ANATOMY OF FASCISM
FASCISM AND SoCIAL REVOLUTION,
by R. Palme Dutt. lntanationai
Publishers.
$1.50.
Students of the social sciences who have been influenced by American
university courses, by the recommendations of the
Sunday Times Book
Review
section, or by the offerings of the Calverton gang, look upon
the theses of the Communist International as little more than sloganizcd
dogmas. Without taking the trouble to study a
C.
I.
document they
usually dismiss it as a "badly written ukase."
This attitude is reflected even among America11 intellectuals who are
overcoming the above-mentioned cultural lags, who are striving to correct
their astigmatism with the aid of the lens of M arx and L enin. While
admitting the truth of the fundamental principles of historical materialism,
they dismiss C.
I.
theses as "politically expedient" stutements, designed
for immediate agitational effect. They are under the impression that
such documents are similar to the speeches of the average capital1st poh–
tician. Accustomed to think of the latter as a business man or as a lobbying
artist, they do not realize that the proletarian "politician" is not only a
practical man of action but a theoretician, a social sCientist of the first
rank.
If
these intellectuals will take the time to study the plenum addresses
of the Comintern leaders, they will find analyses of social trends (of which
the prediction of the current economic debacle is one of many classical
examples) that make the most learned treatises of brain-trusters and social–
planners sound like freshman themes.
But somehow these intellectuals never seem to read the literature
of the C.
"I.
Perhaps the fault is not entirely theirs. They are accustomed
to look: for a systematic treatment of social problems in a lengthy docu–
mented study rather than in a condensed political statement. There is an
urgent need for such heavy artillery on the ideological front, for such
books based upon the generalizations of the C.
I.,
if Leninism is to cut
its way deep into contemporary American thought.
Fascism and Social Revolution,
by the editor of the British Labour
Monthly, is one of the first of such volumes to reach these shores. Dutt
has taken the precise definition of Fascism contained in the
Programme of
the Communist International
and has used it as the basis for a ;ystematic
exposition of the subject. The bnok is an object lesson to intellectuals
and laymen who have been misled by reactionary, liberal, and social–
democratic analyses of Fascism. It uncovers the ignorance or the deliberate
misrepresentation of idelogues who deny that Fascism is simply a new
tactic
of finance capitalism; who hide the
concre~e
nature of Fascism beneath
sophistical arguments about abstract democracy vs. abstract dictatorship;
who paint it as a middle-class revolution; who blame Communism for the
existence of Fascism, etc. In the space of this review it is possible to touch
upon only a few of the aspects of the whole problem which Dutt investigates
so thoroughly.
Answering the question,
Does Communism cause Fascism'!,
Dutt points
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