ARTICLES & SPEECHES, 1991 - 2000

Imperialism, Fascisation and Fascism: An Overview

Contribution to the International Communist Seminar
Jose Maria Sison, Founding Chairman
Communist Party of the Philippines
Brussels, 2 - 4 May 2000

Comrades,

It is of great importance to the proletariat and the rest of the people of the world, in their current struggle against imperialism and for national liberation, democracy and socialism, that we review the phenomenon of fascism before World War II.

In this regard, I have been asked to focus on German fascism in consonance with the theme of the conference, imperialism, fascisation and fascism. It is appropriate to focus on the chieftain of the Axis powers and stay within the time allotted by the seminar. There is simply no time to deal with some depth on the phenomenon of fascism in other countries.

Even as we focus on German fascism, we should refer to a large historical context, involving the development and general crisis of monopoly capitalism, the struggle between the proletariat and monopoly bourgeoisie and the correlation of the fascists, the social democrats and the communists in the time of the Weimar republic.

Most importantly, our historical review must be useful to the understanding of the persistence and further development of the factors that generate fascism and war up to the current circumstances so that we can find guidance for the current revolutionary struggle. Necessarily, we must consider all the stages of the general crisis of monopoly capitalism up to the present so that we can grasp the current status, tasks and prospects of the revolutionary forces and people against imperialism, fascist reaction and revisionism.

Imperialism, Fascisation and Fascism

Even when monopoly capitalism was becoming dominant in the most developed industrial capitalist countries from the 1870’s onward, the monopoly bourgeoisie trumpeted the doctrine of laissez faire. This had been the battlecry of the pre-monopoly bourgeoisie against state trading monopolies and regulations.

By the last quarter of the century of the 19th century, the monopoly bourgeoisie was supplanting free competition with monopoly, consolidating a monopoly bourgeois state and using it to oppress and exploit the working class. When the global era of modern imperialism came about at the beginning of the 20th century, the monopoly bourgeoisie of one country, which had combined industrial and bank capital to form finance capital, used the state in protecting its own industries and competing with the monopoly bourgeoisie of other countries for markets, sources of raw materials, fields of investment and domination of colonies, semicolonies and dependent countries.

The imperialists prated about free trade only to protect their national and ultranational economic interests and to bring about wars on a widening scale for the redivision of the world. Imperialism took final shape as the highest stage of capitalism from 1898 to 1914. The Spanish-American war (1898), the Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902), the Russo-Japanese war (1904-5) and the economic crisis in Europe in 1900 marked the advent of the global era of modern imperialism.

Some imperialist countries, such as England, had the advantage of having colonial possessions even before the imperialist era. Other imperialists like the US, Germany and Japan were late comers in the business of acquiring colonies and became catalysts for a redivision of the world through war. To back up the expansion of capital, the monopoly bourgeoisie in all imperialist countries initiated a certain form of state monopoly capitalism either through state equity in strategic industries or through war-related supply contracts and subsidies.

As monopoly capitalism developed in Germany, the class struggle between the monopoly bourgeoisie and the proletariat intensified, as in the rest of Europe. In the course of the class struggle, the working class movement grew in strength. By the last decade of the 19th century, Marxism became the dominant trend in the working class movement. The German Social-Democratic Party was the biggest party and mainstay of the Second International.

After all previous efforts to suppress socialism since the time of Bismarck, the monopoly bourgeoisie came to terms with the irrepressible social-democratic party and sought to cultivate the reformists within it. Bernstein was the first to arise as the leader of revisionism, advocating evolutionary socialism under the auspices of the bourgeois state. Then his former protagonist Kautsky himself became revisionist and made revisionism the main trend in the Second International.

Social democracy pronouncedly became bourgeois liberalism dressed up in Marxist and socialist phraseology. It was a petty-bourgeois ideology in the service of the monopoly bourgeoisie. The social-democratic leaders espoused reformism and carried out class collaboration with the monopoly bourgeoisie. They supported the strengthening of the monopoly bourgeois state and the colonization of the oppressed peoples and nations. It is instructive to study Lenin’s works that upheld the revolutionary essence of Marxism and comprehensively and profoundly opposed the revisionist renegade line of Kautsky and his followers.

When the imperialist powers prepared for war in connection with the intensifying struggle for a redivision of economic territory, the social democrats voted for war credits, with the verbiage of social-chauvinism and social-pacifism. When the war broke out, they were embarrassed but not embarrassed to death, as later events would show.

World War I broke out in 1914 as a culmination of the first stage in the general crisis of monopoly capitalism. It had a disastrous consequence for the world capitalist system in that the imperialist powers tried to destroy each other and consequently the Bolsheviks and the proletariat turned the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war and triumphed in the weakest link of the chain of imperialist powers, in Russia, which is one-sixth of the world.

Germany and its cohorts lost the war among the imperialist powers. Proletarian revolutions broke out in Central Europe. Workers were able to seize power but lost it because of betrayal by the dominant class collaborationist section of the social-democratic movement. The most important of these revolutions was the German revolution of November 1918.

The Spartacists and Independents had the majority in the Berlin Council of Workers and Soldiers’ Soviets. But the Independents did not follow the lead of Liebknecht in rejecting the approach of the discredited class collaborationist leaders of the social-democratic party and allowed them to regain political prominence and to penetrate and betray the leadership of the revolution.

The German monopoly bourgeoisie, shaken by defeat in the war, the victory of the Russian revolution, the German revolution of 1918 and the aggravated economic crisis, recognized more than ever before the necessity of retaining the services of the social-democratic party as the special tool for chaining the working class to the bourgeois state and for preventing the advance of the German communists and the proletarian revolutionary movement.

As Lenin pointed out, the development of state monopoly capitalism would accelerate after World War I. The monopoly bourgeoisie of all imperialist countries, both winners and losers in the preceding war, had to use the state to concentrate capital and control the working class for another round of monopoly competition and another war for redividing the world. Especially for a loser like imperialist Germany, the monopoly bourgeoisie had to use the state in order to reconstruct its ruined economy and at the same time pay the exactions of the winners of the previous war.

Persistent in their belief that socialism can evolve peacefully from monopoly capitalism, the social democrats interpreted the accelerated development of state monopoly capitalism as the growing condition for the peaceful evolution of socialism. They believed more than ever before that they could transform the bourgeois state against the monopoly bourgeoisie. They refused to recognize that the private monopoly bourgeoisie directed and controlled state monopoly capitalism at the expense of the working class. Thus, they shunned the proletarian class struggle against the monopoly bourgeoisie and its state.

The German monopoly bourgeoisie favored the social democrats as the most important special instrument for controlling the trade union bureaucracy, splitting the working class and opposing the communists in the period of 1918 to 1930. But subsequently, it increasingly favored the use of the fascists for the outright repression of the communists and the working class movement as the global and domestic economic crisis worsened and the Weimar republic became more unstable. It was also impressed with the fascist suppression of the communists in Italy since 1922.

As an essential part of understanding the rise of the German fascists to power, it is necessary to look at both social democracy and fascism as complementary and alternating tools of the German monopoly bourgeoisie. Social democracy was a tool in the left hand and fascism was another in the right hand of the monopoly bourgeoisie.

The social democrats and fascists had a common class character and a common penchant for demagogy. They adopted the petty-bourgeois position and appealed to the level of consciousness of the middle social strata, even as the social democrats specialized in building bureaucratic trade unions and the fascists likewise in mobilizing the youth. They used anticapitalist and revolutionary phrasemongering and yet served the monopoly bourgeoisie. Above all, their leaders were similarly anticommunist, although social democracy had a Left current because of its proletarian mass following and the whole of fascism was rabidly anticommunist.

The social democrats and the fascists differed in methods. The social democrats lived on reformism and loyalty to the bourgeois-democratic constitution. The fascists were for the open use of terror against communists, the working class and other political opponents. They ran far wilder than the social democrats in employing demagogy to make a mass movement. They played up chauvinist, racial and religious prejudices. They combined these with the people’s grievances against the Treaty of Versailles, against the capitalists, Junkers and corrupt officials and against the dire economic and social conditions.

In the course of seeking political power, the German fascists gained the confidence of the monopoly bourgeoisie by carrying on rabid anticommunism, disrupting communist meetings and other activities, by breaking up workers’ strikes and mauling and killing communists. They collaborated with the military and police and cultivated the officers to become members of the Nazi party. After a fascist gang brutally disrupted a communist activity, the military or police arrested and imprisoned the victims, who would be charged in court and convicted by the judges.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler openly admits that to defeat the communists the fascists must steal the color red from them. Thus, he stole the word socialism. The 21-point Nazi program cynically included the following: abolition of unearned income, breaking off interest slavery, confiscation of unearned income, confiscation of all war profits, nationalization of all trusts, profit-sharing in large concerns, confiscation of land without compensation for communal purposes and death penalty for usurers and profiteers.

Behind the scenes the fascists received profuse contributions of money for their extravagant propaganda from the Krupps and Thyssens, Deterlings and Hohenzollerns. In the critical year of 1932, the monopoly bourgeoisie acclaimed the fascists as the favored tool for misleading the people and combating the communists. It regarded them as the necessary instrument for a "restricted" type of constitution in the consolidation of German capitalism. This scheme is documented in the Deutsche Führerbriefe, confidential bulletin of the Federation of German Industry.

The principal leaders of the social democratic party participated in the long-term process of fascisation and facilitated the rise to power of the fascists. They were social-fascists, for being socialist in words but fascist in deed, by having collaborated with the class enemy in suppressing the proletarian revolution of November 1918, by supporting the emergency decrees and other antiworker and antipeople measures in a series of regimes under the Weimar republic and by rebuffing and actively opposing the timely appeals of the communists for an antifascist united front.

Had the social democrats accepted the offer of a united front against the fascists, their combined strength would have been able to isolate and defeat the fascists. In all the elections prior to the chancellorship of Hitler in 1933, the combined votes of the socialists and communists constituted the overwhelming majority. But whenever the communists offered a united front, the social democrats increased their anticommunist propaganda, barred communists from unions and expelled known Left social democrats.

The leaders of the social-democratic party agreed to the appointment of Hitler as chancellor on the weird notion that the fascists would be discredited upon their failure to fulfill their promises. And even after Hitler undertook a series of measures to monopolize political power and repress the communists, the working class and other political opponents, the social-democrat leader Ebert begged Hitler through Hindenberg that the social democrats be tolerated and accommodated under the fascist regime.

The communists made their own mistakes and had their own shortcomings in the course of confronting the rise to power of the fascists. They allowed the fascists to seize the initiative in taking up the people’s grievances against the intolerable impositions by the victors of World War I and neglected to pay as much attention as did the fascists to arousing, organizing and mobilizing the youth, the unemployed, the petty bourgeoisie and the urban semiproletarian masses.

Despite the calls of Comrade Thaelman and the Executive Committee of the Communist International for the German communists to pay adequate attention to work within the dominant trade unions under the control of the social democrats, the German communists assigned only about 10 percent of their ranks to this work and sectarianly confined themselves in the Red trade union opposition.

Having come to power, the fascists turned the bourgeois state into an open terrorist dictatorship of the most rabidly reactionary, chauvinist and imperialist elements of finance capital. It was the most ferocious attack by capital on the working people, unbridled chauvinism, predatory war, rabid reaction and counterrevolution and most vicious enemy of the proletariat and all working people.

For a while, the Nazi regime seemed to be able to stabilize the situation and please the monopoly bourgeoisie with the devices of state monopoly capitalism. It pushed public works projects and war production, generating profits for the monopoly bourgeoisie and some temporary increase of employment. But the relentless world economic crisis and the rapid rise of war production and militarization of the youth further upset the economy and the lives of the people and drove the fascists even more to launch aggression and ignite World War II, with the ultimate aim of destroying the Soviet Union.

World War II was the climax of the second stage of the general crisis of monopoly capitalism. It was basically an interimperialist war, in which one alignment of imperialist powers fought another for a redivision of the world. However, the war could no longer be decided strictly among the imperialist powers. The German fascists had as main objective the destruction of the Soviet Union. In turn, as one of the Allied powers, the Soviet Union ensured the defeat of the Axis powers and the advance of the forces of national liberation, democracy and socialism.

It served as the most powerful bulwark against fascism and victoriously carried out a patriotic war. It bore the main brunt of the fascist offensive in Europe. But it dealt German fascism the deadliest blow. After winning the Battle of Stalingrad, the turning point of the war, the Soviet Union carried out a powerful counteroffensive to seal the fate of the German fascists and their cohorts.

The Third International and communists of various countries consistently raised the calls for a workers’ united front and for the People’s Front against the fascists. They were the most resolute and the most militant in realizing these calls. The application of the united front policy extended to all forms of struggle, depending on the circumstances in various countries.

The united front for revolutionary armed struggle against the fascists was of crucial importance. It would result in the liberation of entire peoples and the establishment of people’s democracies in Asia and Eastern Europe. The best and most extensive example of the antifascist united front policy of the communists was carried out in China. Keeping their independence and initiative, the Chinese communists made a truce and alliance with the Guomindang against Japan, took advantage of the imperialist war to strengthen the people’s army and was prepared for the revolutionary civil war after World War II.

Fascism in the Period of the Cold War

Soon after World War II ended with the victory of the Allied powers, the third stage of the general crisis of monopoly capitalism began. One-third of humanity came under the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. Several socialist countries arose in Asia and Eastern Europe. A great wave of national liberation movements was sweeping Asia and Africa.

However, the US emerged as the No. 1 imperialist power, having been unscathed by the war and having picked up the spoils of war as a late joiner as in World War I. US policymakers were alarmed that World War II had brought about several socialist countries and national liberation movements. They were worried about a resurfacing of the US economic crisis if war production were to come to a halt and hordes of US troops were to be demobilized.

The US decided to launch the Cold War as a pretext for continuing its war production, for deploying US troops in overseas military bases and building military alliances. It proclaimed itself as the leader of the imperialist alliance against communism and defender of the "free world". It stepped into the shoes of fascist Germany as the most rabidly anticommunist power and the most aggressive enemy of socialist countries and the national liberation movements.

It adopted fascist demagogy. Having no formidable social-democratic and communist parties within its national borders, the US settled on misrepresenting monopoly capitalism as "free enterprise" and conformity to it as "moderation" between the presumed extremes of fascism and communism. US imperialist propaganda started equating the Soviet Union to Hitlerite Germany.

Within US society, the McCarthyite witchhunts targeted communists and all suspected communists in all walks of life. But the US monopoly bourgeois state stayed short of becoming a complete fascist dictatorship. By reaping the most profits from World War II, it actually acquired plenty of economic allowance for retaining the frills of bourgeois democracy. It stood to profit further from the reconstruction of the devastated economies of Europe and Japan and the expansion of a US neocolonial empire at the expense of its own imperialist allies. It conceived of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods agreements as the framework for Pax Americana.

The Cold War policy of containment consisted of economic blockade and building of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and other military alliances to encircle the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. Had not the Soviet Union developed the atom bomb early enough to bring about a nuclear stalemate in Europe, the US would have used its nuclear monopoly to provoke a war directly with the Soviet Union. Earlier in the closing year of World War II, the US had used the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to preempt a Soviet offensive against Japan.

In the pursuit of the anticommunist crusade, the US whitewashed the fascist war crimes of the monopoly bourgeoisie of the erstwhile Axis powers and encouraged them to undertake economic reconstruction in subordination to US monopoly capitalism. West Germany served as the forward base for containing the Soviet Union in the West and Japan as the forward base for containing the Soviet Union in the Pacific, China, the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea and Vietnam in Asia.

It was in the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America that US imperialism installed fascist governments to dominate the working people and suppress the legal democratic forces and the national liberation movements. These were rabidly anticommunist regimes of open terror. It was also in such countries that US imperialism launched wars of aggression. The US wars of aggression against Korea and then against Vietnam and the whole of Indochina kept on aggrandizing the military-industrial complex in the US.

The Cold War was practically the third world war if we take into account the following: 1) the massive scale of the overseas military bases, the personnel and equipment that the US mustered in order to encircle the socialist countries and suppress the peoples; 2) the millions of casualties among combatants and local populations in the US wars of aggression; and 3) the hapless victims of carnage in US-directed campaigns of terror carried out by US-sponsored fascist regimes.

In Southeast Asia alone, US imperialism and its puppets were responsible for the killing of more than six million people in Vietnam and the massacre of more than one million communists and suspected communists by the Suharto military fascist regime in Indonesia. Why do we call fascist the rule of open terror by puppet regimes after World War II? They engaged in anticommunist demagogy and unabashed state terrorism on behalf of the foreign and domestic big bourgeoisie.

Thus, in the Philippine historical experience, we have described as fascist the Marcos regime from 1972 to 1986. This was a rabidly anticommunist rule that did away with bourgeois-democratic niceties and murdered at least 100,000 people (including the Moro people) in order to serve the interests of the foreign and domestic bourgeoisie. The US military conquest of the Philippines, which started in 1899, killed at least one million or ten percent of the population. But we do not call it fascist because it was simply a war of imperialist aggression.

We must include in the rogues’ gallery of fascist dictators or bourgeois state terrorists such "heroes" of the US "free world" as Chiang Kaishek of China, Sygman Rhee and Park Chung Hee of South Korea, Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen van Thieu of South Vietnam, Lon Nol of Cambodia, Suharto of Indonesia, Marcos of the Philippines, Zia Ul-Haq of Pakistan, the Shah of Iran, Mobutu of Congo, Botha of South Africa, Idi Amin of Uganda, Videla of Argentina, Castello Branco, Costa e Silva, Medici and Geisel of Brazil, Batista of Cuba, Somoza of Nicaragua, Pinochet of Chile, Stroessner of Paraguay, Duvalier of Haiti, Fujimori of Peru and others.

Notwithstanding the millions of casualties and the colossal resources spent by the US in the Cold War, the revolutionary forces of the world won unprecedentedly great victories up to the middle of the 1970s. These included the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China and the victory of the Vietnamese and other Indochinese people against US imperialism. It may be said that these were the greatest victories of the revolutionary cause of socialism and national liberation consequent to the third stage of the general crisis of monopoly capitalism and prior to the reversal of socialism in China.

No socialist country was ever defeated by any US war of aggression. When the Soviet Union came under revisionist rule, the US ultimately succeeded in outmaneuvering the Soviet Union in the Cold War by pushing neocolonialism and the arms race and by penetrating all the revisionist-ruled countries. The biggest factor ever that caused the restoration of capitalism in socialist countries of the working class was the rise and advance of modern revisionism, centered in the Soviet Union and spread on a global scale. From the time of Khrushchov to that of Gorbachov, the modern revisionists declared that the working class had completed its historic mission of building socialism in order to liquidate the proletarian class dictatorship and class struggle and push the restoration of capitalism.

Where the working class had taken power and built socialism but where the bourgeoisie subsequently recovered political power and privatized public assets, the modern revisionists played the role of the classical revisionists, the social democrats, as betrayers of socialism. As soon as modern revisionists took power, they became monopoly bureaucrat capitalists and social-fascists using demagogy and terror against genuine Marxist-Leninists, the working class and the entire people.

In Eastern Europe, Tito of Yugoslavia was the early bird of modern revisionism and social-fascism, preceding Khrushchov by some years in the same manner that Mussolini was the forerunner of Hitler. Under encouragement of no less than the Khrushchovite revisionists, the ruling parties of Eastern Europe enthusiastically took the road of revisionism, under the cover of the anti-Stalin campaign. They included in their ranks unremoulded class collaborationist social democrats that had become overnight communists after the triumph of the Soviet counteroffensive.

For more than 30 years since 1956, the political and economic strength of the Soviet Union was sapped by the self-indulgent and thieving monopoly bureaucrat bourgeoisie, that misappropriated for its self-enrichment and for the arms race with the US an increasingly large part of the surplus product produced by the proletariat. The monopoly bureaucrat bourgeoisie pretended to be communist and touted as socialist the state ownership of the means of production, until Gorbachov and Yeltsin dropped the communist and socialist masks, disintegrated the Soviet Union and pushed the undisguised privatization of public assets.

With regard to China, there were internal conditions that bred modern revisionism as in all preceding revisionist countries. Even as the capitalist and landlord classes had been eliminated legally and economically, they could be resurrected by revisionists who germinated and developed from the petty-bourgeoisified section of the bureaucracy and intelligentsia and who declared prematurely that the class struggle was already dying out.

As in the case of the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin, the revisionists sprang into action to seize political power from the revolutionary proletariat in China soon after the death of Mao. They converted the class dictatorship of the proletariat into that of the monopoly bureaucrat bourgeoisie. In a social-fascist way, they systematically persecuted and removed genuine communists from the communist party and from leading positions in the state. They prated about social order and stability and crowed about socialist labor discipline only to deliver the working people to exploitation by foreign monopolies and the domestic big bourgeoisie.

The undisguised restoration of capitalism in China came about even faster than in the Soviet Union after the Chinese revisionists seized political power. The old bourgeoisie immediately got back its assets, received for a second time redemption payments for war bonds and was allowed to borrow capital from state banks in order to engage in private business. The new bourgeoisie dismantled the commune system, raided the state banks by taking loans without collateral, took over existing medium and small enterprises under the legal fiction of management lease, put up private enterprises by acquiring cheap equipment and raw materials from the state sector and opened the economy to direct and indirect investments by foreign monopoly capitalists.

In any country where socialism is betrayed, the new dominant bourgeoisie tends to assume the character of the comprador big bourgeoisie because it subordinates the economy to the foreign imperialist banks and firms, undermines and destroys the industrial foundation previously created under socialism and stashes away funds abroad in the most unbridled fashion. Always fearful of the working people whom it has robbed, it is quick to use the coercive apparatuses of the state as well as private armed gangs against them.

Since the end of World War II, communists have won great victories against imperialism, revisionism and fascism and all reaction. But so far, the deadliest enemy has been modern revisionism, which has felled ruling communist parties and socialist societies from the inside. Revisionist renegades initially base themselves on a petty-bourgeoisified bureaucracy and intelligentsia and gradually creep up to the highest levels of authority in the party, state, army, economic enterprises and cultural institutions until they can seize political power and use the levers of power to restore capitalism.

Communists have a weapon to fight and defeat modern revisionism in socialist society. This is the theory and practice of continuing revolution under proletarian dictatorship to consolidate socialism, combat revisionism and prevent the restoration of capitalism. It is necessary but it is not enough to install the proletarian class dictatorship by politico-military means, transform private ownership of the means of production to public ownership in socialist construction, train a great number of professionals and technicians, take administrative and judicial measures against domestic class adversaries and build the defense against the imperialists.

For a whole historical epoch, it is necessary to uphold the hegemony of the working class and conduct class struggle at the base and the superstructure of socialist society, to keep the primacy of the socialist relations of production over the forces of production, to deepen the proletarian class stand of the bureaucracy and intelligentsia and to carry out the proletarian cultural revolution continuously in stages in order to complete the proletarian conquest of the superstructure through education and the mass movement under the leadership of the revolutionary party of the proletariat until imperialism is defeated on a global scale and communism becomes possible.

In China, where the antirevisionist theory and practice of continuing revolution under proletarian dictatorship through cultural revolution was first tried out, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution prevailed for a decade (1966 to 1976) but still could not prevent the rise to power of the revisionists headed by Deng Xiaoping and their restoration of capitalism.

The Marxist-Leninist attitude towards such a reversal should not be any different from that taken towards the success and defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. It requires all the communists to study the objective conditions and subjective factors in building socialism as a new revolutionary phenomenon that succeeds for a while but is defeated, to appreciate the victory of the revolutionary proletariat and to learn all the positive and negative lessons in order to reach a higher level of revolutionary consciousness and class struggle in defending, consolidating and further developing socialism.

We must face squarely the fact that modern revisionism has destroyed socialism from within rather than imperialism from without. It is our bounden duty to pose the problem and work for the solution on the basis of all previous experience and achievements. The more urgent practical problem now on a global scale is to fight and defeat the big bourgeoisie and all reactionaries and achieve national liberation, democracy and socialism. But we must be able to answer immediately the honest question of comrades and the people as well as malicious ridicule by the enemy about the resoluteness and competence of genuine communists to sustain and develop socialism after it is won.

In the meantime, imperialism and all reaction are themselves generating the objective conditions for the resurgence of the anti-imperialist and socialist movements. We have an abundance of tested and proven Marxist-Leninist theory and practice in waging socialist revolution and construction up to a certain point. We must have the foresight to go beyond that point by preventing the rise of revisionism and the restoration of capitalism in any future socialist society and to keep the Red flag of socialism flying for an entire historical epoch until we reach the threshold of communism.

The Currents and Prospects of Fascism

Under conditions of the full restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union, China and other countries, the imperialists and reactionaries have the temerity to claim that history cannot go beyond monopoly capitalism and they intensify the oppression and exploitation of the working people in an unprecedented way.

For the second time since 1870, the monopoly bourgeoisie is taking gargantuan and absurd efforts to depict itself as the paragon of "free market" globalization and to use the monopoly bourgeois state as well as the neocolonial puppet states in order to carry out a systematic campaign to attack the working class and oppressed peoples and thereby maximize the profits of the monopoly bourgeoisie. The giant monopolies have accelerated the concentration of productive and finance capital and centralized control of markets.

Taking after the neoliberal fashion set by US imperialism, all the imperialist allies and neocolonial puppet regimes deck themselves out in the language of bourgeois democracy and the "free market". The bourgeois parties of all sorts do likewise throughout the world. In Europe, the social-democratic, Green and other parties that disguise their big bourgeois ideas with petty-bourgeois words can hardly be distinguished now from other big bourgeois parties in pushing neoliberal reforms.

Even while "free market" globalization tries to conjure the illusion that it is for the privatization of public assets rather than for direct investments of the state in productive enterprises, state monopoly capitalism continues to grow as the generator of finance capital and provider of purchase contracts and subsidies to the monopoly bourgeoisie. Based on its past record, the monopoly bourgeoisie can shift from the anachronistic language of neoliberalism to the blatant terms of state intervention and protectionism at a certain point in the worsening of the capitalist crisis.

Against the ever rising social productivity due to higher technology and higher level skills of the proletariat, the monopoly bourgeoisie is engaged in unbridled profitmaking, by pressing down wage levels, causing mass unemployment, wiping out competition, further ruining client countries and therefore shrinking the world capitalist market. The crisis of overproduction in the world capitalist system is worsening and deepening. One round of the destruction of productive forces leads to another, aggravating the chronic mass unemployment and chronic financial crisis and contracting the global market.

We are now at a new stage in the general crisis of monopoly capitalism, which extends from the latter part of the 70’s. This new stage encompasses the squeeze on the third world countries and on the monopoly bureaucrat states (even while the latter masqueraded as socialist), the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War and the current overproduction of all types of goods, lately extending to high-tech.

The contradictions between imperialism and the oppressed peoples, among the imperialist powers and between the monopoly bourgeoisie and the proletariat in imperialist countries are sharpening. The US still manages to hold together the imperialist alliance against the workers and oppressed peoples. But it is increasingly resented by its imperialist allies for acting unilaterally according to its national interest. There are also growing contradictions between the imperialist and neocolonial states. The new world disorder is becoming more turbulent and is generating the conditions for fascism and war as well as the resurgence of the anti-imperialist and socialist movements.

Among the imperialist countries, the US has the strongest economy by having the lead in high technology, attracting Europe and Japan to invest in US securities, pushing a trade offensive and practising protectionism, skimming the cream mainly from the client states under its neocolonial domination and taking advantage of its imperialist allies. However the US has grave difficulties in trying to overcome such costs of winning the Cold War as the heavy debt burden arising from high military spending and from trade accommodations for erstwhile frontline allies in the Cold War.

The US is still the No. 1 debtor of the world and incurs huge trade deficits despite its trade offensive. The biggest financial bubble in the world is now in the US. It consists of the overvaluation of assets, especially in the areas of financial services and high technology. The current figure for high US growth rate is bloated by such overvaluation. The current high employment rate is actually padded with part-time jobs which have replaced regular jobs in a big way.

In a manner of speaking, Germany has accomplished Hitler’s ambition of German economic supremacy in Europe. But as a result of intensified competition with US monopoly capitalism, Germany and the rest of Western Europe have become stagnant and afflicted by a chronic crisis of overproduction and chronic mass unemployment. Russia and Eastern Europe are available for capital expansion but this is limited both by the Western imperialist policy of dumping on them surplus products and by the continuous degradation of the economies there under the auspices of the comprador big bourgeoisie, which has an extremely corrupt and criminal character, especially in Russia.

Since the bursting of its financial bubble in 1990, Japan has been practically in a state of economic depression. The monopoly bourgeoisie has built industrial plants abroad and these have served to push down domestic production and employment at home. As the biggest creditor for financing the high consumption of the exploiting classes of East Asia and the overproduction of certain goods, Japan was hit hard by the bursting of the East Asian bubble in 1997. The US continues to push hard a trade and financial offensive in Japan and the whole of Asia.

In the lesser industrial capitalist countries, where the workers suffer more mass unemployment and more cutbacks on hard-won social gains than elsewhere, the working class movement and the broad based people’s movement have become more militant against the monopoly bourgeoisie and its bourgeois political parties. In time to come, these are bound to spread and mount in defense of the rights of the workers and peoples in all the industrial capitalist countries.

In the absence of a strong revolutionary party of the proletariat, the monopoly bourgeoisie appears to be uninterested in sponsoring fascism in the most advanced industrial capitalist countries. And so the bourgeois parties fallaciously claim that communists beget fascists. In the first place, it is the crisis of the ruling system that engenders the resistance of the workers and the people and the advance of the socialist movement led by communists. When the monopoly bourgeoisie adopts fascism to unleash terror, the communists, the workers and the rest of the people have all the right to wage armed revolution.

Due to the economic crisis, the three global centers of capitalism (US, European Union and Japan) are bound to increasingly find themselves at odds with each other over political, economic, financial and military issues. The currents of nationalism, racism and fascism are rising in direct proportion to the deterioration of social and economic conditions resulting from the neoliberal reforms being undertaken by the dominant bourgeois parties. Fascist parties, groups and movements are already influencing bourgeois propaganda and are preparing to seize the initiative from the bourgeois-democratic parties.

Wishing to share the costs of aggression and still afraid of incurring US casualties in ground wars, the US has encouraged both Germany and Japan to rearm and engage in war production beyond previous limits and to participate in wars of aggression. Now, a dispute is brewing over the question of whether Europe should have a military force independent of the US. In Japan, resentment is growing over the terms of the US-Japan "new security guidelines" that allows the US to use Japan and its resources for US military purposes. At any rate, war machines are being cranked up and the fascists relish the dream of taking over them someday.

War has already broken out in Europe, with the US and NATO carrying out wars of aggression in the Balkans and with Russia engaged in a war in Chechnya. As the scourge of war spreads in Europe, Germany can deploy troops and fire its guns at first in alliance with the US and increasingly according to its own imperialist interests. The US is also entangling Japan in war preparations and war tensions over the issue of Taiwan and in war preparations against China, North Korea and the national liberation movements in East Asia. Japan is rearming beyond the terms of "self-defense", at first in alliance with the US but also in accordance with its own imperialist interests in the long term.

Russia, the much-weakened imperialist power, is today a hotbed of nationalism and fascism. It is in a position similar to that of Germany after its defeat in World War I. It is in dire economic straits and is under growing impositions from the dominant imperialist powers, the victors of the Cold War, that are strategically determined to keep it even weaker economically and socially in order to render impotent its nuclear arsenal and other modern weapons systems.

A military fascist dictatorship can arise to take advantage of the grievances of the Russian people by promising to revive industry and agriculture, carrying out terror in the name of law and order, engaging in military buildup and taking aggressive actions under the pretext of defending Russian territory and defending the Russian populations in nearby countries. The slide from the prolonged social fascism of the past revisionist regimes and the current rule of the criminal comprador big bourgeoisie towards a military fascist dictatorship is a very short distance.

The expansion of the NATO to the borders of Russia, the war of aggression against Yugoslavia and the US-NATO neocolonization of the Balkans are provocative and can stimulate the rise of a military-fascist dictatorship in Russia. This is also being abetted domestically by the successor party of the old revisionist party which obsequiously plays the role of loyal opposition and like the social democrats under the Weimar Republic blocks the development of genuine Marxist-Leninist leadership among the workers and the rest of the people. There is the urgent need for the genuine successors of Lenin and Stalin to prepare for the proletarian revolution.

China is one more large ex-socialist country on which US imperialism is applying the duplicitous tactics of engagement and containment. The policy of engagement is aimed at stimulating further the growth of foreign investments and comprador capitalism and the disintegration of the state sector of the economy, and ensuring that the communist and socialist signboard is cast off in due course. The policy of containment is aimed at subtly or overtly threatening China militarily and inducing it to become a complete neocolony of the US. The US deliberately bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade to demonstrate the precision of its high-tech military weapons.

The comprador big bourgeoisie is already dominant in China, as private capitalists and bureaucrat capitalists. The national bourgeoisie, that seeks to defend China’s independence and develop its industrial foundation, is playing second fiddle and is the motive force for an anti-imperialist kind of bourgeois nationalism. Economic and social conditions are today rapidly deteriorating. Outbreaks of spontaneous workers’ and peasants’ uprisings are increasing. As polarization proceeds, the contradictory prospects of military fascist dictatorship and proletarian revolution are discernible.

The countries most ruined by the ongoing crisis of overproduction in the world capitalist system are those of Asia, Africa and Latin America and several retrogressive countries of the former Soviet bloc. They have the overwhelming majority of the people of the world. They are squeezed by the global oversupply of mostly raw materials and some low-grade manufactures that they produce for export. They are crushed by perennial trade deficits and foreign debt. Unable to service the ever mounting foreign debt burden, they are under severe forms of austerity and other conditionalities imposed by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and WTO.

In all the underdeveloped countries, US imperialism and its imperialist allies somehow intervene in order to determine the course of events. They "normally" pick the local ruling clique to serve as puppet and to control the local situation even through fascism. They rationalize their military intervention and aggression against the people and the forces of anti-imperialism by claiming to fight communists and "terrorists".

The neocolonial puppet states are prone to use open terror in enforcing imperialist policies and in suppressing the resistance of the people. There is a growing trend to put up fascist regimes in lieu of governments with a bourgeois-democratic façade. Wars and war tensions of regional proportions arise because US imperialism manipulate neocolonial states against each other in divide-and-rule fashion and because certain neocolonial states try to deflect attention from their misrule and domestic crisis by being hostile to neighboring countries.

Violence and demagogic use of rabid anticommunism, nationalism, ethnocentrism and religion increasingly characterize the conduct of ruling cliques in oppressing the people as well as in competing with their political rivals. Wanton massacres are perpetrated and millions of people are displaced, especially in Africa. In Rwanda alone, a million people were massacred in the past decade. Hundreds of thousands were also massacred in Bosnia due to ethnic conflicts stirred up by the imperialists and their puppets.

US imperialism is quick to engage in direct military intervention in armed conflicts in countries that produce oil or have a strategic bearing on US oil interest. Hypocritically, it invokes humanitarianism and peacekeeping in order to deploy and use its military forces for aggression. Thus, it has launched wars of aggression against Iraq and Yugoslavia in order to tighten its control over oil resources and gain strategic positions of strength.

The successes of US imperialism in its wars of aggression against Iraq and Yugoslavia and in imposing Pax Americana in the Middle East, the Balkans and in Central and Eastern Europe are temporary. They merely sow the seeds of wars in the near future, among the imperialist powers themselves and between the imperialists and the oppressed peoples.

US imperialism boasts of its economic and financial power and its high-tech military prowess as instruments for subjugating other countries and keeping them as neocolonies. At the same time, it is worried to death by the assertions of national independence, social instability and possession of nuclear weapons by client states and tries to intervene quickly in conflicts, such as those between India and Pakistan over the issue of Kashmir, in order to promote US hegemony.

In Asia, Africa and Latin America, there are legal mass movements and armed revolutionary movements for national liberation and democracy. Marxist-Leninist parties lead a significant number of these movements. The most sustained armed revolutionary movements are those pursuing the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside and accumulating strength over a protracted period of time until the ultimate nationwide seizure of political power.

The US imperialists’ neoliberal policy aims to abandon or lessen their claim of extending Keynesian "development aid" and to extract more superprofits from the neocolonies by operation of the "free market". This policy is leading to the formation of fascist regimes, with or without any bourgeois-democratic façade. It is extremely harsh to the people and drives them to resist. It also discredits and weakens the neocolonial puppet regimes and makes them vulnerable targets for a protracted people’s war, against which expensive long-distance US high-tech weapons are ineffective.

US imperialism derides states that take an anti-imperialist position as "rogue states" in order to disguise its own aggressive role and to prepare or launch a war of aggression. With boundless arrogance and cowardice, it has used and has threatened to continue using high-tech weapons against such states and against the civilian population, the civil infrastructure, schools and hospitals, power and water facilities, mass media facilities and so on. However, the neocolonial puppet regimes of the US are vulnerable targets for protracted people’s war.

For decades, it has continuously used economic blockade and military threats against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Cuba. These countries have wisely, courageously and successfully defended their national independence and the socialist aspirations of their people. They inspire the people of the world to struggle against imperialism and all reaction and for the realization of their own national, democratic and socialist aspirations.

The new world disorder generates fascism and war and inflicts intolerable suffering on the people. At the same time, it drives the people to wage revolutionary struggle. The way for communists to avert or overcome fascism and war is to strengthen their ranks ideologically, politically and organizationally and engage in the united front in the legal mass movement and, wherever practicable, in armed revolution in order to bring about national liberation, democracy and socialism.

In all countries dominated by imperialism, there must be a revolutionary party of the proletariat to lead the proletarian and nonproletarian masses in the revolutionary movement. In the industrial capitalist countries, such a party must be able to arouse, organize and mobilize the workers and the rest of the people. In countries whose peasants still compose the majority or a significant part of the population, such a party must base itself on the worker-peasant alliance as the main force of the revolutionary movement.

Revolutionary parties of the proletariat in semicolonial and semifeudal countries have a special role in carrying out protracted people’s war. This is the immediate and decisive way of carrying out armed revolution against the imperialists and the local exploiting classes. This is also the way to enhance the conditions for the revolutionary movement of the proletariat and people in the industrial capitalist countries in order to avert fascism and war and to topple the monopoly bourgeois state in case fascism and war cannot be averted.

The workers and oppressed peoples of the world must unite in fighting imperialism and aiming for the realization of socialism. The revolutionary struggles in the underdeveloped countries must support each other in order to raise the anti-imperialist and socialist movements from one level to a new and higher level. At all times, the proletarian revolutionaries must maintain independence and initiative and exercise vigilance against revisionists who specialize in sabotaging a revolutionary movement or revolutionary government from within, even as it is necessary to conduct a broad united front against the common enemy.

Any further development of state monopoly capitalism in the imperialist countries, either as generator of finance capital or as direct investor in productive enterprises, with or without the "free market" masquerade, amplifies the general material conditions for socialism but these do not automatically result in socialism or become the argument for the peaceful evolution of socialism. State monopoly capitalism in the imperialist countries is precisely an instrument for preventing the socialist revolution, intensifying interimperialist contradictions, further exploiting the oppressed peoples of the world, destroying the forces of production in one round after another in the crisis of overproduction and bringing about fascism and war.

The further development of productive forces under monopoly capitalism cannot by itself lead to socialism either on a national or international scale. Socialism can be achieved only when the subjective forces of the revolution gain the strength sufficient to smash and destroy the bourgeois state. The armed seizure of political power by the proletariat and the establishment of the class dictatorship of the proletariat in one country after another are prerequisites of the socialist revolution, whether this passes through the new-democratic revolution or not.

The social turmoil that is now spreading and intensifying throughout the world is the prelude to the resurgence of the anti-imperialist and socialist movement in the 21st century. Great victories are ahead for the proletariat and oppressed peoples of the world!