NinjaGinga [he/him]

  • 0 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 29th, 2020

help-circle


  • The Invitation Offensive – A Popular-Frontist Strategy and Tactic of Undermining Fake ‘Anti-Fascist’ Opposition

    Cases occur in which during a struggle against imperialism or fascism, some organizations that collaborate with the imperialist/fascist foes pretend to be struggling against it, so to mislead otherwise genuine anti-imperialists/anti-fascists. In their struggle against imperialism and fascism, the communists can expose such organizations by what I call “alliance offensives” or “invitation offensives.” It entails exposing collaborationists through proposing an overt alliance with them. That is, the communists would propose an alliance to this organization for a joint struggle against the imperialist/fascist occupation. Owing to their collaborationist nature, the collaborationists would not benefit from establishing friendly contacts with the communists for that might expose their collaboration with the enemy. As such, it puts the covert collaborationists into a difficult position:

    (1) If they reject the proposal, they would lose face in front of the public by appearing not serious about combating the enemy occupation. By contrast, the communists would rightly appear serious in combating the enemy occupation. This would tilt the balance more so towards the communists and would expose to many the collaborationist nature of the organization. It would draw many of the genuinely anti-imperialist/anti-fascist supporters of the covert collaborationist organization away from the collaborationists and towards the communist-led popular front.

    (2) If the collaborationist organization accepts the alliance proposal, then they would face two options: (1) break their word/promise/deal and thus risk being exposed as collaborationists. Exposure would have almost the same results as rejecting an invitation in the first place, except it would be more intensively in favor of communists and a more intensive blow at the collaborationists. Option (2) would be that they would actually go through with the deal, carry out their promises, which would indeed harm the imperialist/fascist enemy occupation. This would force the collaborationists into fighting their own imperialist/fascist bosses hence causing division and friction in the enemy camp. All of these cases are wins for the communist-led popular front and losses for imperialism/fascism and collaborationism.

    In order to render it harder for the collaborationists to betray their deal, communists shall try to negotiate as precondition, some degree of transparency on the part the collaborationist organization, so that it would become easier for communists to gather intelligence on the collaborationists’ potential betrayals of the deal, so to expose the collaborationists’ betrayal of the deal more easily. The establishment of transparency measures would be useful in dissuading the collaborationists from betraying their deal in the first place.

    Related to this strategy is the “invitation offensive” strategy. Socialist and anti-imperialist states can expose imperialists’ Wilsonian hypocrisy by calling for universal disarmament. No one with a basic understanding of class struggles would ever seriously think that universal disarmaments are realistic in the epoch of modern imperialist warmongers. The point though is to show that contrary to their Wilsonian calls for peace and unity, the imperialists are but hypocrites committed to terror. The USSR, the Peoples’ Democracies, and the Comintern frequently used the peace offensives strategy.