We are continuing the publication of Vercesi’s text on the stages of the degeneration of the Communist International from 1926 onwards, and the class political alternative that the Left Fraction of the CP of Italy then presented to the proletariat and to other oppositions – that around the figure of Trotsky – and communist lefts – German-Dutch. The chapter we are publishing here, The Tactics of Anti-Fascism and the Popular Front, covers the period from 1934 to 1938. It was published in two parts in Prometeo #6 of March-April 1947 and #7 of May-June 1947. We do the same in this issue. The second part of this chapter will be published in our next issue.

The Tactics of Anti-Fascism and the Popular Front (1934-38

Hitler’s coming to power (January 30, 1933) did not immediately bring about a radical change in the Comintern’s tactics, which continued to focus on the formula of anti-fascism that we examined in Chapter 4.

The Second International launches a proposal to boycott German products and invites the Comintern to participate in an international campaign designed to raise the indignation of the “civilized world against Nazi tyranny”. The Comintern refused, but did not present any objection in principle, which it could hardly have done since in 1929, at a time when the tactic of alliance with social democracy had not yet been abandoned, it was the Comintern that proposed a vast international action for the boycott of Fascist Italy. And at that time it was the Second International that hesitated to go through with it, thus providing the pretext for the use of the same method by the Comintern after the advent of Hitler in power.

The “boycott” of German products, since it implies the incorporation of the proletarian movement into the bosom of “anti-fascist” capitalism, remains fully within the logic of social-democratic policy, which since 1914 had appealed to the working masses to throw themselves into the war between the capitalist States by making common cause with that imperialist alliance which claimed to be fighting “for freedom and civilization”. The class which, both in the field of production and in the field of international trade, could decide to boycott or not a given sector of the world economy, was evidently the bourgeois class. The appeal to this class by Social Democracy was nothing new, but the confusion which already reigned in the ranks of the proletarian vanguard was made evident by the fact that the trotskist movement, which was moving towards the entryist tactics – that is to say, of joining the socialist parties in order to reinforce their left wings – and the SAP (Sozial Socialist Party), born from the conjunction of the left-wing currents of the German Communist and Socialist parties, adhered to this campaign.

We have already said that the Comintern had not taken a direct and class-based position against the proposal of the Second International. And that’s rather natural if one takes into account that the whole tactic of “social-fascism” had been ultimately a tactic of competing with Nazi movement rather than destroying it, and that the advent of Hitler implied a better organization of Russian-German economic exchanges. In correspondence with the increasing intervention of the State also in the economic field, special provisions were made by Hitler for a State guarantee in favor of industrial groups that received orders from Russia and had to wait a very long time for payment.

On the international level, Russian diplomacy acted on a peripheral line and Litvinov met with the Italian and German delegations at the Conference of Disarmament in Geneva, to support the “pacifist” thesis of disarmament by plans, of immediate realization, against the French thesis, equally “pacifist” and based on the formula of the pre-eminence of the notion of security (i.e. trying to guarantee that the victors of Versailles remained on top) over the notions of arbitration and disarmament.

It was at this time that Mussolini conceived the idea of the Four-Power Pact (France, Germany, England and Italy); the idea of the Four Greats, which would be taken up by the arch-democratic Byrnes in 1946 and supported by the Labourite Bevin, although the actors had changed.

The Four-Power Pact signed in Rome on June 7, 1933 states: “The High Contracting Parties agree to consult on all questions which appertain to them and to pursue within the framework of the League the policy of effective cooperation between all Powers with a view to the maintenance of peace”. The Pact is signed for ten years and contains the hypothesis of a revision of the treaties. This hypothesis had already become a reality, since, after the moratorium proclaimed in 1931 by Hoover, at the Lausanne Conference in 1932 – when there was still a “democratic” government in Germany – Germany was explicitly released from the payment of reparations.

It is well known that Hitler dismantled the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles one by one, not through parliamentary-type consultations, but through major twists and turns. Four months after the signing of the Four-Power Pact, Hitler left the League of Nations and held a spectacular plebiscite. This system of the “fait accompli”, of the “fist on the table” fully responded to the needs of the accentuated preparation of the masses for war and Hitler was forced to resort to it by the fact that the German economy could find no other way out of the situation than an immediate intensification of war industry. And, for this, it was necessary a contemporary and plebiscitary adhesion of the masses. The “democratic” powers temporarily left it at that, waiting for the international situation to reach the point of saturation needed for the unleashing of World War II.

But the essence of the Four-Power Pact consisted above all in a maneuver of distancing Russia from Europe and at the same time in an orientation of support to Germany so that it would overflow not towards the French-English West, but towards the Russian East and particularly towards Ukraine.

It is in these particular international contingencies that the new tactics of the Comintern of anti-fascism and the Popular Front mature: Russia is oriented towards the “democratic” powers. In the fall of 1933, the United States de jure recognized Russia, and the Rundschau wrote an article entitled: A victory of the USSR – A victory of the world revolution.

On the political level, the first symptom of the change of tactics is seen in the Leipzig trial in December 1933. The Dutch anarchist Van der Lubbe, who had set fire to the Reichstag building on February 27, 1933, one month after Hitler had seized power, was to be tried. The Comintern and the Second International immediately unleashed an obscene demagogic campaign: it’s Fascism, Nazism, that has destroyed the sanctity of German democracy; a counter-trial will be organized in the epicenter of the most conservative capitalism, in London; a “Brown Book” will be published by the anti-fascists and Hitler, who magnificently grasped the real meaning of this filthy world farce, will add additional notes to the sacred universal indignation against this attack on the seat of bourgeois democracy: the foreign press will be admitted to the Leipzig trial where one of the defendants, the centrist Dimitrov, will conclude by saying, “I demand, in consequence, that Van der Lubbe be condemned because he acted against the proletariat.” And the Nazi judges “avenge” the proletariat, since Van der Lubbe is sentenced to death and then executed, while the other centrist defendants will be acquitted and washed of the “infamous accusation”.

In the shadow of all this international outrage, meanwhile, Hitler’s ferocious repression of the German proletariat develops. While the campaign around the Leipzig trial reached the height of its publicity, only a few lines are devoted to the simultaneous Dessau trial (November 28, 1933), reduced to an insignificant episode of news: “Ten death sentences were pronounced by the Court of Dessau against communists accused of having killed a Hitlerite paramilitary soldier.”

We have seen, in the 4th Chapter devoted to the “social-fascism” tactic, that Hitler followed tactics different than that of fascism in Italy in 1921-22, and thus his actions largely revolved around a legalitarian plan of progressively dismantling the German democratic institutions of his social-democratic accomplices. Thus an incredible opportunity was presented to Marxist revolutionaries to set up an international action aimed at arresting the hand of the Nazi executioner who fell on the anarchist Van der Lubbe responsible for having set fire one of the fundamental institutions of capitalism, which moreover had served so well to facilitate Hitler’s rise to power! But Marxist revolutionaries had been reduced to the small circle of the Italian Left current which imposed the struggle on class bases both against the victorious Nazism and against the succumbing democracy in Germany, as even trotskists ran to the defense of of social democracy by deciding to join the socialist parties.

As we have said, it’s on the international level and on the level of the particular and specific interests of the Russian State that the new tactics of the Comintern are based on. The formula of “social-fascism” will be succeeded by its complete opposite, the formula of anti-fascism, of the democratic bloc, of the defense of democracy, of the struggle against the factionists (the fascists), a tactic which passes through the defense of the Negus of Ethiopia, the anti-Francoist struggle, and finally falls into the establishment of voluntarism through the movements of the “Resistance” in the course of the Second World Imperialist War.

* * *

In Russia, in 1932, the first Five-Year Plan had achieved complete success. Realized in four years instead of five, it had, in heavy industry, surpassed the goals set at the beginning. In the first chapter of this examination of the Comintern’s tactics, we pointed out that if we cannot imagine any opposition between the first plans conceived by Lenin in 1918 and the considerations of principle which induced Lenin to make the retreat which goes by the name of the NEP, on the other hand an opposition of principle exists between Lenin’s first economic plans, the NEP, and Stalin’s five-year plans. Following in the footsteps of Marx and his schematizing on the capitalist economy, Lenin’s idea on the indispensable planning of the economy was based on the development of the consumer industry to which the development of productive industry had to adapt itself to. The NEP itself is based on this consideration of principle, and there would have been no need to carry it out if the objective had been not the elevation of the living conditions of the workers, but the other one of a purely capitalist type – of an intense accumulation for the development of heavy industry. Lenin would have had no need to make concessions to the peasants and the petty-bourgeoisie – economic and political elements not useful but harmful to the achievements of large-scale industry – but these concessions were necessary in order to keep the orientation of the Soviet economy on the line of a constant improvement of the living conditions of the workers. Stalin broke with Lenin’s Marxist principles both on the internal economic terrain in Russia, when he instituted the five-year plans which could only reach the heights of industrialization through an intensified exploitation of the workers, and on the political terrain with the expulsion from the Comintern of every tendency that remained on the international and internationalist level by opposing the theory and the national and nationalist policy of “socialism in one country”.

The first Five-Year Plan thus meets with total success. Following in the footsteps of his capitalist cronies in all countries, Stalin embarks on the Second Five-Year Plan (1932-1936) claiming that it is now a matter of realizing objectives that in reality have completely different aims to those declared. Since its rise to power, capitalism has always said that the improvement of the general living conditions of the workers depends on the development of the economy and that the greater the amount of production, the greater will be the share reserved for the workers. When the Second Five-Year Plan was being prepared, Stalin said the same thing: heavy industry had been reconstructed, it was now a question of reconstructing the other branches of the Soviet economy and consequently of improving the standard of living of the workers. It was in the course of the Second Five-Year Plan that the new deity, Stakhanov, was born; the essence of socialism became a race for the maximum output of labor and at the same time for the strengthening of the economic and military possibilities of the Soviet State, on the altar of which every demand of the workers regarding wages had to be sacrificed.

This economic orientation does not find any possibility of Marxist push-back from within the Russian Party, and when, at the end of 1934, Nikolayev resorts to an assassination attempt on the Secretary of the Leningrad Party, Sergei Kirov, a ferocious repression befalls the “Leningrad Center”. Stalin, anticipating the procedures that Nazis and democrats will apply during the Second World Imperialist War, goes on to enact reprisals. No trial and 117 people shot. In the meantime, Litvinov joined, in Geneva, a motion that condemned terrorism and supported “Marxist” arguments according to which Marxism and terrorism are irreconcilable. Russia, in order to finance the second plan and obtain the essential raw materials must export wheat. By virtue of the invoked prospects of improvement of the workers’ conditions, the CC of the Russian Party abolishes on January 1, 1935 the bread charter and the rationing of agricultural products. Thus the workers were forced to increase their work effort so that their salaries would allow them to obtain supplies on the free market, since the “proletarian” State no longer guaranteed – through the State warehouses – the control of basic necessities.

It is therefore by force of considerations inherent to the Soviet State on the international level, and in growing opposition to the interests of the Russian workers, that the change in the Comintern’s tactics matures.

The cruel Chinese defeat of 1927 had definitively dragged the Communist International into the vortex of betrayal: only those who wanted to fight for the national and nationalist program of “socialism in one country” could now belong to the International of the Revolution. The others, the internationalists, were first expelled and then, in Russia and Spain, massacred; in other countries they were put on the Index, and insofar as the connivance of the Communist Parties with the apparatus of the bourgeois State was accentuated – this “democratic State” was asked to prove by deeds its “anti-fascist” virtues by abandoning all prevarication and employing repressive violence against the “trotskists”. Everyone who opposes the counter-revolutionary direction of the International is accused of “trotskism”. As in the epoch that followed the liquidation of the First International, the political scene was now occupied by a single signifier which not only increases the dispersion of the movement and adds to its ideological confusion but tends to polarize the attention of the few revolutionary proletarians who survived this tragic massacre around an absolutely inoffensive banner.

In 1866-70 everyone was called an anarchist, Marx included, and it’s known that Marx’s proposal to move the headquarters of the First International from Europe to America was due to his conviction that the new historical situation determined by the defeat of the Commune did not contain the possibility of maintaining an international organization of the proletariat. Its maintenance could only favor the victory of anarchist tendencies against those which were truly proletarian and revolutionary. After 1927 the epithet in vogue was that of “trotskist”. Worst of all, Trotski himself fell into this trap and let the international organization of the Opposition qualify itself as “trotskist”. When Marx had said that he was not a Marxist, he wanted to show that the theory and politics of the proletariat are enucleated in the course of the class struggle, that they constitute a method of knowledge and interpretation of history, not a set of biblical verses to be recited after employing all the sacraments necessary to establish the will of the creator. And Trotski – definitively breaking with what had been the division of Marx, Engels and Lenin, on the fundamental problem of the construction of the Party of the proletarian class – noted that Hitler’s victory nullified the possibility of “straightening out” the Communist International and after an analysis of the situation where an exposé on the Comintern replaced the Marxist understanding of reality, he launched himself into entryist adventures in the left-wings of the Socialist parties. On the political level he gets stuck in the historical hypothesis that not Stalin but Hitler is the super-Wrangel that will concentrate the attack of international capitalism against a Russia that’s been brought to ruin by the impossibility of the realization of the five-year plans. While this political scheme was to be fully denied by the events, the concentration of the proletarian vanguard on the defense of the Russian State, brought to disaster by Stalin, made the political noise that Trotski and his organization made in every country completely harmless: not only could Stalin, from the moment he had been able to bend the Russian proletariat over and force it to endure intense exploitation, carry out the five-year plans, but the Soviet State, incorporated into the system of world capitalism, was to know not disaster but victory in the course of the 1939-45 war. By seeing everywhere – even in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia – an episode of the struggle of world capitalism against Russia, when this Russian State was by then – in the same way as the democratic and fascist States – an instrument of the world counter-revolution, Trotski, who had been one of the greatest leaders of the October Revolution, had become completely impotent in his fight against capitalism; and the epithet of trotskist affixed to everyone was an additional element of the ideological confusion in which the proletariat lay; and all the more so since Trotski and his organization saw growing revolutionary success in the fact that their political merchandise saw great successes in newspaper publicity.

After the outbreak of the world economic crisis of 1929, the Comintern completely reversed terms of the political maneuver that led to the immobilization of the proletarian class: first alliance with the trade-union leaders and Chang-Kai-Shek, then the struggle against “social-fascism”. Although the terms change, the substance remains the same. And, in the course of these two phases of the tactics of the progressive dismantling of the proletarian class both in Russia and in other countries, the Comintern relies on a multiplicity of subsidiary bodies which foster the ideological and political dispersion of the proletariat. In the course of the first period these subsidiary bodies are polarized around the slogan of anti-fascism, in the course of the second period – that of social-fascism – the polarization is made around the formula of the struggle against war and the defense of the USSR.

* * *

After Hitler’s victory, we move towards the tactics of the Popular Front and the social-fascists of yesterday become “progressive democrats” of today. But the evolution of the economic and political situation demanded a corresponding advance on the road to the inclusion of the working masses in the capitalist State. Until 1934 the Comintern found in all peripheral bodies a good-enough vehicle for advancing its counter-revolutionary positions; from 1934, when the capitalist world can find no other way out of the formidable economic crisis which devastates it besides preparing for the second world imperialist conflict, it must go further and make the masses accept as their objective the modification of the form of government of the bourgeois class. The movement of the masses must be reunited with and welded to the capitalist State, and this is the new tactic of the Popular Front, whose experimental center is first in France and then in Spain. It is not at all surprising that the Soviet State, which had decisively and definitively broken with the interests of the Russian and international proletariat in 1927, can so casually make such radical and contradictory changes, and that the Comintern’s policy follows the same line. Mussolini had already made it clear, in 1923, when he boasted of having been the first to de jure recognize the Russian State, that this didn’t commit him to making the slightest modification to his fiercely anti-communist policy. Hitler reiterated the same thing after taking power.

In fact, the point of welding between the politics of the bourgeois States is on a class basis, and in this respect the conjunction is perfect between Stalin’s anti-communist policy and that of all the other capitalist governments which re-establish “normal” relations with the Russian State which has become a “normal” State of the international capitalist class. The reflection in the international field of this anti-communist policy, which is common to both democratic and fascist States and as well as to the Soviet State, is one that formally is expressed in contradictory terms, while substantially the line followed is the same and tends towards the outcome of the imperialist conflict where all “ideals” will be magnificently commercialized to stuff the brains of the workers to manage to get all the proletarians of different nations to slit each others’ throats in a grand new imperialist conflict.

Marx, in “Critique of the Gotha Program”, refutes the Lassallian idea of the existence of a single reactionary bourgeois class, because Lassalle’s simplistic analysis led not only to the impossibility of understanding the intricate social process that capitalism manages to polarize to its advantage, but also the impossibility of welding the proletarian movement to those purely capitalist forces that do not belong to a category qualified as “conservative”. Those who are moving along the line of Lassalle, who conceived a statist socialism based on Bismarck, are the political forces who claim that they want to “correct” the abuses of capitalism when in fact they ensure the success of these abusive forms, the only forms that can exist in capitalism in its historical phase of decadence, the phase of imperialist and monopolist capitalism.

Despite the fact that in Germany and Italy these forces are called fascist, while in France they are called socialist and communist, the political program is the same, and if Blum can’t carry it out, while Hitler above all obtains indisputable successes in State interventionism, this depends on the different particularities of the two capitalist States and on the place they occupy in the process of the progression of capitalism in its international expression.

As for the contrasting formal expression of a process which is international and unitary, as for the fact that one State is called fascist and the other democratic, that bourgeois domination is exercised in one country under one particular form, in another country under another form, the matter presents no difficulty of understanding for Marxists. The bourgeois class, which is a whole, a whole of which we cannot – unless we leave the straight path of Marxism – separate one section from the whole and to present in opposition against the whole, has seen, in the period of development coinciding with the end of the last century, a clash between its political and social forces of right and left (the conservative and the democratic), but in the historical phase of its decline it can only use the old division into right and left for the purposes of propaganda and the interests of its domination over the proletariat.

Both the Popular Front of France and Nazi Germany are on the same plane imposed on capitalism by history, and if one resorts to anti-fascist ideology while the other resorts to Nazism, the aim is the same: to frame the masses under the firm discipline of the State in order to launch them into war massacres. The relations between the different bourgeois States have no fixed character since they’re dependent on their evolution in the international field and on the impossibility of the intervention of an element of conscious and voluntary guidance of the different bourgeoisies. Churchill is an example of how one can remain consistently and fiercely anti-communist while very easily going from fighting to being allied to Russia or Germany.

In this becoming of the unitary process of the State in the imperialist phase of capitalism, we witness the fact that certain States find in the States opposed to them for the defense of their interests the political material that facilitates the mobilization of the masses away from their class-based goals and into their station wagon of war. In January 1933, in correspondence with Hitler’s rise to power, we see the realization in France of a government formula that seemed as leftist as could be, given the contingencies of the moment, while Daladier is called to government by a parliament that had known, in 1932, an electoral victory of the left.

As for the politics of the Russian State and the corresponding tactics of the Comintern, they were everywhere counterrevolutionary but took on contradictory expressions over time. It is that of “social-fascism” in l930-33, because the objective of international capitalism is then concentrated in the victory of Hitler. Once this terrible defeat was inflicted on the German and world proletariat, and this victory was solidly established, the objective shifted to other countries and particularly France. The result is the policy that will be specified in the formula of the Popular Front, a policy that will do the business of both French and German capitalism, as well as the capitalisms of all other countries. The idea of fatherland will be positively invoked by both sides, since it is clear that on both sides of the barricade there is now only one aim: to threaten “national integrity” with war.

The essence of the new tactic is therefore the integration of the proletariat into the respective State apparatuses, while the constant changing of international objectives of capitalism is what really determines the anti-fascism or pro-fascism of the Soviet State and the formal expression of the Comintern’s tactics: alliance with social democracy, then “social-fascism”, then the Popular Front.

(To be followed, translated by the International Communist Party: http://www.international-communist-party.org/English/Texts/46CominTact.htm#5=)