See August Thalheimer, a dissident German Communist. Became a Brandlerite, if I remember correctly. Yup, http://www.iisg.nl/archives/gias/k/10890099.html KPD-O (Deutscher had a good interview w/ Brandler in NLR decades ago.)
Home Page of Johannes Schneider (miss him, invite him back, Doug) ... Marx; CLR James: August Thalheimer: Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin, What are Transitional Slogans?, 1923: A Missed Opportunity? Victor Serge ... http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3667/homepage.htm
The Voice of the Turtle ... being produced by Marxists working outside Stalin's suffocating embrace, a distinguished cohort which included John Strachey, August Thalheimer, Ignazio Silone ... http://www.voiceoftheturtle.org/show_article.php?aid=136 - 23k
In Telos, http://www.angelfire.com/biz/telospress/contents40.html" (Chris, Viktor Zaslavsky: The Rebirth of the Stalin Cult in the USSR.) Frank Adler: Thalheimer, Bonapartism and Fascism August Thalheimer: On Fascism The Thalheimer is also collected also in, Dave Beetham, "Marxists In The Face Of Fascism, " and critiques in, a book that great comrade Dorothy Healey of the CPUSA, NAM and DSA, helped the author on, "Under the Shadow of War: Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and Marxists, " by Larry Ceplair. Used copies for $10 at http://bolerium.com, the left antiquarian bookstore in S.F.
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/445/new_right.html
"Origins of fascism and the new right."
> ...Fascism as insult
The term ‘fascism’ has been subject to all manner of different definitions since it was first coined (Benito Mussolini adopted the fasces, a bundle of sticks with an axe at their centre, the symbol of state power in ancient Rome, as the emblem of his movement). Mussolini’s ‘Italian Fascisti of Combat’ was formed in March 1919 when 54 people - mostly demobilised soldiers, pro-war former syndicalists and extreme social chauvinists - signed up to his programme. Fascism, in the words of Il Duce, stood against liberalism, the “exhausted democracies” and the “violently utopian spirit of Bolshevism” (B Mussolini My autobiography London nd, p65).
Nowadays on the left, however, the word has degenerated into little more than a throwaway insult. Members of the Genoese paramilitary police force are dubbed fascists by black bloc anarchists; the guerrillaist left in Turkey describe all the country’s governments as fascist since the foundation of the modern state by Kemal Atatürk in 1923; fascism is frequently equated with any manifestation of racism or anti-semitism; restrictions of civil liberties imposed by David Blunkett are denounced as creeping fascism, etc.
Such abusive labelling rallies support, fills those who use it with righteous moral indignation and often provokes a pleasingly spluttering response from the target. Yet it does nothing to reveal the true nature of fascism as it emerged historically and functions as a social force in capitalist society. This is no matter of pedantry or semantics.
If you shear fascism of history, if fascism is reduced to little more than something unpleasant and threatening, an object of opprobrium, then one cannot methodologically distinguish between the role played by fascism in mercilessly destroying the organised working class in Europe during the 1920s, 30s and 40s on the one hand and the Peterloo massacre of 1819 or the anti-trade union legislation introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s on the other.
Giving back fascism a clear, definite, meaning by rooting it in history has nothing to do with any softness towards carabinieri violence in Genoa, fondness for the Turkish state, toleration of racism and anti-semitism, or endorsement of Blunkett’s draconian terrorism act. On the contrary, by labelling fascist what is not fascist, terrible mistakes in political practice are inevitable and building an effective movement against the real fascist menace is severely impaired.
For example, in the late 1920s and early 30s ‘official communism’ dogmatically classified everything and everyone from the Labour left to Ramsay MacDonald’s national government, and from German social democracy to Franklin D Roosevelt, under the rubric of fascism or tendencies towards fascism. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration was written about by Britain’s foremost communist political thinker as a “transition to fascist forms, especially in the economic and industrial field” (R Palme Dutt Fascism and the social revolution London 1934, p251).
Fascism was said to grow organically out of bourgeois democracy. According to Manuilsky, in his report to the executive committee of the Communist International, only a liberal “can accept that there is a contradiction between bourgeois democracy and fascism” (quoted in M Kitchen Fascism London 1983, p5). Stalin summed this approach up by coupling together social democracy and fascism as “twin brothers”.
This ‘third period’ theory led the Communist Party of Germany to shun any united front with the “social fascist” Social Democracy. Meanwhile Adolf Hitler - supposedly not especially dangerous - swept to power. After 1933 the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party were both banned, trade unionism abolished and parliamentary democracy ended. Concentration camps awaited communists and social democrats alike.
Over 1934-35 Stalin’s Communist International ‘corrected’ its analysis of fascism. First at the 13th plenum, and then at the 7th congress, Georgi Dimitrov delivered a new formulation which was duly adopted by all ‘official communist’ parties. Dimitrov redefined fascism as the “open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital” (G Dimitrov The working class against fascism London 1935, p10).
His cure was, though, not much better than the original disease. Fascism was still viewed as a stage of capitalism. But overcoming fascism was completely divorced from the revolutionary class struggle against capital. Besides blessing cooperation with social democrats, the door was held ajar for the forthcoming drive for popular fronts in every country - Britain, India, US, France, Spain, etc. They would countenance communist support for the less terroristic, less chauvinistic and less imperialistic representatives of finance capital. Eg, Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle.
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> From afar Trotsky damned the ‘fourth period’ as a headlong dive into naked
class collaboration. He ranked Comintern’s new line on a par with social
democracy’s collapse before inter-imperialist war in August 1914 - the
Marseillaise had drowned out the Internationale. The Communist
International had entered the “social patriotic camp”, he concluded (L
Trotsky Writings 1935-36 New York 1977, p129).
We can safely say, then, that putting the term ‘fascism’ on a firm scientific basis hardly blunts, but greatly sharpens serious, meaningful political practice. Certainly without a correct theory the fascist germ that lies festering in the belly of present-day socio-economic conditions can neither be successfully fought nor killed... <SNIP> -- Michael Pugliese