The left must free itself from the vicious cycle of bourgeois liberalism and fascism
A call to break ourselves from the stranglehold of economism, reformism, class collaboration, and uncritical faith in bourgeois liberalism
After the La France Insoumise (LFI) candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon narrowly missed the second round of the presidential elections, coming in third with 22% of the vote, Mélenchon rallied his voters to vote against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, but stopped short of endorsing the Emmanuel Macron. Now, in the first electoral pact of France’s left in 20 years, Mélenchon has united, under the coalition Nouvelle Union Populaire écologique et social (NUPES), the Europe Ecology–the Greens (EELV), the French Communist Party (PCF), and the Socialist Party (PS) to stop Macron’s neoliberal agenda.
In comparison, since Bernie Sanders rallied his voters to unite behind then 2020 U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden against Donald Trump, any social democratic demands, including demands for universal healthcare, free public college education, expansion of social security and an increase in taxes on the rich, have largely been subsumed and discarded by liberal Democrats. The result of a disorganized left tailing behind liberal leadership in the U.S.?-- A re-opening for the resurgence and expansion of the reactionary fascistic right.
Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Communist Party during Mussolini’s Italy, and R. Palme Dutt, 1930s British member of the Communist International, long before analyzed the conditions that led to the triumph of fascist power in Italy and Germany in the 1930s: a) the intensification of economic crisis and class struggle as capital attempts to hold onto its power in a prolonged period of economic decay, b) a breakdown of bourgeois democratic institutions, and c) the disillusionment and division of the working class, absent a politically independent class-conscious leadership and organization among the working class.
Gramsci and other members of the Communist International pointed to the failures of the Second International’s class collaboration policies- its abandonment of class struggle for purely narrow economic reforms and its support for national chauvinism during and post WWI- as the birth seeds of fascism. During the inter-war period of relative economic prosperity, the German and Italian governments were able to placate and divide the working class through social democratic concessions.
This period, however, does not last, as Dutt writes in Fascism and Social Revolution, “This system worked well enough until the world economic crisis began to destroy the basis of stabilization… The weapon of social democracy was more and more blunted by each successive use. Widespread disillusionment grew with the failure of Social Democracy, not only to lead any fight for socialism, but even to fight to maintain existing conditions or defend the daily interests of the workers”
In 1918, German workers and soldiers had overthrown the old State, their councils spread throughout the country. But the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), instead of destroying the old regime, breaking up landed estates, taking over the banks, and building a workers' army, joined into a coalition government with the bourgeoisie under the Weimar Republic dragging along revolutionary workers under their leadership. The SPD’s goal became to save capitalism and prevent revolution, refusing four times to join the Communists in its united front against fascism. Instead, it deferred to the liberal leadership to contain fascism, even after the Weimar Republic installed Hitler as Chancellor.
By 1920, workers in Italy were engaged in widespread strikes and land seizures. They occupied factories in North Italy, and because of its active base-building, the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI) captured one-third of the votes in parliament. But the reformist leadership within PSI resisted taking political power and instead directed the workers to leave the factories after obtaining a 20 percent wage increase. The burgeoning working class movement was thereafter demoralized and PSI membership dwindled in subsequent years until they were incapable of fighting Mussolini’s ascension to power.
In short, fascism flourished under the protection and assistance of a bourgeois democratic government, with the collaboration of a reformist left, which had divided, weakened, and incapacitated any kind of revolutionary resistance from the working class.
Historically, France and the U.S. have had strong liberal institutions that have been able to weather economic crises, but after years of failed left leadership and sustained economic crisis, we are seeing these liberal strongholds unravel today.
In 2016, France’s Socialist Party president François Hollande undercut the power of organized labor and long-standing national labor laws when he passed the El-Khomri Law, making it possible for employers to “negotiate” conditions with individual workers and easier for companies to lay off workers and reduce overtime and severance payments. Despite widespread strikes and protests, trade unions accepted the law under the threat of job cuts, while Hollande sent the police to clamp down on protesters. It was under Socialist Party president Hollande, and not Macron, that railroads and electricity began to be privatized. It was under Hollande, and not Macron, that refugee camps began to be razed. Macron’s anti-worker policies were merely a continuation of Hollande’s anti-worker policies. Having exposed its outright betrayal of the working class, in 2017, the French Socialist Party and its candidate Benoît Hamon failed to enter the second round of the presidential election. This past April, its candidate Anne Hidalgo won a pitiful 1.75% of the vote. On the other hand, far-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen has gained ground since 2017, losing by a lesser margin of 18 percentage-points compared to the 32 percentage point loss in 2017.
In the U.S., it has been a downhill battle for revolutionary working class movements since the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), at the height of its power in the 1930s, was absorbed into the social democratic politics of the FDR administration, and then later merged with the AFL in 1955. Abandoning the opportunity to build an independent working class political organization, time and time again, burgeoning spontaneous movements among the working class are swallowed by liberal bourgeois institutional politics and then neutralized. The energy of the Black Power movement swallowed by electoral politics and federal social service programs. Occupy Wall Street’s denunciation of finance capital and the 1% swallowed by promises to forgive student debt. The energy of Black Lives Matters swallowed by bias training for police and a handful of police convictions. More recently, following the 2016 election when supporters of Bernie Sanders, were looking for independent political leadership that would break away from the liberalism of the Democratic Party, what they found instead was a strategic focus in Our Revolution, which directed the working class to “occupy the Democrats” and put their hope electoral politics and collaboration with liberal Democrats.
Dutt writes, “Where the working class movement fails to realize its revolutionary role, follows the leadership of Reformism, and thus surrenders to large capital, and even appears to enter into collaboration with it, there the discontented petit-bourgeois elements and declassed proletarian elements begin to look elsewhere for their leadership. On this basis Fascism is able to win its hold.”
For those who turn to liberalism as a bulwark against fascism, one needs to look at the growth of Le Pen’s and Trump’s following under the presidency of Macron and both Biden and Obama. Le Pen was able to sway the most backward strata of a disaffected working class with her platform of social welfare and anti-immigrant nationalism, while campaigning against “the president of the rich,” Macron, who had abolished the wealth tax, cut pensions for workers, cut unemployment benefits, and furthered the privatization of public industries.
In the U.S., following the economic crisis of 2008, Obama not only let finance capital off the hook for the economic crisis, but bailed out the banks with more than $350 billion, no-strings attached, of taxpayers money and shifted the financial burden from to ordinary debtors. This created an opening for the right who found their champion in Trump. Now, a ban on Twitter, a criminal investigation, and a Democratic takeover in both legislative houses and the executive have not stopped Trump, who was declared the “Republican kingmaker” after his endorsement launched several right-wing candidates to midterm general elections. Fascist tendencies are still very much alive and proliferating beyond Trump, as right-wing candidates compete to see who can propose the most reactionary laws to restrict rights for voters, women, immigrants, and LGBTQ people.
Dutt writes, “Bourgeois democracy breeds Fascism… The more the workers place their trust in legalism, in constitutionalism, in bourgeois democracy, the more they make sacrifices to save the existing regime as the lesser evil against the menace of fascism, the heavier the capitalist attacks and the more rapid the advance to fascism… This is the lesson of Germany.”
We are and have been in a prolonged period of capitalism’s decay. As economic crises become more frequent, more intense, more lasting, class inequality more stark, imperialist wars more deadly and violent, whatever limited social rights we have begin to break down under the pressure of economic crisis. Class struggle becomes more intense, the facade of bourgeois democracy exposed, and faith in our institutions dissipates. This past presidential election, France experienced a record 28% voting abstention rate. In 2016 the U.S. presidential election had its lowest voter turnout of the past 20 years. The 2020 Capitol insurrection symbolized a challenge of the government's legitimacy from the backward strata of the working class. And today, the U.S. Supreme Court faces a crisis of legitimacy as its justices rule against the majority of citizens.
In this crisis of legitimacy, capital struggles to hold onto its power, but can no longer rule the same way-- so where does it turn? Dutt writes, “The bourgeoisie increasingly turns its back on parliamentary democracy in favour of more direct and open forms of coercion and the authoritarian state…. thus increasing the powers of the executive, of the police, and limiting working class movement and rights.”
In France, this turn towards authoritarianism started, not under Marine Le Pen, but under President Macron. Macron has issued laws restricting the rights of asylum seekers, protesters, prisoners, labor unions and nongovernmental organizations. It is under Macron that Islamaphobic measures, banning the veil, religious dress, and foreign flags, were passed. It is under Macron that police powers, including search warrants, stop-and-search, and the use of drones on citizens have been expanded. During the Yellow Vest movement, 2,495 protesters were wounded, 30 lost one eye, and five had their hand blown off. Macron had stepped up repression of migrants, razing their camps and sending them back home, even after 27 migrants drowned trying to cross the English Channel.
In crisis, bourgeois democracy makes way for the fascistic reactionary right to divide and crush the working class to the point where they are not a threat. Only when this happens, does capital restore the rule of bourgeois democratic law. As Gramsci writes in Democracy and Fascism, “the freedom to organize is only conceded to the workers by the bourgeois when they are certain that the workers have been reduced to a point where they can no longer make use of it, except to resume elementary organizing work - work which they hope will not have political consequences… Fascism, by shattering the working class, has restored to "democracy" the possibility of existing.”
Thus, capital facilitated Biden to come to power to restore “democracy” and the “rule of law,” after Trump had aided the ruling class in successfully dividing the working class and drawing the most backwards section of the working class behind its reactionary leadership. Today, we find ourselves repeating this cycle. On the one hand, our liberal leadership abandons its campaign promises to working people, and with the other hand, calls on people to vote for them to restore its basic rights against a reactionary right-- women’s rights for reproductive health, immigrant rights to public education, LGBTQ rights, rights to vote. It buys off representatives from sections of the working class- people of color, women, LGBTQ workers to divide and narrow the working class struggle, to disarm any real threat of an unified working class against capitalism.
Putting an end to the cycle requires a clear political direction
As it becomes increasingly clear that our liberal leadership, tied to finance and monopoly capitalism, cannot and will not improve the conditions of the working class, where will the left stand in all this? Under the chokehold of reformist leadership, the working class will forever be caught in the vicious cycle of bourgeois democracy and fascism, resistance stunted and blunted by reformism, by its blind faith in bourgeois legalism. Capitalism will continue towards decay, moral degeneration, violence, and suppression until the working class takes up its revolutionary role to provide political leadership.
The only way for the working class to extricate itself from this vicious cycle is, as Dutt writes, “The creation of an organization which, transcending at one and the same time the limits of narrow party organization and of trade-union organization, realizes the unity of the working class on a vaster terrain: that of preparation for a political struggle in which the class returns to the field arrayed for battle autonomously, both against the fascist bourgeois and against the democratic and liberal bourgeois.”
While Nouvelle Union Populaire écologique et social NUPES’ agreement with the Socialist Party walked back some of its original demands to the disagreement of the New Anticapitalist party (NPA), the left pact is significant, because under Melenchon’s leadership, it has forced its members to take a stand either for or against liberalism. By agreeing to unite under Melechon’s leadership, the Socialist Party is repudiating the party’s past turn towards neoliberalism and its abandonment of social democratic principles started under former president François Hollande. The task forward for Melenchon and the LFI must be to go beyond economic reformism and fuse with working class movements and struggles to develop their political leadership.
What about the left in the U.S.? For us to extricate ourselves from the vicious cycle of bourgeois liberalism and fascism, we need to take heed of the missed turns and opportunities in our history. We need to put forward demands that will unify and strengthen the power of the working class, expose the class collaborationists and opportunists who mislead the working class by accepting concessions that divide the working class-- demanding legalization of only a few immigrants, instead of calling for equal rights for all workers, a few more dollars in wages instead of control of our time, cancelling rent or accepting a few unions jobs on luxury constructions instead of stopping the displacement of working class communities. We need to and break ourselves from the stranglehold of economism, reformism, class collaboration, and uncritical faith in bourgeois liberalism- lest we squander again the heart and energy of thousands of working people fighting today.