Of course, Paul having adopted the same disastrous Popular Frontist strategy of Stalin, from the 1930's, uses the same kinds of arguments that Stalin and the Stalinists used in the 1930's to justify the workers subordinating themselves to their own bourgeoisie, including all of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois talk about a “people's war”, as though any Marxist can talk about some homogeneous “people”, or “nation”, as against the Marxist analysis that all such abstract concepts simply hide the existence of antagonistic classes, within them, with opposing class interests.
In the 1930's even some within the Trotskyist movement were drawn in behind this fallacy of the need to oppose the threat of fascism represented by Hitler and Mussolini. The Palestinian Trotskyists argued, specifically that Hitler presented a threat to the workers' state in the USSR, and so some kind of common front against it was justified. Trotsky responded, setting out why such a belief is nonsense.
“We maintain that in the quarter of a century that has elapsed since the outbreak of the last war, imperialism has come to rule even more despotically over the world; its hand weighs more heavily on events during peacetime as well as wartime; and finally, that under all of its political masks, it has assumed an even more reactionary character. In consequence, all the fundamental rules of proletarian “defeatist” policy in relation to imperialist war retain their full force today. This is our point of departure, and all the conclusions that follow are determined by it…..
Monarchist reaction in the last war, they state, was not of an aggressive historical character, it was rather a survival, whereas fascism nowadays represents a direct and immediate threat to the whole civilized world. The struggle is therefore the task of the international proletariat as a whole in peacetime as well as wartime. It is only natural if we become suspiciously wary: such a narrowing down of revolutionary tasks – replacing imperialism by one of its political masks, that of Fascism – is a patent concession to the Comintern, a patent indulgence of social-patriots of the “democratic” countries….
They focus their attention on fascism, as the immediate threat to the world working class and the oppressed nationalities. They hold that a “defeatist” policy is not applicable in those countries which may be at war with fascist countries. Again, such reasoning over-simplifies the problem, for it depicts the case as if the fascist countries will necessarily be found on one side of the trenches while the democratic or semi-democratic are on the other. In point of fact, there is absolutely no guarantee for this “convenient” grouping. Italy and Germany may, in the coming war as in the last, be found in opposing camps. This is by no means excluded. What are we to do in that case? Indeed, it is becoming increasingly difficult to classify countries in accordance with purely political features: Where would we assign Poland, Rumania, present-day Czechoslovakia, and a number of other second-rate and third-rate powers?
The main tendency of the authors of this document is apparently the following: to hold that “defeatism” is obligatory for the leading fascist countries (Germany, Italy), whereas it is necessary to renounce defeatism in countries even of doubtful democratic virtue, but which are at war with the leading fascist countries. That is approximately how the main idea of the document may be worded. In this form, too, it remains false, and an obvious lapse into social-patriotism….
They do not take sufficiently into account the fact that in the epoch of decaying capitalism shifts and semi-shifts of political regimes occur quite suddenly and frequently without altering the social foundation, without checking capitalist decline. On which of these two processes must our policy be based in such a fundamental question as war: on the shifts of political regimes, or on the social foundation of imperialism, common to all political regimes and unfailingly uniting them against the revolutionary proletariat? The fundamental strategic question is our attitude toward war, which it is impermissible to subordinate to episodic tactical considerations and speculations…
But the Czech working class did not have the slightest right to entrust the leadership of a war “against fascism” to Messrs. capitalists who, within a few days so safely changed their colouration and became themselves fascists and sub-fascists. Transformations and recolourations of this kind on the part of the ruling classes will be on the order of the day in wartime in all “democracies”. That is why the proletariat would ruin itself if it were to determine its main line of policy by the formal and unstable labels of “for fascism” and “against fascism”….
That policy which attempts to place upon the proletariat the unsolvable task of warding off all dangers engendered by the bourgeoisie and its policy of war is vain, false, mortally dangerous. “But fascism might be victorious!” “But the USSR is menaced!” “But Hitler’s invasion would signify the slaughter of workers!” And so on, without end. Of course, the dangers are many, very many. It is impossible not only to ward them all off, but even to foresee all of them. Should the proletariat attempt at the expense of the clarity and irreconcilability of its fundamental policy to chase after each episodic danger separately, it will unfailingly prove itself a bankrupt. In time of war, the frontiers will be altered, military victories and defeats will alternate with each other, political regimes will shift. The workers will be able to profit to the full from this monstrous chaos only if they occupy themselves not with acting as supervisors of the historical process but by engaging in the class struggle. Only the growth of their international offensive will put an end not alone to episodic “dangers” but also to their main source: the class society.”
In WWII, “Democratic imperialism”, of course allied with the dictatorship of Stalin, which Trotsky described as differing form that of Hitler only in its greater brutality. And, proving Trotsky's point, in 1942, the fascist dictator Vargas, in Brazil, brought it into the war on the side of "democratic imperialism". Today, NATO has as one of its members the dictatorship of Erdogan in Turkey, and has close economic and military ties with a range of unsavoury regimes from Duterte in the Phillippines, to the feudal Gulf Monarchies. “Democratic imperialism” has no concern for the categories of “democracy” as against “fascism”, because, as Trotsky describes, these are just political masks that it picks up and discards according to what best suits its needs at the particular time. During WWII, the introduction of national governments, the suppression of strikes, and political opposition, let alone of internment made it only marginally discernible from the regimes of fascism, and, of course, if you were an Indian, then your continued oppression at the hands of British imperialism meant there was even less discernible difference between the two.
Today, its only necessary to look at how quickly western governments have withdrawn basic bourgeois democratic rights and freedoms, introducing wide-ranging curfews and bans on the right to free assembly imposed over a two-year period, along with introduction of internal passports, a withdrawal of the right to free movement, and so on. All of that was backed up by a wall to wall state propaganda campaign that was totalitarian in its completeness. Now, even the ineffective Russian propaganda from RT is too much for western governments to risk, and so they have banned it, demonstrating, how quickly they can come to represent the Bonapartist and fascist regimes they claim to oppose!
Even the most basic freedoms, such as holding a party in your own house was made a crime! Now, we have the Canadian government introducing the Emergency Powers Act as a hammer to crack the nut of protests against the introduction of vaccine passports. Imagine what these Bonapartist regimes would do, if they were faced with real working-class opposition? And, yet, sections of “The Left”, like Paul, have not only failed to oppose this creeping totalitarianism and Bonapartism on the part of the state, they have actively encouraged it! One thing I can say for sure, and for free is that is not "How To Fight Fascism”.
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