Comrade,
Of course all analogies are incomplete. A better, more up to date, analogy would be
the word "racist". Because of some minor abuses of that term, a main political current
in the U.S. today vigorously discourages usage of the term "racist" and poses the
"false" accusations of racism as a worse problem than racism itself. The abuses of the
term "racism" do not amount to a reason to stop using the term. Similarly, the
specific history of "social fascist" in Germany in the 1920's, about which we do not
see entirely eye-to-eye, does not cause an important confusion of the use of the term
today. In fact most people today, don't know about that history.
I disagree with getting rid of the word "fascism" itself, too, because there is still
a danger that at some point the financial oligarchy will become desparate and try to
institute wholesale, open terrorist rule again. This is one reason, the U.S. will not
outlaw fascist groups, because it might need them at some point. "Fascism" is an
important scienttific term we should continue to use to measure the U.S. political
economy.
My example of the assassination by the SD's pokes more of a hole in your notion that
"social fascist" was inaccurate than you admit. I don't take an approach that
communists and social dems were equally to blame for the failure to unite against the
fascists in Germany.
Comrade
>>> Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 06/03/99 01:21PM >>>
I wrote:
>Charles, please _don't_ use this terminology ("social fascism"). It has a
>long and bad history:
Charles responds: >As far as I can tell, the term "democracy" has a long
and worse
>history than "social fascist", but I am not about to let some abusers of the
>term "democracy" make me stop using it.
>
>By your test of usage, I would have to ask you to stop using half the
>political words in your vocabulary. Believe me, I can give you historical
>horror stories of many of the words and phrases you use. So, lets not get
>into such a silencing semantic game...
I was _not_ trying to silence you, just trying to avoid non-confusing
terminology.
The analogy with "democracy" is incomplete: "democracy" is a political
ideal that almost _everybody_ is in favor of. After all, Pol Pot called it
"Democratic Kampuchea." Because everyone (except strict conservatives)
favors democracy, they are always redefining it so that what they favor is
called "democracy." On the other hand, "social fascism" is no-one's ideal.
No-one has the incentive to drape themselves in the banner of social
fascism. So there is less abuse of the term for partisan purposes. It's
more of a descriptive term. I was simply saying I didn't think it was very
descriptive because it was confuseable with the old usage.
Actually, I try to avoid the use of the word "fascism" too, for another
reason: it's been highly overused. That's why I talk about the similarities
between X (US allies in the third world, for example) and Mussolini. At
least there's a concrete meaning to references to Mussolini. "Fascism" has
been so over-used that it includes both the mean cop (or a psyhological
type) and a specific kind of government and lots in-between.
>... For example, Luxembourg and Liebkneckt were assasinated by SOCIAL
DEMOCRATS.
>Thus, there was some "social" fascism in the recent history of that party.
>As somebody mentioned again, Mussolini had been in the Socialist Party. It
>was not at all clear that "socialists" and "social democrats" could not
>transform into fascists in that period. The Nazis were demogogically
>"Socialists" as Ron Hay mentioned recently on a related thread. The point is
>hindsight on what the "social fascists" were in the 1920's misleads about
>the acuity of the German CP assessment of the situtation.
Sure the SDs were wrong to kowtow to the capitalist status quo ante and to
participate in the killing of L&L. But the CP's "social fascism" jargon
took that further, in a very sectarian direction. Also, you should remember
that the SD wasn't the only party with faults. During the 1920s, the CP
became increasingly subordinate to Russia's foreign policy, which seems a
bad idea from the point of view of German workers.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html
Bombing DESTROYS human rights. Ground Troops make things worse! US/NATO out
of Serbia now!
