Socialism or Barbarism:
The inevitable crisis of imperialism

The brutal treatment of refugees, including children, and 
their illegal incarceration in isolated camps has shocked many 
Australians. So too has the failure of the Australian Government 
to defend the legal rights of two of its citizens who have been 
illegally held and tortured by the US at its Guantanamo base in 
Cuba. The Howard Government, with the support of the Australian 
Labor Party, has given ASIO police state powers and passed a 
number of laws wiping away long-standing democratic rights. These 
include provisions for the indefinite secret detention of 
Australians and the proscribing of organisations without even 
parliamentary scrutiny. Australia is not alone in the passing of 
such reactionary "anti-terror" laws. In the US, Britain, Canada 
and elsewhere governments have, as in Australia, used September 
11 to introduce extreme repressive laws and excessively tight 
security measures. It is not surprising that in such a climate 
the possibility of fascism is being raised. In the following 
article David Lethbridge of the Bethune Institute of Anti-Fascist 
Studies expresses some views on this question. (It should be born 
in mind that it was written in March, 2003.)

A dozen years ago, the capitalist ideologists were unanimous in 
their conclusion: socialism can not work. Given the immense power 
of the capitalist media, capitalist political parties, and the 
capitalist state, this false conclusion filtered down to broad 
sectors of the working class.

But times have changed. It is increasingly evident that it is 
capitalism itself which ultimately can not work. A dozen years of 
unipolar US capitalist power, and what are the results? Not 
exactly a paradise of peace and plenty.

The US economy is spiraling down into a classic over-production 
crisis. A decade of firings, lay-offs, corporate restructuring, 
union-bashing, and wage clawbacks, coupled with the increasing 
loss of industrial jobs to a poorly paying service industry, have 
resulted in a working class which can scarcely afford to purchase 
more than absolute necessities.

Workers in the major capitalist states who may once have believed 
that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and similar 
economic treaties would bring prosperity and a higher standard of 
living are beginning to realise that it was all lies and false 
promises. Working people already know what academic studies have 
begun to reveal: that they are working longer hours now, and for 
less pay, than they did a generation ago.

Across both the USA and Canada, budgets for health care and 
education have been slashed. In California, significant numbers 
of community colleges are closing. In Oregon the state has closed 
hospitals and schools and is refusing to continue subsidising 
medication for the mentally ill.

At the same time, global capital is facing a crisis of 
legitimacy. Seattle, Genoa, Quebec City, Kananaskis, all give 
evidence that corporate globalisation is being massively 
rejected. In Latin America, the people are already organising and 
rising against the Free Trade Area of the Americas [FTAA — 
negotiations are floundering — Ed.]

This crisis of imperialist legitimacy is reflected in the 
millions upon millions of people across the world who are opposed 
to the US war on Iraq. Not only do the world's people fail to 
accept any necessity for the US-led war, but many are beginning 
to recognise that the attack on Iraq is only a small part of a 
far more extensive US plan for the total economic, military, and 
political domination of the world. That this scheme is in every 
sense Hitlerian, that this endeavour is in every sense truly 
fascist, has begun to dawn on large numbers of people.

There are those who will argue that the US state is not yet 
fascist on the grounds that political parties have not yet been 
suppressed. This argument flows from the classic analysis of 
fascism propounded in the 1930s by the Communist International, 
and crystallized in the brilliant formulations of Georgi 
Dimitrov.

And yet what is forgotten in such an argument is that the 
political parties which were the focus of fascist suppression 
were the parties of the working class — the communist and 
socialist parties. In the 1930s, and especially in Europe, the 
working class parties were the political representatives of broad 
sectors of the working class. Membership and electoral strength 
could be measured in terms of tens of millions. Hence the 
necessity for the fascists to declare such parties illegal and to 
smash them.

No such necessity exists in the contemporary period, particularly 
in the US or Canada. Why bother to declare illegal, to smash, or 
to drive underground the CPUSA or the CPC or any other existing 
party holding to a socialist platform? While our numbers are 
indeed growing, our parties are not at all in the same position 
as the Communist Parties of Germany or of Italy in the 1930s.

And so, because the imperialist ruling class has every capability 
of carrying out a fascist or quasi-fascist global hegemony while 
at the same time being able to cover itself with the cloak of a 
false democracy, why risk ideological exposure? Why risk 
embroiling itself in a constitutional and legal quagmire by 
suppressing political parties which — at least for the moment — 
present no actual threat to their regimes?

The USA is not yet a fascist state. But class analysis easily 
demonstrates that the line between imperialism and fascism is a 
thin line indeed.

With a domestic economy in turmoil, with growing numbers of 
Americans being deprived of even the basic necessities of health 
care and education, with an over-production crisis threatening to 
turn into yet another serious recession, the imperialists, in 
their drive for world domination, may yet find it expedient to 
cross that thin line that separates the "dictatorship of the 
bourgeoisie" (Marx), from the "open dictatorship of the most 
reactionary, chauvinistic and imperialist elements of the 
financial oligarchy" (Dimitrov).

It would be not only political folly, but a betrayal of the 
working class to pretend that the danger of fascism is not 
increasing, and increasing rapidly. For, as the famous writer 
Norman Mailer recently noted, the preconditions for fascism have 
already been constructed in the US.

The critical juncture at which point capitalism in its 
imperialist phase either descends into fascist barbarism or is 
overthrown by the working class and its allies is approaching; 
how quickly it is as yet too early to foresee. But recent history 
has begun to indicate that capitalism can no longer operate as it 
has in the past.

Endless war and deepening poverty may well be the oracular stars 
under which a groaning and blood-soaked capitalism must surely 
lay down on a hill of skulls, both to die and to give birth to an 
infant socialism, squalling, and red, and bursting with bountiful 
new life.