We re-publish in English an article, released by the Argentina-based group Cuadernos de Negacion that deals with the rise of the extreme right. More specifically, it deals critically with the use of the term “fascist” to describe this tendency. We agree with them that the danger of fascism today is not necessarily to lead us into war, but to portray liberal democracy as the only possible horizon, thus expunging any class perspective in the name of “anti-fascism”. Moreover, we agree that democracy itself, which has become the order of organized exploitation of class society, has integrated and perfected “fascist” repression and ideologically benefits from its appearance by the possibility of portraying a common enemy by which all sorts of inter-classist coalitions may form. The logic of the “lesser of two evils” is one that captures the working-class on a bourgeois ideological terrain. Pro-revolutionaries must understand this mechanism with a view to counter its perspective. We consider this text to be a good contribution to that discussion.

IP

POSTSCRIPT ON

FASCISM AND ANTIFASCISM

Cuadernos de Negación, 2024

This article was originally published in Fascism / Antifascism (Lazo Ediciones, 2024). This book also contains: Cuando mueren las insurrecciones (When Insurrections Die ) and Fascismo / Antifascismo (Fascism/Anti-Fascism ) by Gilles Dauvé, the debates it sparked with the magazine Aufheben and the excerpt of an interview with Troploin. More information at: lazo Ediciones and Cuadernos de Negación.

For more than ten years we had intended to publish a concise critique of anti-fascism compiling various articles, many of which have been left out of this book but which we circulated in other media. Even at the beginning of the century we gave wide circulation to a text that came to us from Spain entitled “Antifascism as a form of adherence to the system”. At that time we wanted to provoke and debate with punks and skinheads, as well as with anarchists who were adhering to the new antifascism as a countercultural movement in a gangster way. We wanted to emphasize that fascism and anti-fascism were much more than street fights and gang confrontations. That they were not simply forms of struggle but mainly political contents, which in both their traditional and contemporary expressions—even considering their great differences—had and have nothing to do with overcoming capitalism, but quite the opposite. We refer to politics in its simplest meaning: “Art, doctrine or opinion concerning the government of States”.

Today, when even in the mass media there is talk of “Antifa”, with Trump a few years ago calling it a threat to nothing less than the United States, that intention of the beginning of the millennium seems distant, but its object has not disappeared; on the contrary, it is part of a broader issue. In Argentina, a diffuse movement that does not rule out electoralism, and in fact on many occasions articulates itself on the basis of it, is beginning to popularize notions of modern anti-fascism. When a candidate wins who is not to the liking of social democracy or the so-called left-wing or progressive Peronism, people begin to speak of fascism, of dictatorship. Following this pattern, Macri or Milei were labeled as fascists.1 Thus, an “electoral antifascism” appears as an “electoral antifascism”-synonymous with anti-right, and it has become interchangeable to speak of “the rise of fascism”, “of the right”, or “of liberalism”. It is the call for unity to defend capitalism and its democracy, typical of historical anti-fascism.

For their part, residues of classical fascism are once again appearing as a political alternative for dissatisfied proletarians: invocations of its original versions by a few nostalgic, provocative or ignorant people, and fundamentally its neo- or post-fascist variants. The new rightists, who are increasingly rooted in the working population, present different tendencies critical of capitalist society, towards certain excesses of the same and fundamentally as a response to the liberal-progressive managements of the last decades and to the so-called “globalism”. Despite their greater or lesser belligerence2, all the major right-wing parties in the West are running for election. They are even going so far as to claim to be anti-politics in order to save politics in the name of the opposite. This 2024, they warn, is a hinge year in this sense, in many countries the popularity of right-wing alternatives is growing and new ones are appearing. The fact that all of them have formed political parties and are sitting for elections in an orderly manner tells us a lot. The electoral path and the democratic order is respected from left to right.

The struggles driven by anti-fascism in the “best” of cases reinforce the widespread illusion that the State is an arbiter above the classes, which is usually accompanied by seeing capital not as a social relation but as a group of multinationals or cruel and greedy men.3And in the “worst” of cases it leads to anti-fascist unity. Yesterday and today for orderly elections, to maintain capitalist normality. Yesterday and today to go to war or to accept “states of emergency” in the name of democracy.4

Of course, sometimes it is necessary to confront neo-Nazis in a neighborhood or in a city for immediate survival reasons. But that does not necessarily lead to anti-fascist or anti-racist ideology, just as fighting for better working conditions does not oblige us to form a union or to defend the supposed dignity of labor.

Fascist gangs can become a horrendous danger and can even count on the veiled support of rulers, police, journalists and businessmen. The same people will leave them to their fate when they are no longer of use to them.5

What the bourgeoisie cannot get rid of is its security forces to maintain capitalist peace, those that torture and kill day by day, the same ones that, paradoxically or not, enforce the laws against antisemitism, as well as repress the demonstrations against the worsening of living conditions. They obediently comply with whatever the law of the bourgeoisie orders according to the context.

What is now internationally defined as Antifa is a decentralized activist movement comprising a number of autonomous groups. They may or may not use violence or political reform, or even stand up against the state, but they want to force the state to renounce its necessary reactionary and/or right-wing liberal component. In turn, today’s anti-fascism has been transformed into broader political expressions, linked to social movements and progressive politics entering its most impotent stage in a context of economic stagnation, parallel to the growth of the new rights.

Anti-fascism and fascism were born under certain specific conditions of the development of capital which today have changed considerably. Both the current electoral anti-fascism and the gang-like street anti-fascism that confronts the neo-Nazi gangs, common in the United States and Europe, are not the statist and military anti-fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, that which liberated cities by killing and raping their inhabitants. But they are its political heirs and therefore it is important to know its history.

Those who emerged victorious from World War II subjugated the world proletariat by means of a new global order: a democratic capitalist regime in the West (with its repressions and dictatorships whenever necessary) and a “state-capitalist” regime in the Soviet bloc. In this way, they were forced to be satisfied because they had certainly conquered freedom or at least avoided a right-wing totalitarianism, and it would have been worse if the others had won. This is the constant campaign of fear chosen by the anti-fascists.

The imperialist alliance that won the world war, personified in Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, is the one that would insist on the importance of fascism. It is the official story of “the good guys” that explains who “the bad guys” are. It is enough to see which of the two sides of murderers, exploiters and rapists was banned and which was not. It is this prohibition that makes many believe that to choose the banned side is to be against the status quo. And that may explain why sometimes “rebellion turns right-wing”.

Neo-Nazis or racist and anti-immigrant gangs are a street problem in many cities, but, as in the past, that does not require becoming “antifa”. This same label, today as yesterday, serves to unite the oppressed and oppressors, exploiters and exploited, rulers and ruled. In the name of anti-fascism we are called to unite with our exploiters, we are called to defend the murderers of today: the progressive or leftist rulers of any country, who also have blood on their hands. Or to unite with the heirs of other mass murders such as the Stalinists or Maoists, who fight the communist movement in the name of “communism”.

It is necessary to clarify that it is not necessary for them to have blood on their hands either, although which ruler, by action or omission, does not… It is not simply a question of fighting against the excesses of democracy, but against democracy as the order of organized exploitation, of class society.

But how is it that we still continue to speak of fascism? If we still speak of fascism today it is, to a large extent, thanks to anti-fascist ideology. And it is not simply a question of semantics, of an error of nomenclature. It is better to call things by their name. Trump, Bolsonaro or Milei may be many things, but they are not fascists, and neither are the IMF or the World Bank. It happens that calling them by that name is very useful to create a very broad political front where everyone fits but only a few are in charge.

The anti-fascist strategy is always similar. If Twitter or Facebook censor Trump it is justice, if they censor his opponents it is an attack on rights. If those who are called fascists have raped or tortured it is denounced, if the countries that defeated the Nazis did it, it is hidden. Just as to this day there is no mention of the massive rapes (twelve million!) against women in the countries defeated in the second war and even in liberated allied countries such as France.

In these lands and at least for now, to gather a series of enemies behind the label of fascism is no longer to send us to war, but to show liberal democracy as the only possible horizon. It will have its defects, we are told, but it is better than fascism.

But war is always there, and now in “the heart of Europe” it leaves us with some lessons on this question. On February 24, 2022 Putin declared war with a euphemism:

“I have made a decision to carry out a special military operation. Its aim will be to defend the people who for eight years have suffered persecution and genocide at the hands of the Kiev regime. To this end, we will aim at the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.”

That the majority of leftists support Russian action against Ukraine, which is considered to be a “nest of neo-Nazis”, is not surprising. That Putin is himself an authoritarian and conservative ultra-nationalist, very close to the Eurasian post-fascism of the current defenders of the Russian Empire does not seem to matter much to them, as these leftists are simply opponents of US imperialism rather than being integral anti-capitalists. Many of them never believed that Stalinism was a counterrevolution, and they continue to believe that today’s Mother Russia is the legitimate heir of the Soviet Union of the most heroic times.6

But also, when democrats and progressives in general call “fascism” a whole set of policies and identities (such as the so-called neo-Nazis, the alt-right, the followers of conspiracy theories, reactionary anti-feminism, anti-immigrant gangs, anarcho-capitalism in all its variants, national-bolshevism, and every new “right-wing” identity) they confess not to understand what is happening or not to want to understand it.

For those who are in a permanent electoral campaign, the mention of the “fascist threat” is one more discursive resource like the urgency of a transition to renewable energies, or the promise of security measures. Everything in the State, nothing against the State, nothing outside the State, as Mussolini said. But in the right medium, without excesses or exaggerations.

This desperate attempt to bring the ghost of fascism to life is not intended to arouse enthusiastic support for democracy in the West as it did 90 years ago. Because it is no longer necessary, they have already won. And they do not say “choose this, it’s the best” but “this is the only one there is”. That is why for the progressives everything that is not pro-democracy is garbage and delusions, from the reactionary pseudo-critical drifts to the communist perspective for human emancipation. Today it does not seem to be democracy what is at stake, but rather a highly discursive political alternation, in a geopolitical context where tensions between nation blocs are becoming more acute. If some regimes, such as Russia’s, are not democratic according to Western standards, they are not the norm. And in matters of warfare, the democratic NATO has been the principal warrior of the last half century.

We are witnessing an over-emphasis on the “totalitarian risk” with the sole objective of disputing the co-command of democratic states, on both sides of the center. We cannot be sure that a more generalized drift towards totalitarian forms of state is not possible, but, in any case, it is worth reaffirming with Dauvé that anti-fascism has not stopped fascism, just like the more or less progressive left has not stopped the more or less reactionary right. It is clear that there are confrontations between fractions of the bourgeoisie, but to what extent is it possible to infer in this dynamic of opposition in defense of the less terrible alternative? To what extent does this perspective bring us closer to or distance us from a revolutionary transformation? Do today’s anti-fascists ask themselves this question? Do they care? Capital demands different state management according to the needs of its reproduction, counterrevolutions and wars included. It is important to understand where the need for each transformation of political regimes is coming from before embracing any of them.

Gilles Dauvé tells us that historical fascism was not really opposed to democracy, but was an exceptionality in defense of capital. So it was not a question of “fascism or democracy”, but of “fascism and democracy”. When analyzing the vestiges of fascism in its new forms, two dimensions are fundamentally considered: violence and ideology. With regard to the former, contemporary Western democracies—with governments from left to right—repress and employ “states of exception” when necessary, without turning to violence or ideology, when necessary, without turning to overtly totalitarian forms of state. Democracy includes and perfects “fascist” repression, in addition to open warfare in the name of its defense. For their part, extreme right-wing expressions have carried out their mandates democratically and with great moderation, despite their extreme ideological battle speeches. Hitler and Mussolini came to power through semi-institutional channels with their parties-militias , and then seized total control of the State and began the great war effort. Nothing similar is happening. For the time being, democracy is not alternated by the “new fascisms” nor by states of emergency, but it has integrated them.

“What threatens anti-fascism after 1945 are not the ideas of the communist left (the critical texts of Bordiga, for example): anti-fascism is emptied of content from within. With the end of Nazism, nothing is more evident. An evil is absolute only as long as it remains unique: fascism, however, does not cease to reproduce itself in a succession of opposing figures, less and less credible, as the exclusive incarnation of Evil. Who is the current fascist, the warmonger Bush or his enemy, the anti-Semite Ahmadinejad? The anti-fascist dilemma is not its scarcity of enemies, but its abundance. […] The extreme right implanted in Northern Europe is precisely that: the extreme of the right, not a movement born of popular violence to restore by means of dictatorship the authority of the State. The alleged fascist danger is shown to be soluble in democracy.”7

The critique of anti-fascism as it has been deployed for almost a hundred years by the Italian communist left and continued by various anti-capitalist expressions is not a tactical and strategic program to be repeated, but a good lesson not to forget in our current situation.

The anti-fascist frontism was, like fascism, the result and the expression of the defeat of the revolutionary assault of the four-year period 1917-21. Its essence lies in the substantial renunciation of the revolutionary struggle against capitalism (which, at best, was postponed to better times) in the name of the restoration of democracy and the “rule of law”. Its horizon is interclassism, that is to say, the alliance between classes or fractions of classes, on the basis of common opposition to fascism, a fact which imposes in the first place the renunciation of specifically proletarian methods of struggle.

Today we are only a few light years away from a social context that is remotely comparable, in terms of intensity of class struggle, to that of the 1920s-1930s.

To affirm that a “fascist danger” is hovering over our heads today is nothing less than idiocy. There is no fascist dictatorship on the doorstep: the only existing dictatorship—today as yesterday—is that of capital, the value accumulation process, which now permeates and dominates all the chinks in the cracks of life and social relations.

“What applies to anti-fascism applies to all the “anti-isms”: the transformation of the enemy into an absolute enemy feeds on the myth and reproduces it. […] “Fascism” thus becomes a passing category, the key with which to “explain” and hold together the most disparate phenomena: from the normal and democratic police repression to the manifestations of racism in the suburbs and proletarian neighborhoods; from the anti-immigration policies of governments of all colors and shades to the return to the scene of a neo-fascist mob as aggressive and high-profile (thanks also to the “anti-fascists”) as it is numerically modest; from the new stages of the process of progressive emptying of the functions of national parliaments—occurring in all Western States since at least 1914—to gender violence and the growing success of ultra-nationalist and populist movements and parties, culminating in Italy in 2018 with the formation of the right wing Lega-M5S government and in the US with the election of Trump. Everything, in the head of the more or less militant anti-fascist, concurs to compose the distorted representation of a society and a State increasingly “fascistized”. As if the these phenomena were incompatible with the much-vaunted democracy (of the right and of the left)! And as if they did not find their necessary material basis in capitalist social relations and their historical evolution”.8

The critique of anti-fascism, therefore, is not a question of logical coherence, much less the maintenance of a doctrinal purism. It has arisen and deepens from and for struggles.

To fight against those who govern today by labeling them as fascists does nothing more than ask for more democracy, and has done nothing more than place in government the progressives who relieve them, so that later the “fascists” return. The examples in Argentina are clear and those in Chile dazzle us. Bachelet and Boric9 have applied laws that the right wing could not have imposed. In the hands of Piñera10 the laws that absolve murderous carabineros11 or allow them to shoot without warning would be fascist, in the hands of the “socialists” it is order.

We wish with this set of affirmations and denials to contribute to the ongoing struggles. And we wish to overcome the trauma. A trauma so great that today, being direct witnesses of one of the most terrible massacres of this civilization, that of the State of Israel in Gaza, there are those who insist on not calling things by their name, calling Israel fascist, as if it were not enough to know that it is a capitalist state, beacon of democracy and the free market in the Middle East, exporter of killing machines to the whole world. It seems to sound less serious to call them democrats and capitalists, or to call them simply murderers.

• 1This book is part of an attempt to understand these phenomena in a radical way, continuing earlier publications: our books Contra el liberalismo y sus falsos críticos, Lazo Ediciones, 2023, and La religión de la muerte. Sobre viejos y nuevos fascismos by Julio Cortés Morales, Lazo Ediciones, 2024.
• 2Some critique democracy, its equality, freedom and rights. On this, see the section “Antiliberalism and anticommunism, left and right” in Against liberalism and its false critics.
• 3For their part, Nazis of all types and historical times base their supposed anti-capitalism on something similar but personified in their favorite scapegoat “the Jews”.
• 4For example, any questioning of quarantines and isolation measures in the context of the coronavirus was quickly associated with the right wing and, of course, qualified as a “fascist attitude”. On this, we published a collection of articles under the title Coronavirus, crisis and confinement, Lazo Ediciones, 2020.
• 5The example of Golden Dawn in Greece is very explanatory in this regard. From being a shock force in the streets, busted by the police, to being the third party in the 2014 elections, it was declared a criminal organization in 2020. We recommend the article “Greece: When the state turns antifa”
• 6Julio Cortés Morales, “Ucrania y Rusia: ¿Nazis contra el fascismo?” (Santiago de Chile, 2022).
• 7Gilles Dauvé and Karl Nésic, Más allá de la democracia, “Beyond Democracy” (2009)
• 8F.B., “Miseria del antifascismo”, 2018.
• 9IP: Michelle Bachelet, a center-left politician, was president of Chile in 2006–2010 and in 2014–2018. Gabriel Boric rose to prominence as a leftist student protest leader in 2011 and became President in 2022.
• 10IP: Sebastián Piñera, a conservative businessman, was president of Chile in 2010–2014 and in 2018–2022.
• 11IP: The Chilean national law enforcement gendarmerie.