Translated by: Juan R. Fajardo,
2016.
Source of the text: Translated from Historia de la
crisis mundial, in Obras Completas, volume 8, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/historia_de_la_crisis_mundial/index.htm
Editorial Note: This text is available in print as
part of: José Carlos Mariátegui,
History of the World Crisis and Other
Writings, Marxists Internet Archive Publications (2017); ISBN
978-0-692-88676-2.
Author’s Notes:
The symptoms of a crisis of the democratic order could be felt since before the war. What has driven this crisis? The parallel increase and concentration of capitalism and of the proletariat. The countries’ economic life and economic forces have passed into the hands of these two great powers, beside which the State has acquired a role, not as referee, but as mediator. The conflicts, the contrasts between one force and the other, could not be solved by the State save through deals, direct agreements between them. In those deals, the State has but played the role of matchmaker. The shape of a new society has been incubating in the form of the old society. The nation, by virtue of the new social reality, has ceased to be a predominantly political entity, to become a predominantly economic entity. This change in the nation’s substance has brought about the crisis of the political State. History shows us that a society’s forms of social and political organization correspond with the structure, with the tendency of the productive forces. Bourgeois society, for example, has no origin other than in the birth of industry. Within Medieval society, the bourgeoisie was the industrial class, the artisan class. As the bourgeoisie grew richer, as industry grew, the privileges of the aristocracy, of the nobility, became unbearable. The laborer and the bourgeois were mixed at that time into a single class: the people. The bourgeoisie was the people’s vanguard and it was the class which led the revolution. Laborer and bourgeois coincided in the wish to abolish the aristocracy’s privileges. More than by reasons of ideology, the fall of the aristocracy, of the medieval order, was determined by concrete reasons in the emergence of a new form of production: industry. New forms of production have been created under the democratic order, the bourgeois order. Industry has developed extraordinarily, pushed along by the machine. Huge industrial enterprises have emerged. The expansion of these new productive forces does not allow the old political molds to endure. It has transformed the structure of nations and demands a transformation in the democratic order’s structure. Bourgeois democracy has ceased to correspond with the organization of the productive forces which have changed and grown formidably. That’s why democracy is in crisis. Parliament is democracy’s typical institution. The crisis of democracy is a crisis of parliament. We have already seen how the two great contemporary forces are capital and labor and how, beyond parliament, these forces clash or struggle. Democracy’s theorists might suppose that these forces are, or should be, proportionally represented in parliament. But it is not so, because society is not split cleanly between capitalists and proletarians. Between the capitalist class and the proletarian class there are a series of amorphous and intermediary layers. Besides, just as the whole proletarian class does not have a precise awareness of its historical and class necessities, the whole of the capitalist class is not gifted with a precise class consciousness. The mentality of the big industrialist or the banker is not the same as the mentality of the medium rentier or retail merchant. This dispersion of social classes is reflected in parliament which, therefore, does not exactly reflect the large interests at play. The political State turns out to be an integral representation of all social layers. But the conservative force and the revolutionary force polarize into single-interest groupings: capitalism and proletariat. Within the parliamentary order there is room only for coalition governments. Today, the tendency is toward factional governments.
Currently, the intensifying of the class struggle, the expansion of social warfare, has accented this crisis of democracy. The proletariat attempts the decisive assault on the State and on political power in order to transform society. Its growth in the parliaments is threatening to the bourgeoisie. Democracy’s legal instruments have turned out to be insufficient for preserving the democratic order. Conservatism has needed to appeal to illegal action, to extra-legal methods. The middle class, society’s intermediate and heterogeneous zone, has been the nerve center of this movement. Lacking a class consciousness of its own, the middle class feels itself equally distant from, and inimical to, capitalism and the proletariat, but some capitalist sectors are represented within it. And, as the current battle is waged between capital and the proletariat, all intervention from a third element must operate to the benefit of the conservative class. Capitalism and the proletariat are two great and singular camps of gravitation which draw in the scattered forces. Whosoever reacts against the proletariat serves capitalism. This falls to the middle class, from whose ranks the fascist movement has recruited its partisans. Fascism is not an Italian phenomenon, it is an international phenomenon. The first European country in which fascism appeared was Italy because in Italy the class struggle was in a sharper period, because in Italy the revolutionary situation was most violent and decisive.
Process of fascism. Its rise to the top. Its systems. Its methods.
Fascism in Germany, in France, in Hungary, etc. Lugones in Argentina.