[From the new edition of the pamphlet, 1978]
The republication of Ted Grant’s classic pamphlet The Menace of Fascism comes at a timely moment. Written in 1948 when the relics of Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts were attempting to regroup their battered forces in the grim “austerity” days of the postwar Labour Government, its republication today coincides with the re-emergence of Fascism as an issue for the British Labour Movement. The National Front and other Fascist splinter-groups like the National Party and the British Movement have reared their snouts with greater assurance than at any time since Mosley’s days.
In the 1977 municipal elections, the NF won 120,000 votes in the Greater London area alone. Nor have Fascist. activities been confined to the electoral plane. They have swaggered arrogantly through immigrant areas in a deliberate attempt to provoke violent clashes. Every day come new cases of Fascist brutalities up and down the country. Immigrants have been punched, kicked, knifed, clubbed, and thrown through plate-glass windows. Acid and nerve-gas canisters have been thrown in their faces, and their homes and clubs have been petrol-bombed. In isolated cases trade union militants too have been viciously attacked.
These ugly throwbacks to earlier expressions of reaction are paralleled by the murderous activities of the MSI in Italy and the first stirrings of Fascist thuggery in other countries, notably in France where violent attacks on North African workers have taken place. The scale of these attacks should not be exaggerated, but nevertheless they represent a sinister threat for the future which will be ignored by the Labour Movement at its peril.
At the same time, politically conscious activists within the workers’ organisations have reflected on the lessons of the horrific defeat suffered by the Chilean workers in 1973, the most bloody in the chain of defeats in Latin America, stretching from Brazil in 1964 to Argentina in 1976.
The struggle of the working class to overthrow capitalist rule and clear the way to the creation of a classless society demands the utmost theoretical clarity, in understanding the obstacles placed in its path. Its political awareness can only by blunted by the self-indulgent ravings of petit-bourgeois rebels, like the member of the Baader-Meinhof gang who bade his mother farewell because “the felt stifled by Fascist society” and was off to “join the revolutionaries”. Any West German worker would correctly regard as madmen those who are unable to differentiate between Hitler and Schmidt, between life under Nazi tyranny and life under the Social Democratic-Liberal coalition.
Marxists do not loosely bandy words about, or use “Fascism” as an indiscriminate term of abuse, not because they are pedantic but because a successful cure depends on a precise diagnosis.
No ruling class in history has ever been unduly squeamish in defence of its power. But as Ted Grant shows in this pamphlet, Fascism is more than mere repression. It is a specific. tool of capitalism in the age of its decline. This terrible epoch of war and revolution, holocausts and genocide, spawned the first regimes in history to depend on mass movements of the petit-bourgeoisie.
Capitalism in its death agonies tried to counter the growth of the Labour Movement by creating hoodlum gangs mobilised to kill shop stewards, break up picket lines and workers’ meetings, and blow up trade union headquarters. The Black Hundreds in Russia and the Freikorps in Germany were thus used as auxiliaries to the Official organs of state repression. But even these were not strong enough to smash the trade unions and stamp out every manifestation of independent activity by the working class. It took the mobilisation of a mass movement to achieve even temporarily the real goal of Fascism: the destruction of the embryo within capitalism of the future socialist society, as embodied in the traditions of the Labour Movement.
Ted Grant explains graphically how Fascism triumphed in Italy and Germany. Mussolini’s cut-throats were armed by the capitalists in response to the wave of strikes and occupations. Under police protection, the Fascisti‘ methodically smashed the Labour Movement. After the betrayal of the 1918 German revolution, – Hitler’s desperadoes also helped the state terrorise the workers. At the head of growing paramilitary movements, and equipped with limitless military and propaganda resources, Hitler and Mussolini became indispensable to the ruling class. Both wielded such power that they eventually took over the state and dismantled even the traditional bourgeois parties without meeting any serious resistance. Every element of democracy was surgically cut out. Finance capital was freed at last of the nuisance of a Labour Movement, but at the cost of relinquishing direct control of the state to arbitrary dictators.
The Capitalist State
Every state machine can be reduced to “armed bodies of men.” Even the most democratic state is a machine consisting of police, army, judges, warders, tax collectors, a permanent bureaucracy dedicated to preserving the social status quo. But the ruling class is jealous of its rights. The capitalists grudgingly accept the state as a necessary evil. But they stringently check its powers. It must not over-reach itself and encroach on their rule. They want cheap government. Red tape, extravagence, corruption, wastage, nepotism and other inevitable consequences of bureaucratism combine to rob them of “their” profits. That is why they have evolved a complex system of checks and balances, public accountability, separation of powers, etc. which together make up Parliamentary democracy.
In the modern epoch capitalism, groaning and creaking, can survive only by leaning more and more heavily on the state, to defend its. property against enemies at home and abroad and also to invest capital, bail out moribund companies, finance research, provide services, etc. But still the capitalists are alarmed at the growth of this monster the state, and howl for the pruning of the bureaucracy.
But they do not always have the power to call their political and administrative servants to account. In periods of emergency, or especially of revolution, when the contending classes can be poised so near to equilibrium, the state rises above the constraints of its masters. Where a decadent ruling class presides over a declining social system it suffers crises in which its authority is discredited. It is decrepit, corrupt, split into wrangling factions. In those situations a disciplined party of the rising class can lead the way to a new society. But if it cannot rise to its task, the warring classes are locked in deadlock. The “armed bodies of men” can act as independent arbiters, playing off the mutually antagonistic factions and classes, and balancing between them, while ultimately defending the existing property relations. This is Bonapartism – a military-police dictatorship.
A narrowly-based military dictatorship cannot for long dam up the tide of history in the advanced capitalist countries, with their powerful Labour Movement. De Gaulle’s mild Bonapartism was impotent when it came to the revolutionary events of May 1968, and even the Greek Junta was pitifully incapable of stabilising society.
The paradox of the situation is that capitalism can only survive by turning the workers into slaves, and that cannot be done by decrees from on top. But in present conditions it has no hope of resorting to a new mass movement, crazed with mystical fanaticism and thirsting for revenge on the workers, which alone could dismantle the organisations built over years of sacrifice.
Hitler, Mussolini and other Fascists had money from Big Business, and the complicity of the police. But they also had resources more difficult to obtain: great private armies, recruited from those strata of the population standing midway between the two decisive social classes. Never has Fascism succeeded in obtaining a foothold in the trade unions. On the other hand, the monopoly capitalists despise them as ranting loud-mouths. They hire them much as dance-hall managers hire bouncers or protection gangs,soon to be trapped in their clutches themselves.
Fascism feeds on the prejudices of small businessmen, squeezed by the monopolies; peasants bled by the banks; intellectuals tired of Parliamentary hypocrisy; unemployed youth seeking an outlet for their energies; paupers, spivs and racketeers…Out of this raw material, seducing it with radical demagogy against the trusts, magical incantations about national glory, racialist poison, etc. it fashions a human battering-ram.
These strata are mostly the natural allies of the workers. They are doomed under capitalism. In their hopeless predicament, they instinctively look first to the Labour Movement as the natural force for change. If a conservative labour leadership fails to offer them action, they subside into despair and are prey to the demagogy of any adventurers. They have not the workers’ ingrained loyalty to the Labour Movement, and thus their very discontent can be exploited by the ruling class. But first the workers’ parties have the chance to win them. In Russia, a small working class with a revolutionary leadership was able to draw behind it millions of small peasants. In contrast, the German Revolution brought to power a ‘responsible’ Labour Leadership which used as its alibi the need to appease the middle class by pandering to its prejudices. The result was that the middle class in frenzy eventually rallied around the Nazi stormtroopers who at least looked as if they meant business, and the – strongest working class in Europe was enslaved, without Hitler even needing to fire a shot.
The Nazis were the direct descendants of the volunteer counter-revolutionary mercenaries, the ‘“Freikorps”, which bore the swastika as their emblem and which were actually organised, armed and financed by the Social-Democratic leaders in 1918-23 to disarm and massacre workers and thus “restore order”.
Fascism cannot be switched on and off like a tap. As Trotsky explained,one of the necessary conditions for its existence is ‘“‘the despair of the petit-bourgeoisie, its yearning for change, the mass neurosis of the petit-bourgeoisie, its readiness to believe in miracles, its readiness for violent measures; and the growth of its hostility towards the proletariat, which has deceived its expectations.”
After Fascism is victorious it loses its mass base. In Germany for instance, the SA which was the Nazi’s army of murderers and thugs but which consisted of perverted “idealists”, who seriously wanted to break up the monopolies and depose the “Establishment” were disarmed and liquidated in the furious ‘Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, one year after Hitler’s putsch. This was the price for the support of the generals. The mercenaries were thus ditched as soon as their dirty work was done. The middle class sees the monopolies prospering as never before. But by then it is too late.
The fascist apparatus of police tortures and concentration camps is intact. All resistance is broken. But its mass network of spies and informers has vanished. The regime degenerates into a Bonapartist police state, surviving through the inertia following a catastrophic defeat.
It is characteristic of Fascism that the historical memory of the class is almost blotted out. It takes a generation or more for the workers to renew the class struggle, build underground trade unions, learn Socialism afresh. Hence the longevity of Fascism in Spain and Portugal, where its collapse was not hastened by military defeat as in Germany and Italy.
The capitalists are assured of cheap labour, but they pay a heavy price in surrendering control to a greedy and demented clique. Alarmed at Fascism’s irresponsibility they are powerless to intervene. The capitalists prefer to entrust the power, when they cannot wield it through their traditional channels, to the Generals, who have a thousand and one links to the capitalists through family relationships, intermarriage, a common education, investments in industry and the banks, common clubs and restaurants, etc.; but by the same token these cannot inspire the same devotion as the mob demagogues of Fascism. In extremity, the capitalists try to use the Generals to reassert control. They succeeded in replacing Mussolini with Marshal Badoglio in 1943, with a mandate to capitulate to the Allies. The 1944 „Generals’ plot” against Hitler was also the produce of nothing more noble than the naked cash calculation of the German capitalists that Hitler was imperilling their wealth. Spain also degenerated into a ramshackle corrupt police-state.
Under Juan Carlos it has become the most precarious and impotent of Bonapartist regimes.
Military Dictatorship
Even a military dictatorship needs at least passive support. The issue was explained in “The Times” in early 1974. Faced with the miners’ strike, the Tory election defeat, the minority government, and the troubles in Northern Ireland, and with the Chilean coup fresh in their minds, the ruling class seriously debated the feasibility of a British coup. First a strategic expert argued that the army had the resources to take over easily. In reply, a professor from Sussex University – and such people are paid to curb and moderate the policies of the more hot headed elements within the ruling class – reminded them that logistic considerations are not enough, that Kornilov’s putsch provoked the Bolshevik insurrection, that the German Kapp marched into Berlin to be greeted by a general strike and could not find even a stenographer to take down his ‘decrees’. The discussion was concluded with an article explaining that a coup in Britain would be preceded by a long period of strife, in which the Army would be called upon to aid the police in coping with mass pickets, food riots, etc. The General Staff in time would have to be represented at Cabinet meetings to offer opinions on policy, and eventually the military would lose patience with the politicians’ Parliamentary niceties and would sweep them aside. This is in fact the origin of most military regimes.
Greece
What happens when the military take power without first securing for themselves a certain social foundation, was eloquently demonstrated in Greece. The King, the royalist Generals, Karamanlis and other serious representatives of the ruling class were justifiably angry, when their own carefully prepared strategic plans to ride out the first stages of a Popular Front regime and only later set in motion a contingency NATO mechanism for a coup, were rashly pre-empted by the colonels in liaison with the CIA. Why was this? They had not become democrats overnight. But as strategists of capitalism they had broader historical horizons. They were furious at the indecent haste of those Colonel Blimps, who vented all their prejudices by such absurd acts as the banning of long hair and miniskirts. They realised that society is too complex to be run by screaming sergeant-majors stamping their feet and commanding the people to ‘stand to attention’. The very brutality of the dictatorship, while temporarily stunning the workers, would only tilt all Greece to the left.
The seven unstable years of the junta proved how right they were. Greece lurched from one crisis to the next. It changed in turn from a monarchy to a Regency to a Republic. Far from taming the workers, the junta feverishly rolled banknotes off the printing press to appease them. 1973 saw student riots, then a naval mutiny, then a virtual uprising at the Polytechnic, and finally a new coup! The hated police chief Ioannidis shouldered Papadopoulos aside and cancelled the promised elections. Like the Spanish police in 1975-6 he acted not out of devotion to an ideal, but out of sheer rat panic. Then came the desperate adventure of the coup in Cyprus. The regime found itself embroiled in a war with the Turks. The ignominious end of the junta underlined its instability. Not even waiting to submit their resignations, Ioannidis’ puppet Ministers simply packed their bags and fled, muttering: “We are a ridiculous Government“. All that the junta achieved in the long run was to usher in a prolonged period of pre-revolutionary crisis lasting from 1974 to the present day.
Chile
In contrast, the Chilean generals, in consultation with the capitalists of Chile and the USA, carefully prepared the ground for their coup. When General Vaux, shortly before the 1970 elections, tried to stage a coup, the US State Department advised him to wait. Allende presided over Chile for three years, nationalising substantial sectors of the economy and doling out reforms, eating deep into the vitals of capitalism. The capitalists bit their lips and plotted their revenge. They had extracted from Allende a solemn promise not to tamper with their State – the armed forces and the judiciary – or their press. So they could afford to bide their time while the CIA “destabilised” and the Patria y Libertad sabotaged the economy. Allende dared not take socialist measures in reply. Reaction rubbed the noses of the middle class into the resulting chaos. When the Generals took over, they had the tolerance if not sympathy of broad strata of society. This gave them greater confidence and freedom of action than their Greek counterparts, who in fear of the workers had to keep looking over their shoulders. The very fact that the revolution had gone so far in 1970-3 forced the Generals to inflict all the more ferocious measures of repression.
Is Chile then a Fascist state? Pinochet and his henchmen are Fascist scum, vowing to “‘cut out the cancer of Marxism”. But so was Papadopoulos, who also swore to “‘cure Greece of communism”. He failed abjectly! To destroy the only productive class cannot be done simply at the dictate of a few Fascist officers. With inflation up to 700% the middle class feel cheated. They detest the junta. Even the Christian Democratic leadership, which invited the coup has denounced the regime. Meanwhile, Chile today, only four years after the coup, has been rocked by its first strike wave. What eloquent testimony to the power and heroism of the working class!
Pinochet and his gang have Fascist ambitions, but not the mass instrument required to carry them out. The Labour Movement has not been destroyed, but merely clubbed on the head. It can recover far quicker from such blows. The counter-revolution has been savage, but it has rained down from on top. Its indiscriminate ferocity reveals its underlying weakness. Without a network of informers, penetrating every block and every factory, even the most blood thirsty of regimes cannot turn the clock back a generation as did those of Mussolini, Salazar, Hitler or Franco.
MILITANT predicted in 1967 that the Greek junta would not last more than 5-7 years. The same is true of the Chilean regime. It has killed without distinction, and burned books at random – consigning to the bonfires books on Cubism, for fear that they would spread Castro’s pernicious influence! It has had to appeal to factory managers to act as spies, and school principals to inform on pupils, teachers and parents. Such a regime lacks the human resources to shape a whole epoch.
On the other hand it is more repressive than a classic Bonapartist regime. The slaughter expresses the desperate position of capitalism. This regime cannot afford to balance judiciously between the classes. It is a protection gang acting on behalf of the monopolies.
Fascist regimes have come to power in all kinds of ways. In Germany it took power without firing a shot, and then proceeded systematically to exterminate the active strata of the working class. In Spain it began with a military revolt, followed by a civil war and an aftermath of executions which together led to the slaughter of a million workers. In Portugal, it was a relatively bloodless coup, which then ruled by a policy of indiscriminate torture. What they had in common was that they threw history back for decades.
By contrast, even the most bloodthirsty regimes today, such as Chile or Indonesia, cannot. count on more than a temporary breathing-space of stability. The balance of forces internationally is tipped so heavily towards revolution, that no stable Fascist tyranny anywhere in the world can be consolidated. And this is the ultimate purpose of political classification. The contradiction between Fascism and Bonapartism reduces itself to the burning questions – how strong are our enemies? What are the prospects for their overthrow?
What will be the effects of the Chilean junta? Like the Greek dictatorship, it will disintegrate. But the masses will not just start again where they left off in the days of the Popular Unity. Then the activists were alert to the threatening catastrophe, questioning their parties’ programme, building the ‘“cordones“. (workers’ councils), stockpiling arms in the factories. Soldiers, sailors and even junior officers were trying to organise. But the workers’ political level has been lowered by the slaughter of so many militants, and their grinding poverty will make them remember the Popular Unity with nostalgia as a Golden Age.
Its failings will be forgiven by the mass of workers, even though the most politically conscious will have learned the lessons of 1970-3. Fascism is a brake on history, and even in trying to implement a Fascist programme the junta has temporarily destroyed the workers’ cohesion. Only when the economy revives will the workers again feel themselves as a class, rising above their misery to a revolutionary perspective.
Changed Balance of Forces
Reaction today can go no“ further than it has in Chile. Bloody as it is, no military regime could last long today – although for that very reason it would use the opportunity to massacre millions of worker militants. The postwar boom in the advanced capitalist countries has whittled away the traditional reserves of capitalism. Before the war the European ruling class could enlist innumerable blacklegs from among the middle class. But now peasants and small businessmen have been largely wiped out; the white collar workers are organised; the. students are looking to the left. The working class in Germany has grown from 40% in 1933 to about 75% today. The peasantry has shrunk to 8%. After three decades without a serious defeat, the workers are immeasurably strengthened. The social reserves of capitalism have been fatally eroded by the very process of the postwar economic upswing. Society is polarised so grotesquely into the camps of Wage Labour and Capital that it looks like the prototype blueprint of the general social trends mapped out in the “Communist Manifesto.”
Immigrants
At the same time, one of the most important social effects of the boom, besides drawing into industrial activity millions of people at home from the intermediate strata of society, was to suck into booming Britain and Europe millions of immigrants from the Caribbean, the Indian Subcontinent, Southern and Eastern Europe, North Africa, etc. Capitalism not only distorted the economies of entire countries by making them dependent on single crops; it regimented whole populations as fodder for specialised labour in the advanced capitalist countries, e.g. Mauritians and Fillipinos recruited into the British hospitals.
This ensured the ruling class a constant supply of cheap labour. But it also gave it the chance to recruit an army of super-oppressed workers who could be denied many of those rights conceded to the indigenous workers with their- long traditions of trade union organisation. Thus we have the Immigration Act (1971) and even the repatriation of surplus manpower at times of recession. For instance during the slump of 1974-76, 870,000 migrant workers from Southern Europe went back home from the Common Market countries.
Racialism
A necessary auxiliary weapon to help entrench this policy of discrimination, and where necessary “Help them on their way” back home, is the whipping up of racialist and chauvinist prejudice. The capitalists could thus import back to their own countries their favoured device of “divide and rule“, so successfully employed to maintain their rule in the colonies, above all in the British Empire, in India, Cyprus, Palestine, the African colonies, Ireland, etc.
In any case, the existence of social strata owing no national allegiance to their own states, with a cosmopolitan and “‘rootless”’ outlook, has always been considered by the ruling class to be a threat to social cohesion.
The Monday Club, for instance, published an article praising “an ideology which would unite all classes of the nation, rich and poor, in defence Of its traditions and culture” and warning of the “harmful effect on traditional culture and society of an important politically-motivated alien community in the heart of the nation … An alien community owing no allegiance and having no ties to its host country does in fact constitute an ‘anti-nation’ within its borders.”’ [Monday World].
There have been many earlier waves of immigration of labour in capitalist society during previous boom periods – e.g. Irish peasants fleeing from famine, or Jews fleeing from pogroms in Eastern Europe (who played a similar economic role to the migrant East African Asians today.) These sections too were subject to attack. The anti-Irish riots in the 19th Century, the anti-Semitic campaigns in the first decades of this century (in which leading Tories like Winston Churchill eagerly participated, even to the extent of praising the exposure of a “worldwide Jewish conspiracy’”’ in the forged ‘Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”) culminated in the Mosleyite pogroms of the 1930s.
However, it would be false to accuse capitalism of inherent racialism. The capitalists are endemically no more racialist than they are patriotic, Christian or monogamous. Capitalism has only one prejudice – for profit. Hence, whatever the personal peccadillos of Enoch Powell, he as Minister of Health in the Tory Government of the 1950s and early 60s, was the most enthusiastic recruiting sergeant for the importation of cheap labour from the West Indies for exploitation in the hospitals of Britain.
During periods of labour shortage and of booming order books, racialism recedes into the background and remains on the level of patronising chauvinism, inherited from the old days of imperial grandeur. During the period of the post-war boom Fascism did not exist as a serious force. Sir Oswald Mosley lived in splendid isolation in Paris, occasionally attending nostalgic reunion dinners with his old friend, the Duke of Windsor, both of them no doubt dreaming of the day when they would be recalled to England. On the lunatic fringe of the Tory Party, there was the League of Empire Loyalists, its executive committee glittering with Dowager Duchesses and Major Generals. The openly Nazi outfits were nothing more than cliques of perverts and psychotics who indulged their fantasies by parading in front of mirrors in swastikas and jackboots and listening to Hitler’s speeches on records. This was, for instance, one of the more innocent pastimes of the Moors murderers. It is from this cesspool that the present leaders of the National Front, Tyndall and Webster have crawled. Their mentor, Colin Jordan’s credentials as a Fuhrer were tarnished when he was caught shoplifting three pairs of red knickers from a supermarket. It is revealing episodes like this which give an insight into the diseased nature of those groups that openly espoused the cause of Nazism.
In the last 10 years the racial issue has been systematically cultivated by the ruling class, casting a cold eye on the dangers posed by the gradual leftward move of the activists in the Labour Movement over that period. However, it is a device which it has learned to use with extreme caution and regard for the circumstances of the moment. It has cleverly exploited every retreat, every disappointment, every pause in the class struggle. And it has learned to put the issue back into cold storage whenever the movement experiences a new upsurge.
Racialism is, after all, only a particularly vile and virulent refinement of nationalism. Wherever the Labour Movement is inert, passive, dormant, at a moment of stress and insecurity, inevitably bourgeois nationalist prejudices will come to the fore. Nationalism advances and retreats in inverse ratio to the activities of the Labour Movement. In no country was racialism more rife than Imperial Russia, land of the pogrom. And yet in October 1917, the hundred nationalities of the Tsarist Empire united under the banner of the Hammer and Sickle to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Today, after half a century of Stalinist, bureaucratic rule, separatist tendencies are stronger than ever among every one of these nationalities. In Spain, forty years of Fascism has reinforced Basque and Catalan nationalism. The collapse of the Popular Front in Sri Lanka has paved the way for. an unprecedented rise in communalistic violence. In Northern Ireland, sectarianism has waxed and waned in inverse proportion to the vicissitudes of the class struggle. Scottish nationalism has become a force for the first time in decades due to the failure of the Labour leadership to solve any of the problems facing Scotland. Racial prejudice, too, can spread only to the extent that the traditions of the Labour Movement are muted or muzzled.
Powellism
It was in 1968, at a time of disappointment, after the heady successes in the elections of ‘64 and ‘66, when the Labour vote in by-elections and opinion polls had slumped to 25-28%, and the ranks of Labour’s activists were gripped in a mood of despair, that Powell’s first bombshell exploded. As the Trade Unions edged into opposition to the Labour leadership, and while the opportunity was there to exploit the atmosphere of disillusionment, the capitalist class made a conscious decision to inject a dose of racialist poison into the social bloodstream. For the next four years, Powell was elevated into a popular folk hero, his every utterance blared forth from the headlines. This only stopped once that erratic and unstable demagogue had committed the cardinal sin of voting Labour in 1974.
On a minor scale, Powell’s outburst touched an echo among the more backward strata of the working class, although this was grossly exaggerated by the media. Meat porters and other street traders have always been vulnerable to the whipping up of reactionary prejudices. But even those few dockers who marched in support of Powell could not have been won away from his cause simply by the crescendo of pious hypocrisy with which his words had been greeted by everybody from the Times to the B.B.C., to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to the Tory and Labour Front benches. They wanted answers to their absolutely justified fears for their jobs.
The rise of racialism was checked when the Trade Unions moved into action on class issues, mobilising their forces against the anti-Trade Union Government White Paper ‘In Place of Strife’, and in several major strikes. Even the surprise victory of the Tory Party in the 1970 General Election far from demoralised the Labour Movement, but spurred it into the biggest mobilisation of the class for half a century.
But at the first brief pause in the class struggle, as the Labour Movement drew breath after the exertions of the 1972 miners’ strike in which the whole Labour Movement had displayed the most sustained solidarity, the ruling class lost no time in making another ugly trial run around the issue of the Ugandan Asians, who were allegedly about to “engulf the country”. This immediately produced its due crop of beatings and petrol bomb attacks on immigrants. Within months, however, a new upsurge of the class struggle cut across this process. One mass strike after another unrelentingly hammered down on the Tory Government, until the second miners’ strike led to its overthrow in February 1974.
For three and a half years following that victory the Labour Movement has suffered the shock of the world slump, of mass unemployment, of savage cuts in real wages and in the social wage. The previous mood of confidence, almost amounting among certain sections to a syndicalist euphoria, soon gave way to a sudden lull. It was not that the movement did not have the resources to fight. It was a question of loyalty to the Labour Government and a willingness to “give it time“, and also of utter bewilderment within its ranks as to where to look for a lead. The leaders of the Labour Party had abandoned their radical postures adopted in the tail-end of the period of the Tory Government, and could offer nothing but attacks on the workers’ living standards and a flagrant abuse of their supporters’ loyalty. But the unkindest cut of all came from the “Left”? leaders whose authority had been reinforced in the struggle against the Tory Government – Tribune MPs like Michael Foot who became the main henchman of the government in its dealings with the Trade Unions, and even more so trade union leaders who had earned enormous authority in the struggles with the Tory government, figures like Hugh Scanlon, Lawrence Daly and especially Jack Jones who was the principle architect of the so-called “social contract.”
Although for three years strike figures were reduced to a minimal level and the Labour Movement was acquiescing in wage cuts, the ruling class understood that, once the dam broke, a huge tidal wave of strikes would begin. At the same time it monitored the conclusions being reached by the activists of the workers’ organisations with alarm. The vanguard of the movement was rapidly absorbing the political lessons of these events. Marxism was gaining ground in the constituencies. Up and down the country, the question of the right of recall over Labour MPs was being raised consistently for the first time, an issue symbolised above all at Newham North East. That is why the ruling class launched a campaign of interference in the internal affairs of the Labour Party and Trade Unions unprecedented since the beginning of the century. Again and again High Court Injunctions were invoked dictating how Trade Union votes should be cast at conferences, how their officials should be appointed, the method of election, the rules of GMC representation. etc. At the same time the Press has weighed in with hysterical campaigns in an attempt to determine who should be Labour candidates in elections, who should be appointed as officers at Transport House, and even who should be allowed to make up the rank and file of the Party. It is not only the particular activities of so-called “Trotskyist infiltrators” that they fear, but the general threat that the movement would take adequate measures to safeguard itself against misrepresentation by Tory infiltrators like Reg Prentice who have dominated the Parliamentary Labour Party for so long.
The ruling class eagerly cashed in on the lull in the class struggle to divert attention to the obvious scapegoats and provide a focus for reaction. Suddenly in the Spring of 1976, as if at a pre-arranged signal, a vicious press campaign designed to stir up racial prejudice was launched. This time it was not hordes of Ugandan Asians but perhaps a few hundred Malawi Asians who were, allegedly about to “flood the country”, apparently all living in „five-star luxury hotels at taxpayers’. expense’. Simultaneously the scurrilous “Hawley Report“ was published, painting lurid pictures of floods of illegal immigrants pouring into every port. A liberal seasoning of these reports with spicy stories of “‘black muggers” and „social security scroungers” produced the perfect recipe.
Immediately it had its effect in the murder of Asian youths in East London and Southall, and vicious attacks all over the country. Electorally the success of this campaign was reflected in the increased votes in municipal and by-elections for the National Front and other Fascist parties.
Immigrant Youth
But one thing that the capitalists had not reckoned on was the fighting capacity of the new generation of immigrant youth who were not prepared to touch their forelocks in gratitude to the ‘Mother Country” as their parents had done. Fresh to the realities of the class struggle, immigrant workers have learned all the better the need to organise. While trade union membership among the working class as a whole is about 50%, among immigrant workers the figure is about 60%. They have shown themselves to be the best fighters on the picket lines. A whole rash of heroic sweatshop strikes has demonstrated this, at Mansfield Hosiery, STC, Imperial Typewriters and many more. More significant still is the fighting spirit shown by black workers side by side with white workers in national strikes like those of the building workers and hospital workers in 1973. But the spirit of formerly backward immigrant workers has been symbolised best of all on the picket lines at Grunwicks. Mostly Asian women, the Grunwick workers had hardly heard of Trade Unions before they went on strike. Today, having learned the hard way the real role and function of the police, the courts, the press, the Tory Party, and the Trade Union bureaucracy, and recognising where to find inexhaustible reserves of support and solidarity from their natural allies, the Grunwick strikers have set a shining example to the whole Trade Union movement.
Especially in the last couple of years, the younger generation of immigrants has become. increasingly politicised. Political realities have obliged them to open their eyes. They are forced to think out in whose interests it is that the Press pours out racialist lies, that the police persecute and harass them, that the whole state machine is mobilised to shield the National Front from the anger of the immigrant community. And they are forced to seek out their most trustworthy allies in the fight for their sheer survival. The rise of the Indian Youth Association and the PNP Youth Movement (UK) indicate the high political level of immigrant youth today. The Southall murder marked a turning point in this process. It provoked a virtual. uprising of these youth. For days, Southall became a ‘no-go“ area. “Vigilante” groups sprang up in many immigrant areas. From that time onwards, immigrant youth were prepared to meet the provocations of the Fascists in head-on clashes.
At Wood Green, Lewisham, Brick Lane, … young immigrants were in the front-line of the counter-demonstrations which at least partially put the Fascists to flight. These confrontations were entirely unlike previous skirmishes like that at Red Lion Square in 1974. At that demonstration, as Militant said, at the time, Kevin Gately died a martyr to fascist thuggery and police violence, but a martyr also to the light-minded adventurism of romantic student sects who imagined that Fascism could be stopped in single combat with bands of „avenging angels”, instead of through the mobilisation of the Labour Movement. We always insisted that the Fascist menace could only be stamped out by mass action in the traditions of Cable Street, where half a million workers blocked Mosley’s path in October 1936.
Capitalism creates a trail of human wrecks, pauperising and bankrupting small businessmen everyday. We cannot cure all of them of their xenophobic neuroses and delusions. Only the creation of a new society based on harmonious and rational human relations can make such perversions extinct. All that we can do is to stop capitalism organising them into a fighting force, prevent them whipping up a frenzy among the petit-bourgeoisie, reinforcing their prejudices, mobilising and arming these sadists. We can keep them, off the streets. In the privacy of their own homes, they are rendered relatively harmless.
The petit-bourgeoisie is volatile by its very nature. Easily exhilarated, they are equally easily discouraged. As Ted Grant demonstrates, Hitler and Goebbels themselves admitted that the Nazis could easily have been crushed at the beginning. A petit-bourgeois movement needs to keep the momentum going of constant successes or it quickly evaporates. By its nature it has not the stamina and endurance to brave the pressure of mass hostility. One sharp lesson is enough to plunge it into rapid decline, and disintegration. Mosley’s Blackshirts never recovered from the shock of Cable Street which began its plunge into obscurity. The neo-Nazi German NPD likewise was dealt a death-blow in the late 1960s, when 20,000 trade unionists converged on their conference and put their delegates to flight. The neo-fascist CDS in Portugal suffered the same fate in 1974-5 and the process of reaction was delayed. .
The National Front
For all its vulgar boasts that it is “Britain’s fastest growing party”, and its decision to field over 300 candidates at the next election, it remains a fact that the NF has never succeeded even at a national mobilisation, with free coach trips for participants, in turning out more than 1,000 supporters on the streets. This. is the clearest possible indication that it represents merely a garbage can for the protest votes of frustrated deserters from the camps of the two major parties, who keep their prejudices secret within their polling booths The NF can never live up to its leaders’ aspirations and become a mass paramilitary fighting force capable of taking on the Trade Union movement.
Why have the NF’s loudmouthed supporters. proved so nervous about showing their real strength on the streets? Not because of the activities of the ultra-left groups on the fringes of the Labour Movement, nor because of the protests of gaggles of vicars and do-gooders wringing their hands on the sidelines, nor even because of the mobilisation of massive sections at this stage of the Labour Movement. First and foremost has been the mobilisation of local immigrant youth alongside the most politically aware militants of the Labour Movement who have taken the lead and shown the way to the organised working class.
We completely reject the pious protests of Liberals and right wing Labour leaders, like Merlyn Rees, at this absolutely justified attempt by immigrants, alongside Labour activists, to defend their communities against these swaggering bullies. It is no better for Marxists to hold up their hands in horror lamenting. that they “should have waited for the Labour Movement”. That would be to utterly misunderstand the real lessons of the 1930s. Cable Street was not a magical event, dropping out of the sky, but the outcome of a series of smaller incidents in which the vanguard of the working class were prepared to risk life and limb in the struggle to expose the nature of fascism. Even at Cable Street the local Jewish population played a major role in turning on to the streets. They were supported by hundreds of thousands of trade unionists. But at that time the ponderous official bodies of the Labour Party and the TUC stood aside. Despite Morrison’s appeals to stay away, large strata of Labour workers turned out at Cable Street. The smaller workers’ parties on the periphery of the Labour Movement also threw their energies into that great expression of proletarian solidarity – the Independent Labour Party, and .the Communist Party (which in those days recognised the necessity of physically blocking the path to the Fascists and did not like today, make moralistic appeals to them.) It goes without saying that no comparison can be made between these parties, which had the support of tens of thousands of industrial workers, and the petit-bourgeois sects of today. Cable Street was among the biggest demonstrations ever held in Britain and the local incidents at Lewisham and elsewhere are in no way comparable.
How To Fight The National Front
The LPYS and the supporters of Militant played a vital role at Lewisham and other demonstrations. As in the LPYS anti-racialism campaign of 1973-4, which culminated in the demonstration of about 3000 trade unionists, black and white, in Bradford, – which, though on a smaller scale, was a model of how to fight racialism most effectively – and as at Walthamstow in January 1974 when the LPYS successfully mobilised to fight the threat of Labour Party meetings being broken up by Fascists, so too at Lewisham and elsewhere during 1977, the LPYS were ‘able te give leadership to the energies of the unorganised black youth, where the sects were in confusion and disarray.
The sects have tried to jump on the bandwagon of immigrants’ reaction against Fascist provocation, and the capitalist Press has been only too eager to focus attention on their activities and present these clashes as private gang wars between rival Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee “extremists”, the political equivalent of football hooligans. In reality the activities of the sects have been entirely peripheral. For these interlopers, it is a desperate struggle to isolate the blacks from their natural allies,the Labour Movement. That is why they insist on usurping the organised workers’ role and portraying their own puny forces as the only protection of the immigrants against Fascism. Atter all, the only protection of the for the existence of these fringe groups comes from monitoring the first primitive stirrings of hitherto unorganised strata coming fresh into the class struggle – women, blacks, students, etc. – and try to poison them against the Labour Movement by playing on the conservative role of the bureaucracy which had previously done so little to win them into its ranks. These strata are vital auxiliaries to the embattled heavy battalions of the Labour Movement, capable at a time of revolution of the greatest heroism and self-sacrifice, and at particular junctures even far in advance of the traditional organised workers. Only by convincing them that they can never move the ponderous machine of the Labour Movement into action, can the sects have any hope of scraping together a social base for their own organisations.
In vain! For the immigrants themselves the issue is too serious to be resolved by frivolous prattle about “incident centres”, “vigilantes” and “black self-defence”. Nothing could be more contemptuous of the immigrants than to make arrogant concessions to them of their ‘right’ to defend themselves. Socialists are naturally in favour of the right of any individual or any community to defend itself against the attacks of the bigots. But the problem does not end there. In Northern Ireland we have a crushing refutation of this idea. Entire paramilitary armies stocked with the most sophisticated firearms have proved incapable of offering real protection to either community. It is not for us merely to concede the blacks their ‘rights’, we must offer a lead based on the concentrated historical experience of the working class. Marxists must hammer home the theme that there is only one force in society strong enough to defend the livelihoods and indeed the lives of workers, strong’ enough ultimately to sweep away the social system which spawns racialism and Fascism – the Trade Union and Labour Movement, with more than 11 million “soldiers” in its ranks.
The working class, it is true, is not composed of saints. Born amid the filth and slime of capitalism, workers are prey to the daily brainwashing of the media which reinforce every backward prejudice, in relation to race, women, gambling, swearing, etc. But the Labour Movement is the embodiment of all that is most progressive in society, the embryo of socialism within the womb of the old barbarism, a living monument to the fact that workers have no alternative but to rise above divisions of craft, nationality, sex or race, and give organisational permanence to the lessons learned on the picket line.
Marxists cannot determine the extent of racial prejudice within the working class, by consulting snap opinion polls, or election results. They look at the question dialectically,. with relation to the ebb and flow of the class struggle.
The recent racialist attacks have sent a shudder of revulsion down the spine of the Labour Movement. After the catastrophe of the 1930s, organised workers understand instinctively in the marrow of their bones that Fascism must never again be allowed to conquer. These ugly attacks have acted like the vaccine of a deadly bacillus, building up the resistance of anti-bodies and immunising the Movement against the danger of future and far more formidable attacks from a mass Fascist movement.
That is why the ideas of Marxists within the Labour Movement on how to fight Fascism have earned. tremendous respect and authority over the last year or two. The resolution passed at the 1976 LP Conference on Racialism, was moved and seconded by LPYS members and overwhelmingly carried. It was on the initiative of the LPYS that the NEC of the Labour Party called a mass demonstration of 30,000 workers, in conjunction with the TUC, against racialism. This is more than the Labour Party at national level was ever prepared. to do against Mosley in the 1930s. The stupid tactics of the ostrich, of „burying your head in the sand” and hoping that the Fascists would just go away if we didn’t give them “publicity” – an attitude that proved suicidal for the workers’ parties in Italy and Germany – that attitude, though still expressed by right-wing Labour leaders like Merlyn Rees, no longer prevails within the Party. In most Trade Unions, too, the initiative has been taken for a leafletting and educational campaign on these issues. At this early stage in the fight to defend the Labour Movement from Fascism, these signs bode well.
However, it is not what we mean by a real campaign. the weed of racialism has to be torn up before it grows. The only way to destroy it is by using the full force of authority of the trade union movement, to hold factory meetings in working time, organise token strikes and even if necessary at a later stage a token general strike, to hammer home to the whole working class how deadly serious the issue is. The Fascists are a fifth column of bosses’ men. They must not be allowed a foothold in the factories where their only effect will be to turn worker against worker. They must be cleared out of the unions, and out of the factories, to neutralise them. Moreover, nobody even slightly tainted with racial prejudice must be allowed any responsible office within the Labour Movement, whether as MPs, councillors, or Trades Council officials, or as shop stewards or humble ward collectors. Otherwise the task of integrating workers of all races into the Movement will be hampered.
Even the limited response of the Movement up to now, together with the resistance of immigrants, has thrown the ruling class into panic. It is noticeable that the previously friendly propaganda of the Press towards the NF, presenting it as a party of “patriots” and for “law and order”, suddenly stopped after the Southall events, and even more clearly after the Lewisham confrontation. The Nazi pedigree of Tyndall and Webster only came out into the light of day after that. Similarly, all the pious cant about ‘Freedom of speech” up to 13th August 1977 changed overnight into appeals for a ban on “provocative marches“.
It was the warning by the secretary of the North-West Region of the TUC that anything up to 20-30,000 trade unionists would attend the counter-demonstration to the NF’s march in Hyde, that led the authorities to “ban” that march. But what happened on the day was a complete vindication of the position put alone by the Marxists against the effectiveness of “bans” proclaimed by the State. In the event, the NF used the “ban” to play hide and seek with the Labour Movement, in shameless collusion with the police. The Chief Constable admitted that he kept the eventual route of their march secret so that the counter-demonstrators were kept guessing and their forces were dispersed. What an irony for “Britain’s fastest-growing party”! It can only venture on to the streets by keeping its route a secret. One man, the NFs corpulent organiser Martin Webster, had to shelter behind 4,000 police to exercise his “democratic right” to walk along the advertised route! No, to expect the police and the courts to crack down on the NF is naive. As with the Public Order Act of 1936, any law ostensibly aimed at the Fascists would only boomerang on the democratic rights of the Labour Movement. Only one force can “ban“ Fascism – the Labour Movement, by physically denying to them the use of the streets. After the clash in Red Lion Square in 1974, the NF leaders were crowing and bragging: “Let the police clear out of our way so that we can deal with the Red scum!” Today, they have to go whining and snivelling for police protection. That is the measure of how far the balance of forces has changed.
National Front In Crisis
When we look at the little embittered Fascist groups of human trash scattered across Europe today, we see another clear case of Marx’s famous aphorism: „History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce“. After the collapse of the dictatorships in Portugal, Greece and Spain, what chance do they have? Forces that a generation ago, could sound the fanfare for a “thousand-year Reich” have now abandoned even the ambition of taking power in their own right. The MSI in Italy, which enjoyed the patronage and subsidies of Big Business and the Christian Democratic functionaries, and assembled a vast armoury of weapons to intimidate the working class, has abandoned its forlorn dreams of resurrecting the glories of Mussolini’s Empire. It acts merely to sow panic and confusion through its bombings, assassinations and beatings, in exactly the same way as the Chilean Patria y Libertad, to intensify the atmosphere of insecurity gripping the middle class and stampede them into support for an authoritarian military dictatorship which could offer „Law and Order”. They are maintained merely as an auxiliary and a reserve weapon. But the Italian ruling class has many times in the last 17 years moved right to the brink of a military coup, with every detail organised down to time, date, place and personel, only to recoil with dread at the last possible moment. Italy 1977 is not even comparable to Greece 1967. With up to twenty million workers on token general strikes, any move in this direction would mean a declaration of civil war – and the capitalists nowadays don’t feel sure that they could win.
The National. Front was formed ten years ago as a fusion of various fringe sects, from the ex-Nazi Greater Britain Movement and British National Party, to the blimps and boneheads of the League of Empire Loyalists. Since there was only room for one Fuhrer per party, every paranoid had to set up his own party in order adequately to indulge his delusions. But Tyndall and Webster were the only Fascists with a certain nose for political perspectives. They saw that to build even a serious fringe party, it was necessary to throw off the trappings of swastikas, jackboots and the Hitler cult, and make a turn towards the Tory Right. By swallowing the LEL, and later by a clever infiltration of the Tory Monday Club which was moving clearly towards classic Fascist ideas, they made great gains and managed temporarily to cloak themselves in respectable garb. But recent events have blown their cover. Tyndall and Webster are personally too tainted with the smear of Nazism for the NF to transform itself into a mass party.
Already one split has shaken the NF. The former Tory councillor John Kingsley Read, who privately boasted that he was “a bigger Nazi than any of the others“, formed the rival “National Party” in the attempt to exploit Tyndall’s fatal weakness. That party has now split four ways. These splinterings are only the first of many, a foreshadowing of the disintegration of the NF that is coming. The same process has led to a crippling split in the Italian MSI.
Caught between the need to whip up the thugs and offer them the excitement of a fight, and the need to reassure. the petit-bourgeoisie of their respectability, the NF will be driven in opposite directions. This will be all the more intense a contradiction as the class struggle revives. Under the Tory Government of 1970-74, the NF was torn in confusion as to what position it should take towards the strike wave. At one moment it would accuse the Tories of ‘fermenting class war and dividing the nation” and talk of opposing the wage freeze, in the effort to curry favour inside the trade unions, in the next breath it would demand the imposition of the „Industrial Relations Act“ laws to “discipline” the unions as they courted the bankrupted petit-bourgeoisie. In the last three years of relative industrial peace they have sat astride two horses – but at least so far they have not been galloping in opposite directions. But it is amusing to see the NF’s utter confusion on Grunwicks – against the black workers, and against the NAFF,against Ward and against the “mob” picketing the gates. … A Fascist party can only be built on the basis of appeasing the prejudices of the ruined small businessmen who have traditionally supported the Tory Party, and that means it will have to settle on a crude anti-union crusade. And this will cut off its last tenuous bases of support in the trade unions.
The handfuls of bullies will be increasingly impatient with the NF’s public claims that it is not Nazi. They will be attracted to the open Nazi gangs like the British Movement, Column 88 and the League of St George (of which there is an overlapping membership with the NF in any case). The example of Derek Day and his Hoxton barrow-boys shows this trend. On the other hand, the bulk of the petit-bourgeois rabble will find plenty of room for them in a Thatcher/Joseph Tory Party over the next period. It is groups like the National Association for Freedom, no doubt, financed from very dubious sources, the “Anti-Communism Movement” of the notorious strike breaker the Dowager Lady Birdwood, and other new groupings like the Middle Class Association (led by a Tory MP) and the National Federation of the Self-Employed, that show the outline under relatively innocuous titles today of what could become a mass Fascist movement later.
The Monday Club , which is firmly based within the Tory Party, has called for “the rejection of liberal democracy as electoral bribery with the wealth of the nation as the plunder” since “Government is too important to be left to democracy.” It has praised Salazar as a statesman who promoted „the higher values of the human personality and the Christian destiny of Man”. The NF brazenly announced that “the Monday Club has a useful purpose as a rallying point and recruiting ground”, and the Monday Club returned the compliment in publicly welcoming the “‘notable contributions ”’ of “extraparliamentary forces on the Right.“ (Monday. World.)
Up until 1964 the monopolies were well represented in the leadership. of the Tory Party, by far-sighted strategists like Churchill, Eden and Macmillan. After a frivolous interlude under Sir Alec Douglas-Home, came the Heath era, under which City whizz-kids and tycoons took over, direct and pliable puppets of the monopolies who no longer had the same room for manoeuvre after Britain’s long historic decline. Now, the pressures of the reactionary rabble in the Associations forced the MPs to vote for the utterly brainless leadership of Thatcher, beside whom Heath looks like a statesman. After all, he was “moderated” by the miners and the working class in general lessons that Thatcher has yet to benefit from. …
The ruling class in any case has grave reservations about whipping up the racial issue too much. They want to avoid at this stage any suggestion of déveloping a Northern Ireland-type situation, with black ‘“‘no-go areas“, etc. Apart from other considerations, they have to take into consideration the changed role of British Imperialism, which depends nowadays on trade and investment links with nominally independent colonial regimes, whose position would be untenable if they maintained links with a Britain in which their own „kith and kin“ were the victims of a “race war“.Foreign Secretary David Owen, writing in the “Observer“ (9.10.77) that the. Labour Government „as a matter of conviction and policy is implacably opposed to racialism in all its forms”, had the frankness also to point out that „this is not only our moral obligation: it is the assertion of our long-term national interest. Last year, trade in each direction with South Africa was worth more than £600 million. Black Africa took more than £1.3 billion of British exports, twice as much as South Africa. Nigeria has now replaced South Africa as our largest single trading partner on that continent.”
British capitalism therefore has a big stake to lose if it tolerates widespread racial violence at home. It is significant that Tyndall admitted that he had been offered money from one big-business consortium if he was prepared to let the racial issue lapse and concentrate on union bashing and the need for “discipline” and “law and order“. That is the pointer to the kind of mass Fascist movement that could develop later, draped in the Union Jack, and appealing to nostalgia for the “Empire”’, with the racial issue taking second place.
Such a Party could still have no hope of taking power by ‘itself. It could however play a vital role as the auxiliary to the official organs of the state, paving the way for a military takeover like that of Chile.
Never again will the capitalists entrust power to unpredictable maniacs like Hitler and Mussolini, inebriated with their own rantings and blinded to reality. Last time they ended up losing half of Europe from the realm of landlordism and capitalism. It was never their original intention even then to hand over the power to them. At the crucial moment they found themselves manoeuvred into relinquishing day-to-day control of their own state, as a lesser evil than revolution. They will be determined now to ensure that the Fascist gangs are kept firmly in their place, within the limits of their classic function as unofficial volunteer auxiliaries, as thugs, provocateurs and assassins.
If a military dictatorship were ever allowed to take power in Britain, it would make the Chilean junta look liberal. It would take the opportunity immediately, precisely because it was aware of its own insecure base, to liquidate hundreds of thousands of trade union militants and Labour activists. But even then it could never succeed in modern conditions in stabilising itself. If in backward Portugal, parties based on the working class, which was only one third of the population, rose like a Phoenix from the ashes to win ‘two-thirds of the votes in 1975, if Spain and Italy today are the most “ungovernable” countries in Europe, after 22 years of Mussolini and nearly 40 years of Franco, then the lesson is clear. While capitalism survives, so will the class struggle, and the political ideas which express the straining of all society towards the resolution of the conflict in a socialist organisation of society.
Only after a series of crushing defeats could the workers in any advanced capitalist country fall victim to counter-revolution. That is proved by the vacillations of the Italian ruling class in carrying through a military coup, the only policy that could even temporarily assure it of stability. The balance of forces between the two antagonistic giants, of Labour with its teeming millions of workers, increasingly skilled and educated, and with boundless resourcefulness, ingenuity and endurance, and Capital which has concentrated the industrial wealth of society into the hands of a few monopolies, has swung irretrievably to the side of the workers.
The last tattered remains of pre-war European fascism on the Iberian peninsular have been destroyed. But this does not” mean that Fascism is nothing but an exhibit in a museum of political antiquities, like slavery or the divine right of Kings. To shrug aside the activities of Fascism in its new guise would be just as irresponsible as to react hysterically. Capitalism is being dragged reluctantly to a showdown with the Labour, Movement. In the approaching class battles in Europe all the latent industrial power of the Labour Movement will be converted into revolutionary energy.
The workers will have many opportunities to change society, to learn from setbacks inevitable along the way, to test out alternative programmes and build a party capable of harnessing their energies, before the possibility will crystallise that it could once again fall victim to counter-revolution. But the Chilean defeat remains a sombre warning of the horrors that could befall us if we fail to act decisively.
We are republishing this pamphlet which gives a brilliant insight into the historical record of Fascism, and into the attitude taken to it by the British ruling class, confident that it will make an important contribution to the vital discussion now gathering momentum,that it will help to rearm the Labour Movement politically for the great struggles lying ahead.
Roger Silverman December 1977
Schreibe einen Kommentar