"The fascists are at the top of the hill waiting to murder us in our beds" is always a good way to spur comrades to action. This piece is a draft of an article for the next issue of Socialist Resistance. We are having a friends and family event shortly to discuss the rise of the far right and it seemed a good idea to come up with a characterisation of the groups active in Britain. My judgement is that we are dealing with proto-fascist organisations. Comments are welcome and you can vote in the poll at the bottom
The far right in Britain has put down deep roots in some working class communities. Former Labour supporters and younger people who have never felt any reason to vote for Tony Blair or Gordon Brown are now willing to give their support to the British National Party (BNP). The BNP and English Defence League (EDL) have been more successful in building and sustaining campaigning and electoral organisations than any of the left’s initiatives in the past decade. A less violent but just as poisonous version of their message, directed at a different audience comes also from UKIP.
One of the ways in which sections of the left have mobilised against the BNP and the EDL is to describe them as Nazis and fascists. Campaigners in Barking have reported that use of this language certainly helped deter some older voters from voting for BNP leader Nick Griffin and his council candidates. I will argue that while organisations like the BNP, UKIP and EDL have the capacity to develop into a fascist movement it is, at the moment more accurate to describe them as proto-fascist, meaning that they still lack several of the features of hardened fascist parties and that this has implications for a working class political response to them.
A fascist movement, as understood by Marxists, combines a number of of elements. To a certain extent these are independent of each other but a full understanding of the phenomenon requires that they be grasped in their totality.
Classical fascism of the sort that arose in the 1920s and 30s is the expression of a severe social crisis of late capitalism. It can coincide with a crisis of overproduction but more fundamentally it reflects the impossibility of a "normal" accumulation of capital in the world market. This is tied to very specific factors such as wage levels, labour productivity and access to markets and materials. A fascist seizure of power is intended to brutally and radically change the conditions of capitalist exploitation to the advantage of the the key groups in monopoly capitalism. For a prolonged period in Britain the balance of forces in workplaces has overwhelmingly favoured the employers. Total strike days in 2009 amounted to 460,000 in 2009, down from 1.04m in 2007. In 1979 the figure was 29m. In the three months to February this year 34% of firms were getting their workers to accept wage freezes, a slight fall from 37% but indicative of a cautious and demoralised mood among many workers. The organised working class is not a major threat to the profitability of British capitalism at the moment.
From the point of view of the ruling class in a society like Britain bourgeois parliamentary democracy is the most efficient way to run the state. The general election campaign was fought on the terrain of offering strategies to manage the capitalist crisis. At issue was merely how much and how quickly the working class would have to pay to resolve it. But other forms of bourgeois rule are available when society’s equilibrium is disturbed. These usually involve a greater centralisation of powers for the executive branches of the state, even if this means that parts of the bourgeoisie are forced out of political activity. But these options, such as military dictatorships or police states, are not enough by themselves to atomise and demoralise a working class with millions of members and strong organisational traditions. To do this the ruling class needs a movement which can wear down and politically defeat the workers’ parties and unions through violence and terror. After it has seized power this fascist movement obliterates the working class organisations by banning them and killing or imprisoning key leaders so leaving the formerly most militant and conscious parts of the working class resigned, deprived of a sense of their collective strength and unable to formulate a political challenge to the fascist state. The old infrastructure of the working class is replaced by corporate staff associations, worker employee councils in which the bosses dominate and a massive range of sporting and cultural groups which reinforce the new ruling ideology. All this is cemented with the destruction of both dissenting bourgeois media and the socialist press.
The ruling class is a numerically insignificant part of society and it needs allies in its assault on the organised workers. It finds these allies in sections of society which are affected by economic crises, business collapses, inflation and unemployment. As we see in areas like Barking and the towns of the de-industrialised north of England many of these people would once have been Labour supporters and union members. It also is a pole of attraction for small business people or workers in managerial jobs who are frightened by a conscious and militant working class. The movement they create has some rhetorical anti big capitalist flourishes to console the small traders and to appeal for the most alienated and disaffected workers. Universally it speaks the language of racism and extreme nationalism. In Europe today Islamophobia has replaced the anti-Semitism of the Nazis.
These movements develop autonomously, slowly building support and articulating in a reactionary way the discontents of those in society with whom the left has failed to connect. However they can only come to power when part of the ruling decides to back them. This has to be preceded by a period of a type of civil war in which the fascists must destroy the workers’ movement. Whether or not they succeed depends on how the workers’ organisations resist. If they fight back successfully they can regain the support of those workers who have defected to the class enemy and win over some of those social groups who had been impressed with the fascists’ boldness and programme. That is why we can say that a victorious fascist movement is also an expression of the inability of the workers’ movement to resolve capitalism’s structural crisis in its own interests.
Having smashed the organised workers the mass fascist movement, from the standpoint of the capitalist class, has served its purpose. Parts of it are incorporated into the state, the more radical elements of its demagoguery are forgotten and the most violent and combative individuals are purged. Without the resistance of the workers’ parties and unions the political, industrial and social conditions have been decisively changed to the benefit of the bourgeoisie which has a free hand to force down wages and increase the rate of exploitation of the working class.
Seen from that perspective fascism represents the class interests of the big capitalists, not the unemployed or the small business people. It is clear that no section of the British bourgeoisie currently considers the BNP as an ally in its struggle with the working class. Of course in a situation of sharp class conflict that could change overnight. Nick Griffin has said that his reason for joining
the National Front was his fear in the 1970s that "Britain was in danger of becoming communist", a period in which MI5 officers were conspiring against Harold Wilson and some army officers were making plans for a military coup. At the moment however the growth of the BNP and the EDL is directly attributable to the Labour Party’s neo-liberal commitment to increasing the gap between rich and poor; pricing less well families out of the housing market and obliging hundreds of thousands to live in overcrowded squalor; its privileging of City financiers over the interests of working people.
While it is right to point an accusing finger at Labour the left outside it also has much to answer for. One of the things the BNP has understood is that it can take years or decades to develop a national profile and find a resonance for its message. By contrast the non-Labour left has staggered from one short term project to the next. A consequence of this is that working class voters who should be receptive to anti-capitalist messages are seduced by the easy answers of racism and Islamophobia when they wonder why they are forced to live in poverty and squalor.
Britain still does not have a mass fascist movement. It has relatively small but growing proto-fascist organisations. They are certain to expand as state spending on housing repairs, education and social services is pared to the bone after the election. As well as confronting them with demonstrations and on the streets a political challenge is needed as well.
Liam redux 
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