If Seeckt and Stresemann were the real “fascists,” what were the Social-Democrats implicated with them? In answering this question, Zinoviev brought together a rather mixed group—Marshal Joseph Pilsudski of Poland, like Mussolini a backsliding Socialist; Filippo Turati and Lodovico d'Aragona of Italy, two moderate Socialists (the latter but not the former later went over to Mussolini); a Socialist minister in the Bulgarian government of the day, who soon resigned; and J. Ramsay MacDonald, then about to form the first British Labour government. Zinoviev leaped from Germany to international Social-Democracy in a passage which contained the idea of social-fascism in essence, even if he inverted the term. As the first statement of the theory, it is worth giving in Zinoviev's own words, which I have tried to render as close as possible to his oratorical style:What are Pilsudski and the others? Fascist Social-Democrats. Were they this ten years ago? No. It goes without saying that they were already then fascists in nuce. But they have become fascists precisely because we are living in the epoch of revolution. What is Italian Social-Democracy? It is a wing of the fascists; Turati is a fascist Social-Democrat. Could this statement have been made five years ago? No. Think of a group of academicians who gradually developed into a bourgeois force. Italian Social-Democracy is now a fascist Social-Democracy. Take Turati, D'Aragona, or the present Bulgarian government Socialists. There were opportunists, but could one say ten years ago that they were fascist Social-Democrats? No, that would have been stupid then. Now they are that.
But it was MacDonald who inspired Zinoviev to coin the phrase which summed up the theory of social-fascism in its first phase:
You may hurl insults at MacDonald: You are a traitor, a servant of the bourgeoisie. But we must understand in what period we are living. International Social-Democracy has now become a wing of fascism.
Later, social-fascism was held responsible for the victory of German fascism on the ground that it had split the working class or had tolerated bourgeois regimes which paved the way for fascism. But this was not the way the theory of social-fascism was presented in 1929. It then insisted that social-fascism was the specific form fascism was actually taking.In Britain, it was a good deal harder to work up the same kind of case against the bloodless MacDonald regime. In 1929, the British Communist party claimed no more than 4,000 members against over 3,000,000 for the Labour party. Some British Communist leaders were understandably reluctant to cut themselves off from the Labour party and to pretend that they, not the Labourites, represented the British working class. But this feat was accomplished, not without considerable prodding from the Comintern, by the simple expedient of reclassifying the Labour party as one of the three capitalist parties and, indeed, the worst of all.23 If social-fascism could be applied to Britain it could be applied everywhere—and was. The theory of social-fascism helped to bring about a catastrophe in Germany; it merely produced a caricature in Britain.
Yet Germany and Britain provided the main justification for the new line at the Tenth Plenum in July 1929. The first report, made by Otto Kuusinen, the loyal Finnish servitor of whatever Russian happened to rule in the Comintern, took the line that the difference between fascists and social-fascists was that the latter used a “smoke screen.” But, he went on, the more social-fascism developed, the closer it came to being “pure” fascism. He thought that British Labourism could be thought of as social-fascism “in the caterpillar stage” whereas German Social-Democracy was already in the “butterfly stage.” To unmask social-fascism, he said, was the most important duty. The second report, by one who spoke with even greater authority, Dmitri Z. Manuilsky, one of the three top Russians in the secretariat, stated that the German Social-Democratic party was already ready to establish an “open bourgeois dictatorship” by itself. Béla Run, then the ranking Hungarian member in the Comintern hierarchy, raised the possibility that social-fascism might be the typical form of fascism in the more advanced capitalist countries. In any event, he declared, any struggle between social-fascism and fascism was merely a struggle “between two methods of fascisation.” The Russian leader of the world Communist trade-union movement, Solomon A. Lozovsky, took to task the idea, which he said was very widespread in Communist circles, that the broad masses of Social-Democracy were less reactionary than their leaders. He insisted that the leaders, top, middle, and bottom, and even some of the rank-and-file, with the exception of some insignificant groups, were going fascist.24
― Mordy, Sunday, 26 June 2016 16:03 (seven years ago) link