- by Marcus Browning
- The Guardian
- Issue #2179
Photo: M Santos
The rise of the right is clear to see in Australia’s defence of Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians, with a news blackout reinforced by the outlawing of pro-Palestinian protests and the Albanese government welcoming the blood-soaked Israeli President with open arms.
The right was also in the forefront in exploiting the mass shooting tragedy at Bondi Beach last year. The NSW Minns Labor government, with Chris Minns was cynically looking to deploy troops in the streets and taking the opportunity to arm police with military hardware: weapons in the name of the 15 victims.
This came soon after the same police force had stood by and watched neo-Nazi thugs pose for publicity photos in front of state parliament, followed by what was an online recruitment drive for the fascists dressed up as reportage in Nine Media’s Sydney Morning Herald.
All the while the media promotional whirl surrounds Pauline Hanson, normalising her hate-and-division fascist grouping.
In terms of war propaganda, although Australia is not a member of NATO the Albanese government and the monopoly-controlled media — the media owned by Nine and Murdoch, and the ABC too — have become just as much a part of the NATO war machine as all the planes, helicopters, tanks, battleships, and cruise missiles.
Meanwhile the economic crisis grows deeper, all the system’s contradictions becoming sharper, the aggressiveness of capital gaining in intensity and brutality.
Fascism and its defeat are too often seen as past historical events. In contemporary Australia, the ruling class responses to the system’s ongoing crisis is to criminalise refugees, militant workers, Arabic and Muslim Australians, environmentalists and anti-war activists. The Albanese government brings into force an industrial relations system devised by the Business Council of Australia and enacts a hostile takeover of the militant construction union (CFMEU). Illegal, immoral wars are waged.
The accumulation of contradictions in capitalist society has seen the growth of the economic, political and strategic power of big finance capital and transnational enterprises and the strong assault on basic social and democratic rights of the working people.
TRUMP REGIME
Internationally, at the centre of emergent fascism is the US, displayed clearly in the regime of Donald Trump. In the heartland of capitalism in its imperialist stage, we see before us the march towards fascism. It has not yet consolidated itself into a fully-fledged system, but is moving by incremental steps, starting with authoritarianism.
Almost every day there is a new move in this direction – the global thug kidnaps the president of Venezuela, renames the Gulf of Mexico, and threatens to annex Greenland, Panama, or Canada. Mainstream media commentators note each new event, incident, or proclamation without exposing the connections between each of these moments and the system which is being constructed behind the headlines.
Like every would-be fascist dictator, Trump has insisted that he will “restore law-and-order.” To that end, the military has appeared in the streets of the US, and in the very capital itself. A new national police force is in the offing, backed up by the fanatical forces of Trump’s MAGA movement and massive amounts of taxpayer money. Like every fascist dictator, from the first day of his regime, Trump has been governing by executive order, sidelining Congress, the courts, and any form of democratic institution.
HISTORY
To know the history of fascism – its development, its defeat and its resurgence today – we begin with Bulgarian Communist Party leader and General Secretary of the Communist International, Georgi Dimitrov.
Just over 90 years ago, on 2 August 1935, Dimitrov delivered a report to the 7th World Congress of the Communist International. This lengthy report contains within its pages the definition of fascism that Communists throughout the world have held to be true and accurate since it was first elaborated. What, then, is fascism?
The Communist International defined fascism as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” Dimitrov explained that fascism developed out of the sharpening of the class struggle and that it was “not a form of state power standing above both classes – the proletariat [working class] and the bourgeoisie [capitalist class].” On the contrary, “fascism is the power of finance capital itself.”
Dimitrov said that fascism becomes the favoured form of the capitalist class because “the capitalists are no longer able to maintain their dictatorship by the old methods of parliamentarism and of bourgeois democracy in general.” In fact, democracy in capitalism becomes “a hindrance in the struggle against the proletariat.”
Fascism then is not an inevitable stage of capitalism but depends on the development of the “forces of the fighting proletariat.” Fascism, from that point of view, is an attempt to forestall the growth of the forces of revolution.
Those forces of revolution are growing around the word as capitalism fails to deliver. In the UK discontent is on the rise after years of a Labour government that presses ahead on autopilot with Tory cruelty towards those in need. Across Europe ‘centrist’ parties promise no future other than a neoliberalism that has failed.
ONE WAY AHEAD
There is only one way to defeat fascism, and Dimitrov knew what it was. All the forces and people’s movements and political parties from the centre to the left, including democratic socialists, social democrats, other left entities, and communists themselves, must put aside their differences and organise themselves into a mass united front to resist confront and oppose every manifestation of fascism.
This will not be an easy task. Class collaboration and opportunism is rife among the non-communist centre and centre-left, and communist parties throughout the capitalist-imperialist world are rebuilding their strength and influence in a period of counter-revolution. Still, it is a task which must be done. Fascism must be defeated.
See Guardian #2169 for a review of ‘Against Fascism and War.’
