councilor.org
| Source | Jurriaan Bendien |
| Date | 04/02/12/14:10 |
| Ernest Mandel remembers: fascism and the students (excerpt from a lecture
given in Bonn, 29 January 1969) The first advances which the fascists made, were mainly among student movements and in student milieus. Hitler gained majority support at German universities, many years before he actually had a significant proportion of the German electorate behind him. The same applies to an even greater extent to Italy and Spain. When the Popular Front battled at the polls in 1936, the Latin quarter of Paris was, ironically, dominated - immediately before and after the general strike of June 1936 - by the semi-fascist "Action Francaise", i.e. by an organisation on the far-right of the French political spectrum. ATOMISATION An important characteristic of fascist dictatorships, both in Italy, in Hitler's Germany and in Spain, was the total atomisation of the working class, and the smashing of workers organisations, which serves to disable well-organised resistance of the working class right from the very start. So long as broadly organised resistance persists, there can be no question of a truly fascist dictatorship. The role and historic peculiarity of fascism was precisely to smash this resistance, and realise the total atomisation of the working class. Dictatorships have emerged in the most diverse forms - the history of capitalism is, in a certain sense, the history of all kinds of dictatorships - but a "dictatorship" in and of itself is not yet "fascism". Military dictatorships can be found, as in Greece, which by their very nature are not in any position to atomise the worker's movement. In most imperialist countries, the working classes comprise tens of millions of people, and you cannot stop them from mobilising with 10,000 policemen or soldiers. Definitive of fascism is that, beyond the military and police apparatus, the fascists have available mass organisations which can terrorise and repress, which can keep the entire working class in a modern, industrialised country "behind bars" so to speak. This fascist terror network has practical-technical presuppositions. The state must have at least one spy in every neighbourhood, in every office, factory and school, in each of its departments, and often, even inside people's residences, which makes it possible to crush even the most elementary forms of mass organisation and mass resistance. RESISTANCE At the same time, there are psychological and socio-political reasons to do with workingclass consciousness, that prevent an active, resolute proletariat, aware of its historical and immediate political tasks, from being atomised and leg-ironed in this way. A devastating political and psychological defeat, the wholesale destruction of the political self-confidence of the proletariat and their acquiescence, demoralisation or resignation, must therefore precede any struggle and stabilisation of fascist political power. However, once this terrible situation has occurred, the organised resistance by the working class becomes impossible for quite some time. This is proved by the historical experience of classical fascist dictorships. Spanish fascism eventually broke up through its internal development, and became a decadent military dictatorship, which failed to prevent mass resistance by the working class, and in fact does not prevent it. In the three classical fascist dictatorships I mentioned (Germany, Italy, and Spain until about 1953), there were to be sure thousands upon thousands of resistance actions by communists, social democrats and revolutionary socialists from all sorts of different currents. The point however was, that they could agitate only as individual groups, as small islands in the broad movement, but not as an organised workingclass movement. So the resistance against fascist rule therefore by definition has this atomised, relatively individualistic character. Yet, and this is the key point, from the moment there is no longer any question of organised mass resistance, but only of resistance by individuals, i.e. from the moment that individual consciousness and even just pure moral outrage becomes a prominent, immediate source of motivation for action, the intelligentsia is without doubt much better equipped than other social strata to engage in it. It was easier for the intellectuals to get worked up about genocides and fight them, than for isolated workers lacking access to all the facts. Through the effective atomisation of the workingclass wrought by a fascist dictatorship, the subjective preconditions for individual revolt were reached with much greater difficulty among workers, than among intellectuals. That's why the intellectuals assumed such an important place, when mass resistance against the consolidated power of fascism took off again. ITALY AND YUGOSLAVIA In Italy, the first political organisation produced by the new resistance movement was the Giustizia e Liberta group. This group didn't actually form part of the old Communist Party or the social democrats; it consisted exclusively of students and intellectuals. Later, it founded the so-called "Action Party", which played an important role in the armed resistance between 1943 and 1945. The role of small-size resistance groups of German intellectuals and students after the outbreak of world war 2 is quite well-known; the same applies to Spain, during the interval between 1946 and 1953. In connection with my thesis, however, I ought to mention one other example, which at first sight contradicts what I said, but in reality confirms it. The only European country which, after world war 2, experienced an organic socialist revolution, a revolution realised with active support from the masses of the population, in the wake of popular resistance against fascism, was Yugoslavia. Only in the Yugoslav territories could the Communist Party organise the whole student movement and bring it under its control before the outbreak of war. The great majority of those who founded the Yugoslav partisan movement in world war 2 likewise came from the intelligentsia. The workers only joined in later, on a much bigger scale, with a more disciplined organisation than the students had. Most of the students, I regret to say, were actually killed, because they usually lacked the organisatorial qualities, professionalism and the self-discipline of the workers, indispensable for this kind of anti-fascist campaign. Nevertheless, they were the first to throw themselves into battle, and so, you have to give credit where credit is due. It was a similar story in Cuba, after the Batista dictatorship was established. - from: Ernest Mandel, "The role of the intellectuals in class struggles" (1969), an unpublished English translation from the slightly revised German/French/Dutch versions, by Jurriaan Bendien, May 1987. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho