In periods of developing economic and political crisis those strata who possess neither the collective strength of the organised working class nor the economic and political power of the bourgeoisie are forced into ever more desparate circumstances. They are powerless against inflation as it eats away their savings and their capital, the possibility of climbing the social ladder becomes ever more remote for them.
The existence of a petty-bourgeoisie in desparate straits is not, in itself, however, sufficient to build a Fascist movement. More than desperation and frustration are required. Fascists must instil the confidence, the belief that the petty bourgeoisie and sections of the lumpen proletariat rabble can be a force to be reckoned with. This confidence cannot grow as long as the principle protagonists in the class war are determined, indeed capable, of settling accounts in their own interests. But, if that struggle is in stalemate, if the working class is strong but incapable of settling accounts with capitalism then Fascism can grow apace. The growth and scale of Fascism is evidence of the defensive strength but offensive weakness of the working class. Under its banner Fascism can assemble not only the petty-bourgeoisie but sections of the lumpen proletariat and the most reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie for action against the workers’ organisations.
What separates Fascism from other right wing formations is that it seeks to build a mass movement to impose its policies by direct action and force. At the centre of all Fascist movements, therefore, must be the street gangs, the picketbreak squads, the street armies and marches. From the beginning street marches and intimidatory gangs are vital to instil confidence into those who, as individuals, are insignificant and unorganised. Such marches must have a direct target to attack and humiliate.
This is not to say that marching on the streets, the formation of intimidatory gangs are the sum total of Fascist activity. They are supported by all the traditional forms of political activity, work in the unions, leafletting, the formation of racist community associations, newspaper selling and electioneering, wherever the Labour movement leaves them openings. Of course, Fascism only comes to state power at the behest of the bourgeoisie. The historic role of Fascism is as the mailed fist of the counter-revolution smashing the working class movement. Only in certain very specific situations, therefore, does the bourgeoisie place state power in the hands of the Fascist gangs.
Essentially the National Front represent a small and embryonic Fascist movement. This must give us no grounds for complacency. There are important differences between contemporary Britain and the Weimar Germany from which the Nazis emerged. Unlike the Nazis the National Front cannot look to masses of discontented demobbed soldiers to form the core of their street armies. In Britain the vast majority of those whose objective social situation could drive them to Fascism, are not yet desparate enough to take to the streets against immigrants and the working class’ organisations. The Tory Party, with its institutionalised right wing, is capable of articulating the demands and grievances of small businessmen, the self-employed, to a significant degree.
However, the objective capitalist crisis, the racism and bankruptcy of the Labour leaders, makes possible the formation of a Fascist nucleus in Britain today, a nucleus that is larger and more relevant than at any time since the Thirties.
The essential link between the small number of trained Fascists existing in Britain in the Sixties and the layers of potentially enraged and organised Fascist support is racism. By linking falling living standards, decaying social services with immigration, Fascism can feed on and grow from that reservoir of racist culture nurtured under British imperialism. Unlike the ‘respectable racism’ of the Tory and Labour politicians, the National Front pose the need for direct action, for intimidation and force.
The National Front is, at present, precisely a ‘front’ — a training school for the Nazis. The discrepancy between their vote, their paper membership and the actually declining numbers that the NF can mobilise for their marches, are an indication of the problems facing the trained Fascist leaders, and the tasks facing the Left. The main problem for the NF at present is how to maintain their precarious ‘right’ to parade and march, to use that ‘right’ to draw their waverers and stragglers into the intimidatory street marches. Such ‘action’ can appeal to the hardened Fascist thugs, to sections of white youth outside the influence of the labour movement (it is no accident that the NF are at present making a prioritised bid to build a youth movement) to the lumpens and the committed. However, their ability to transform electoral supporters, routine NF members is threatened every time the working class organises physically to prevent their marches.
The Front’s electoral performance has been weaker in all areas where the labour movement has organised against them on a significant scale. Wood Green, Ladywood, Bradford and Leicester are all examples of this. The low turn-out of National Front members at Lewisham (around 600) show the difficulties facing the NF leadership in mobilising their street forces against certain physical resistance from the labour movement and sections of the black community. The rout of the NF march in Lewisham underlines the necessity to mobilise in order to impose no platform for the fascists – no marching, no selling, no meetings. It also shows that significant sections of young workers and black youth can be won to fight alongside revolutionaries on a scale large enough to stop the fascists.
Once again the lesson that Trotsky drew from the rise of Fascism in Germany — that it will only grow if it is allowed to, if it is allowed to gain control of the streets, has been proven. What other lessons must the Left learn, or re-learn?
Although we can halt the Front through counter-mobilisations, this is not the same as destroying Fascism once and for all. Fascism is rooted in the objective crisis of capitalism, the conditions for its growth remain. The enormous strength of the working class is dissipated, misled by reformist leaders. The argument that the fight against Fascism is the fight against capitalism — the fight for workers’ power, is no mere rhetoric.
It is in this situation that a bitter struggle must be waged in the workers’ movement against those – certain black community leaders, the Stalinists and the Labour Party lefts, who argue that the campaign against the National Front should be directed to persuading the capitalist state to ban the National Front. At a time when Lewisham, and the mobilisation in preparation for the Front’s Tameside march show the real possibility of halting the forward march of the British fascists all reliance on state forces will only play the role of positively disorienting and demobilising the anti-fascist forces.
The bourgeoisie will never ban fascism, will never dismantle fascist organisations or seriously impede their growth. Whilst the capitalist class looks to fascist organisations to maintain its power only in specific situations, it always sees the fascist gangs as a potential auxiliary and aid in the class battle. A developing fascist organisation, in a period of mounting social crisis, is a potential weapon that the bourgeoisie will not discard. In the 1930s, and again at Tameside, the State forces intervened in the conflict between the workers movement and the fascists in order to prevent the working class organising to stamp out fascism and extend and develop its own strength.
The very state forces being called on to implement such a ban are organised against the working class in every key struggle, their purpose is of course to defend the interests of the capitalist class. It is in fact to sow illusions in the neutrality of these forces to suggest that they are a neutral weapon which can be used against the fascist organisations, and will “protect” the black community and the workers’ movement.
To call on the bourgeoisie to ban the fascists is to abdicate the responsibility of revolutionaries to mobilise the only force that could stop fascism — the working class movement and the immigrants — organised to impose no platform for fascists.
The Tameside ban
In the aftermath of Lewisham the Labour Government and the police moved to ban the National Front march in Tameside. Predictably the Morning Star proclaimed the ban as a victory and the North-West Region of the TUC took it as a signal to call off their planned anti-racist demonstration. Less predictably the largest groups to the left of the CP, the SWP(GB) and the IMG both responded by welcoming the ban whilst criticising only its application to the meetings of the left.
Why was the ban in Tameside imposed? Was it aimed at preventing the National Front from organising? The ban was not, and could not have been, aimed at stopping the fascists. What concerned the police and the forces of “law and order” was that whole sections of young blacks and young workers were mobilising to fight alongside the left to physically stop the Front. When Merlyn Rees and the chiefs of police talk of “preventing violence” they mean preventing the breaking up of the Front’s march by organised anti-fascists. The ban served to prevent the left from organising its forces, from settling accounts with the NF again. That is why it is not an unfortunate or accidental side affect that the left was banned too, as both the Socialist Worker and Socialist Challenge have implied. It was in fact the central object of the state forces.
The SWP has hailed the ban as a victory. Their only difference with the CP and the Labour Lefts has been to argue that it was the militant struggle at Lewisham, not peaceful marches and protests that secured this victory: the Thameside ban. In this sphere of activity, as in the economic struggle, the SWP turned to the reformists and argued that only through militant tactics can reformist goals be achieved. Despite the militancy of their tactics this summer the SWP had no answer to the Tameside ban concentrating instead on organising a victory demonstration in Manchester.
The IMG and Socialist Challenge while claiming the ban on the Front to be a victory opposed the ban imposed on the left. In this way not only did they fail to understand the real meaning and object of the Tameside ban they too have no alternative to the “ban the National Front” campaign of the reformist left and the smug complacency of labour officialdom when the ban was imposed. The task of revolutionaries was to expose and oppose the Tameside ban, to oppose all reliance on the state machine in the fight against fascism. To that purpose the revolutionary left, and its largest component the SWP in particular should have called for a national united campaign against the ban and for no platform for fascists. Such a campaign of meetings and demonstrations could have posed the only alternative to the legalistic and pacifist campaign of the lefts and the TU bureaucracy, could have prevented the Tameside ban serving its purpose of demobilising or fragmenting the forces of black youth and the working class prepared to fight the Front. Such successes as were secured at Lewisham are, by their nature temporary unless they serve to break sections of the workers movement and the black community from reformist and pacifist illusions in the state forces. No movement can be organised to take the working class forward in the period ahead without that struggle. Despite the successes secured by the Lewisham mobilisation, and despite the confidence of the left since then, and the evident disarray in the fascist ranks, the failure of the revolutionary left to campaign against the Tameside ban was therefore a serious political setback in the struggle against fascism.
In fighting Fascism we have to develop methods of struggle which strengthen the working class on all its battlefronts. While we must build a working class anti-Fascist movement this must be done as one part of organising the fighting strength of the class as a whole. This is the keynote of our approach to anti-Fascist work.
We are for a principled Labour movement united front against Fascist organisation. The central element of this activity must be collaboration to impose NO PLATFORM FOR FASCISTS — no selling, no marching and no meetings — in all areas. No platform must mean organised national and local caucuses in all unions to drive the Fascists out of the unions. In the Labour Party we have to drive out all active racists.
Such united fronts in the areas, nationally co-ordinated and focussed, must be composed of bona fide delegates of Labour movement organisations and the fighting bodies of the immigrant communities.
We must not simply counterpose the Labour movement ‘sociologically’ to the pacifist projects of the Stalinists and Labour Left. We must counterpose a principled class programme that can both unite and equip those sections of the Labour movement prepared to act, to organise, against the Fascist menace. We will fight in all committees committed to the No Platform position for a programme of:
- Opposition to all immigration controls
- For Labour movement support for black self defence
- For the right of immigrant workers to caucus in the Trade Unions and Labour Movement.
This programme is not optional — without it an effective working class campaign cannot be waged. The attacks on immigrant organisations and Left groups, the attempts by the Fascists to build a youth movement and Trade Union caucuses are an urgent warning to the working class movement. The successes of Lewisham and Ladywood must not blind us to the need for ongoing principled work, on a united basis, to defend the Left and immigrant organisations, to systematically destroy the organised base of Fascism.
