[This is an unofficial translation, the text by the Committee for Reconstitution (Spanish State) can be read in Spanish here. You can download the PDF version of this translation by clicking here.]
“Since the proletarian revolution in Russia and its victories on an international scale, expected neither by the bourgeoise nor the philistines, the entire world has become different, and the bourgeoisie everywhere has become different too.”
Lenin
Nobody is unaware that the shift towards the right of the political panorama in the Spanish state has been corresponded in the communist movement with the feverish spread of an unapologetic social-chauvinism. But few dare to draw the ultimate consequences of a problem that has already arisen numerous times in the history of our class. The reader of Línea Proletaria will know that, in recent years, the Reconstitution Line (RL) has found the category of social-fascism useful to explain the white thread that leads from opportunism (and worker opportunism in particular, but not only) to the development of a fascist mass movement. Today, unapologetic opportunism fantasizes about barbed wire, about seducing the armed forces, about the workers’ fatherland, and about beating up, in the name of communism, those who —like us— offend the national flag (rojigualda or tricolor, which is the same at this point). Their German grandparents already put on the Prussian hussar’s jacket to order the proletarians to go die in the name of the country, and, when Spartacus rose up, they did the same to order the patriots to kill him in the name of socialism. Their parents, the Khrushchevs, the Brezhnevs and company, also spread socialism in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in Afghanistan (in the same way that their legitimate children, the ultra-conservative Putin and the ultra-conservative Russia, spread decommunization in Ukraine). And they all received, then, the same adjective from revolutionary communism: social-fascists.
Not by chance, this term is strongly placed in the foreground in the context of two of the three great changes that the contemporary labor movement has experienced: the historical emergence of the Communist Party at the beginning of the October Cycle (1917-1989) and the restoration of capitalism in the USSR in the 1950s, its transformation into “social-imperialist abroad and social-fascist at home,” according to Mao (the third great turn being the symbolic fall of the Wall, at the end of the 80s). In these junctures, however, the concept of social fascism had a mainly political projection, often leaving the connection of this category in the body of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine up in the air. And while no one verbally questions the centrality that the dictatorship of the proletariat or the Communist Party has in this current of revolutionary thought, the notion of social-fascism has been and is more problematic among those who call themselves Marxist-Leninists. Also among the declared enemies of the proletariat, whose attitude towards the subject usually alternates between confusion and simplicity. Long before his political suicide, the young Pablo Iglesias challenged the Comintern of the roaring twenties, with its class against class doctrine plus its use of the social-fascist adjective against social democracy, and praised the sensible Comintern of the Popular Front, reasonable and open in matter of political tactics. Prudent advice kills more than the sword. Revolutionaries should decide against childishly contrasting two chapters in the history of our class. Also of discarding and adopting concepts based on the narrow margin of political calculation, which is the barometer of Iglesias’ judgments on the Communist International (although the ideological-bourgeois character of this type of reasoning is clear when considering that the line of the Popular Front was not exactly successful, not even from the point of view of immediate political success, as was clear from its experience in these lands). Whatever the case, the idea of social-fascism occupies a strange place in the eyes of the majority who, friendly or unfavorably, talk about Marxism. It is intuitively associated with chauvinism and red-fascist nationalism, with class collaborationism, with the worker lieutenants of the imperialist bourgeoisie and also with the blind communist intransigence towards the social democrats (apparently, they did not exterminate enough vanguard proletarians to justify that the Comintern considered them class enemies). Since intuition is made up of a mixture of empirical, political, sentimental and other criteria, it cannot replace precise theoretical and scientific delimitation, which is what grants universal nature to a given idea.
The plane of analysis that best positions us to address this task is that of history. With the Cycle of proletarian revolutions of the 20th century closed, we communists find ourselves in the right position to elucidate the assumptions, logic and meaning of that concept, as well as the place it should occupy in the vanguard theory that summarizes the requirements of the revolution today. Let’s start with some results that are already well established in the work that the RL has been carrying out in this regard. The Communist Party is characterized by highlighting the conscious factor as the determining factor in the construction of communism, providing means and tools based on the ultimate goal of a classless society —hence, for its (re)constitution, the forging of vanguard cadres educated in a comprehensive conception of the world and in the fight against schematism and determinism in general, and economism in particular, is essential. The RL has pointed out this question, which Leninism substantiates, as the key to the beginning of the new Cycle of the World Proletarian Revolution (WPR), and this has led it to focus, theoretically, on the question of the historical limitations that have led to the crisis of said subject (Summation of the October Cycle). This internal aspect is the main one. But from here we can draw a derivative towards the external aspect, which is none other than the reflection in the bourgeoisie of the emergence of the Communist Party, the transformation of the class struggle of the bourgeoisie against the communist proletariat, which also gives a new content to the old workers’ opportunism —of which Lenin already said that its highest form is, precisely, social-chauvinism. At this intersection is where we can best understand the deep content of the concept of social-fascism and its implications.
The point of view of strategy can be useful as a first approach to this historical phenomenon. The strategy forces us to consider all aspects of the problem (elementary basis of the Marxist class analysis) and, in addition, emphasizes its relationship with the final intention of the actor in question, of the subject, with the order, arrangement and hierarchy of said elements to achieve the projected goal (tactics-as-plan). And, although Marxism has defined opportunism as the renunciation of long-term objectives in favor of momentary success (Engels), this qualification has long ceased to be accurate in historical (not necessarily political) terms. It is true that the dogmatic and anti-Marxist reductionism that restricts the working class to its dimension as variable capital (economism, unionism) closes the possibility of that totalizing perspective, feeding politically on the ad aeternum reproduction of the resistance movement and abjuring, in the words or in fact, of any final objective, as the honest opportunist Bernstein already wrote. But stopping at this is, today, insufficient.
Engels’ qualification is enunciated at a time when the workers’ party was the social democratic mass party. In that context, opportunism was and could not be more than the absolutization of the mechanisms of that first political configuration of the proletariat: the union as the axis of the workers’ organization (on which the national social democratic parties were built) and the fight for reforms. and for political rights as the engine of the constitution of the working class identity, of its consciousness of itself in opposition to the bourgeois class, all of this embedded in the corresponding national framework. The tactical leader, who maneuvers on the given movement on the street or in parliament, was the cadre model of the mass party. Precisely, what will distinguish the left, revolutionary social democracy, will be its emphasis on the final objective of the working class and its necessarily international and internationalist dimension, as established by that program of the revolution that was The Manifesto of the Communist Party.[1]
But this collapsed in 1914. The social democratic parties signed the Sacred Union with imperialism and euphorically joined the states and empires dialectic. They put their gigantic machine of trade unions, propaganda and institutions at the service of the national cause and sow discord among the workers of the peoples of Europe. They unleash white terror on the internationalist left, terrorism with which the organized social democratic masses compromise, when they do not directly support it. The former coexistence within the labor movement becomes its opposite, in the armed repression of the internationalist wing, carried out with sinister discipline by the opportunist wing in close collaboration with the imperialist General Staff and the police. Combining like a fox the carrot of social reforms with the military stick, opportunism has matured to become a true strategist of the counterrevolution, a reward deservedly earned by the heroes of the SPD who sacrificed themselves to proclaim the German republic, the of eight-hour workday… and to organize the carnage in Berlin and Munich, instructing the Freikorps and the Steel Helmets in how these things are done and educating the working masses in the fanatical defense of their imperialist state.
This new model of bourgeois cadre, which moves with equal ease in mass organizations as in state departments, is the imperialist corollary of the communist revolutionary leader, of the Leninist strategist of the revolution,[2] a phenomenon similar to the split of socialism into two wings, into two parties. For the bourgeoisie, strategically facing class war means combining, coordinating, distributing and prioritizing all available resources, from intelligence, military development and counterinsurgency tactics to political and social reforms, investment in the education of the masses (in the bourgeois ideological totems) and the sacrifice of the momentary or particular interests of this or that layer of the bourgeoisie in favor of the sense of state —closing of ranks that is expressed, naturally, as chauvinism. In a certain way, and just as the first mature revolutionary experience of the proletariat gives rise to the political mold for the entire process of revolution up to communism (the Communist Party), the first great anti-communist war of the imperialist bourgeoisie —jointly with social democracy— provides the political keys of that reaction all along the line that is imperialism.
Let’s dwell briefly on this. As the contradiction between productive forces and private appropriation entails the tendency towards communism but also the tendency towards the restructuring of capital, the survival of the bourgeoisie as a class depends on stopping the decomposition of its world by all means, plunging its domination into greater social depth, of the masses —deepening whose provoking economic conditions are the material subsumption of all social spheres under the cycles of capital accumulation, the distribution of the globe, of the entire globe, and the constitution of the proletariat as a class; that is, the same objective conditions that are at the basis of the emergence of the Communist Party.[3] The subjective dynamization of these conditions passes, as we say, through the formation of bourgeois cadres capable, as a whole, of handling themselves skillfully in all fields of knowledge and practice, constituting the bourgeois equivalent of the proletarian collective intellectual, which provides operability to the imperialist state and allows combining, systematically and with great synergy, all forms and tactics of counterrevolutionary or simply counterinsurgency struggle.
And this question is key because the central teaching of the modern revolution, according to Lenin, is that “only when the ‘lower classes’ do not want to live in the old way and the ‘upper classes’ cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph.”[4] The crisis of the capitalist mode of production engenders revolution if and only if the proletarians do not want to continue living in the old way, if they have their highest form of proletarian class organization,[5] the Communist Party, at their disposal, if they have managed to articulate the subjective factor of the revolution. Otherwise, the crisis of capital ends with its restructuring, which is historically based on the aforementioned ideological and political penetration of imperialism into the depths of contemporary society, a mass society by definition and which becomes, in its entirety, the strategic theater of operations of the class enemy.
From the point of view of the bourgeoisie, this process deeply disrupts the ideological foundations of its domination. The growing weight of the spontaneous and reformist movement of the working class in the process of capital accumulation itself questions the individualist-liberal basis on which the bourgeoisie had based, in general terms, its view of the world. The recognition of the trade union as the corporatist representative of the working class is, implicitly, the recognition that the appropriation of the social product is also just that, a social issue.[6] The black moth of imperialism emerges from this cocoon renewed by the reactionary subversion of the communist program of socialization of property, conveniently regulated and crumbled based on quotas, and certainly not as a premise of that integral development of the individual that Marx talked about, but as guarantee of the order between the various branches of production, on the one hand, and all social spheres, on the other.[7] The state becomes a committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie to a degree that Engels could not foresee when he wrote that statement. If its bureaucratic apparatus was an already threatening itch in the sweaty folds of the flesh of the old liberal bourgeoisie, it has now become a suppurating scab that surrounds its entire skin. The state, once limited to clearing the obstacles of free capitalist accumulation and apparently situated above the sum of equal individuals that civil society always was for the liberal creed, is increasingly taking on the appearance of a living organism, in which each element of society has its corporatist role and function: an authentic system of links that goes from the executive-administrative direction of public affairs and its military apparatus to the most open and spontaneous organizations; from the hard core of the state to the trade union, to the party, to the press, to the neighborhood association, to the snitch on the balcony and the police without a badge.
Up to this point we have limited ourselves to the highest vertex of this system, the bourgeois collective intellectual (which encompasses the state bureaucratic and executive apparatus, Parliament, intelligence and security organizations, lobbies, academia, etc.), and the transmission belts that embed their direction in the whole of society. But “transmission belt” does not mean anything other than the mass line contemplated from the organizational angle: what it is about is the political content that it embodies, and in which the bourgeois political game is deployed without calling into question the hard, economic and executive nerve of its system of domination. Precisely because imperialism neutralizes spontaneity from its very presuppositions, it is preserved as the elemental political logic of the last class society (expression of the anarchy of production), no matter how incorporated it is in the mechanisms of control, discipline and direction of its necessary counterpart, the state. In this game of forces, the bourgeois parties are only distinguished by the degree to which they aspire to carry this incorporation as the last barrier against social decomposition or against the revolutionary overcoming of the system.[8]
On the other hand, if this relationship between spontaneous movement and the imperialist state is internal on the general-historical level (which we have analyzed up to this point), on the immediate political level both elements appear as external, one in front of the other. This particularity engenders countless spontaneous illusions in the theoretical vanguard, educated for decades in political empiricism and opportunistic presbyopia. But appearance does not mean fiction; it does not mean unreality. It has a moment of truth, because it is through this gap of relative political exteriority where spontaneity disruptively penetrates official life, and forces it to permanently reconfigure itself in order to once again guarantee the peaceful accumulation of capital. That capital is the continuous revolution of all the conditions of production makes this disruption systematic and inevitable, just as systematic and inevitable is the obligation of the bourgeoisie to find new checkpoints of political balance for incessantly changing conditions. That is the objective content of reform under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and in the absence of the revolutionary subject —an absence that only today, at the closing of the October Cycle, allows us to contemplate that content in its “purest” form, no longer as a by-product of the proletarian revolution. That is why contemporary bourgeois politics is, necessarily, mass politics, and in the first instance directed at the sector of the masses that stands out in this disruption from its immediate demands: the practical vanguard.
As the reader will know, the conquest of the practical vanguard is the central question of the political reconstitution of communism, that is, of the reconstitution of the Communist Party, of the organized revolutionary movement. And blessed be the proletarian intuition of the Comintern, because when it puts the label of social-fascists on the bloodthirsty dogs of the SPD, it does so in the context of that strategic battle for the revolutionary recomposition of the German proletariat after the war.[9] And that is the key to the matter: the practical vanguard. The political crisis of the liberal-parliamentary system, eaten away from below by spontaneous movements that are the living expression of the anarchy of production, has several possible solutions. We will point out, for the purposes of this analysis, the two extremes: the proletarian revolution as a real solution to the problems of the masses, which inevitably involves the (re)constitution of the Communist Party; or the possibility, ultimately and among others, of recomposing the bourgeois order on the basis of an organized, fascist, reactionary mass movement, in which that practical vanguard —the key to spontaneous movement— is incorporated not into the transmission belts of the revolution, but to those of the counterrevolution. This organic fusion tends to suppress, in turn, the liberal coordinates of the traditional political domination of the bourgeoisie, but not in the direction of the proletarian commune state, but in that of the corporatist state, which implies the shrinking of democracy for the ruling class itself and the expulsion from the political game of sectors of the bourgeoisie that once fully participated in it (one of the characteristics that the RL has been pointing out as fundamental to fascism). This is the structural logic of the matter, its conditions of possibility. Whether this possibility becomes an effective reality, and to what degree, is a question that belongs to real historical development; it is at that level, in the concrete analysis of the concrete situation, where it must be examined and determined (political line).
In effect, we are talking about a logic: corporatism nests in the depths of the political logic of the imperialist state, and fascism is, considered from this angle, its extreme development, the consummation of the assembling of the masses as the organizational pillar of the state. This is not an apodictic law; it is not about the deterministic, inexorable and finalistic consummation of some premises. In fact, and as we have already said, the very revolutionary nature of the bourgeois mode of production makes any form of state, any political balance reached at this or that moment, in itself something precarious (equilibrium suggests an idea of zero-sum contradictory forces, not a dead, deflated stability). The monopoly of political power by a single faction of the bourgeoisie is an exceptional form, not the normal one for a society based on the production of goods and competition.
Therefore, specifically, and preventing both the abuse of this category and its sociological-scientistic deturpation, corporatism expresses a certain correlation of forces, a certain state of the class struggle, whose natural thermometer is the practical vanguard. It is the political nature of its ideas, customs and traditions, that is, of its consciousness, that determines its receptivity to a possible authoritarian or fascist resolution of the crisis of the state, beyond speculations about cold objective, structural and deterministic tendencies that have little to do with the Marxist analysis —and they tend to be behind the simplistic assimilations of imperialist bourgeois democracy and fascism, strictly reduced to repression, or to the open terrorist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, according to the limited formula of the Seventh Congress of the Comintern. And yes, in the October Cycle the threat of the proletarian revolution was the factor that precipitated the adoption of the fascist form of domination by the bourgeoisie. But, precisely, the absence of the revolution as an ideological, political, cultural and moral referent for the masses creates a more than favorable environment so that, in situations of social crisis, more or less permanent today, the objective tendency towards corporatism is implemented naturally as the default political logic at all levels of society, including, of course, the practical vanguard of the class. And it is in the latter where the thesis of social-fascism acquires sense.
The thesis of social-fascism is the generalization of the Leninist thesis that the spontaneous development of the labor movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology,[10] but seen from the side of the counterrevolutionary role of opportunism when the proletariat has historically conquered its highest form of class organization and split the labor movement. In line with that conception of the state as a chain of links, in which every scoundrel has his place under the black sun of imperialism, it is the bourgeois workers’ party that historically embodies reform, which spontaneously directs the resistance movement of the class (which encompasses all its partial expressions, not only the economic and trade unionist) and which has an immediate responsibility in the formation of the culture, traditions and certainties that define the leaders of said movement, its practical vanguard. For this reason, and if the Communist Party is distinguished from the reformist workers’ party by ideology,[11] the state of said layer expresses not only the degree of social maturity of the proletarian revolution, but also that of the counterrevolution, that of the ideological and political conditions for the constitution of a reactionary mass movement. Since the universal progress that the revolutionary bourgeoisie once advocated died, the feverish apology for the particular improvement that imperialism celebrates cannot have any further purpose than to feed the sectoral, selfish, corporate, gregarious, narrow, mediocre, self-satisfied, accommodating and petty consciousness of the masses, cretinism, opportunism, ignorance, careerism, submission, servility; a culture located a stone’s throw away from the fascist restructuring of the mass movement, with or against the very reformists who fueled it.[12] Right and equality before the law appear incapable of offering more democracy, of offering solutions to the problems of the masses, and must be transgressed if the dominant state of affairs is to be ensured. And there is no longer any place for the liberal preventions of someone like Sieyès, who recommended keeping particular interests out of politics so that the Ré-publique would not degenerate into Ré-totale. Today, the spontaneously reformist character of the imperialist state is generally fed by the same subjective conditions as its authoritarian, fascist transmutation.
And this is true for the entire transition from capitalism to communism; the thesis of social-fascism means that “the permanence of the reformist organization type expresses that, in the first place, the process of conscious elevation of the masses towards the place of the communist vanguard is necessarily gradual,”[13] but focused from the point of view of reaction, from the in view of the steps that the bourgeois labor movement takes to preserve its privileges and oppose the revolutionary transformation of the class. This includes, of course, the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat too, as Mao perceptively suggested when he referred to the revisionist USSR as social-fascist and pointed out that the People’s Republic of China was under the exact same risk, a risk tragically materialized after 1976. Indeed, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the highest point of the revolutionary class struggle of the Cycle, was also the point of greatest maturity of the counterrevolution: from the point of view of the ideology promoted by the right of the CPC (productivism, material incentives, chauvinism, feminism, etc., all of them painted red) and from the point of view of the political articulation of their counterrevolutionary work. Waving the red flag against the red flag was to raise the Red Guards against the Red Guards, to send the shock workers of the counterrevolution against the shock workers of the revolution; that is, confronting the sectors that were objectively situated in the practical vanguard as it existed under the conditions of socialism and that represented, respectively, the reformist consciousness and the revolutionary consciousness of the class. That is precisely the form that the mature proletarian revolution assumes: civil war between the organized revolutionary masses and the organized counterrevolutionary masses, between the highest form of organization of the proletariat (the Communist Party) and the highest form of organization of the bourgeoisie (the state plus its transmission belts). And it is not at all coincidental that its last line of defense is the reformist workers’ party, the strategist of the counterrevolution, since it is the one which can best pilot its social roots in the last and deepest class war in history by exploiting the spontaneous, reformist consciousness of the proletariat[14] (which is also a negative index of the potentiality of this class, given the objective place it occupies in capitalist social relations and that the bourgeoisie cannot ignore to articulate the political conditions of its domain).
The thesis of social-fascism requires, therefore, analyzing the correlation between reaction and revolution at a given moment, and also the class struggles between the fractions of the bourgeoisie itself, especially when, as is the case, the revolution is absent from the social scene. In that sense, we do not need to look further than to the Spain is different cliché: the Spanish state is an imperialist State, where the communist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat are the order of the day, and where the hegemon of the bourgeois labor movement, the PSOE, is amply accredited as the left hand of the bourgeois dictatorship and as its ultra-reactionary spearhead. Since its debut as a party of government after the Transition, Spanish socialism has stood out as an efficient anti-worker manager, it has waged an authentic terrorist war against the Basque national movement, stirring up discord between peoples, and it has enthusiastically joined the military adventures of its imperialist bloc in the former Yugoslavia, in Libya, in Ukraine, etc., in addition to other niceties that would make the list endless. From their ranks have come the González and the Zapateros, the Solanas and the Chacones, the Borrells, the Calvos and other fanatics. There can be no doubt about its sinister nature and the destiny that the proletariat has to reserve for it.
Now, when the fraction of financial capital represented by Aznar and the Partido Popular hawks unilaterally broke with part of the old consensus of 1975–1982 (with the intervention in Iraq, the Atlanticist turn at the expense of Europe and the government based on decrees) and spurred a certain fascistic tendency —not so much because of its nostalgic and irredentist rhetoric as because it meant the marginalization of a sector of the ruling class itself, including the labor aristocracy—, the PSOE and everything to its left threw themselves into the mobilizations against the war. And they did not do it, of course, out of anti-war convictions (UGT called a terrifying two-hour strike), but because the strategic interests of the Europeist Spanish state and the right of the sectors represented by the socialists and Izquierda Unida to their piece of the imperialist cake were at stake. Then, they fully demonstrated their ability to redirect the mobilizations of the time to their own benefit (against the war, for the Prestige case, for the lies about 11-M…), without, of course, talking about manipulation or deviation from its natural course: the slogans of the anti-war movement were none other than those of pacifism and its maximum reach was the punishment vote against the Partido Popular. But in a context in which the dominant contradiction in the world was between the imperialist countries and the oppressed peoples, and with the Spanish state going through a time of economic stability, Zapatero’s first government was presented as the restoration of the old consensus, of the old rules of the game, as champion of the essences of liberal democracy against Aznar’s petty partisanship. The political crisis of 2002–2004 did not end with the deepening of the fascist path initiated by Aznarism, but with its interruption and the channeling of social unrest through a greater democratic opening for the labor aristocracy, the bourgeoisies of the oppressed nations and the sectors of the Spanish bourgeoisie marginalized by the Partido Popular—a result that was reflected in the vanguard in the form of an insufferable and demagogic resurrected republicanism, sponsored by Zapatero himself and whose high tide lasted more than a decade.
These conditions began to change when the second decade of the century arrived, after the crack of 2008 and with the war in Syria, when the good times ended and the imperialist unilateralism of the United States began to be called into question by Russian and Chinese imperialism. In the Spanish state it was expressed as what we have called Restoration Crisis 2.0, whose first stages were marked by 15-M and the explosion of the national question in Catalonia —an expression of the disorganization of the labor aristocracy and various strata of the Catalonian bourgeoisie, respectively. As the RL pointed out at the time, the rise of Podemos came to demonstrate the total bankruptcy of the schemes of revisionism and the absolute superfluity of the red identity to ride the spontaneous movement and sit in Congress to legislate some small reforms.
The 15-M cycle, as left-wing mobilization, inevitably dominated by the spiteful labor aristocracy, yes, but also the embodiment of the deepest social crisis since the Transition, contributed to the development of the revolution in the Spanish state in the sphere in which it is developing today: it unleashed the open crisis of revisionism and catalyzed the proliferation of circles of propagandists attached to the RL, the basis on which it was able to jump from opinion trend to a political movement in its own right. But, at a general social level, 15-M and Podemos did not and could not aspire to anything other than the restoration of the old positions lost by the labor aristocracy, the resolution of the crisis not forward, but backward. Consequently, the Spanish state was its natural and logical framework of action, the venerable democratic institutions were the highest level to which to aspire (that narrow heaven, or lil’heaven, that had to be taken by storm) and the usurpation of the place of the PSOE was the logical and coherent roadmap, not to mention its shameless vocation for the Spanish state to climb positions in the European imperialist chain.
But the old social pact laid broken in pieces. It was not the river Rubicon, but the Styx, that re-hashed social democracy was crossing. Contrary to Zapatero’s restauratio, the refoundation of the alliance of the labor aristocracy with the imperialist bourgeoisie could not be carried out with a vulgar parliamentary incantation. The conjured demonic powers ran at their free will, without the sorcerer’s apprentice bothering too much to try to tame them: we have already commented on another occasion[15] about Podemos’ liberal disregard for establishing itself as a mass party, sacrificing links with the spontaneous movement in the altar of Spain and the institutions. This clumsiness of the enemy —which the proletariat must keep in mind even if it cannot afford to always count on it— conditioned the way in which the first act of the Restoration Crisis 2.0 was resolved: recovery of the PSOE as hegemon of the bourgeois workers’ party and state party (which has managed to drag Podemos, IU-PCE and a good part of revisionism) and starvation of the 15-M and the Catalan national movement in the face of the arrogance of its reformist and nationalist leaders, certifying their bankruptcy as referents of reformism and of national bourgeois-democratic liberation, respectively.
And the chickens have come to roost. By the time the motion of censure against Rajoy triumphs, and especially by the time Unidas Podemos (UP) enters the PSOE government, the spontaneous leftist movement is practically desiccated and the only thing sustaining the most progressive government in history is the permanent state of alarm: first the anti-fascist alert, then the COVID alert and, lately, the Borrellian closing of ranks around the Euro-Atlantic imperialist bloc (with all that this has added to the strengthening of the repressive apparatus of the state). The recent general elections have brought us another helping of emotional blackmail, unity against fascism and hackneyed reactionary clichés about the “two Spains.” All of this not only indicates the discredit and lack of an promising, and even credible, program of the “social-communist” camp, as all political commentators never tire of repeating. It expresses, above all, its objective inability to find the conditions, consensus and rules of the game that establish a new point of political balance for the Spanish state. It is not a problem of lack of will, but rather it is the crisis of the economic foundations of the welfare state, based on technological development sustained by strong public intervention and the more or less continuous increase in the productive force of labor, as well as its rate of exploitation. This model, which with its ups and downs roughly corresponds to an entire cycle, could combine economic growth and international competitiveness with the increase in real wages, the affirmative involvement of the monopolistic-imperialist state in the reproduction of the labor force and the maintenance of a broad public sector —state, regional, provincial and municipal— that redistributed part of the surplus value produced (social security, health, social policies, a large body of civil servants, subsidies for trade unions and their apparatus, etc.). But it all depended on not stopping that movement. This delicate rhythm broke down at the end of the first decade of the century and, at least in the countries of the imperialist West, it is not in sight that can be recomposed without the sacrifice of the material and human surplus.
In summary: the labor aristocracy has lost part of its traditional privileges as a reactionary dominant class, and the failed assault on the heavens of 15-M and Podemos has put an end to the old socio-liberal certainties that allowed it to recover its position in 2004–2008. Not in vain, people like Losantos have pointed to Zapatero the Bolivarian as the political father of Iglesias, and from that point of view they are absolutely right. It is an arc that goes from the Comprehensive Law on Gender Violence to the reactionary women’s strike of March 8, 2018 and the law of only “yes” is “yes,” from the federalizing fit of the Miravit Statute and the nation of nations to the lukewarm attitude of Podemos and company in the face of the national oppression of Catalunya (more concerned with marketing than with democracy), from the alliance of civilizations and Moratinos’ multilateralism to the Europeist commitment of the PSOE-UP tandem, from the Law of Historical Memory to the last “red” republican program of revisionism, etc.
All these reformist keys have been defining not so much of a style of doing politics, but of the program with which the labor aristocracy and the pactist sector of the bourgeoisie resolved the crisis caused by Aznar’s second term, but which is failing without palliatives to solder the joints that burst with the Restoration Crisis 2.0. The figure of Yolanda Díaz expresses like no other the current volatility and precariousness of the objective bases of the reformist party. On the one hand, revalidation of all the essentials of the Partido Popular’s labor reform, that is, the reform that sanctioned the reduction of the amount of structural participation of the labor aristocracy in the distribution of surplus value.[16] On the other, a large compensatory bribe of 17 million for the trade union centrals in the General State Budgets of 2022 (an increase of almost 100% since the communist minister took possession of the Labor portfolio)… but that, like all bribery of this nature, it is specific and must be revalidated every year, without restoring the position of the trade unions in the state or protecting it from political and electoral wobbles. Irene Montero, for her part, is the one who best personifies the crisis of its subjective foundations. The so-called civil war of feminism and, above all, the scandal of the law of only “yes” is “yes” constitute the natural indicator of the extent to which feminism —not long ago one of those pillars of consensus— has become incapable of generating agreement even within the reformist camp. Of course, much less has the bourgeois workers’ party been able to ingratiate itself with the social sector embodied in VOX and the Partido Popular, whose fight against the Sanchista state is eloquent about the extent to which the unity of the different fractions of the bourgeoisie has broken down to continue dominating jointly or by turnism. And it is clear that the party of the discontented is not, today, on the left side of the bourgeois political spectrum. Progressivism entrenches itself firmly in its old positions; reaction takes action and initiative. The subversives and seditionists jealously defend the current legality; the immobilists cry out for its subversion. The party of rebellion votes against the rebellion; the party of order, against itself. Dynamic Spain stays at home; backward Spain overtakes from the right. Political integrity is represented by a jacket; clientelism, a fanatic of its inexorable principles. The secessionists work diligently for the unity of Spain; the Spainists, for their dissolution. The reds look to the past; the whites, to the future. The sense of state is the interest of the party; politics, technocracy. The conservative party is the PSOE; the revolutionary party, the Civil Guard.
In this mess the bourgeoisie is unable to understand itself and cries out for certainty. And in the same way that after the good days came the bad days, after the bad days came the worst days. The current social-chauvinist plague —not at all reducible to a series of organizations or individuals— is the reflection, on the vanguard of the class, of the crisis of the traditional liberal-reformist program, fundamentally shared by revisionism, and the attempt of a fraction of the labor aristocracy to devise an opportunist program of a new style, free of the commitments and complexes that until now gave order to the way this class had of understanding its reactionary political project of shared domination with big capital. That is the entire content of the battles between the undefined left and the politically incorrect inquisitors of progressive postmodernism: whether to preserve the old tactic of the labor aristocracy or look for a new one under the skirts of mature opportunism, with all the intermediate positions and mixed breeds that fit between the two. No one is innocent in this game: the strength with which social-chauvinism has erupted is directly proportional to the tenacity with which the false communists have insisted on selling communism to the trade unionist, republican, feminist and other consensuses for decades, hindering the recovery of revolutionary Marxism as a conception of the world and as an ideological referent for the vanguard itself. They are nothing more than two successive links in the same careerist chain, of the same petty class resentful of the loss of its dusty dominant class privileges.
Social-chauvinism thus appears as the opportunist critique of opportunism, at a time when the crisis of the previous reformist program opens the door to a greater reverberation of its revolutionary critique: while revolutionary Marxism champions the consistent application of the right of self-determination against the marketing of small-nation nationalism, social-chauvinism cries out for the unity of Spain; while revolutionary Marxism points out the imperative to destroy the imperialist state, social-chauvinism demands its best executive-police strengthening and its departure from Euro-Atlantic structures to carry out its scavenger foreign policy in a sovereign manner and without supposed restraints; while revolutionary Marxism shoots against the plural left due to the reactionary nature of the construction of the movement as a sum of partial fronts, social-chauvinism does so due to its workerist exclusivism; while revolutionary Marxism takes aim at feminism for its counterrevolutionary and corporatist nature, social-chauvinism criticizes it for its inability to serve its political project, that is, for not being corporatist enough (hence it contrasts feminist corporatism with the equally reactionary and identity-based trade unionist, workerist corporatism); while the war cry of revolutionary Marxism is proletarians of all countries, unite!, social-chauvinism sobs over the borders and masturbates morbidly with nonsense about the Hispanosphere and Anglo-German capitalism, with the Spanish workers’ nation, with one country for the working class, etc., etc.
This ideological shift within the theoretical vanguard carries with it the possibility that the bulk of the population, and especially that decisive practical vanguard, ends up conflating communism with social-chauvinism and the squadron, para-police rhetoric, in which a not inconsiderable part of the theoretical vanguard frolics today. This last question not only determines the political profit that this trend can obtain in the short term, especially when the Spanish political panorama has ostensibly turned to the right and when there are many bourgeois cadres who keep an eye on the left without complexes (as yesterday they kept them on the plural left). It also poses a strategic problem for the reconstitution of communism, to the extent that it stokes national distrust in the name of socialism and distributes its indigestible ideological stew among the masses, discrediting Marxist (further) and making it difficult the fight to recover its referentiality. Not only among the theoretical vanguard; in the practical vanguard too, making it more receptive to chauvinist and authoritarian demagoguery as a way to solve the crisis, which would already place us on the threshold of a possible fascist mass movement. This may force a considerable tactical adjustment of the Plan of Reconstitution, to the extent that communism would find itself in contradiction between the low degree of development of its reconstitution (today ideological, centered on the theoretical vanguard of the class) and the development of a reactionary, fascist, mass movement (the fight against which requires mechanisms that, by their nature, are rather located in the set of tasks corresponding to the political reconstitution, to the reconstitution of the Communist Party).
If the previous chapter of the Restoration Crisis 2.0 was the swan song of the old dogmas, in the present arc the articulation of the new ones is played out. Regarding the vanguard of the working class, it can be expected that the development of the social-chauvinist trend will either distance it from all problems related to communism and party construction, or will continue to digest “classical” revisionism and channel its crisis into the direction of building a new revisionist political platform that is more or less operational and opportunistically mature. Both possibilities can occur. In that sense, social-chauvinism has an advantage, both because it rows in favor of the political current of the Spanish state and because its hysterical representatives are taking the task of conquering public opinion and weaving a minimum ideological harmony with their audience very seriously, exploiting precisely the bankruptcy of the previous reformist cycle and the fatigue of a good part of the vanguard with its clichés and fetishes. On the other hand, we are already seeing that the posthumous heralds of the latter respond to the development of social-chauvinism in the vanguard by attempting to reverse history and insisting on the old plural reformist program and the old multicolored “communism” (the “sum of struggles”), despite the fact that it has failed, despite the fact that its failure has been the immediate cause of the Spanish fever and despite the fact that this bet leads them to greater political irrelevance as the crisis of the state deepens. Revolutionary Marxism takes no sides here, and the proletariat is only responsible for denouncing the ones and the others and the internal bond that unites them, which is what substantiates the thesis of social-fascism in the current circumstances of the class struggle in the Spanish state and, in particular, in the field of the theoretical vanguard. Only the consistent application of the Plan of Reconstitution will allow the crisis of revisionism to be translated into the development of the revolution, which today requires the construction of a vanguard referent and, in particular, the defense of proletarian internationalism and the unconditional fight against social-chauvinism. These are the inalienable bases of the revolutionary political line today.
We can only move forward. If Esau, the disowned, is to rise and break the yoke from his neck, he will do so knowing that
we do not have reserves in the rear to back us up nor a stronger wall to shield our men from disaster.
Committee for Reconstitution
(Spanish State)
August 2023
Notes
[1] “The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section working-class parties of every of the country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.” MARX, K.; ENGELS, F. The Communist Manifesto. Penguin Classics. London, 2014, pp. 342–343.
[2] “Lenin is the first great revolutionary leader to adopt the position of the strategist in the political leadership of the proletarian class struggle. . . . Unlike the barricade leader, who can only direct a military action, who identifies himself with it and who makes the entire course of the struggle depend on that action alone, thereby reducing all the capacity, intensity and depth of the political movement to the extent that a few tactical maneuvers can confer, Lenin, on the other hand, applies to the leadership of the movement a strategic perspective, that is, the method of combining tactical actions according to the strategic objective, always subordinating the former to the latter and using absolutely all possible means, political and military, in relation to each phase of the movement.” New Orientation on the Path of the Reconstitution of the Communist Party, available at: https://reconstitucion.net/Documentos/Fundamentales/NO_idiomas/Nueva_Orientacion_I_ENG.html [Bold from source – Editor’s Note.]
[3] It is interesting that the science of geopolitics emerged at this same time, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and is the closest thing to what we could call the subjectivity of imperialism. To the extent that capital accumulation is carried out at a global level and to the extent that any pre-capitalist geographical outside or only formally subsumed by capital disappears; to that extent, we say, the geostrategic doctrine of each imperialist state expresses its self-consciousness of the (geo)political conditions of the reproduction of its position in the process of capital accumulation, as well as those of its rise in the imperialist chain. It is enough to consider the theories of Mackinder, Ratzel/Haushofer and Spykman/Mahan, which correspond, clearly and respectively, with the position and expectations of British, German and American imperialism throughout the last century, in the same way as the rise of China today defines its Far Seas doctrine. But this topic, although suggestive, is not the subject of this work.
[4] “Left-Wing” Communism—an Infantile Disorder; in LENIN, V. I. Collected Works, volume 31. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974, p. 85.
[5] Ibidem, p. 50.
[6] “Such men [magnates line Krupp, Stumm, Thyssen, etc.] tended, with varying emphases, to resist unionization and reject the idea of collective bargaining. During the war, however, they had softened their antagonism under the impact of growing state interference in labour relations, and on 15 November 1918 business and the unions, represented respectively by Hugo Stinnes and Carl Legien, signed a pact establishing a new framework of collective bargaining, including recognition of the eight-hour day. Both sides had an interest in warding off the threat of sweeping socialization from the extreme left, and the agreement preserved the existing structure of big business while giving the unions equal representation on a nationwide network of joint bargaining committees. Like other elements of the Wilhelmine establishment, big business accepted the Republic because it seemed the most likely way of warding off something worse.” EVANS, R. J. The Coming of the Third Reich. The Penguin Press. New York, 2004, pp. 112–113. In this regard, see El sindicalismo que viene [The Trade Unionism to Come]; in LA FORJA # 35, 2006, pp. 50–63.
[7] Ellas quieren la libertad y el comunismo [Women Want Freedom and Communism], in LÍNEA PROLETARIA #6, December 2021, p. 39.
[8] “The fact that imperialism is parasitic or decaying capitalism is manifested first of all in the tendency to decay, which is characteristic of every monopoly under the system of private ownership of the means of production. The difference between the democratic-republican and the reactionary-monarchist imperialist bourgeoisie is obliterated precisely because they are both rotting alive.” LENIN: C. W., vol. 23, p. 106 [Bold our own – Editor’s Note.]
[9] An example of how, for the KPD in the late 1920s, the practical vanguard was not concentrated in the trade unions: “Even more menacing [than criminal gangs] were the attempts, often successful, by the Communists to mobilize the unemployed for their own political ends. Communism was the party of the unemployed par excellence. Communist agitators recruited the young semi-criminals of the ‘wild cliques’; they organized rent strikes in working-class districts where people were barely able to pay the rent anyway; they proclaimed ‘red districts’ like the Berlin proletarian quarter of Wedding, inspiring fear into non-Communists who dared to venture there, sometimes beating them up or threatening them with guns if they knew them to be associated with the brownshirts; they marked down certain pubs and bars as their own; they proselytized among children in working-class schools, politicized parents’ associations and aroused the alarm of middle-class teachers, even those with left-wing convictions. For the Communists, the class struggle passed from the workplace to the street and the neighbourhood as more and more people lost their jobs. Defending a proletarian stronghold, by violent means if necessary, became a high priority of the Communist paramilitary organization, the Red Front-Fighters’ League.” EVANS: Op. cit., pp. 237–238.
[10] What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement; in LENIN, C. W., v. 5, p. 384.
[11] Thesis of Reconstitution of the Communist Party, p. 9, available at: https://reconstitucion.net/Documentos/Fundamentales/Tesis_idiomas/Tesis_Reconstitucion_PC_ENG.pdf
[12] At the beginning of 1933, as “the political repression and marginalization of the Social Democrats rapidly became more obvious, so the trade unions under Theodor Leipart began to try to preserve their existence by distancing themselves from the Social Democratic Party and seeking an accommodation with the new regime. On 21 March the leadership denied any intention of playing a role in politics and declared that it was prepared to carry out the social function of the trade unions ‘whatever the kind of state regime’ in power. . . .
On 28 April they concluded an agreement with the Christian and Liberal Trade Unions that was intended to form the first step towards a complete unification of all trade unions in a single national organization.” EVANS: Op. cit., pp. 355–356.
[13] Thesis of Reconstitution, p. 7.
[14] This problem was clearly seen, although from liberal coordinates, by some of the most astute scholars of the Cultural Revolution: “[Mao] shares at least one conviction with Western liberals: that, while the difference between paternalistic socialism and fascism is a real one, the line between them is easily crossed. The Kuomintang crossed it; Mao believes that the Soviet Union has crossed it; and he fears that his own party is only a few short steps from it. . . . To both Mao and his liberal opponents in China, the enemy is the same: bureaucracy; but they diverge entirely on the means by which it should be combated. The liberals believe, essentially, in gradually improving the elite. Mao believes in destroying the foundations of the elite. He faces one of the fundamental problems of politics: the tendency for a levelling revolution to produce its own new privileged establishment. But he does not hope to defeat this possibility, as is widely believed in the West, simply by perpetually recurrent, disruptive mass protest.” GRAY, J.; CAVENDISH, P. Chinese Communism In Crisis. Maoism and the Cultural Revolution. Frederick A. Praeger. New York, 1968, pp. 67–68.
[15] Editorial: Ni nueva normalidad, ni vieja normalidad: ¡Revolución o barbarie! [Neither New Normalcy, Nor Old Normalcy: Revolution or Barbarism!]; in LÍNEA PROLETARIA #5, December 2020, pp. 12–13.
[16] The difficulties posed to temporary hiring, for their part, have already been successfully circumvented by the natural laws of competition: employers, large and small, quickly learned to use the trial period as an efficient substitute for the temporary contract. Dismissals before the end of the trial period (which do not require prior notice, reasoned cause, or compensation) skyrocketed by 620% last year: if in 2021 there were 75 000 employees who did not exceed said period, the end of 2022 recorded a total of 540 000.
Comuna Roja 