Working Class and the Ascendancy of Neo-Fascism
Prabhat Patnaik
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WALTER Benjamin, the German philosopher who was himself a victim of fascism, had linked the ascendancy of fascism to the failed proletarian revolutions that had preceded it. He had of course Germany in mind, where, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, there had been several attempts to effect a similar revolution. These attempts had failed, leaving the proletariat exhausted, and divided in its loyalty between the Communists and the Social Democrats, who in turn had been rendered irreconcilable by the spilling of the blood of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and many others under the latter’s rule. All this made it easier, when the economic crisis of the 1930s erupted, for the fascists to seize power on the basis of the support provided by monopoly capital, especially a new stratum of monopoly capital that had sprung up.
Benjamin’s theoretical proposition was important because it saw fascism as a response not to an advancing proletariat, but to a proletariat whose advance had been stalled; fascism was to prevent any revival of the proletarian advance that could occur in the context of the economic crisis which had caused large-scale unemployment and distress.
The current upsurge of neo-fascism that is visible in many countries of the world, from India to Hungary, Argentina, Brazil, Italy, France, Germany and the United States, has not been preceded of course by any failed proletarian revolutions; nonetheless the condition for the ascendancy of fascism that Benjamin had mentioned, namely a weakening of the working class, is fulfilled in the present context as well, though it is brought about by an altogether different factor, namely, the operation of the neo-liberal regime.
Neo-liberalism adversely affects the strength of the working class in at least three different ways. First, while the working class still remains organised along national lines, capital has become globalised; we have in effect therefore the working class of a nation facing capital that is international, because of which the former suffers a loss in its striking power. Militancy on its part, countered with the threat by capital that it would relocate production elsewhere, necessarily remains circumscribed. The fact that in the United States the real wages of an average male labourer in 2011 was marginally lower than in 1968, as economist Joseph Stiglitz has shown, is testimony to this attenuation in workers’ striking power.
Secondly, there is a rise in the relative size of the labour reserves which works in the same direction. The crisis of course causes such a rise by creating unemployment, but even prior to the crisis the relocation of capital from the metropolis to the global south has a similar effect. In the metropolis such relocation reduces the number of jobs that would have become available otherwise, while in the global south the neo-liberal assault on petty production, including above all peasant agriculture, causes a migration of destitute peasants and petty producers to cities in search of jobs whose availability diminishes at the same time. It diminishes because of the acceleration in the rate of technical change brought about by the increased competitiveness that is introduced by trade liberalisation. The working class everywhere therefore gets hamstrung by the rise in the relative size of the reserve army of labour even before the onset of the crisis.
The third factor that weakens the working class is the privatisation of public sector enterprises that occurs under neo-liberalism. Workers in the public sector are generally better organised than those in the private sector all over the world. In the US for example, while only about 7 per cent of workers in the private sector are unionised, the percentage unionised in the public sector is 33 (which includes the unionisation in the education sector). Privatisation therefore has the effect of reducing the organisational strength of the workers. This is an aspect that is scarcely ever discussed; the effect of privatisation in reducing innovativeness and making the economy less self-reliant and more parasitic, at least in the periphery, is widely recognised, but not its effect in denting the workers’ striking power.
A reduction in workers’ striking power does not mean that they cannot have large and impressive nation-wide mobilisations for specific temporary actions; we have seen many such actions over the last several years in India, but a sustained action by workers until their demands in particular sectors or relating to the economy as a whole are met, such as had happened in the 1970s in India in the form not just of the railway strike but of the loco-men’s strike that had preceded it, becomes much more difficult to organise.
Thus the weakening of the workers’ striking power that Walter Benjamin had attributed to the failed revolutions in Germany after the first world war, and had adduced as an explanation for the ascendancy of fascism, occurs in today’s world as a fall-out of neo-liberalism. Of course such weakening alone does not explain fascism’s ascendancy; but it is against this background of weakening of the workers’ organisations that the economic crisis, to which neo-liberalism inevitably gives rise, facilitates the ascendancy of neo-fascism.
Liberal opinion misses this connection, both because it generally shuns visualising society in class terms, and focusses instead on individuals and non-class groupings of individuals, and also because it generally approves of neo-liberalism. It is therefore at a loss to explain why there should be a simultaneous upsurge of neo-fascism all over the world, as is happening at present. Why should there be a sudden emergence of the Trumps, the Modis, the Bolsonaros, the Mileis and the Melonis at this particular juncture? Their simultaneous appearance, it stands to reason, must be caused by a common international conjuncture; and this common conjuncture can only be the dead-end reached by neo-liberalism after having reduced the strength of the working class over a period of time. The ‘other’ that each of them picks on as the object of animosity for the majority of the population in their respective countries, may be different; but the underlying reason why such an ‘other’ has to be identified by each of them at the current juncture remains a common one, namely the onset of an economic crisis of neo-liberalism.
Several important conclusions follow from the above. First, powerful workers’ organisations are absolutely essential for the preservation of democracy, a conclusion that is again at complete variance with much liberal opinion. Liberal opinion is generally hostile to workers’ organisations, often accusing them of “holding society to ransom” through their strike actions; but this represents not only an attitude of callousness towards the labouring poor which is ethically repugnant, but also a shallow understanding of the functioning of society. In fact the freedoms that even individuals enjoy, not just the working class as a class, become possible because of the strength of the workers that operates as a bulwark against the ascendancy of fascism. The implicit distinction drawn by liberal opinion between individual freedom on the one hand and trade union rights on the other, with the belief that the former can remain intact even while the latter is encroached upon, lacks validity.
The second conclusion that emerges is that the public sector is essential for democracy. This is something which again is contrary to liberal opinion, according to which private enterprise and liberal democracy complement one another. The fact that an economy where the private sector is pervasive and the public sector has a negligible presence, is incapable not only of meeting social objectives, such as providing essential services to the population at affordable prices, or achieving a modicum of technological self-reliance, but also of defending democracy, is missed by this perspective: the public sector is associated with strong trade unions and strong trade unions make possible the defence of democratic rights. To say this does not amount to equating a pervasive private sector economy ipso facto with neo-fascism; it only amounts to suggesting that such an economy is far more vulnerable to the onslaught of neo-fascism.
It is not just that fascism which Georgi Dimitrov had characterised at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International as the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most revanchist and reactionary sections of finance capital” crushes trade unions, and arrests and persecutes trade unionists, as Bishop Martin Niemoller’s famous remark had made clear; but the ascendancy of fascism, when other conditions for such ascendancy, such as the existence of an economic crisis, are present, is facilitated by the absence or enfeeblement of trade unions.
The struggle against a neo-fascist State requires therefore not just a political strategy of alliances, but also a strategy for the revival of working class strength; the coordination between workers and peasants, as is happening in India at present, becomes a crucial step towards such a revival.
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