A-Infos (en) France, UCL AL #350 - History, 1924: Bolshevised anti-fascism at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

From June to July 1924, the Fifth Congress of the Communist 
International was held in Moscow. This constitutes a radical turning 
point in the politics of the communist parties of Western Europe, now 
Bolshevised under the control of the Comintern. The anti-fascist 
strategy, that of the United Front against fascism, prohibits any 
strategic alliance with liberal democrats or social democrats, the 
latter even being described as "the left wing of fascism". This failure 
to take into account the specificities of the fascist phenomenon and 
danger, considering that the only anti-fascists are the communists, will 
henceforth, before a late reversal in 1935, be the official policy of 
the communist parties of Europe.

The question of the definition of fascism and the means to combat it has 
arisen in revolutionary organizations since the appearance of the 
phenomenon in Italy in 1919. The questions which are (re-) posed at the 
present time cannot avoid knowledge of the history of anti-fascism[1].

Among the notable moments of this history, the Fifth Congress of the 
Communist International (IC), the Comintern, is one of those which is 
the most unknown today: it is nevertheless at the origin of the blind 
political choices of the communist parties in towards fascism until 
1935... two years after Hitler's accession to power. If the success of 
National Socialism is not to be attributed solely to the strategy of the 
Communists - the social democrats (and the liberals) were no less 
inconsistent in the face of the reactionaries and fascists during this 
period -, this he bears a heavy responsibility for not having taken the 
fascist danger seriously enough.

On the one hand, by making it a simple armed arm of capitalism, on the 
other hand, by only considering communist activists as sincere 
anti-fascists.

From the beginnings of the large-scale development of the fascist 
phenomenon in Italy at the beginning of the 1920s, communist activists 
in Italy - Antonio Gramsci in particular -, then in Germany - especially 
Clara Zetkin and Karl Radek -, offered a fairly fine.

Clara ZETKIN (1857-1933)
They show its particularities and novelty with regard to past 
reactionary movements, notably the fact that "fascism constituted a mass 
movement, relying primarily on a small rural and urban 
bourgeoisie"[2]rather than on the army, traditional ally of reactionary 
movements. Faced with the repeated failures of the revolutionary or 
insurrectional movements which have multiplied in Europe since 1917 3, 
the question of the necessary defense of the working class [3]in the 
face of reactionary or fascist danger was very early discussed within 
the Comintern.

The birth of anti-fascism
The taking into account by international communist authorities of 
fascism as a "political category in its own right", an object of 
mobilization and struggle of the workers' movement, was a reality from 
the year 1922. But this was immediately coupled with a renegotiation of 
the definition of fascism. As the historian Gilles Vergnon notes, 
"generally speaking, the analyzes of the CI have, from this period 
onwards, engaged in both an extension and a reduction of the fascist 
phenomenon"[4].

The extension consists of encompassing under the term fascist any 
element of the reaction. The reduction, for its part, consists of a 
minimization of the political and socially anchored character of 
fascism: "utilitarian reduction to "white bands", to the "golden youth 
of the bourgeoisie""[5]. The materialism claimed by communist leaders is 
subordinated to the interests of communist parties in their struggles 
for political hegemony within the labor movement.

The birth of the common front
The IVth Congress of the IC opened on November 5, 1922 in Moscow, just a 
few days after Mussolini's march on Rome.

It is in the Resolution on tactics that a point on "international 
fascism" is devoted. This is defined there as an expression of "the 
political offensive of the bourgeoisie", the fascists being "white 
guards specially intended to combat all the revolutionary efforts of the 
proletariat"[6].

Fascism is unspecified, being understood only as an instrument in the 
hands of the bourgeoisie to destroy the organized proletariat, without 
seeing its specific characteristics. As for the mobilization of all 
communist parties, "the resolutions of the IC, which aims to be a 
centralized transnational organization like an army in the field"[7], 
having in fact "the force of law for the communist parties of the world 
whole", it is important to show that fascism is everywhere.

Thus, it is stated there: "The danger of fascism now exists in many 
countries in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary, in almost all Balkan countries, 
in Poland, in Germany (Bavaria), in Austria, in America and even in 
countries like Norway. In one form or another, fascism is not impossible 
in countries like France and England either.»[8].

Regardless of the magnification of the lines, the important thing is to 
ring out the general mobilization. This is how it is defined "that one 
of the "most important" tasks of the communist parties is "to organize 
resistance to international fascism, to put itself at the head of the 
entire proletariat in the fight against gangs fascists"[9].

If the term "fascism" is quickly taken up and used in the press of 
different ideological currents to qualify various reactionary phenomena, 
what is specific to communists, "it is the invention, against this 
formidable and polymorphous "fascism", of "an "anti-fascism" which is 
both a framework for mobilization that they control and a rallying sign 
against adversaries united and stigmatized in the light of their common 
dangerousness"[10].

The Comintern in charge
Anti-fascism was born, but it must essentially serve the cause of the 
Communist International. It quickly became a specific and main feature 
in the political and ideological confrontation of the communist parties 
against social democracy.

Thus, during the period 1923-1924, the communist parties took up the 
orientations traced by the IC and practiced "a "closed anti-fascism" 
which combines a maximum extension of the adversary (everyone, or 
almost, is "fascist" except the communists) and a minimal restriction of 
the field of alliances (no one is "anti-fascist", except the communists) 
"[11].

The hardening of the political line of the communist parties, dictated 
by the Comintern, is not unrelated to the internal struggles within the 
Russian Communist Party within the framework of the succession of Lenin, 
who died in January 1924, but has been removed from power since. the 
first months of 1923.

Another major event explains this radical shift: the failure of the 
attempted German Revolution following the crushing of the Hamburg 
Uprising led by the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) in October 1923, 
which sounded the death knell for the hopes of revolutionaries in 
Western Europe.

A new roadmap
It is to Grigori Zinoviev, then president of the CI, that we owe the 
expression "social fascism", pronounced at the XIIIth conference of the 
Russian Communist Party in January 1924. According to Gilles Vergnon, 
this expression "serves as "instrument in the internal struggle led by 
the Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev "troika" against the "Trotskyist" 
opposition, after the fiasco of a German revolution (the German October) 
expected in the fall of 1923.

Grigori Zimoniev (1883-1936), the inventor of the term "social fascism", 
was a member of the troika before being sentenced to death during the 
first Moscow trial and executed the day after the judgment, August 25, 1936.
Trotsky relied on the German policy of the Comintern to criticize its 
positions and strategy. The expression "social fascism" has, according 
to the historian Leonid Luks, a double function: to disqualify the 
positions of Trotsky and his allies within the Russian Communist Party 
and, at the same time, to "hide with radical rhetoric , the de facto 
renunciation of the struggle for power" in Germany.

Thus, "amalgamating social democracy with fascism also makes it possible 
to associate in the same group Heinrich Brandler, unfortunate leader of 
the KPD in 1923, accused of the failure of the "German October", Leon 
Trotsky and Karl Radek, rivals in the Russian CP, in the name of a 
"Menshevik" and social-democratic past with which they only apparently 
broke. Indiscriminately denouncing as fascists the socialist Friedrich 
Ebert, General von Seeckt, boss of the Reichswehr and... Adolf Hitler, 
both masks and justifies the failure and isolation of the KPD"[12]. 
Under these conditions it was impossible for the KPD to ally with the 
"left wing of fascism".

It was on the occasion of the Fifth Congress of the Comintern, in 
June-July 1924, the congress of the "Bolshevization" of the communist 
parties, that the new anti-fascist roadmap for the communist parties was 
established. Social democracy is defined as being "the left wing of 
fascism", effectively prohibiting any strategic, or even tactical, 
alliance with it to combat fascism.

It is now impossible for the communist parties to ally, even tactically, 
with the social democrats to fight fascism. The "common front against 
fascism" becomes an exclusively communist front, that is to say those 
who follow the line dictated by the Comintern.

From the United Front to the Popular Front
It took more than ten years for the Nazis to come to power in Germany in 
1933, but also in February 1934 for the united anti-fascist upsurge in 
France and the insurrection in Austria (Februarkämpfe), led by the 
socialists against the Patriotic Front ( who advocated an Austrian 
nationalism called "Austrofascism"), so that the leaders of the CI began 
to change their position.

It was Georgi Dimitrov, whose arrest by the Nazis, then his acquittal, 
for complicity in the burning of the Reichtag made him an anti-fascist 
hero, who announced the Comintern's new anti-fascist policy in a 
strongly critical speech from the previous line.

From now on, in the face of fascism, the Communist International 
defends the "United Proletarian Front, Anti-Fascist Popular Front".

It is a 180° turn that is made, Dimitrov going so far as to advocate the 
just defense of bourgeois democracy in the face of fascist danger. 
Unfortunately, the United Proletarian Front was shattered in May 1937 in 
Catalonia, when the Stalinists attacked and then hunted down the 
militants of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, 
anti-Stalinist Marxist) and the CNT.

Once again, faced with fascism and reaction, the Stalinists preferred to 
hunt down the activists of the workers' movement, Bolshevism being 
unable to admit dissonant voices within the socialist camp.

In August 1939, with the signing of the German-Soviet Pact, known as 
Ribbentrop-Molotov, Stalinism erased with the stroke of a pen nearly 
twenty years of anti-fascist struggles of sincere communist activists, 
unfortunately led by cynical apparatchiks.

David (UCL Savoies)

To validate
[1]As an extension of the work of the collective La Horde, Ten questions 
on anti-fascism (Libertalia, 2023), we believe that "anti-fascism is a 
struggle to defend" not only in the face of the rise of the extreme 
right but also in the face of the amalgamations with which it is 
associated, including in our social camp. Transmitting the history of 
proletarian self-defense struggles, with its successes and failures, is 
part of this approach.

[2]Ugo Palheta, "Antifascism and the labor movement in the interwar 
period: strategic debates around a historic defeat", Mouvements, 104, 
2020, p.16

[3]The Finnish Civil War (1918), the German Revolution (1918-1919), the 
Bavarian Council Republic (1919), the Hungarian Council Republic (1919), 
the Biennio Rosso in Italy (1919-1920) .

[4]Gilles Vergnon, Anti-fascism in France, Presses universitaire de 
Rennes, 2009, p. 22.

[5]Idem.

[6]IV Congress of the Communist International, "Resolution on the 
tactics of the Communist International", available on Marxists.org.

[7]Gilles Vergnon, op. cit., p. 22.

[8]IVth Congress of the Communist International, "Resolution on the 
tactics of the Communist International", op. quote

[9]Gilles Vergnon, op. cit., p. 22.

[10]Idem, p. 23.

[11]Idem, p. 24.

[12]Gilles Vergnon, op. cit., p. 24.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?1924-L-antifascisme-bolchevise-au-Ve-congres-de-l-Internationale-communiste
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