FASCISM AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION

Formatter’s Note

As this text is a very pertinent Marxist analysis of fascism contemporaneous to its rise and development, I felt it particularly necessary for transcription and formatting.

The existing PDF for this text, while visually clean, has formatting issues that make for difficult reading, due to contextual misidentification by the OCR tool used. These include issues with blockquote and citation demarcation, indentation, punctuation conflation, and numerical malformation. I have done my best to remedy these issues. Additionally, I have endeavored to link cited sources that exist on marxists.org, so that one may follow the references.

This was transcribed predominantly from the second revised edition available at Dutt’s section at marxists.org, due to it being a preferable source for reformatting. I have conducted a somewhat careful comparison between the second and third editions, and revised this to include as many of the changes and additions as I could find. Big thanks to SocialismForAll for his audio version of the third edition, which helped immensely with the comparison. Please consult the original sources at the link above if you have any concerns about version differences.

Frontmatter

We say to the workers: ‘You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and international wars, not only in order to change existing conditions, but also in order to change yourselves and fit yourselves for the exercise of political power.’

MARX (On the Communist Trial at Cologne, 1851). [source]

The bourgeoisie sees in Bolshevism only one side… insurrection, violence, terror; it endeavours, therefore, to prepare itself especially for resistance and opposition in that direction alone. It is possible that in single cases, in single countries, for more or less short periods, they will succeed. We must reckon with such a possibility, and there is absolutely nothing dreadful to us in the fact that the bourgeoisie might succeed in this. Communism ‘springs up’ from positively all sides of social life, its sprouts are everywhere, without exception-the ‘contagion’ (to use the favourite and ‘pleasantest’ comparison of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois police) has very thoroughly penetrated into the organism and has totally impregnated it. If one of the ‘vents’ were to be stopped up with special care, ‘contagion’ would find another, sometimes most unexpected. Life will assert itself. Let the bourgeoisie rave, let it work itself into a frenzy, commit stupidities, take vengeance in advance on the Bolsheviks, and endeavour to exterminate in India, Hungary, Germany, etc., more hundreds, thousands, and hundreds of thousands of the Bolsheviks of yesterday or those of to-morrow. Acting thus, the bourgeoisie acts as did all classes condemned to death by history. The Communists must know that the future at any rate is theirs; therefore we can and must unite the intensest passion in the great revolutionary struggle with the coolest and soberest calculations of the mad ravings of the bourgeoisie…. In all cases and in all countries Communism grows; its roots are so deep that persecution neither weakens, nor debilitates, but rather strengthens it.

LENIN (“Left-Wing” Communism, 1921). [source]