The present period of capitalist crisis has created circumstances conductive to the growth of fascism and the ‘popularisation’ of racist ideas. At the same time recent events have shown that there are increasing numbers prepared to openly oppose the National Front and its activists. The ANL carnivals are sufficient evidence of that.
However this anti-racist, anti-fascist energy stands to be dissipated unless it is welded into a force capable of actually smashing the fascist threat. Since Lewisham, the successful mass mobilisation that prevented the N.F. from marching, the left (in particular the SWP and IMG) has retreated into a liberal, propagandist approach to fighting fascism as exemplified by the Anti-Nazi League and the Anti-Racist, Anti-Fascist Co-ordinating Committee. The size of individual ANL demonstrations and dances must not blind revolutionaries as to the real tasks facing us — to forge a Workers United Front against racism and fascism capable of integrating the political and physical struggle necessary for the working class counter-offensive.
All past experience has shown that the central objective of the fascist movement is the complete destruction of working class organisation for the benefit of capitalism. Fascism first arises as the organisational and political expression of the exasperated middle strata and recruits into its ranks sections of the lumpen proletariat. The politics of fascism are thus the politics of the middle strata; nationalism, racialism, anti-communism and a yearning to return to the days of the ‘free-market’ economy. In short, fascist politics are a grotesque reflection of the ideology of the capitalist class. It is therefore the case that the fascists cannot be opposed on the basis of bourgeois political conceptions but only by policies which reflect the interests of the working class, ie internationalism, anti-racism and communism. It is also the case that the struggle against fascism is part and parcel of the battle between capital and labour. This strategic alliance between anti-fascists and sections of capital are not just ludicrous but positively suicidal.
The workers united front must be capable of striking at the roots of fascism by opposing racism and nationalism in all their manifestations. At the moment it is the Tories who are making the major gains through racism with the aim of weakening the labour movement by dividing it along lines of ethnic origin. But the Labour Party, with their appeals to the national interest, are equally complicit in stoking the racist fire. The recent select committee report calling for tighter immigration controls was as much the responsibility of the Labourites (in particular ANL sponsor Sidney Bidwell), as the Tories. To oppose racism and nationalism head-on, the workers united front must adopt a position of opposition to all immigration controls. Any position short of this gives tacit support to the oppression of ethnic minorities in the working class. Further we must argue that there is no place in the labour movement for those who wish to weaken or destroy it. All fascists and active racists should be prevented from taking official positions (or removed if they already hold them) and expelled from the union.
We should not forget that in essence fascism is a military force. The racist murders and attacks, the bomb attacks on workers organisations and individual anti-fascist militants all testify to this. We cannot and must not rely upon the State to protect us. We should not be so foolish as to believe that the police will protect black people or that the state can ban the fascists. In fact the police defend the fascists and systematically intimidate immigrant communities; the State as an arm of capitalism cannot and will not ban fascism. Where bans have been imposed they must have affected all marches and served to demobilise the anti-fascist offensive. We must build active support in the labour movement for black self-defence. In recognising the military nature of fascism, the working class cannot allow the fascists to organise. We have to be prepared to prevent fascists from holding meetings and every time fascists appear on the streets anti-fascists should be mobilising to stop them marching. Effectively, this means we give the fascists no platform for their racialist outpourings.
The existing anti-fascist organisations are manifestly incapable of fulfilling these tasks. The ANL, whilst having drawn 80,000 people to a carnival cannot by its nature seriously tackle the questions of racialism or physical confrontation with the fascists.
It is a popular frontist coalition of those calling themselves socialist and even ‘revolutionary’ and non-working class elements. It’s programme is one sufficient to hold this motley alliance together and, as such, inevitably cannot mount any serious challenge to the mobilisations of the fascists. Its platform is pacifist — openly courting a response after Lewisham ‘among the many thousands of people who hated the Nazis but disapproved of the Socialist Workers Party’s strategy of physically confronting them on the streets.’ (A. Callinicos in Socialist Review No 3) It is no surprise therefore that, the very day after the first ANL Carnival the fascists of the N.F. marched in London with no resistance from the ANL.
Socialist Challenge argued, very dishonestly, that the organisers of the carnival did not know the exact time, place and date of the fascist march and so were unable to mobilise against it. Socialist Worker was content to comment the National Front could only put together a few hundred bedraggled people, who had to march in the rain whereas the ANL had 80,000 people and sunshine as well! Peter Hain (the ANL press officer) in his interview in Socialist Challenge No 45 came closer to giving the game away when he said: ‘It was a secret march that we’d got wind of before. But realistically, all the energy and organisation that had gone into the carnival had just exhausted everyone.’
In reality the ANL would have had no physical difficulty in organising a counter-demonstration — rather it was politically incapable. If the ANL were to openly support physical confrontation with the fascists its liberal and Stalinist supporters would be driven away.
The kow-towing of the ANL to second-world war chauvinist propoganda — ‘Hitler’s policies led straight to the Second World War… Tyndall is trying to do the same.’ (ANL leaflet ‘Why you should oppose the National Front’), their open alliance with those, such as Sid Bidwell, who are complicit in institutionalised racialist legislative recommendations render them incapable of fighting the fascist and racist threat. Alex Callinicos made this plain when he argued that ‘in the abstract, perfectly correct’ (sic) demands such as ‘opposition to all immigration controls and no platform for fascists’ must be opposed as policy positions for the ANL because, if adopted, they would ‘kill it stone dead’. An organisation that faces death if it adopts the only policies that can lay the basis for an effective fight against racism and fascism is an obstacle to the building of a Workers United Front. Only by driving out of its ranks its chauvinist and racist supporters could the ANL take a step forward — and this the ‘revolutionaries’ of the SWP will fight tooth and nail to prevent.
In short the ANL is an alliance subordinated to acceptable bourgeois politics in the search for alliance on a pacifist and nationalist programme. The fact that the ANL has made a turn to workplace orientation does not in the least alter this. The result can only be to tie whole sections of workers willing to fight fascism politically and organisationally to a bankrupt coalition with sections of the bourgeoisie.
Recognising the ANL as a roadblock, as well as the enormous potential existing to take the struggle against racism and fascism forward, Workers Power attended the Anti-Racist, Anti-Fascist Co-ordinating Committee conference with clear and concrete proposals. Our motion called for the ARAFCC to not affiliate to the ANL while supporting individual ANL activities on their merits. Instead we called for the ARAFCC to summon a Labour Movement delegate conference to lay the organisational and political basis for a Workers United Front against Racism and Fascism. ARAFCC was to approach the ANL to ensure joint cooperation in building the conference while fighting for a principled programme against that of the ANL.
The forces in attendance at the ARAFCC conference could have prevented a stampede into the popular frontism of the ANL. They could have laid the political basis for a principled alternative. They chose not to do so. Instead a resolution prompted by the IMG was passed uncritically endorsing the ANL and offering ARAFCC assistance. While dreaming of a division of labour within which the ANL fought the fascists and the ARAFCC took on racism, it too refused to adopt a principled programme with which to challenge the racist threat. Compounded by organisational proposals from the petty-bourgeois Big Flame group which commit the ARAFCC to building ‘regions first’ in preparation for a national federal structure the ARAFCC failed every single test before it. It is left as no more than a collection of local committees, usually composed of interested individuals committed to liberal anti-racist campaigns and with no perspective for rooting itself in the labour movement.
For our refusal to bow to the populism of the ANL and the liberalism of the ARAFCC we were roundly condemned as sectarians. But it was not just the IMG who condemned us — so too did the I-CL. While recognising the limitations of the ANL they describe it in the leaflet given out at the conference as ‘a big step forward’, arguing for those present at the ARAFCC conference to constitute themselves as a left faction inside the ANL. Their resolution explicitly called for local Anti-Racist Committees to become local branches of the ANL.
What the I-CL forget to say, in their haste to be on the left of the ‘new movement’ billed by all from the Guardian to Socialist Challenge and Socialist Worker as bound to be the ‘biggest thing’ since CND, is that the ANL is an obstacle to mobilising new forces against the fascist threat, that it was, and is, the task of communists to direct those forces who want to fight fascism away from pacifist and chauvinist leaders of the ANL towards the building of a Workers United Front against Racism and Fascism. The ARAFCC had an opportunity to do just that, it failed to do so.
For our part Workers Power will continue to oppose any organisational and political subordination of local anti-racist committees to the ANL while fighting against all manifestations of cretinous parochialism and liberalism in the local committees. We will lend our support to all fighting to force the ANL to break with its chauvinist and pacifist supporters, to adopt a principled programme against the racists and fascists. Unless these tasks are performed, are fought for vigorously and as a matter of urgency, the tremendous success of the Lewisham mobilisation, the real possibility of drawing a whole new layer of anti-racist working class youth into struggle will have been squandered in the popular front of the ANL.
