PDF-Version: Le Prolétaire – Infantile Anti-Anti-Fascism
We have before us a leaflet, supplementing La Guerre Sociale, and drafted with the participation of six other groups. The large number of authors of this text undoubtedly explains the contradictions that can be noted there, but there is nevertheless a common orientation.
The authors’ objective might seem sympathetic: they want to fight the democratic antifascism and its attempt to mobilise the proletariat around the defense of the bourgeois order. Unfortunately, they pose the problem backwards: instead of denouncing the real content of democracy and awakening the workers’ revolt against all forms of capitalist domination, they apply themselves to the idea that fascism is no worse than democracy, which ultimately trivialises all bourgeois exploitation and oppression. Instead of accusing democracy, they almost excuse fascism, and blame democrats for inventing the crimes of the open dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
This absurdity is due to the fact that, even if they sometimes copy Marxist phrases, these people are idealists who have the same anti-materialist conception of history as the vulgar bourgeois democrat. Hence their stupid, otherwise inexplicable stubbornness to rush to the existence of gas chambers in extermination camps. Why do they want it so badly that it is almost a matter of principle?
For the democratic philistine, the extermination of Jews is the inexplicable horror by its very nature, the gratuitous crime of Nazi monsters. Our brave anarchists and anarchoids do not understand any more than they do, they see the facts the same way. And since they disturb them, they deny that they took place. As a result, they are obliged to construct a whole pseudo-materialist theory of religions and ideology, to compare “the fearful visions of hell” with “exaggerated or invented horrors” by the dominant class to incite “men (…) to find a certain unity (…) to switch in the same terrors”!
In reality, no one needs to invent horrors and it is difficult to exaggerate: capitalism produces much more than imagination can. The important thing is to know what attitude we have in the face of these horrors.
Each bourgeois fraction, each bourgeois group or camp tries to use those of the others, by pinpointing the infamies of the neighbor to rally the proletarians to its own cause. And at home, all the bourgeoisies, all the bourgeois parties helped by their pseudo-worker platforms, use as well the blind violence that springs from social antagonisms as the calculated and centralised violence of the state and the police, to call the proletarians to submit to and adhere to their order.
Can we respond to this exploitation of our own crimes by the bourgeoisie by simply denying their reality? No! That’s dumb; in all senses of the word.
The proletariat does not deny the reality of torture, massacres and exterminations, even if it is not alone in suffering them. It does not deny the countless horrors perpetrated by the bourgeoisie, but it shows their real cause. Which – careful! does not mean that it absolves the executing agents. These horrors do not leave it indifferent, they arouse its hatred and its will to fight them. But it can only really fight them by placing itself on its class field, with its class perspective and its class weapons, and not by allying itself with forces that actually aim to paralyse it and subjugate it to the bourgeois order.
It is in this spirit that we analysed the extermination of the Jews during the second imperialist war, in a 1960 article republished in a brochure with a presentation in 1978. We refer the reader to this brochure entitled “Auschwitz or the Great Alibi”.
As for the people of the La Guerre Sociale whom infantilism has led to whitewash an imperialism instead of denouncing them all, let them escape as they can from this war!
Source: Le Prolétaire n°322, 1980
Libri Incogniti 