ON THE COMINFORM

5 Cominform and the question of people's democracy as a modern type of...

Stalinism is not exhausted in the building of a democratic world front. It is only a component of the united front tactics of Stalinism under the given momentary conditions of the changing political world situation.

A democratic world camp is by no means sufficient for the goal of the world dictatorship of the proletariat, does not alone fill the Stalinist foreign policy, for example, not only to defeat Hitler's fascism, but to abolish the inevitability of war and fascism in general.

This struggle against the inevitability of fascism cannot be the democratic struggle, but only the socialist struggle. Only with the world dictatorship of the proletariat is the inevitability of fascism eliminated - not before, that is, not through a "democratic world camp". In order to remove the inevitability from fascism, in order to consistently realise the democratic principles of the post-war period, Shdanov should have fought for the revolutionary annihilation of world imperialism through the world proletarian revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the world proletariat:

"Not yet a single question of the class struggle [not even the class question of the democratic or anti-fascist struggle - note W.E.] has been decided in history otherwise than by force" (Lenin, Vol. 26, page 459).

The question of the international class struggle cannot be decided otherwise than by revolutionary violence on a world scale, by the violent proletarian world revolution, while the democratic world front can only facilitate this struggle.

The essence of proletarian anti-fascism has never been to serve the re-establishment of bourgeois democracy, for fascism has arisen from none other than bourgeois democracy, and from it will always only inevitably arise new fascism, but never socialism. Therefore, whoever fights for the re-establishment of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie cannot belong to the camp of socialism and thus cannot be a fighter for proletarian democracy, cannot be a true anti-fascist. Only proletarian anti-fascism is true anti-fascism, is the only anti-fascism in the world that will eliminate the scourge of fascism from the globe forever through world socialism. The world bourgeoisie is primarily concerned with keeping its economic world power in its hands, the question of political form is subordinate to this; in this respect the world bourgeoisie is "flexible", it is even willing and able to make certain concessions to the proletariat in questions of democracy, which the proletariat in turn knows how to exploit for its socialist revolution.

" ... under strong pressure 'from below' the bourgeoisie has always and everywhere 'resigned itself' to the republic if only it retained its economic domination" (Lenin, Vol. 26, page 36). [or got it back - W.E.].

So, as far as the democratic questions are concerned, one must not create dangerous illusions; this is not a way of eliminating capitalist class society, as Lenin correctly pointed out. It is a question of eliminating the political power of the world bourgeoisie in order to be able to wrest world economic power from it in the first place - and this is a socialist, not a democratic question of the class struggle.

The most consistent anti-fascists can only be the proletarians as a revolutionary class, can only be the communists, because they are the only anti-fascists who fight not only against this or that concrete, particular fascism, but beyond that against its inevitability, against fascism in general and in general, against social-democratic pactorship towards the bourgeoisie as the other side of the coin of fascism.

To want to force the world proletariat into a democratic camp at the cost - mind you: at the cost of the socialist camp - is thus revisionist, means to end up in the bourgeois camp of social-democratism on the tracks of Dimitroff's revisionist united front tactics.

The Mensheviks have never done anything but vacillate in the face of Stalinism. And the most violent fluctuations of Menshevism took place with the emergence of the class struggle between the world socialist and capitalist camps after the Great Patriotic War. The Mensheviks, disguised as "Stalinists", could not consistently decide for either camp. They took no independent stand whatsoever, but resorted to the phantom of the "democratic world camp". For Stalin, this did not at all mean that he was indifferent to this petty-bourgeois buffer zone between the bourgeois and the proletarian world camps. He masterfully knew how to transform these neutralising forces into forces against world imperialism, even if only within a limited framework and for a limited time.