Buchenwald is capitalism
The outbreaks of racist crime and antisemitic hooliganism, the epidemic of Swastikas and other similar delights, seem well-positioned to restore color and prestige to the virtues of progressive democracy, and to justify the cry: the threat of Nazism has come back, alongside with the horrors of concentration camps, of brutal violence against the weak! Let us unite together to save the untainted purity of anti-fascism! And why not, let us rebuild a popular front to defend human rights!
So, should democracy therefore be a bulwark against the comeback of the triumphant beast? Are there therefore no more hidden Buchenwalds and Mathausens on the day the purity of democracy would be protected from the threat of reemerging Swastika-carrying fascists? Comfortable, of course; but it is not like that. Buchenwald does not need to reappear for the comeback of "fascist regurgitations": Buchenwald is already here, dear gentlemen of universal democracy; it has been here since the day when Fascism was militarily defeated, and was inherited by the democratic winners. What have been fifteen years of perfect domination of democracy on a worldwide scale, if not fifteen years of aggravated fascism? Are you afraid of the resurgence of genocide, you intellectuals longing for democratic blocs? Well, what was the massacre of the forty thousand Algerians in 1945, under the banner of the universal front of bourgeois anti-fascism, from the great resistance leader De Gaulle to his vice-president Thorez, if not a classic example of genocide in the style of the hooked cross? What is the dripping of localized wars, now in Korea, now in Algeria, now in Indochina, now in Hungary, now in Egypt, etc., if not a repetition - without swastikas, granted! - of the Hitlerian tune?
The ultra-racist and, in its relation to Black people, certainly not inferior to the Hitlerian model South Africa, is part of the United Nations of ultra-democratic coinage, but nobody has ever thought and thinks of putting it at the door or nailing it to the verdict of the "universal conscience". The "color line" was traditionally part of the politics of one of the pillars of universal democracy: Great Britain. Colonialist France and Belgium have their hands oozing with Black and Semitic white blood, and the former will be one of the pillars of the détente and “peaceful” competition policy hatched for the next "summit" meetings. The International Red Cross launched a feeble cry over torture practiced in Algeria even before De Gaulle, under the guidance of the socialist proconsul Lacoste, and happily continued and perfected by their successors. These are not torture methods with the Hitler trademark: but they are still torture. Only a few have any complaints: everyone instead wants to flatter the torturers in the name of "freedom from fear". In the United States, official and unofficial racism declines, but the Black continues to be, in fact, a citizen minoris juris. As for "genocides", the Kremlin has - in the long history of counter-revolution and its diplomacy, now pro-Hitlerian, now pro-Western, always reactionary - quite a lot to teach. No, fascism is not dead, because capitalism is not dead!
And if, from the bosom of a society that claims to have established the four freedoms and have educated the new generations to worship them, the very latest phenomenon of blue jeans jumps out, those tagging Swastikas on the walls, what can this society boast of having "taught" to its young people, if not what we mentioned above? Or maybe the democratic society is scandalized because young people dare to take away from itself its sinister monopoly of terror and racial persecution? What happens is the sign of the rottenness that the mercantile society, the society of shopkeepers and product sellers, of "services" and of human flesh, emanates by itself: and this rot is not a pathological phenomenon of which democracy should or could get rid of; it is its own sap, corrupt and corrupting. The "search for the guilty" method is typical of capitalism: if things are not going well, the Jew is scapegoated, and at the same time the outrage of the exploited masses is diverted towards the anti-Jew.
Only a society organized by proletarians on a basis other than that of man and their work considered as a commodity to be sold and purchased on the market, and human labor valued as a means not to preserve and reproduce the species, but to keep and reproduce Capital endlessly, will be able to remove from the face of the earth not only the swastikas drawn on the walls, but the brutal violence practiced under a thousand different flags and symbols, and under the shield of the hypocrisy of the moralists. Only the struggle of the world proletariat of all "races" and of all states will bury the racist and chauvinist monster.
The fetid racist tide awakens the proletarians to the awareness that capitalism, in any form, is oppression, brutality and death.
From "Il Programma Comunista" n. 1 of 1960
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