Ideological Social Democracy Is Social Fascism: Yet Again
I’ve been a bit apprehensive in the past about using the old Comintern era label of “social fascism” because it’s often thrown around in the most sectarian, harmful, petty and foolish ways — the average rank and file DSA member is by no means or any definition of the word a “fascist”. However, when we investigate the ideological water-carriers of this latest iteration of social democracy, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and others who have attracted attention for their populist soundbites and have mislead millions of earnest people (many of whom fancy themselves revolutionaries), we can come to the conclusion that the social fascist label still holds good to describe them.
Social democracy as it manifests itself in the United States and other imperialist countries (UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Germany, etc.) is basically a more freehanded (towards “citizens”) fascism. Free shit for the first world, at the expense of the third. Every few decades a “movement” or several “movements” arise due to the cyclical boom/bust cycle inherent to capitalism that leads millions of ruined petit-bourgeois and proletarians (particularly the settler variety) down the path of either right or left populism. The left populists, many of whom traffic in a bastardized version of “socialism”, blame “the 1%”, “the billionaire class”, or some other nebulous category but never get into the Marxist categories of real class interest or class position. Thus, we have unrepentant millionaires in the United States and the UK positioning themselves as socialists and “socialists” claiming that it is possible for an individual to make a million dollars a year and be a “worker”, a “proletarian”. This shows the utmost necessity of reading our Marxist classics along with studying deeply the theory of those who have actually made revolution in the global periphery. There are people who have made armed struggle in the United States — failed armed struggle, but armed struggle nevertheless. Maoists hold that armed struggle is the highest stage of class struggle, if you are not gearing up for armed struggle but instead engaging in reformism as strategy, you are not a socialist. You can not be a Socialist and promote class collaboration — meaning uniting millionaires and temp workers in the same party. Communism is the ideology of the lowest and deepest masses and those who have thrown themselves 100% in their corner on the field of class struggle. Class collaboration ideology is fascism — our goal is to exacerbate and sharpen class contradictions, not flatten them by melding various contradictory classes and semi-classes into “the working class” and allowing the most privileged strata to make line and demands.
To be a Socialist, you must be a Communist. Socialism is the transitional stage from capitalism to communism — during this period the foundations of communism are built and there is consistent class struggle. There is no peaceful road, no short cut, no parliamentary path. Socialism is a fragile thing that must constantly be advanced and sharpened through struggle, violent and nonviolent. It is not a reform. It is not a series of reforms. Without violence, there is no Socialism. To not be a Communist yet call yourself a socialist and pursue a reformist, eclectic pipe dream of socialism is to be a revisionist and a fascist — a revisionist one because it throws the living essence of the Marxist ideology into the garbage, a fascist one because it promotes class collaboration ideology in lieu of class struggle ideology. The first world would-be socialists must learn that they cannot have their cake and eat it too. You cannot express “concern” for the masses of the third world while ignoring the fact that they call for real revolution here, not reforms and handouts that eat up ever more of their stolen wealth.
Socialists do not believe in borders for imperialist countries. Imperialist countries do not respect the borders of the masses of people they exploit when they run all over the world stealing their wealth (and people), bombing and committing other dreadful crimes. Thus, any socialist who engages in “borders” rhetoric or “we can’t let them come here” rhetoric is pandering to right populism and is no Socialist at all. They are a fake socialist, a fraud socialist, a social fascist. Socialists are proletarian internationalists, meaning that we support the right of the masses to move anywhere they please, particularly to the country that has destabilized and destroyed their homelands. What right does the US to tell a Salvadorean they can’t come here after destroying El Salvador? What right does an American have to lecture to a Venezuelan after destroying Venezuela? The main error of the US “left” is that it doesn’t take a global perspective and does not seriously grapple with the fact that it lives in the most atrocious imperialist country in the history of humanity. Thus, it is perfectly fine with holding its hands or offering ineffective whimpers as imperialism does imperialism. The corrective would be to take some Marxist-Leninist-Maoist medicine and steel itself against Sanders style sugar bullets.
