Every recent election cycle in the US has been accompanied by leftwing cries to “get out the vote” for the Democratic party, originating most prominently from the CPUSA in communist circles [1]. We are told that, despite every obvious instance of the Democratic Party crushing US labor and waging imperialist war, that guaranteeing a Democrat victory is essential to stopping the rise of fascism embodied in Trump and the MAGA movement.
We are expected to believe both that the Democrats are a lesser, liberal evil categorically different from the Republican’s fascist infection, and that allying with the Democrats can stem the tide of fascist political takeover in the US. What is the content of the first distinction, and what are its implications for the strategy implied by the second assertion?
The MAGA movement is a thoroughly fascist creation. However we question the clean line that the Democrats and their sympathizers try to draw between themselves and their more outwardly vicious counterparts, we can never lose sight of the MAGA movement’s fascist core.
For every appeal by Trump to the despair of coal country and the anxiety of a US middle class robbed of security by the availability of cheap labor, there is a racist attack on Latine workers, immigrants, and China. There is no contradiction here; Trump’s anti-establishment rhetoric focuses on the loss in prestige of a US middle class whose privileges have always been supported by imperialism despite an appearance of proletarian relations to the means of production [2].
Trump’s actions in his presidency continued Obama’s support for finance capital through quantitative easing [3]. He simultaneously wielded tariffs in a failed trade war with China to appeal to those who seek the revival of industrial capitalism. The Republican Party’s threatened invasion of Mexico during Trump’s path towards the 2024 elections [4] show the usual crux of fascism in the West: the softening of capitalism’s contradictions at home through the subjugation of countries abroad. They understand that the quest for Lebensraum lies at the heart of the US’s trajectory as a national project.
What about the Democrats? We should remember, despite the gulf in time, that they were founded by Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson—the latter being Trump’s self-admitted political inspiration—whose main claim to fame in US history comes from extending political participation towards whites without property, which went hand and hand with cementing the racialization of US “democracy” [5].
This connection is not as strained as Democrat sympathizers would imply. When they complain about Trump’s assault on democracy, there is always a palpable undercurrent that this insecurity is unthinkable in the US, that the abortive coup of January 6th is something at home in the Global South, but which should be anathema to the respectable democratic tradition of blood-soaked “America”. Democracy for them is still defined by a purposeful divide between “the West and the rest”, and the scandal of January 6th comes from its supposed disgrace of the US when compared to the other countries of the West [6].
Of course, democracy among the supposedly exceptional is not an exclusive preoccupation of fascism; it’s a political tradition baked into liberal DNA, derived from the slave-owner democracy of Athens. What distinguishes fascism from liberalism is its internal emulation of imperialist expansion meant to blunt class conflict with cheap land and labor [7]. The initial form of the colonial relation used the unprecedented productive ability of the proletariat to subordinate colonized economies with floods of cheap goods [8]. This part of the colonial relation sharpened class conflict, while settler-colonialism provided an outlet for those strata displaced by capitalism to become its well-fed foot soldiers. Liberalism grew capitalist power via the former, while fascism violently protects its power through the latter.
Therefore, fascism has a fluctuating presence dependent on capitalism’s needs at the time, particularly in the history of the settler-colonial US. Andrew Jackson’s genocides and “Herrenvolk” (Master-race) democracy show an early victory for US fascism whose kernel existed before the 1776 Revolt [5]. Meanwhile, the radical Republicans during the Civil War and Reconstruction show a liberal desire to develop capitalist class relations within the US, promoting its industrialization [9] (p. 212). The current Democrats need to be positioned within this political relation where fascism and liberalism are more thoroughly intertwined than in any other state.
What is the Democratic Party’s political content? On foreign policy, the Democrats only differ on their increased willingness to fight both Russia and China simultaneously, while Republicans are more willing to negotiate with Moscow [10] while spurning the Democrats’ few diplomatic negotiations with Tehran. On China, the two are more or less united in their sustained hostility, just as they are united in attempts to sabotage socialist projects in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. Notably, they are united in destabilizing the Latin American countries whose crises provide the migrant workers that suffer Trump’s racism.
As the 2020 election heated up, we heard no shortage of Democratic tirades against Trump’s policy at the border, a policy which Biden brazenly expands in all avenues of barbarism [11]. Both sides apparently agree on the need for a population of terrorized workers who will work starvation wages at risk of deportation. Little else could be expected from a Democratic Party which makes the same appeals to preserving the US middle class as Republicans [12], because both parties implicitly understand that the prosperity of the US middle class is based on imperialist plunder.
If there is any difference between the Democrats and Republicans on strategy, it is a simple consideration of which opponent to tackle first. If there is any difference in terms of fascism versus liberalism, it is simply the fact that the MAGA portion of the Republican Party is spearheading the fascist descent while Democrats and traditional Republicans lag a step behind.
Representative Gaetz and Trump’s other close followers in the Republican party demonstrated their faction’s difference from the Democrats decisively when they withheld their votes for House Speaker McCarthy this past January. They forced the Speaker to go through 15 rounds of voting, and the fact that McCarthy won in that initial battle obscured the fact that a few Republicans were able to form a bloc that held their peers hostage, allowed Trump to mediate as a power broker on McCarthy’s behalf, and created rules which would allow them to finally vacate the Speaker’s seat this October [13].
Imagine if that kind of political maneuvering was practiced by any member of “the Squad”. Their criticism of Pelosi never resulted in a similar challenge, just as Bernie Sanders’ success in the 2020 Democratic primary was never wielded to the same effect as Trump’s in the 2016 Republican primary. Trump knows that he has a large power base which he can leverage against the Republican party, a power base that they desperately need, so he deliberately threatened to run third party if they sabotaged him [14]. Bernie had the same vital support but has repeatedly made it clear that he would never withhold his support for the chosen Democratic candidate against Trump [15]. As a result, the Democrats comfortably maneuvered to rally behind a political corpse, handing Biden the nomination and snubbing Sanders a second time.
This is the only criteria through which we can label Trump and MAGA as uniquely fascist. They are unique as the only dynamic force in mainstream US politics. Their successes and failures are measured against the weighty carcass of “respectable” neoliberal politics—i.e. the last cocktail of liberalism and fascism, which MAGA struggles against in order to replace with a new formula.
That the new cocktail of liberalism and fascism leans more towards the latter is without doubt, and has even been noticed by self-described liberals, just as they noticed the obvious with Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. We communists can accept the truth of their accusations, that fascism is consolidating control in the US, without accepting the drivel that the Democrats who aid and emulate fascism at every turn somehow hold the key to turning back this tide, or that fascism can be attributed to the individuals of Reagan, Bush, or Trump, and not to the systemic white supremacy at the core of the “American nation”. Neoliberal Reagan was succeeded by neoliberal Clinton, and the war on terror’s torch was calmly passed from Bush to Obama. In more ways that not, Biden has accepted the torch lit and passed by Trump.
So when the CPUSA declares the importance of stopping fascism, we shouldn’t shrug them off, but we must interrogate the solutions that they offer us, especially those that take the Democrats at their word. The position of this party is presented as a united front strategy aimed at halting US fascism [16]. They assert that we must vote for the Democrats because they are the only viable alternative to MAGA Republicans at the moment (despite the fact that the CPUSA has been employing this rhetoric since at least 2008 [17]), and they promise to support vaguely progressive candidates when doing so won’t threaten a Republican victory: “We want to help build the broadest coalitions possible to flip Republican districts, protect working-class champions, and support progressive primaries in safe Democratic districts” [18]. In practice, their interpretation of a united front strategy is to never take the course of action which could allow a MAGA candidate to take power in the immediate future.
This united front strategy is attributed to Antonio Gramsci, Palmiro Togliatti, and—most clearly by the CPUSA—Georgi Dimitrov [18]. However, the CPUSA have only understood this strategy in partial form, not in actual practice or historical purpose. The formal idea of a united front strategy is simple: uniting with ideologically diverse elements, from social democrats to liberals and anarchists, against fascism because doing so provides scientific socialism with a larger range of forces to combat fascism with. This part of the strategy is a matter of quantity, of ensuring that the strategy combating fascism has numerically sufficient forces to carry out this struggle.
Georgi Dimitrov defined his united front as based on unity of action: “Unity of action of the proletariat on a national and international scale is the mighty weapon which renders the working class capable not only of successful defense but also of successful counter-attack against fascism, against the class enemy” [19] (p. 20). The calculus of power led Dimitrov to the natural conclusion that a fragmented proletariat was vulnerable to fascist assault, while a united proletariat was capable of counterattack.
We see allusions to the same calculus made by CPUSA’s lip service to a united front: “The conservative Democrats should be primaried and challenged by progressives, democratic socialists, and Communists. But not differentiating progressive Democrats from fascist Republicans is dogmatic adherence to the long-discredited “social fascist” theory, which equated social democracy with fascism. The social fascist theory led the Communist Party of Germany to overemphasize the threat of the SPD (Socialist Party of Deutschland) while the Nazis grew in strength.” [20]
The CPUSA would have us believe that it is learning from Dimitrov to preserve the numerical superiority of the anti-fascist forces while discarding the outdated, impractical theory of social-fascism which led to communism’s failure in Germany.
What did Dimitrov—who himself promoted social democrats as the primary ally of the communist united front—say?
“Why is it necessary for the realization of the political unity of the proletariat that there be complete independence from the bourgeoisie and a rupture of the bloc of Social-Democrats with the bourgeoisie? Because the whole experience of the labor movement, particularly the experience of the fifteen years of coalition policy in Germany, has shown that the policy of class collaboration, the policy of dependence on the bourgeoisie, leads to the defeat of the working class and to the victory of fascism. And the only true road to victory is the road of irreconcilable class struggle against the bourgeoisie, the road of the Bolsheviks.” [19] (p. 69)
In short, Dimitrov recognized the Social Democrats’ culpability for fascist victory in Germany, and rather than concluding that the communists should have ignored the Social Democrats’ collaboration with the bourgeoisie, he concludes that a united front’s viability depends on a schism between the Social Democrats and that bourgeoisie!
Of course, Dimitrov was a scientific socialist, so he recognized that no tactic can be applied universally. Did he advocate for collaboration with the bourgeois parties in the US of his time period? “It is perfectly obvious that the interests of the American proletariat demand that all its forces dissociate themselves from the capitalist parties without delay” [19] (p.29). Hardly a policy that promotes voting Democrat. We can claim that Dimitrov was observing a different US landscape, but how do we process the following warning? “In no case must the initiative of organizing the party be allowed to pass to elements desirous of utilizing the discontent of the millions who have become disillusioned in both the bourgeois parties, Democratic and Republican, in order to create a ‘third party’ in the United States, as an anti-Communist party, a party directed against the revolutionary movement” [19] (p. 30). We can see the modern revelance of Dimitrov’s advice in the rise of MAGA, not a formally different party, but a political faction which unquestionably rose on the shared unpopularity of establishment Democrats and Republicans.
We cannot understand Dimitrov’s strategy and advice if we limit ourselves to viewing the united front as a matter of numbers. Rallying a coalition against fascism means as little or as much as the quality of the strategy that coalition is rallied around, and the CPUSA says as much in words if not action: “The lessons here are that leadership cannot be left to the Democratic Party” [21]. The rhetoric of the CPUSA has always been its sharpest sword: “Yes, it’s bourgeois politics. Yes, it means working on issues with forces with whom we don’t always agree. Yes, it means getting your hands dirty and a bad taste in your mouth. But as we said last week at the international conference, those who fear the bad taste of things are likely to fail” [1]. These words from the leader of the CPUSA portray any communist who refuses to mobilize for Democratic candidates as utopian, and the CPUSA’s voting strategy as a demonstration of selfless pragmatism.
However, to quote Togliatti speaking on an inverse behavior of ultraleft communists: “This feeling of theirs is something to be respected in that they show they know what a principle is. But their position is wrong because it is not in this way that one sticks to one’s principles” [22] (p. 83). It’s good that the CPUSA understands that politics mean putting aside moral satisfaction for the most effective path to power, but in practice, their anti-fascist strategy comes down to “getting out the vote” for the least outwardly offensive bourgeois candidate: i.e. they pursue the safest path from a moral perspective at the expense of actually routing fascism.
An anti-fascist strategy cannot be called such when it tails a bourgeois party that actively funds MAGA candidates in Republican primaries [23]. The Democrats know that their only appeal at this point comes from being the moderate “alternative” to MAGA fascism, so they know that they need MAGA candidates to garner electoral support. In doing so, they may win a few elections, but they give MAGA candidates the spotlight and continue to perpetuate the underlying capitalist causes of fascism. Following the “anti-fascist” strategy of these Democrats isn’t just tailism; it’s social-fascism, proof that the CPUSA and similar forces have not learned from the failure of socialism in pre-Nazi Germany but have instead doubled down on the strategy of Social Democracy in that period.
E.M.S. Namboodiripad and P. Govinda Pillai, themselves familiar with the struggle against Hindutva fascism in India, outlined Gramsci’s idea of the anti-fascist untied front: “Gramsci held that the factory workers’ councils should be the main link in the broad anti-fascist alliance which would have Socialists and other democrats in its fold … Gramsci believed that the masses—organized and fighting—should be the heart and soul of the anti-fascist alliance. The alliance of Socialists and other democratic forces would be their allies” [24] (p. 67). Gramsci’s picture here points toward the leadership of the working masses over the anti-fascist alliance, the growth of its hegemony over the broadly democratic forces.
The anti-fascist coalition becomes an effective fighting force when the working class can lead the other anti-fascist social forces thanks to its historical position and experience as a class. Dimitrov agrees with Gramsci on this as well: “For it cannot be seriously supposed that it is possible to establish a genuine anti-fascist Popular Front without securing the unity of action of the working class itself, the leading force of this anti-fascist Popular Front” [25] (Dimitrov’s emphasis). Dimitrov unambiguously calls for the leadership of the working class over the anti-fascist front for it to even be considered “genuine” anti-fascism.
The CPUSA would have us believe that this leadership is gained while mobilizing for the bourgeois Democrats: “the Communist Party’s got to play a leading role in this fight — not to support the Democratic Party but to build a movement and build relationships to win the battle for democracy fighting on the issues. If we do that, then when we run our own candidates — and I keep saying it, we must — we’ll already have in hand the contacts, the networks, and the coalitions needed to win” [1]. Conversely, Dimitrov saw that the proletariat’s unity—a precondition for its leadership—developed by its struggle against its bourgeoisie: “And unity of views is worked out best of all in joint struggle against the class enemy even today. To propose to unite at once instead of forming a united front means to place the cart before the horse and to imagine that the cart will then move ahead.” [19] (p. 69). What has the CPUSA done if not called for a united front before the US working class had the maturity to break from political dependence on bourgeois parties? It has placed the cart before the horse.
When Joe Sims claims that the CPUSA’s strategy will lay the groundwork for its own candidates in the future, we should ask why these candidates haven’t yet appeared seven years after Trump’s election and fifteen years after the CPUSA used the same rhetoric to mobilize for Barack Obama [17]. More importantly, even if we take the CPUSA at its word—that its independent candidates are just around the corner—we must ask if the parliamentary struggle is really limited to running communist candidates or supporting bourgeois candidates. In other words, we must ask if it is even necessary for a communist party to field its own candidates before it can start exercising independent power in parliamentary politics.
We must return to the mainstream maneuvers of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. In the 2016 Republican primary and the 2023 challenges against Speaker McCarthy, MAGA demonstrated an intuitive understanding of the ability for a minority faction to cast a large shadow concealing its true limitations. They know how to withhold their support to wring power from the hands of establishment Republicans, whereas the failure and dependence of Bernie Sanders and the Squad rests in their inability to challenge the hegemony of establishment Democrats via the same means.
The failure of the CPUSA’s united front comes from an unconditional tactical line which removes the CPUSA’s power as an independent faction. Their ability to mobilize could be a tool used to gain concessions from Democrats by threatening to withhold support, thereby controlling the strategy of MAGA’s opposition. The CPUSA cannot claim to be seeking the independent leadership of the working class over an anti-fascist coalition when it refuses to weaponize the weight of that class to increase its sway within said coalition. The Democratic Party understands that it needs the progressive-leaning section of its electorate to survive, but the leftwing forces who claim to truly represent that stratum act as if they need the Democratic Party more than it needs them.
Fascism is not voted out of power, but parliamentary politics are an important arena for training the working class and allowing it to assert political power. An arena and a pulpit, parliamentary politics served a purpose even under the explicit rule of fascism:
“Gramsci realized that there was not sufficient appetite for a general strike or other such actions; he, therefore, asked the Communist members to attend the parliament. The public was inspired by the impassioned speeches made by the Communists in parliament against Mussolini’s authoritarianism and against the violence unleashed by the Black Shirts in the streets and factories. Thus, Gramsci, who knew most about the futility of parliamentary institutions under fascism, utilized the parliament to break through the desert of passivity”. [24] (p. 34)
Therefore, when we criticize the CPUSA for their parliamentarism, it should not be for parliamentary action per se but for their ironically shallow understanding of the parliamentary arena’s potential.
The vanguard against fascism must have a full understanding of the tools at its disposal and their potential, creative uses. It also needs to keep the nature of fascism in constant view. Fascism is not a passing bourgeois fad, but a natural complement to the insecure status of capitalism at a specific historical moment. To expel fascism without expelling capitalism—even if temporarily—in such countries as Italy, Japan, or Germany, means moving forward to a different historical condition in which the vestiges of fascism remain within a new bourgeois-democratic shell. As is becoming increasingly apparent in all these countries, fascism’s movement is dialectic, and the unresolved contradictions leading to fascism become the new kernel of this modern movement towards conflagration.
For a permanent victory against fascism, a socialist political takeover is required, but for even a temporary victory, a new stage in the political regime of the country gripped by fascism is needed, as has been witnessed in the political reformation of Germany, Italy, and Japan after WW2. When any party claiming to be the vanguard of the working masses in the US strategizes on eliminating fascism, it can never be viewed as a matter of turning back or stopping the clock to protect the existing political order; it can only be a strategy which works towards a new political order, and any appeals to the existing political liberties must be made with that overall strategic orientation.
The CPUSA fails as an anti-fascist force because its orientation lacks this forward ambition. This is indicated from its explicit rejection of violent revolution [26] to its championing of a “bill of rights socialism” where “The struggle is to revolutionize the republic to preserve the republican system at a higher level of development” [27] (Crowder’s emphasis). On the tactical level, the CPUSA fails because it refuses to creatively apply the tactics of past Marxist-Leninists and mistakes form for content. They can appeal to the pragmatism of Dimitrov and Gramsci all they want; without understanding the preconditions for the united front’s success and its dialectical relation to fascism, the CPUSA is doomed to repeat the fate of the Social Democrats in Germany.
Bibliography
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