We hereby share an unofficial translation of an article from Issue nº100 of the newspaper El Pueblo from Chile.
Notes on Fascism and Corporatism
(Part I)
For several years now—and even more so recently—accusations of
fascism have been leveled at José Antonio Kast. These accusations are
largely justified, as this individual’s own statements and credentials
characterize him as a fascist. Part of the problem is that fascism and
the corporatization of society have in Kast just one of their
representatives, one who knows how to use the old “representative
democracy” and its rules. The most serious problem begins with those who
stand behind the judge shouting, “There goes the fascist!” There he
goes!“ These people, disguised as democrats or socialists, hide their
corporatist positions but end up staunchly defending the same 1980
Constitution they previously criticized, and they try to present
themselves as our ”heroes” without heroic deeds or our bourgeois
democrats without bourgeois democratic revolutions.
By Juan Segundo Leiva Popular Research Center
To understand fascism, it is necessary to understand what the State
is and the nature of its classes. Marx argues that “the origins of
States are lost in a myth, which must be believed, but which cannot be
discussed.” For his part, the great Lenin stated that “the problem of
the State is one of the most complicated and difficult, perhaps the one
in which bourgeois scholars, writers, and philosophers have sown the
most confusion.”
For Lenin, the State is organized violence. He says that maintaining a
regime of exploitation is impossible “without a permanent apparatus of
coercion,” without “a machine for one class to repress another.” And he
further clarifies this point: “This machine can take various forms. The
slave-owning State could be a monarchy, an aristocratic republic, and
even a democratic republic. In reality, the forms of government varied
extraordinarily, but their essence was always the same: slaves had no
rights and remained an oppressed class; they were not considered human
beings.”
Lenin clarifies that “any State in which private ownership of land
and the means of production exists, in which capital rules, however
democratic it may be, is a capitalist State, a machine in the hands of
the capitalists for the subjugation of the working class and poor
peasants. And universal suffrage, the Constituent Assembly, or
Parliament are merely a form, a kind of promissory note, which does not
change the essence of the matter.” He insisted that the form of State
domination may vary, “but power is always, essentially, in the hands of
capital, whether or not there is restricted voting or other rights,
whether it is a democratic republic or not; in fact, the more democratic
it is, the more crude and cynical is the domination of capitalism.”
“Capital, once it exists, dominates the entire society, and no
democratic republic, no electoral rights can change the essence of the
matter.” This becomes more acute and unsustainable under imperialism.
We will take up Chairman Gonzalo’s approaches to this important
issue. He points out that Lenin also saw that, with imperialism, the
armed forces became much more powerful and the entire economy became
militarized, that the bureaucracy grew immensely and the apparatus
became increasingly repressive, but he did not have the opportunity to
see fascism. Fascism will emerge as a necessity of the bourgeois State
to stop the revolution. Fascism does not raise its head or emerge in
Russia because the proletarian revolution triumphs. As the revolution
unfolds in Europe, fascism will appear on the scene and develop a fierce
“struggle against parliament until it crushes it.” It is important to
note that Marx, long before, had already formulated that the bourgeois
system is closely related to the strengthening of executive power to the
detriment of parliamentary power, which is declining. This
strengthening of the executive is nothing other than its growing
reactionary nature.
It is extremely important to emphasize the fact that a State is
always a dictatorship. For this reason, the experience of authoritarian
governments is a phenomenon that predates fascist regimes. Similarly,
regimes based on terror predate fascism, therefore terror—despite their
sophisticated use of terror—is not one of its main characteristics.
Some typical features of fascism and corporatism can be found
earlier. Marx, always a visionary in many things, analyzed the
phenomenon of Bonapartism. His book “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Napoleon Bonaparte” is a rich source of political concepts that
contribute to understanding fascism and the reactionarization of the
State. In this sense, Bonapartism is related to the fact that the class
struggle itself generates its “heroes,” that is, characters, often
grotesque, who eventually become the saviors of the moment, in
particular the saviors of the ruling classes, as their representatives.
These are the führers, the “leaders.” This is the case, to mention a
few, in Chile or Peru, Argentina or Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s, when
fascist military dictatorships, with their respective “leaders,” ended
up, through coups d’état, overthrowing the “democratic representative”
regimes that were already mired in deep crises and, as we pointed out,
were becoming insufficient for the revolutionary rise of the working
class and peasant masses.
In the case of the rise of fascism in Germany, it is important to
understand the impact of the October Revolution and the failure of
Germany’s own proletarian revolution in 1919, which was an aborted
revolution. The German Social Democrats (revisionists at the time) came
to power under the protection of Hindenburg serving the established
order and resorting to the army to crush the German revolution and
maintain the old order. This paved the way for the rise of Nazi-fascism.
After their rise in the decade of 1920, Hitler and its Party
conquered a bigger influence, supported by the international and German
financial bourgeoisie, even the one from United States. They aimed to
contain revolution and communism, as well as to act against the Soviet
Union. It was the ongoing counterrevolution.
However, the origin of fascism lies in Japan. “Action is polarized,”
says Chairman Gonzalo, “revolution and counterrevolution, and bourgeois
forms and liberal ideologies are insufficient to contain the revolution,
hence the need for fascism.” Since the beginning of the 20th
century, militaristic sectors have been waging a fierce struggle
against the Japanese parliamentary liberals, while at the same time the
rise of the Japanese labor and peasant movement sowed terror among the
imperialists and monopolists (zaibatsu). This determined an
outcome in favor of the militarist “statists,” the crushing of
parliament, and the defeat of the workers and sharecroppers. This is to
mention just a few of the examples that abound in world history.
Fascism is not the same everywhere; it takes specific forms depending
on the historical and political conditions in which it develops and the
degree of development of the revolution it faces. It can even coexist
with parliament for a time, which creates a dilemma for some of its
representatives. Fascism, despite its specific historical differences,
has general characteristics that are common to all forms: it sweeps away
everything that is bourgeois-democratic, it promotes nationalism
(chauvinism), it uses social demagogy, a supposed struggle against the
rich (or the rich take care of themselves), grand offers to the masses
(the “radical change”).
An important leader of the Communist International, George Dimitrov,
considers fascism to be a State that represents and defends the
interests of the financial bourgeoisie (the imperialist big
bourgeoisie), introducing fascist criteria of denial and rejection of
democratic liberal principles, rejecting the parliamentary bourgeois
order to promote corporatism, and which also uses terror, soft politics,
and hard politics. With regard to terror, what fascism does is develop
more violence as an instrument of paralysis and domination, in order to
achieve its objectives of applying its fascist goals and the corporatist
order (political objective). This is why a key issue in understanding
fascism is that it cannot be characterized only by terror, but also by
the denial of bourgeois freedoms.
As a way of confronting the rise of people’s protest and revolution,
and when democratic-representative forms are no longer sufficient to
contain this, the reaction attempts to implant the fascist regime, the
corporate State, the vertical organization of society based on the
fascist trinity: businessmen-officials (or technocrats-workers), with a
political centralization of power in the Executive.
Every State is a dictatorship. This dictatorship can operate, as it has since the 20th
century, in the form of representative democracy or in the form of
military governments. It can do so at crucial moments or when it has the
urgent need to defend or develop the prevailing order of exploitation.
The big landlord-bureaucratic State, such as the Chilean State,
oppresses the people, especially workers and peasants, strikes at the
petty bourgeoisie, and restricts the middle or national bourgeoisie.
This joint dictatorship of two classes (big landlords and the big
bourgeoisie), its system of government, whether representative democracy
or corporatism, and the politics that guide it, demoliberal or fascist,
respectively, exploit and oppress the people.
All this becomes more complex when revisionists (bourgeois workers’
Parties) develop a fascist political conception in practice and seek to
corporatize society. In this sense, the false Communist Party that
governs China today is a sham for many.
After the counterrevolutionary coup in 1976, the glorious Party
founded by Chairman Mao Tse-Tung became a fascist Party (as he had
warned regarding the actions of the right wing within the party), and
its regime, beyond the achievements that survived the workers, became a
counterrevolutionary regime, a system based on capitalist restoration,
with aspirations to become an imperialist power and, in the long term, a
hegemonic superpower at the global level. To this end, it has had to
develop fascism and corporatize Chinese society. These are issues of
great relevance to understand at the present time.
(To be continued in a future edition)
