The general crisis of imperialism and state-monopoly capitalism (private and public) pushes big capital and the big rents of the dominant reactionary blocs in the various European countries to foreground the economic and political offensive against the proletariat and the popular masses (large sectors of women and youth, service workers, micro-entrepreneurs, poor peasants, etc. ), to accentuate the oppression against oppressed peoples and small nations (starting with support for the genocide of the Palestinian people), to deepen warmongering expansionism and participation in the inter-imperialist war that is emerging as a long positional war. All this has been fueling for decades in European countries an increasing corporativization of society and an irreversible fascistization of institutions and various state apparatuses. Such processes which, taken together, are an expression of the dying phase of imperialism.
Within this framework, the hegemonic crisis of parliamentary systems, the historic parties of the bourgeoisie, and the large reactionary trade unions is rampant. Mass abstentionism, sometimes even a majority one as in the case of our country, is the main expression of this crisis that indicates the now abyssal gap between the proletariat and the popular masses and the usual forms of the exercise of reactionary hegemony.
On another and opposite side, the hegemonic crisis is also fueled by relevant parts of the reactionary middle classes affected by the crisis (privileged petty bourgeoisie in general and thus working-class and service aristocracy, personnel of the hegemonic apparatuses, white-collar, exploitative small business of labor-power and rich peasants, etc.). These strata of the middle classes in fact claim more power, privileges and more repression and they candidate themselves as the mass social base of the bourgeoisie, big monopoly capital, and the rents variously linked to the state and international capital.
These are the basic coordinates in the light of which to read and interpret the results of the italian and european elections. These elections confirm the irreversible nature of the tendency to make a political form emerge that adequately corresponds, in terms of the composition of parliaments and the formation of government executives, to the rampant corporatization and fascistization of society and reactionary bourgeois institutions. All this in an attempt to seek a way out, functional to the strategic interests of big capital and the rampant hegemonic crisis of the various states.
Elections show how openly fascist political forces are advancing everywhere, and how everywhere such forces are putting increasing pressure on those semi-fascist liberals and center-left and social-democratic forces, in fact social-fascists, which for several decades have been the main protagonists in serving fascistization, warmongering expansionism and the economic offensive against the popular masses. This kind of situation will force liberal-semifascist forces to unite, on the level of governing alliances, either with social-fascist ones or increasingly with fascist ones. In either case it will be the fascist forces that will take advantage of the situation.
Excluding the possibility that the situation, on the level of electoral results, in this or that country or in the majority of European countries, may in the future temporarily reverse itself means having and proposing a mechanistic view of these processes with the only real result of belittling the problem of fascism. Indeed, it is on the contrary foreseeable that the tendency for the full establishment of fascism, with the permanence or otherwise of parliamentary forms and opposition forces, will be established entirely only through oscillations. On the other hand, precisely these oscillations have characterized, since the early 1920s, the intermediate phase between the First and Second World Wars. Moreover, it is mechanistic to think that the establishment of fascism today can fully correspond to the forms taken by the Mussolini regime or any other fascist regime of the past. The bourgeoisie itself learned from the defeats it suffered in the past and thus also developed new institutions and new reactionary strategies to assert fascism.
The results of the italian and european elections refer, with the rampant abstentionism, to an embryonic political polarization. A polarization also hinted at by the ongoing development of mass opposition movements, though still characterized by the hegemony of economicist, reformist and movementist forces. It is therefore noteworthy that part, albeit a minority, of abstentionism is in fact on the far left of the political spectrum. Mass abstentionism itself, as a whole, shows that there is a significant part of the working class, youth, popular masses and micro-enterprises that, albeit in a swinging, confused and disjointed way, aspires to radical political and social change.
Forces on the left side of the political spectrum that emerged from the European elections carry programs that are ultimately reactionary and also have no real autonomy from social-fascist forces. Among such forces that even raise the issue of anti-fascism instrumentally at times, as in the case of the “green-left alliance” list that landed in parliament with 6 percent of the vote, the problem of fascism is reduced to that of fascist political forces. Thus the fact that the latter are both an expression and a ring of the tendency toward fascism structurally inherent in the crisis, monopoly capitalism and the imperialist state is concealed. The consequence is that an “Anti-Fascist Front” is proposed with the same social-fascist, or even liberal-fascist, forces that continue to be promoters of the processes of fascistization and corporatization of society and the state.
Outside this line-up, namely in the extended galaxy of far-left forces, a distinction must be made in our country between those who chose to participate in the elections by supporting this or that list, this or that candidate, from those who raised the banner of abstentionism. In the first case we are talking about groups linked to social-fascist forces. In the second we are talking about forces often characterized by erroneous positions on the nature of the general crisis, imperialism, the state, state monopolististic capitalism, so-called “bourgeois democracy” and the problem of fascism. To summarize, dogmatic and mechanistic (a certain way of referring to Marxism-Leninism accompanied by the struggle against Maoism), councilist and workerist, bordighist and especially trotskyist positions prevails.
These tendencies agree in underestimating the problem of fascism. This is because of the denial of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory of imperialism as a dying stage of capitalism and the crisis of state monopoly capitalism (public and private) leading to fascism. Also because of such basic theses as the identification of parliamentarism and the party system with liberal-type bourgeois democracy (when already Dimitrov in the historic congress of the Third International made it clear that fascism can also present itself by maintaining a simulacrum of a multi-party parliamentary system).
In this regard, it should be pointed out that in Italy there has never even been a liberal-type bourgeois democracy and how the exit from World War II resulted in the recycling of fascist forces and institutions within the state, among other things not coincidentally the same ones, coming from the Mussolini regime (MSI-FdI) that today directly hold the government and that come from the 20-year Mussolini era.
Among the erroneous theses hegemonic on the far left stands out the one that identifies fascism with a mass terrorist regime, confusing fascism with the kind of regime that emerges in the terminal crisis phases of fascism under the advance of the revolutionary struggle and which, having eventually failed down the road of restructuring in a liberal-fascist key (as happened, e.g., with relative success with the end of the Franco regime in Spain), they can do nothing but resort to mass terrorism in the attempt to prolong their egemony.
Again, the historical theses of the Seventh Congress of the Communist International are rejected, and we are careful not to consider those expressed by the Communist Party of Peru and President Gonzalo (assassinated in prison, as was the case with Gramsci, because he was deprived of the care necessary for his health), who in both cases deny that counterrevolutionary violence is the central element in characterizing the nature of a fascist regime.
Moreover, such violence is reductively interpreted as something openly deployed, ignoring the whole process of corporatization of the state, which, although in its present state in a less conspicuous way, results in an increasing reactionary militarization of society. This denies the continuity and in a sense the deepening of the politics of fascism in our country, peddling the idea that on the ground of the crisis of imperialism, monopoly capitalism and the rampant hegemonic crisis a liberal democracy is possible in Italy.
Among the various theses that undervalue fascism particularly dangerous are those that appeal to “leftist anti-Stalinism,” namely the councilist, operaist, bordighist, and trotskyist theses. In one way or another, these essentially trotskyist tendencies repropose the thesis of fascism as Bonapartism. In essence, they assert that the fascist political forces that are taking hold and establishing themselves in the various European countries are expressions of the middle classes affected by the crisis who would come into contradiction on the one hand with the proletariat and on the other hand with the big bourgeoisie and industrial-financial capital (and thus with the historical parties of the bourgeoisie that have been established in Europe since World War II) aspiring to gain control of the state and institutions. Now let’s look at Trotsky’s own statements: “Before our eyes in Germany, democracy has been supplanted by Hitler’s aristocracy, while the bourgeois parties are shattered today the German bourgeoisie does not rule directly; from a political point of view it is in complete subjection to Hitler and his gangs…” “These mercenaries sit on their master’s neck, sometimes tearing the tastiest bits out of his mouth and moreover spitting on his bald head” [Trotsky, The class nature of the Soviet State, October 1933].
Theories of fascism as bonapartism openly belittle the problem of fascism. This is because they paradoxically contain the ‘idea that today the rise of fascism in Italy and Europe is not entirely reactionary, but instead also has a progressive aspect. These theories see in the advance of the right-wingers, on the one hand, the expression of the discontent, protest and demands of the popular masses and, on the other hand, an increasing weakening of the domination and hegemony of big finance capital, which today would be the main support of the “democratic-bourgeois” parliament. Thus they operate, as, moreover, bordighism already did in Italy, to pave the way for fascism and hinder an effective reaction of the proletariat and the popular masses.
An extreme version of these theories is found in leftist populism at the time when such populism tends to merge with trotskyism. This tendency of an increasingly explicitly red-brown nature takes different forms, e.g., in Italy the CARC-nPCI greeted the results of the European elections by writing, “The EU bosses, the promoters of war, of submission to NATO and austerity have lost ground everywhere.” The recent formation of Popular Resistance, coming from Rizzo’s CP, continues on the old line of the same CP; a party that already hailed the rise of the fascist pitchfork movement in 2011. In Germany, we have Sahra Wagenknecht (which claims to combine nationalism, racism, social policies and socialist phraseology) who took 6.2 percent of the vote in the European elections. What these forces have in common is the idea that the mass following that fascist forces are having is an expression of the manifestation of both reactionary and revolutionary tendencies, and that therefore one should not oppose these forces head-on, but rather share some of their “basic problems.”
The situation imposes on the genuinely communist forces in our country a political line characterized by the advance of revolutionary forces through the development of strategic defense within the framework of a protracted struggle for the development of an anti-fascist people’s democratic revolution on the road to socialism. Revolution centered on the development of a New Resistance in the form of people’s war. To this end, it is necessary to work on the formation of a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party. In Italy, this involves taking up Antonio Gramsci’s way on the basis of Maoism and rebuilding the Party.
In order to advance and develop the strategic defensive along with the theoretical, political and organizational work for the establishment of a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party, work must be done on the political orientation, organization and unification of all sincerely communist and democratic forces on the basis of the strategy of people’s revolution.
It is a matter of working in Italy for the construction of an anti-fascist front with proletarian hegemony that will gradually gather and unify, in the course of the struggle and the revolutionary process, as a function of the construction of the new popular power, the most conscious and advanced sectors of the working class, of the mass movements (in the first place today of the youth, students and women), of the most exploited strata of the popular masses (particularly of the south and islands), of the several million micro and very small entrepreneurs in agriculture, industrial handicrafts, commerce, etc. (those who do not employ on average more than one unit of labor-power annually). It is a matter of defending, representing and mobilizing, from this perspective, the classes and social strata affected by warmongering expansionist policies and the increasingly advanced fascistization of the state (starting with the new laws being implemented, those that accentuate repression against movements opposing differentiated autonomy and the premierate). Classes and strata suffer the yoke of big monopoly capital and from big rents old and new; who pay the price from warmongering policies; who today are subjected to the ongoing economic offensive against workers in all sectors with the rise of exploitation and prices, unemployment and precarization, the slashing of wages and small rents, the devastation and dismantling of public social services; the spread of semi-feudal forms of production and labor; and the dramatic resurgence in the south and islands of the southern question.
NUOVA EGEMONIA, June 2024
CONTRIBUTI TEORICO-POLITICI PER LA COSTITUZIONE DEL PARTITO MARXISTA-LENINISTA-MAOISTA 