialism” nor “national liberation” or “people’s self-determination”, neither dictatorship nor democracy: autonomous, radical and internationalist proletarian struggle against capitalism, its states, its homelands, its wars, its democracy and its reforms; against its supporters and against its false critics and opponents alike; for class war, insurrection and communist and anarchic world revolution. At this stage in history, it will be that or die forever. •

[1] Obviously we despise fascists and we think that the only thing they deserve is a 9mm bullet in the head, as they are the extreme right of capital and the state. But we also despise antifascists as they are Social Democrats, as they are (sometimes) the extreme left of capital and the state. The anti-capitalist and revolutionary struggle must then distance itself from, criticize, denounce, fight and crush its both enemies.

[2] Draft from some international comrades on Ukraine.

Source in Spanish: “Ellos no pueden parar la revuelta #2: ¡Contra la Guerra Imperialista! (Primera Parte) Invierno 2014-2015” & https://antagonismorp.wordpress.com/2016/08/14/antifascismo-instrumento-del-capitalismo/