24.10.2024

Crushing it in the egg?

‘No platform for fascists’ and ritual confrontation with the far right have been tested to destruction. As a tactic it clearly does not work. We need a serious alternative, argues Mike Macnair

On June 25 1973, standing in the sacked offices of the French Ligue Communiste, which had just been raided by the police in response to the Ligue’s attack on a rally of the fascist Ordre Nouveau, LC leader Alain Krivine said:

… you cannot avoid your responsibilities. As long as it is not too late, fascism can be crushed in the egg. We are young, but we have better memories than the older people. We do not want to see a recurrence of what happened a few decades ago. When fascism raises its head, there is always the same reaction: ‘They are no threat, there will always be time to act, etc.’ And then one fine day it is too late.

No freedom of speech for racists and anti-Semites! And since all the traditional workers and democratic organisations have failed to assume their responsibilities, the revolutionists have had to do it. We carried out the June 21 action as a test, a warning to the nation. We have shown the way.¹

Around 50 years later, the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, the political descendant of the LC, split into two ineffective fragments.² In June 2024, the descendants of French fascism, the Rassemblement National, together with its allies, won 33.34% of the votes in the first round of the National Assembly elections, and only second-round stand-down agreements between the Nouveau Front Populaire and the Ensemble coalition of the bankster-Bonaparte, Emmanuel Macron,³ prevented the RN from obtaining a parliamentary majority.

The RN should probably be categorised like the Italian Fratelli d’Italia or the Austrian Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, as post-fascist rather than actually fascist: it does not directly organise a militia or propose the immediate suppression of left political organisations and trade unions. But all these parties could very easily morph into full fascist projects; and their growth illustrates with sharp clarity the failure of the project of crushing fascism in the egg.

Ten blows

On the other side of the Atlantic, the language goes back further. On December 21 1953, The Militant, paper of the US Socialist Workers Party (no relation to the British SWP), carried a leader warning about the December 4 1953 speech in Detroit by 1930s US ‘Catholic Social’ anti-Semitic demagogue Father (Charles) Coughlin: “The fascists, once they get rolling, will quickly take on all the trappings and techniques that are required by an American fascist movement. The danger is to wait until fascism gets rolling in high gear. The task is to crush fascism in the egg.”⁴

In January 1954 Murry Weiss wrote in the SWP’s journal Fourth International about witch-hunter Republican Senator Joe McCarthy (who the SWP characterised as proto-fascist): “Our conception of fighting the fascists is to crush them in the egg. Never give them a chance to become powerful antagonists. For every blow the fascists deliver against any section of the working class or minorities, we propose that labour strike back with 10 blows.”⁵

A common attribution of ‘crushing fascism in the egg’ is to Leon Trotsky, but without a citation. It seems more likely that the source is Daniel Guérin’s 1936 Fascisme et grand capital (which the SWP published in translation in 1939), quoting Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels:

If in the beginning, when the Hitler bands were still weak, the workers’ parties had answered them blow for blow, there is no doubt their development would have been hampered. On this point we have the testimony of the National Socialist leaders themselves. Hitler confessed in retrospect: “Only one thing could have broken our movement - if the adversary had understood its principle and from the first day had smashed, with the most extreme brutality, the nucleus of our new movement.” And Goebbels: “If the enemy had known how weak we were, it would probably have reduced us to jelly ... It would have crushed in blood the very beginning of our work.”

But National Socialism was not crushed in the egg; it became a force. And to resist that force, the German socialists could conceive only one tactic: to trust the bourgeois state and ask for its aid and protection. Their leitmotiv was: ‘State, intervene!’⁶

Hitler and Goebbels were talking rubbish here. The reason they were not crushed by armed force in the early 1920s was not softness of “the adversary” (the communists), but because the Weimar judiciary and police chose to protect the Nazis and hand out mild sentences to them, while killing and disarming communists. And if the Nazis had been killed, so that it was not them who headed the German state’s armed anti-worker militia auxiliaries, it would have been someone else with a similar, if not identical, ideology.

By 1975, the US SWP had become aware of a danger in the formula, ‘Crush fascism in the egg’. Thus Farrell Dobbs:

The line-up in the preliminary stage is one of the ruling class attempting to mobilise initial fascist forces. The conscious revolutionary vanguard has the task of mobilising the forces that are going to prevent the fascists from imposing their dictatorship in the crunch. That crunch occurs later when we’re at a higher, more intensive stage of struggle, when the capitalist crisis has become far deeper than today.

If you start by attempting to hastily gather together a vanguard force and crush fascism in the egg, you are playing into the hands of the fascists. You are losing ground in the mobilisation of the real class that can do away with fascism, and the fascists are gaining ground as a result. Now that’s the problem the ultra-lefts fell into in San Francisco.⁷

‘Crushing fascism in the egg’ remained the policy of other US Trotskyists and semi-Trotskyists: notably the Spartacists and the Seattle-based Freedom Socialist Party.

In the 1960s-70s, the US SWP had engaged in translating Trotsky’s writings of the later 1920s down to his death. Given the sharp debate over the issue, one might expect that, if there actually was a Trotsky quote to support the idea, it would have been dug up in the 1970s. It does not seem to have been. I do not exclude the possibility that it exists, but I am not going to hunt for one, since, if Trotsky did believe it, he would have been wrong.

Just as the LC and its successors in France failed to crush fascism (meaning the far right) in the egg, so those Trotskyists who cling to the policy in the USA are now more marginal than they were in the 1970s, while fascist-like demagogy has come to play a major role in the Republican Party. Dobbs was right.

In Britain, ‘no platform for fascists’ began as ‘official communist’ activity before the far left had any political significance.⁸ It inherently entails popular frontism, because it denies the right of racist (etc) speech to a specific group which is politically-rhetorically identified with the World War II enemy - while ignoring the much more effective racist incitement operations of the Conservative Party and its press, and of the home office (and of the equivalents in other countries). That is, it inherently asserts a ‘broad democratic alliance’ against ‘fascism’. It became a fetish of the Trotskyist left from the 1970s (probably originally imitating the LC).

In Britain, the episodic rise of far-right parties - the National Front, the British National Party, and so on - has not as yet led to a new mass far-right party. The reason is that the Conservative Party already is a mass far-right party with antecedents which go back to Jew-baiting in the 1730s, 1750s and 1900s, raising ‘church and king’ mobs against political opponents in 1711-12, 1714-15 and the 1790s, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Curragh Mutiny in 1912-14, and so on. Far-right parties grow under Labour governments, but their clothes are invariably stolen when the Tories are in a position to challenge effectively for government office.

Alternative

‘No platform for fascists’ and ritual confrontation with the far right as a tactic clearly does not work. So what is the alternative?

Fascism as a movement threatens the working class with two different things. One is violence - organised violence by fascist bands, big or small. At the moment we do not have organised fascist bands threatening the workers’ movement: merely incitement leading to disorganised violence against migrants. The other thing is that the far right threatens us with the spread of extreme nationalist, chauvinist and racist ideology.

What do we do about the threat of violence? The united front is the right answer, but by this I do not mean the united front on the basis of ‘No platform for fascists’. It is the united front for organised self-defence.

For a while in the USA there existed a small far-right organisation of left origin called the National Caucus of Labour Committees, which set out to break up the public meetings of all the different left groups. In response, the Communist Party of the United States, the American Socialist Workers Party, the Spartacists, etc formed a united front for forcible self-defence against the NCLC - and defeated it.

In Oxford in the 1970s, when the National Front announced it was going to break up a leftist public meeting on Ireland. Ruskin college students union immediately announced that it would host this meeting and provide security for it. The National Front did not show their faces.

The point is that the united front of the workers’ movement for organised self-defence against fascist violence, irrespective of the political differences between us, can work. When we had the meeting on Ireland there was sharp disagreement amongst us - there still is sharp disagreement among the left. But it is not a question of shutting up about differences; it is about concrete agreement to defend the ability of the working class to organise by forcible self-defence.

In relation to the ideological aspect, the answer is different: the answer is a fight over ideas. This means a political fight against nationalism, against class-collaborationism, against corporatism. It means a political fight to clarify that there is nothing worse about finance capital than there is about industrial capital; that there is no natural or unnatural alliance between the working class and industrial capital against finance capital.

Because this is a political struggle, it is actually directly counterposed to Georgi Dimitrov’s conception of the united front or popular front (from the 1935 seventh congress of Comintern), which has subsequently been adopted by most Trotskyists, which calls for self-silencing on disagreements in order to win unity, followed by winning the masses by being the ‘best fighters’ for the common aims. You cannot actually shut up about your differences in order to get unity for a fight against the ideological aspect of fascism, when in reality the ideological positions of the fascists are shared by the Labour leadership and by the Tory Party.

What we need in order to carry on that fight is a party - not a groupuscule the size of the CPGB or even the size of the SWP or the Morning Star’s CPB, but a Communist Party of the scale, and democratic methods of functioning, to be able in principle to include most of the existing left on the basis of Marxism. It is our inability to unite as Marxists which discredits us all - to the point at which it is the far right which today appears as the only mass alternative to capitalist corruption.

1. www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/krivine/1973/06/interview.html. On June 28, the Ligue Communiste was banned by the French state for this action, and Krivine and another comrade were jailed.↩︎

2. www.workersliberty.org/story/2022-12-12/harmful-split-french-far-left - this has useful information in spite of the scab social-imperialist politics of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty.↩︎

3. Macron’s presidency was originally supposed to be the means of defeating the RN by regrouping the political centre around a neoliberal project - hence his original (2016) party name En Marche! changed in 2022, as this became fly-blown, to Renaissance.↩︎

4. www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1953/v17n51-dec-21-1953-mil.pdf.↩︎

5. www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/weiss/1954/01/mccarthy.htm. (It should be noted that, contrary to Weiss’s analysis, McCarthy was in fact brought down by the Senate in summer-autumn 1954.)↩︎

6. D Guérin, Fascism and big business F and M Merr (translators) New York 1973, pp152-153 (updated edition of the US SWP’s Pioneer Press edition of 1939, translated from Fascisme et grand capital Paris 1936).↩︎

7. www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/swp-us/education/counter/dobbs02.htm.↩︎

8. E Smith No platform: a history of anti-fascism, universities and their limits of free speech Abingdon 2020, chapter 2.↩︎