Oh, this inconvenient VII Congress
Recently, the Department of International Relations of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) published an article criticizing the International Anti-Fascist Forum in Moscow. With this material, the theoreticians of the KKE broke through another ideological bottom, accusing the VII Congress of the Comintern (1935) of mistakes and of a problematic (it must be understood as unscientific) definition of fascism. It should be assumed that for most parties the theoretical developments of the Comintern of that time are authoritative and relevant to this day. Their consideration and analysis are aimed primarily at how we can put into practice the experience of struggle accumulated by the communists over many decades. And finally, the comrades of the KKE openly declared to all the anti-fascists that they did not agree! First of all, the ideologists of the KKE took up arms against the definition of the Comintern (Georgi Dimitrov) given at the Seventh Congress to fascism in power:
“Fascism is an open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialist elements of finance capital…
Fascism is not a supra-class power or the power of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital.
Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist reprisals against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia.
Fascism in foreign policy is chauvinism in the crudest form, cultivating zoological hatred against other peoples.”
The theoreticians of the KKE do not agree with the fact that Dimitrov singled out finance capital as the main customer of fascism. In addition, the KKE declares for greater persuasiveness that Dimitrov’s definition is not only erroneous, but also outdated to date. It must be understood that this argument is intended for those who consider the position of the Comintern to be correct. The definition, they say, was largely opportunistic, because it was given in conditions when “imperialist forces planned the destruction of the only socialist state in the world, and the USSR sought to split the imperialist forces and exploit their contradictions.”
The most interesting thing is that, despite all this criticism of the developments of the Seventh Congress, the ideologists of the KKE themselves have for a long time not given any definition of fascism of their own, hiding only behind a reference to the Sixth Congress of the Comintern held in 1928, which allegedly gave fundamentally different interpretations: “under certain specific historical conditions, the offensive of the bourgeoisie, imperialist and reactionary, takes the form of fascism”, and “signs of fascism were set forth in detail in the resolution on the international situation at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern.”
But if we look at where the ideologues of the KKE send us, that is, in the materials of the Sixth Congress, we will see that it is there that a clear definition has not yet been formed, but the analysis of the phenomenon in the process of its formation was underway. Among other things, a number of external signs of fascism were identified and enumerated: direct violence, the struggle against the proletarian movement, the achievement of political unity of all ruling classes (banks, large-scale industry, agrarians), reliance on the discontent of broad strata of the petty bourgeoisie and even workers, social demagoguery, etc.
We know that in 1928 fascism had not yet developed in full force, had not yet developed to its highest form, which later manifested itself in fascist Germany. Even an aggressive foreign policy, this important feature of fascism, had not yet become evident by 1928. And we also know that Marx advised the study of phenomena in their mature form: “human anatomy is the key to the anatomy of an ape.” That is why it is absolutely clear that the VII Congress of the Comintern knew much more about fascism than the VI Congress. The effect of accumulating knowledge also worked. Moreover, in both cases, practically the same people were engaged in the analysis of fascism.
In the 1920s, when the communists had not yet fully studied fascism, the label of fascism was often applied to any rigid bourgeois regimes. For example, it is known that the German communists of the late 1920s believed that Weimar Germany was already a fascist state by that time. However, the same communists (German and not only) after 1933 saw Hitlerism, that is, fascism in its developed form. And this already made it possible to theoretically separate fascism from other forms of bourgeois dictatorship (according to Lenin, any bourgeois-democratic state is at the same time the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie), which always (i.e., not developed into fascism) behaves in relation to the working class as a machine of class suppression. By singling out fascism as a special phenomenon, it was possible to select the most effective methods of struggle against this particular form of bourgeois dictatorship (for example, the tactics of popular fronts).
Fascism is a product of the epoch of imperialism, its specific instrument, and it is obvious that the main customer of fascism will be that part of capital which was formed in the epoch of imperialism as the new ruling force, that is, finance capital. Even if there are various strata of the bourgeoisie in the country, then above all of them in the epoch of imperialism there is always finance capital, the most powerful part, formed by the merger of banking capital with industrial capital and taking upon itself more and more functions of direct management of the economy, including through the state machine. The same Sixth Congress of the Comintern has repeatedly emphasized this danger.
The references of the ideologists of the KKE to the fact that the formulations of 1935 depended on the opposition of the USSR to the capitalist world look somewhat ridiculous, since in 1928 the imperialists desperately wanted to destroy the Soviet Union – but for some reason the authors of the document on behalf of the KKE consider it possible to refer to the decisions of the Sixth Congress adopted that year. Perhaps in 1928 the imperialists hated the USSR and the October Revolution less than in 1935? But it doesn’t seem like that.
In addition, it should be said that the opposition of the decisions of the last two congresses of the Comintern is methodologically incorrect. Instead of respecting the scientific principle of historicism, of showing how one decision arises from another, the ideologists of the KKE decided to apply the method of the liberals, who like, for example, to contrast the works of the young and mature Marx. It affects immature minds, but we are dialecticians, we understand the phenomenon in development.
We see that the statements of the KKE about the erroneousness of the assessments and definitions of the Seventh Congress of the Comintern do not stand the test of elementary facts and are contrary to logic.
Read more at The Communist, theoretical journal of the PCUSA: The Communist Party of Greece and its Ideological Alchemy – The Communist
