Antifascists, above all, need flexibility, precisely because fascism, though practiced by the most inflexible of people, has never been a coherent ideology. Its constituency is by definition the most confused section of any population, but a mob of confused people is dangerous; some years ago a confused but presumably well-meaning gang attacked the office of a paediatrician. This story tears me apart; there was a brass plaque on the door – as if you would … I have a belly laugh over how thick some people can be, then rage that members of my own Class have been so badly served by the education system we all paid for, and are so ill-equipped to live in the modern world.
Mussolini, who started in the labour movement, set about incorporating it into capitalism, ‘vertical syndicalism’, and the bourgeoisie into the state apparatus. This he called “Corporatism, a merger of corporate and state power”, everyone in their place, set from above. It requires a closed system, sited within one geopolitical entity, or nation-state.
Mussolini set the tone for the 20th Century, he read widely: Hegel, Kant, Kropotkin, Nietzsche, Marx, but rather than adopt any particular moral philosophy he learned the technique of creating inspirational, wise-sounding slogans that appealed to the masses. So to Hitler and his National Socialist Workers Party; smarting from the humiliation of Versailles, and paranoid antisemitism, the great depression gave them the popular support they needed to take power. Full employment was achieved through military Keynesianism.
During the Comintern’s “class against class” period, the phrase “social democracy equals social fascism” was their excuse for waging war on the parties of the Second International rather than the emerging fascist movement – with catastrophic consequences for both tendencies. The phrase is entirely apt, however. Under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera which followed Mussolini’s example, the socialist U.G.T. union leader Largo Caballero collaborated with the government in compulsory arbitration boards, robbing the Spanish Working Class of any agency in industrial disputes. So between the wars Europe and the U.S.S.R. re-armed and re-built with centralised economies. It turns out the only viable way to fight an industrial mechanised war is to have everyone working for the state, and so it was for the next lot.
The cold war was a replay of ‘class against class’, allowing fascists to re-group in Britain unchecked apart from periodic Working Class direct action. Meanwhile the authoritarian Atlee government stuck to the corporatist model, building a social democratic settlement by ruthlessly pillaging Britain’s colonies as they struggled to break free, using conscripts to scab on strikes and enacting repressive anti-working class legislation. The bourgeoisie weren’t happy either, as they wanted unlimited capital accumulation – because that’s what capitalism requires. ‘Corporatism’ was still being used without irony by Labour politicians in the 1970’s, to describe the mixed economy.
The problem with all this is that the citizen is both client of the state and its adversary. This is felt viscerally and populism recognises it. Wage labour is an abusive relationship however you dress it up, and nationalised industry means your boss has his own army and police force, an unattractive proposition. If bureaucrats fix both prices and wages no-one is going to be happy with their decision, so to many, a free market was easily sold by bourgeois politicians.
This is why 20th Century politics has lost its relevance; populism is right-wing by default because no party offers credible redistributive economics, the only worthwhile signifier of ‘the left’. Corbyn’s attempt at left populism failed because it didn’t – and couldn’t – go far enough. The people wanted brexit, dammit, not free broadband! “We want are country back” and they didn’t believe he could make the trains run on time.
But what about ‘social justice’? Well that always was a load of bollocks, justice is a bourgeois concept related to payment of a debt, it relies on transaction and coercion, which defeat both morality and utility. The only way to achieve freedom and equality for all is collectively, through Working Class solidarity, but end-stage capitalism has atomised the Class into a socio-economic continuum, so workers no longer identify with their Class, but with those who share their language, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, religion or football team.
Right populists like to define their views as ‘conservative’; it has an air of respectability about it and implies defence rather than attack, or even return to an earlier time. It is instructive that many A.F.D. supporters in East Germany are nostalgic for the D.D.R. They have no ideology, they want a wage, a roof, food and drink, and to not work too hard for it. If that means they have no say in the composition of any executive body, why would they care? Can you honestly say it’s helped you? Whereas the old regime struggled to keep people in, the A.F.D. – whose support is greatest in the least diverse areas, has a sinister policy it calls “re-migration”, a euphemism for deporting German citizens of non-German ethnicity; that won’t end well.
But just as one old gang of authoritarian demagogues liked to call themselves ‘communist’; conservative means nothing any more. Their opponents are characterised as ‘liberals’. Liberalism is simply the postulate of a theoretical freedom and equality under the law, with private property and the enforcement of debt, this takes in most modern vote-beggars but anarchists see it for the scam that it is. In the U.K., historically all fascist and proto-fascist groups have come out of the Conservative and Unionist Party, or the Young Conservatives, taken briefly to the streets then returned to electoral politics in a different form. This has been the case for over a Century.
One of the pillars of populism is artificial scarcity, an invention of the bourgeois state. If you want a hierarchical society, in which power is expressed by denying the needs or desires of others, you have to persuade your citizens that the necessities of life are in short supply, that they must be rationed or bargained for. Even that the state could “run out of money” – there’s another catastrophic failure of our education system! The Communists used artificial scarcity also, in a vast empire that produced unimaginable quantities of wheat, rice, coal, oil, minerals and manufactured goods. Better to export these to buy arms than let the workers have the fruits of their labour.
Does it matter then, whether the gang we face on the streets are National Socialists or right-wing populists? Not really, what counts is whether they can stand in the way of us acting collectively as a Class. We could draw a line however, between the sellers of this crap and the punters. That will take thousands of individual conversations between Working Class people, and will have to wait until the fighting is over, or ideally, before it starts.
The arguments are simple: firstly, there is no shortage of anything on this island; there are a million empty dwellings and millions of tons of food thrown away annually. Healthcare is rationed only because this social duty has been turned into a commodity, for profit. Secondly, borders serve only the bosses, not us, they exist to maintain differentials in prices and wages to keep down the price of raw materials and boost the markup on manufacturing. Gentrification creates borders even within the territory; we all know districts where we couldn’t afford a coffee, let alone accommodation, but you may still have to commute there to clean offices.
Remind your audience that capital, unlike labour, flows freely around the globe. Should the phrase “economic migrant” come up, I like to introduce vacuum cleaner merchant James Dyson, who received every privilege of the social democratic settlement, free education paid for by the Working Class, even free school milk, and is now reputed to be the fifth richest person in Britain. He moved hundreds of jobs from Wiltshire to Malaysia to pay them £3 per hour, which begs the question: if we all worked for that rate who’d buy his bloody vacuum cleaners at five hundred quid a pop? Imagine the outcry if Malaysians were coming here to take advantage of our paltry minimum wage, and if they get visas as doctors or midwives, that’s just a rich country leeching the education system of a poor one, and they won’t be allowed to bring their kids.
“What about all these asylum seekers?” Ask the criminal gangs that bombed the crap out of five countries to maintain their supply of petroleum. ‘Radical Islam’ promoted by NATO (yes, including bin Laden and Hamas) during the cold war turned out to be more successful at exploiting the grievances of marginalised and ill-informed populations than Marxism-Leninism, and came back to bite the West on the arse. Refugees are small in number compared to middle-class Ukrainians and Hong Kong Chinese, who have been allowed to work and pay tax, smoothly integrating with the economy.
Of course the real fascists don’t want them either. The hand-wringing of Tory politicians over children drowning in the channel cuts no ice with those who want to burn the survivors in their beds. I have no hesitation in describing such people as fascists, regardless of affiliation. They need taking out, not by the state but by the Working Class.
That just leaves the plethora of weird online cults devoted to misogyny, transphobia, conspiracy, crank science and what-have-you, tilting at windmills. They are in good company with the self-styled Western Jihadis. I can’t see these fantasists being defeated in their natural habitat, but eventually they must emerge from their holes into the real world, and where they resort to violence, they must be met by violence. I always advocate vulnerable people to form affinity groups with others who share their circumstances. These can federate into defence committees, co-opting any others willing to turn a hand. As ever, let the boots do the talking.
Wessex Solidarity