Anatole Sawosik | Pole of Communist Revival in France (PRCF)
Faced with the rise of fascism in Europe, we must unite as never before, in line with the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, proletarian internationalism with popular patriotism, and thus unapologetically contest the fascists, on our class basis, for the banner of national sovereignty. We must also dialectically link the commitment to national independence with the strategic struggle for socialism.
As we know, Dimitrov insisted in his 1935 conclusions on the urgent need for communist parties to champion the independence of their respective homelands because, as we know, the Third Reich wanted to forge a Greater Germanic Europe on the ruins of free nations by joining forces with the vassal oligarchies of many European countries that ‘preferred Hitler to the Soviets’.
Faced with the danger of globalised imperialist wars, which in our time have a hegemonic, even exterminatory dimension, the Seventh Congress taught us, in principle, not to denounce “imperialism” in abstract terms, but to identify the main enemy of the peoples in each era. Yesterday, the Seventh Congress called on communists not to dismiss Nazi Germany and its Western rivals, even if they were imperialist (France, England, the USA, etc.), but to target primarily Hitlerism allied with Mussolini and the Japanese militarists, whom the Comintern rightly described as the ‘shock troops of world reaction’. Moreover, Hitler’s final defeat in 1945 led to the unprecedented expansion of the world socialist camp, demonstrating the futility of the Trotskyists’ criticism of the Seventh Congress for burying the struggle for socialism in the name of anti-fascism. Today, it would be simplistic and erroneous to dismiss, as some communist parties do, like the Trotskyists, on the one hand, the very diverse countries that make up the BRICS—even if some of them are bourgeois and counter-revolutionary, such as Russia, or heavily reactionary, such as N. Modi’s India—and, on the other hand, Euro-Atlantic hegemony, the number one enemy of the peoples, including the peoples of Western Europe and North America. Modi. Indeed, since 1945, US imperialism, flanked by its Anglo-Saxon, European, South Korean and Japanese vassals, has been tempted, in order to maintain the threatened global domination of the dollar and above all to avoid being supplanted by China led by the CCP, to go all out in a potentially exterminatory Third World War, with the help of nuclear weapons. And this global hegemony is all the more dangerous because it is in decline and is playing with the very survival of humanity, relying on the most reactionary forces on the planet, from the neo-Nazis in Kiev to the ultra-Zionists, including the jihadists of the Islamic State (Syria), the obscurantist Chinese sect Falun Gong and the most delusional North American messianists.
How can we fail to see that in the five states that make up the initial core of the BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—proletarian and communist traditions and legacies are strong or just waiting to be revived? So much so that a global victory for multipolarity led by the BRICS would inevitably reignite the global confrontation between Capital and Labour and Capitalism/Socialism on a global scale, while the struggle for multipolarity encourages all the dominated or marginalised countries of the world to reaffirm their national sovereignty against hegemony (as we see from the ALBA countries to the Sahel countries), which is very positive. In reality, since Euro-Atlantic hegemony is currently the spearhead of the most unbridled capitalist globalisation, its defeat would open a huge breach in the flank of capitalism itself, just as the defeat of Hitlerism in 1945 opened a huge breach that made it possible to create the European socialist camp and pave the way for the socialist and/or anti-imperialist revolutions in China, Vietnam, Cuba and Africa. This is all the more true given that the global proletariat, and especially the working class, has been awakening almost everywhere since the early 2020s in the form of a powerful strike movement that stretches from India to Great Britain, from Bangladesh to South Korea, from Mexico to the USA via Quebec, not to mention, in the most recent period, the strike movements in Greece, Belgium, Italy, and of course in France at the moment.
Unfortunately, many progressives confuse ‘fascism’ with ‘fascisation’. Fascism, defined by Dimitrov as the political mechanism that allows the most reactionary layers of imperialism to crush the working class, and in doing so to liquidate freedoms, but also to quietly prepare for imperialist war, is only the end result of the process of fascisation. This is why we must not cry fascism at every measure taken by the police to tighten bourgeois democracy, as this would only trivialise fascism itself and weaken the vigilance of workers. But symmetrically, under the pretext that the forms of fascistisation are never the same in different countries and periods and that, for example, the countries of the EU are not currently fully fascist, we must not deny the increasingly clear process of fascistisation of bourgeois democracies which, faced with a breakdown in political consent on the part of the working classes, notably a latent rejection of European “integration”, support for NATO, acceptance of capitalism, and acquiescence to the Palestinian genocide, etc., are becoming increasingly hardened, cultivating state anti-communism, flirting with the racist far right, allying themselves with Bandera, neo-Nazi or neo-Mussolini movements, and designating certain sections of the population (notably ‘Muslims’ today) as scapegoats for the social crisis. In short, as Dimitrov observed, increasingly creating the conditions for fascism in the strict sense of the term, i.e. the liquidation of bourgeois democracy and unbridled violence against workers.
This is why, even if the forms of fascism have changed between the 1930s and today, in order to combat the march towards fascism, it is still necessary to combine this struggle with the defence of popular interests, the rejection of imperialist wars, and the defence of national sovereignty, without ceasing to confront the far right itself directly.
Anti-fascism does not mean supporting the bourgeois bloc responsible for fascism by default, but calling on workers not only to fight the far right, but also to strike at the Euro-Atlanticist policy that constantly creates the socio-cultural breeding ground for fascism. Today’s anti-fascism must therefore not consist in dreaming of an impossible ‘progressive reorientation of the EU’, as the PCF does, as if the EU were an alternative to fascism, but in explaining that European ‘integration’, insofar as it aims to establish a fascist and warlike empire, to destroy the popular gains of each country, to carve up free nations, criminalise communism, etc., is in essence and in fact, with the general crisis of capitalism of which it is a symptom, one of the root causes of fascism, which must be fought no less than the far right. This is all the more true given that, in our era, the old ‘populist’ far right and the new ultra-warmongering reaction that claims allegiance to the EU-NATO and the anti-Russian crusade have already begun to merge, as shown by the support given by Ursula von der Leyen and Co. to the Ukrainian regime, which is riddled with avowed neo-Nazis.
Conclusion: the line of principle drawn by the Seventh Congress encourages us more than ever to reject both the ‘funeral march of the working class’ and the empty union behind this or that bourgeois, petty-bourgeois or nationalist force. By defending this rigorous and unifying orientation, Dimitrov did not betray the essence of Leninism, he fully deployed it; for Lenin, the Party must unite behind it all the forces of social change, given that only the working class is capable of gathering around it, in a vast ‘front of fronts’, all the struggles for emancipation. Today, when capitalism has become exterminationist, leading humanity to death or barbarism, communists have the highest of responsibilities: that of consistently carrying on the anti-exterminationist struggle for life, that is, until the final victory of communism.
This is what Fidel understood when, denouncing Gorbachev and his policy of abandoning socialism under the pretext of universal peace, the Cuban leader ended his historic speech in Camaguey with the revolutionary and universally unifying slogan: Patria(s) o muerte, socialismo o morir, venceremos!