CURRENT SITUATION: NOTES ON THE WORLD CRISIS (3)
On the Political Crisis
February 7, 2024
We have been writing and repeating that, as the representatives of the German state themselves have recognized: the masses are dissatisfied with everything and against everything that the present situation means and stands for, the masses have become more active and are on the move. As in the rest of the world, here also the imperialist exploitation and oppression of the proletariat and the masses of the country itself has grown. The power of capital has increased immensely to the same extent as the share of the profits of the capitalists and the income and state budget has increased and the difference with the income of the masses has widened enormously.
In this situation the present crisis with inflation and recession is not only unloaded mainly on the oppressed countries, but also on the workers and other toilers in Germany.
The masses are the arena of contention between revolution and counter-revolution and between the reactionary forces which see their collusion and struggle for the management of the imperialist state and its institutions increasing. Here comes that all this anti-AfD (Alternative for Germany—Trans) propaganda and mobilization seeks to manipulate the masses for the defense of their “democracy,” the current imperialist order, and to win elections.
The statements made by the Minister President of Thuringia Bodo Ramelow, several days ago, in an interview on German TV ZDF, as the highest representative of the Land of Thuringia, shows how the rulers in that country (the whole Federation) perceive the situation. What Bodo Ramelow said has already been said by other politicians, analysts and journalists and they need to continue to propagate it.
There is a generalized perception of political crisis, worsening of collusion and reactionary struggle, which is expressed in the “lack of consensus,” discrediting of those in charge and growing delegitimization of the institutions and their representatives, added to the great activity and mobilization of the masses.
The objective situation in development is leading to a palpable reactionary offensive throughout Europe, carried forward in collusion and struggle by two forces, one of them represented, for example, in Germany and France, etc., by the AfD, FN, (National Front—Trans) etc., and the other force, represented by the parties, their academic representatives and established media, with their differences according to their particular interests, e.g., whether this is in government or in the “opposition,” such as the SPD, (Social Democratic Party of Germany—Trans) and the other force, represented by the parties, their academic representatives and established media, with their differences according to their particular interests, e.g., whether this is in the government or in the “opposition,” such as the SPD, Greens, FDP or the CDU-CSU, the party of the “left,” all of them reactionaries defending the established order.
From the above, there is an increasingly reactionary bourgeois-democratic regime, with increasing cuts in rights, liberties and benefits for the proletariat and the reactionary people. It’s reactionary.
The conditions for this development are the deepening of the “multi-crisis” of the system and the danger of questioning its order, which the reactionaries of both forces see in the growth of the activity and mobilization of the masses and their struggles.
The reactionary tasks are threefold, those that have to do with the State, the economy, and to avert the danger represented by the current trend of the masses.
That is why, today, we offer below, as a representative of the international proletariat, José Carlos Mariátegui, founder of the CPP, (Communist Party of Peru—Trans) saw in the early 1920s, a development that has historical similarities with the current crisis of bourgeois democracy and the rise of fascism at that time:
“Another point of scientific socialism important to Mariátegui is the crisis of bourgeois democracy whose symptoms could be perceived before World War I and whose causes he sees in ‘the parallel growth and concentration of capitalism and the proletariat’; in that way the development of monopoly, characteristic of imperialism, and the questioning of the bourgeois order by the proletariat are what causes the bourgeois-democratic crisis. Deepening the problem he emphasizes that under the bourgeois regime industry developed immensely with the power of machinery, with ‘great industrial enterprises’ having arisen, and since the political and social forms are determined by the base sustaining them he concludes: ‘The expansion of these new productive forces does not allow the subsistence of the old political patterns. It has transformed the structure of nations and demands the transformation of the structure of the regime. Bourgeois democracy has ceased to correspond to the organization of economic forces tremendously transformed and enlarged. That is why democracy is in crisis. The typical institution of democracy is the parliament. The crisis of democracy is a crisis of parliament.’
Here we have a thesis intimately linked to Lenin's on the reactionary character of imperialism, on which Mariátegui bases his understanding of fascism as political reaction, as an international phenomenon not only Italian nor exclusively in imperialist countries but feasible also in backward nations like Spain, fascism which typically blames ‘all the misfortunes of the fatherland on politics and parliamentarism’; fascism as an expression that ‘the ruling class does not feel itself sufficiently defended by its institutions. Universal suffrage and parliament are obstacles in its way,’ how ‘reaction which in all countries is organized to the tune of a demagogic and subversive beat. (Bavarian fascists call themselves ‘national socialists.’ During its tumultuous training, fascism made abundant use of an anti-capitalist prose...)’; as ‘a nationalist and reactionary mysticism’ which ‘has taught the way of dictatorship and violence’ with its taking of power and repression, the use of the blackjack and castor oil but which despite its duration, ‘it appears inevitably destined to exacerbate the contemporary crisis, to undermine the basis of bourgeois society.’
To Mariátegui, as he taught in ‘The Biology of Fascism,’ from his work The Contemporary Scene, fascism is a political process which ‘for many years did not want to call itself or function as a party,’ whose social composition is heterogeneous and in which ‘the national flag covers up all the contraband and equivocations in doctrine and program... They want to monopolize patriotism.’ But within this ‘the contradictions undermining fascist unity’ always develop, contradictions which first faced ‘two antithetic souls and two antithetic mentalities. One extremist or arch-reactionary fraction proposing the integral insertion of the fascist revolution in the Statute of the Kingdom of Italy. The demo-liberal State had, in its view, to be replaced by the fascist State. While a revisionist fraction instead called for a more or less extensive political rectification’; a contradiction which, resolving itself favorably towards the first tendency, did not therefore cease to exist but continued to develop under new forms: one tendency proposing to sweep away ‘all opponents of the fascist regime in a Saint Bartholomew's Night,’ while others ‘more intellectual, but no less apocalyptic... invited fascism to definitively liquidate the parliamentary regime,’ meanwhile ‘the theoreticians of integral fascism sketch the technique of the fascist State which it conceives almost as a vertical trust of workers' unions or corporations.’ Thus, fascism is masterfully presented, essentially analyzed even in its contradictions.
Furthermore, in his analysis of fascism Mariátegui advances to typify the ‘characteristic attitude of a reformist, of a democrat, however one tormented by a series of 'doubts about democracy' and of unsettled feelings respect to reform’ shown by English writer H.G. Wells regarding Mussolini's regime: ‘Fascism appears to him a cataclysm, more than a consequence and result of the bankruptcy of bourgeois democracy and the defeat of the proletarian revolution in Italy. A confirmed evolutionist, Wells cannot conceive of fascism as a phenomenon possible within the logic of history. He must understand it as an exceptional phenomenon.’ To reformism, as we can see, fascism is not the consequence of the crisis of bourgeois democracy but ‘an exception,’ ‘a cataclysm,’ which is how some see it today in our country, only and exclusively as terror on the march, not seeing it is ‘a phenomenon possible within the logic of history’ caused by: the development of the monopolies into imperialism and the questioning of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat. Let that thesis help us to reject the reformist concepts being propagated about fascism and to have a correct and necessary understanding of history and the current situation in our country.
(…) On the other hand, Mariátegui highlighted that when confronted by a revolutionary threat the bourgeoisie also forms a united front, ‘but only temporarily, only while a definite assault on the revolution is prepared. Afterwards each one of the bourgeois groups tries to recover its autonomy... Within the bourgeoisie there are contrasts of ideology and interests, contrasts which no one can suppress’; that way, the bourgeois block is necessity broken by the development of its own internal contradictions and the development of the class struggle.” (CC of the CPP, LET US RETAKE MARIÁTEGUI AND RECONSTITUTE HIS PARTY, October, 1975).
Translated by the comrades of RedLibrary