Joel A Lewis Youth Against Fascism.pdf

YOUTH AGAINST FASCISM
tarian democracy" in the form of the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat." 6 Communists
sought to "overthrow" this "bourgeois dictatorship" to establish a "proletarian dictatorship"
that Lenin contended was a true "democracy for the people."
Prior to the Popular Front, many conceptualized communists as "enemies of democracy."
The Leninist Generation fed this trend by propagating themselves as enemies of
the "bourgeois republic," supporters of "proletarian dictatorship" and promoters of
authoritarian leadership in their international structure. In an odd twist of this equation,
Hitler portrayed communists as foreign enemies of the German nation who used institutions
like democracy to "hurl us into an epoch of chaos." 7 Although fascists opposed all
forms of democracy, Hitler utilized democratic structures to gain state power. 8 Hitler
contended that only a fascist dictatorship could "save" the German nation from Bolshevism.
Georgi Dimitrov identified fascism as the common enemy of all democratic movements,
both proletarian and bourgeois. Communist theory had previously described
fascism as another form of "bourgeois dictatorship" born out of the revolutionary crisis of
democratic republics. Dimitrov insisted that Nazi fascism represented a new form of
"ultra-reactionary" class rule in opposition to all forms of democracy. The Third Reich
rejected all notions of democratic liberties and traditions, substituting the concept of
majority rule with the principle of minority leadership in the personal form of the Führer
and his Nazi Party. To effectively combat fascism, Dimitrov insisted that communists
needed to champion and defend democratic liberties, traditions and institutions. Traditional
"anti-democratic" denunciations isolated communists, alienating them from
mainstream anti-fascist political culture, especially in Britain and the United States.
Popular Front propaganda predominately abandoned Leninist rhetoric about proletarian
dictatorship, contending that only democracy could save the world from fascism.
Youth Against Reformism: The Leninist Generation
The Leninist Generation denounced "bourgeois democracy" as an "illusion." Lenin and
the Comintern insisted, "The most democratic bourgeois republic is no more than a
machine for the suppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, for the suppression
of the working people by a handful of capitalists… "equality," i.e., "pure democracy," is
a fraud." 9 Lenin asserted that workers should "take advantage of bourgeois democracy
which, compared with feudalism, represents a great historical advance, but not for one
minute must you forget the bourgeois character of this "democracy," its historical conditional
and limited character." 10 Lenin envisioned the democratic republic as a transitory
stage in the establishment of a more egalitarian and democratic political order. 11 Communists
posited themselves as opponents and critics of the bourgeois democratic republic,
seeking to establish a new social, political and economic order called socialism that
they considered to represent "true democracy."
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