By Jeremy Dewar
A Radical Guide to Anti-fascism by Samara Ali and Lewis Nielsen, SWP, October 2024, 42 pages, £3
This is a timely publication from the Socialist Workers Party. Not just a reprint of old material, it includes analysis of last August’s riots, Reform UK and Tommy Robinson’s latest iteration.
Ali and Nielsen open the pamphlet with a note of urgency, which is welcome, suggesting that the fascist menace ‘is at its greatest at any time since the 1930s’. This may be an exaggeration in the British context, as we do not yet face the type of violence meted out by the National Front. But internationally the danger is there and growing.
What is fascism?
The first half of the pamphlet deals with the definition of fascism, its current configurations and how Hitler could have been stopped. The authors dismiss the tendency to call any reactionary figures like Putin or Trump, fascist. This is correct; such an apparently radical characterisation actually hides from workers and minorities the real fascist threat behind such figures.
Instead, they characterise fascism as having three elements: counter-revolutionary; a mass movement; and a fake revolutionary mask. While they back this up with quotes from Trotsky, they do not take up and develop his characterisation of fascism as ‘a chemically pure distillation of the culture of imperialism’.
The distinctive feature of fascism is that its goal is to build an armed force that can control the streets and physically destroy capital’s main opponent, the organised working class. To do that it mobilises all those driven to desperation by capitalism’s inevitable crises around slogans based on existing reactionary prejudices. Having identified the scapegoats, fascist leaders predict the existing political parties will be ‘too soft’ on them and, therefore, ‘we will have to deal with them ourselves’.
This is how they whip up the desperate middle classes, the long term unemployed and workers in the most neglected regions. That is why they present themselves as opponents of the ‘elite’. From the beginning, the purpose of their rallies and demos is not only to publicise their demands but to identify both the potential streetfighters and the potential backers of a fascist party. That is the connection between Trafalgar Square rallies and the Southport riots. That is why fascist groups and parties are qualitatively different from other reactionary currents.
This is important for developing anti-fascist strategy and tactics. Such a strategy has to start from the need to prevent the fascists mobilising and organising their forces. At the same time, it has also to fight for demands that really express the needs of the working class and the oppressed in a way that the fascists’ supposedly radical slogans do not.
Old problems
As a ‘guide’ to fighting fascism, the pamphlet suffers from all the deficiencies that have plagued the SWP ever since the foundation of the Anti-Nazi League in the late 1970s. Indeed, Ali and Nielsen are very selective in retelling the history of the ANL and its successors, Unite Against Fascism and Stand Up To Racism.
Most glaring is their revision of the meaning of ‘no platform for fascists’ and what they mean by ‘physical confrontation’. They rail against ‘small, conspiratorial groups [that] mask up and run around chasing Nazis’. This is a gross misrepresentation of the campaigns that stopped the National Front, within which many of their own comrades took a leading role.
‘No Platform for Fascists’ was a slogan derived directly from the analysis of fascism’s strategy for growth. The early mobilisations against the National Front’s marches were organised by the left groups but soon attracted much wider support, culminating in the ‘Battle of Lewisham’. The fascists took a pasting there because the earlier demos in Bradford and Wood Green alerted local youth who certainly were not going to let a bunch of racists parade through their streets.
Immediately afterwards, the National Front announced a march through Tameside, in Manchester. The police, with the backing of the Labour government, banned any counter demonstration and that confronted the movement with a choice: accept the ban or mobilise to stop the fascists despite it.
What was necessary, as Workers Power argued at the time, was a campaign within the workplaces, the unions and the working class and immigrant communities for the biggest possible counter-demonstration and, within that, the organisation of self-defence groups against the fascist gangs.
The SWP thought otherwise. Together with Liberals like Peter Hain and some union leaders, they formed the ANL as an alternative movement and accepted the ban by organising a separate meeting some miles from Tameside. As Alex Callinicos wrote at the time, their view was that, while no platform was ‘in the abstract, perfectly correct’, for the ANL to adopt it would ‘kill it stone dead’.
Instead, it prioritised Rock Against Racism carnivals, on several occasions ignoring NF marches through immigrant areas that were happening at the same time. SUTR continues this practice, often restricting mobilisations to passive protest, without trying to get near the fascists.
For example, when Tommy Robinson’s English Defence League attempted to march through Tower Hamlets in 2013, SUTR held a rally a mile away in Altab Ali Park. Fortunately, hundreds of independent anti-fascists, including Workers Power, broke away to confront the EDL thugs at Tower Bridge. While the police successfully protected the fascists this time, our forceful intervention ensured this was the last time the EDL attempted such an adventure.
The SWP’s strategy for the anti-fascist movement is an example of what they call a ‘united front of a special type’. It is ‘special’ only in the sense that it is the opposite of the united front as developed by Lenin, Trotsky and the revolutionary Communist International.
What they meant was a campaign within the workers’ organisations for their leaders to join with the left to fight for necessary demands and actions, in this case, to prevent fascist mobilisations and organise defence groups. If the leaders will not, they have to be criticised; the rank and file should mobilise anyway, and learn the lesson about their leaders.
For the SWP on the other hand, the united front is purely a means of building the ‘mass movement’—with the current leaders. This leads them to raise only demands and slogans that are acceptable to those leaders. Inevitably, that means not raising the demands that are actually necessary.
Although this wrong method has produced countless trade union affiliations to SUTR, there has been almost no mobilisation of trade union members for their actions. The fake left leaders are allowed to present themselves as champions of anti-racism without a word of criticism, let alone demands for action.
Revolutionary strategy
The biggest failing of the pamphlet, however, is that it does not link the anti-fascist struggle to the fight for socialism. There is no mention of the need for a revolutionary party, nor even of the need to overthrow capitalism, the system that gives birth to fascism.
This is no accidental oversight. For the SWP the answer to fascism is anti-fascism, just as the answer to exploitation is militant trade unionism; the party is merely the organisation that binds different struggles together.
Trotsky was clear on this point. The answer to fascism is not anti-fascism, but socialism. The party of reactionary despair must be met by the party of revolutionary hope. How else are we to win workers away from the fake radicalism of Farage and Robinson? Certainly not by presenting ourselves as defenders of the Labour and union leaders.
We must do this, however, concretely, putting forward demands and forms of organisation that lead workers and youth towards the fight for socialism: black self-defence groups; taxing the rich and confiscating their property to pay for housing and social services for all; a rank and file movement to oust the bureaucracy and transform the unions into vehicles for socialism; and above all working class internationalism not only to welcome refugees and migrants but to overthrow global capitalism.
Some of these may appear distant goals, but if we don’t start fighting for them now, in today’s struggles, they will remain distant. Anti-fascism without anti-capitalism is a project doomed to endless repetition. Those at the sharp end of today’s fascist advance, migrants, Muslims, LGBT+ people, cannot afford to put off the final reckoning with these murderous thugs.
