Stalinist policy that conceals the defense of the capitalist order and the alliance with a part of the bourgeoisie under the supposed need to defeat "first" the counterrevolution in its fascist form.
From the third period and social-fascism to anti-fascism
In 1928 the Third International approved "socialism in one country" at its Sixth Congress... that is, its subordination -and therefore that of the world Revolution it represented- to Russian state capitalism. Zinoviev proclaimed the entry into a "third period" of the revolutionary wave in which the main enemy would be social democracy, which, according to him, had become an appendage of fascism. The first "anti-fascist" group would thus be the "Roter Frontkämpferbund", the paramilitary group of the KPD, devoted to organizing street fights and clashes with its Nazi counterparts and with social democratic youth groups.
The theory of "social-fascism" could only further alienate the millions of workers still organized in formally social democratic trade unions, cultural and sports organizations and cooperatives. Not so much because of the influence of the SPD as because of the experience of seeing the "Roter Frontkämpferbund" and the Nazi SA as a security problem for their own premises. The result was Hitler's electoral advances and the KPD's inability to give them a class response. Aware of this, the German Stalinists and Zinovievists proclaimed "after Hitler, our turn". Obviously, once Hitler reached government, what came was nothing but the destruction of the class associative fabric by Nazism and the dismantling and repression of the workers' movement in Germany.
The invention of anti-fascism as a Comintern tactic
When the Comintern closed this stage in 1935 at its Seventh Congress, the result of its turn would be even worse: anti-fascism had become class collaboration under the slogan of the Popular Front: forming electoral alliances with the "democratic" parties to help them win elections under a patriotic anti-fascist discourse.
Its congress proclaims at the same time that all the countries of the world, from fascist Germany to democratic Norway, from Great Britain to India, from Greece to China, have the same need for a "People's Front" and, wherever possible, a People's Front government. The congress is important because it marks the Comintern's definitive entry -after a series of hesitations and false steps- into its "fourth period", whose slogan is "all power to Daladier" [French republican minister], whose flag is the tricolor, and whose anthem is the Marseillaise, which drowns out the strains of the Internationale.
"The Stalinist turn". Leon Trotsky, 1935
Anti-fascism as a battering ram against the Spanish Revolution
The generalized workers' insurrection of 19 July 1936 answered the military coup by arming the proletariat and dismantling the republican state in half of Spain. The PCE then became the main "party of order", champion of the reconstitution of the state and the defense of private property. Its strategy would put the Comintern's "anti-fascist" policy to the test.
Stalinism tried to divert the armed proletariat, organized in a multitude of committees and local organizations with little or no coordination, into the war against Franco's army under the argument of "first victory, then revolution", while in the rear it encouraged the reconstitution of the state -and its repressive and military bodies-, rebuilding the state around the Catalan government and the Popular Front.
The latter was the electoral expression of the "anti-fascist" alliance formed with the republican parties, the PSOE, the PCE itself and the POUM on a program of restoring the democratic order and private property and dissolving the militias, with the regimentation of the armed workers into the republican army reconstituted with Russian military advisers; that program was what united the internal counterrevolution and the external imperialisms in the massacre of the Spanish revolution.
Anti-fascism as a recruiting slogan for imperialist war
Once the Spanish Revolution had been defeated, anti-fascism would become a slogan of imperialist recruitment, first in Spain, through the International Brigades, and then during the Second World War, when Hitler broke his pact with Stalin. Even the centrist sector of the Fourth International, born to proclaim revolutionary defeatism when hostilities broke out, used "anti-fascism" as a way of escaping its duties and finding common ground with the state.
The S.W.P. deliberately held back revolutionary formulations against the imperialist war and refused to take any action of struggle against it. It justified itself by claiming to camouflage itself from the eye of the police and to adapt its tone to what the then patriotic ears of the proletariat could take in.
But the most despicable and at the same time tragic thing about opportunism is that, while cutting itself off from the revolutionary education and mobilization of the masses, it does not, for all that, escape the blows of reaction unless it submits to it entirely. Thus the leaders of the S.W.P. found themselves sarcastically accused by their government of internationalism and revolutionary defeatism, the very thing they were dodging, and went to prison for a year and a half or two for a crime they had the duty to have committed, but which they always took good care not to commit. [...]
The American leaders of the S.W.P. had little of the fiber and mental consistency of a Liebknecht. Before their judges they proclaimed not the need to transform the imperialist war into civil war, but into a "true war against fascism". They clumsily accused the American government of being unable to finish off Berlin, and their press put forward splendid programs for defeating Hitler.
The words revolutionary defeatism made them squirm, and they vetoed them. All internationalist formulations were carefully struck out of magazine and newspaper, including even the mere word "imperialism" unless it referred to the national enemy. Throughout the whole war -an overwhelming argument in itself- they did not organize a single action against it, nor hand out a single leaflet. Finally, comparing their policy with that of the centrist parties of the time, the British I.L.P. and the Spanish P.O.U.M., the similarity between the two went as far as terminological identity. In a word, the S.W.P. replaced revolutionary politics with the bourgeois and Stalinist politics of anti-fascism, a mere trick of imperialist conscription, twin to the Hitlerite struggle against plutocracy.
"The Fourth International". G. Munis. 1959
Not content with that, they would support the "anti-fascist partisan guerrillas" which, organized and backed by the allied imperialisms in Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece and other countries, would repress the class movements tending to turn the imperialist war into revolution as soon as the Russians, the British or the Americans "liberated" the territory. From the mass strikes in Northern Italy -which had defeated the fascist state and the German occupiers- to the Greek insurrection, where the Stalinists carried out repression hand in hand with the British army.
Nothing else can be expected from an ideology that calls on us to "renounce everything except victory"... over fascism. That is, to renounce everything in order to maintain a form of government devoted to upholding the existing social order.