WeeklyWorker

24.10.2024
We march against them, not with them

We need clear red lines

Fighting fascism and racism by marching with Zionists is an unmistakable example of rank opportunist betrayal. Zionism is racism. To effectively combat today’s far right we must, argues Jack Conrad, begin with clear definitions, a firm grasp of history and reject the ‘broad as possible’ approach of popular frontism

Liberal and left opinion has been part horrified, part dumbfounded by the repeated electoral successes of the far right: Giorgia Meloni and Fratelli d’Italia, Alternative für Deutschland, Marine Le Pen and Rassemblement National, Geert Wilders and his PVV, Benjamin Netanyahu’s national camp coalition.

In Hungary Viktor Orbán and Fidesz have been ensconced in government ever since winning a supermajority in 2010. Illiberally anti-migrant, anti-communist and anti-gay, Fidesz carries about it more than a whiff of anti-Semitism. Inevitably, there are those still further to the right. Jobbik - represented in the National Assembly - displays a distinct fondness for Miklós Horthy, the pro-Nazi collaborator during World War II. Jobbik also had close relations with the unarmed ‘citizen force’, Magyar Gárda Mozgalom.

Nor should we forget India, Russia, Japan, Turkey ... or what is going on here in Britain. The June 2016 Brexit referendum came as a bombshell for the liberal establishment and continues to send out shock waves. Though only securing five MPs in the July 4 2024 general election, Nigel Farage’s Reform accounted for 14.3% of the poll (ahead of the Liberal Democrats). Undoubtedly the immediate driver is anti-migrant suspicions, worries and visceral hatreds. During the summer, pogromist riots erupted in 27 towns and cities across the UK. And, on October 26, Tommy Robinson is, of course, planning to make himself undisputed leader of this formless mob, with a view, one might guess, of fashioning a tightly disciplined, Tommunist, street-fighting force. Meanwhile, whoever wins the Conservative leadership contest on November 2 - Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch - it is clear that, combined together, Brexit, Reform and Robinson have shunted the world’s oldest and most successful far-right political party still further to the right.

Above all, however, there was, is and remains Donald J Trump. Although soundly beaten in both the electoral college and the popular vote on November 3 2020, he secured 74 million votes, the highest ever recorded by any incumbent. More to the point, Trump is running neck and neck with Kamala Harris for November 5 - he is, though, the 4/7 bookies favourite.1 So it is more than conceivable that Trump will become the 47th president.

Trump has long been accused of being a fascist.2 That was most certainly the case in the aftermath of his failed January 6 2021 self-coup. True, there are those who merely reckoned that Trump has “fascist traits”.3 However, The Guardian’s Nick Cohen argued that “If Trump looks like a fascist and acts like a fascist, then maybe he is one.”4 In that same spirit, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warns any “senior Democrat” who resigns themselves to a Trump victory and “fascism” to make way for a “true leadership”.5 Now we have Bob Woodward’s latest book, War, where he quotes Mark Milley. The former chair of the joint chiefs of staff emphatically declares: Trump is “fascist to the core”.6

According to the Socialist Workers Party - and also, I would guess, simply because of their antecedents, its Counterfire and RS21 breakaways too - this is the 1930s in “slow motion”.7 “Fascism is resurgent across Europe. We face a radicalisation of the traditional right, far-right parties and fascist forces”, declares its CC. True, it now admits, the picture today “doesn’t exactly mirror the fascist movements of the 1930s”. Nonetheless, the answer lies in “attempting to build a united front”, which does not just “appeal to much bigger reformist organisations”, but “MPs, trade unions, faith groups, sections of the Labour Party, the SNP, Greens, independent politicians and others”.8 The “others”, believe it or not, includes Zionist bigots, provocateurs and camp followers. The presence of these racists on anti-racist demonstrations has, reportedly, created an almighty stink within the SWP, considerable numbers have resigned, not least from Socialist Worker Student Societies.9 Pro-Palestine activists are rightly outraged too

In other words, we are talking about the modus operandi of the SWP’s Stand Up to Racism popular front and its standard line: “Racism and Islamophobia in parliament is leading to racism and Islamophobia on the streets … All those who oppose this must join in a united mass movement powerful enough to drive back the fascists.”10

For the sake of clarity, historically - that is, from the time of the third and fourth congresses of the Communist International - the united front was, in general, designed as a tactic to be employed by real communist parties - not small confessional sects - to expose the reformist misleaders before the great mass of the working class. By offering a limited platform, an agreement of some kind, to defend or advance immediate working class interests, the communist parties would seek to become the majority. Naturally then, the communists would not refrain from criticising their united front allies: no, on the contrary, they would retain their “freedom in presenting their point of view”. We shall come to popular fronts anon.

My intention, in this article, is to try to bring some clarity, when it comes to fascism. Firstly, by insisting upon a definite, logically consistent, historically informed definition. Secondly, by showing why repeatedly crying wolf over the ‘fascist’ danger and courting the “widest possible” forces to stage the “biggest possible” protests is ultimately self-defeating.11 Thirdly, what might be called the 19th century precursors are discussed. Fourthly, fascism is then put in its proper historical and socio-economic context. Fifthly, we examine fascism through the prism of how it is theorised and explained away by the bourgeois establishment. Sixthly, on the basis of all this, our principles and positions are presented.

Past and present

The term ‘fascism’ has certainly been subject to all manner of different definitions since it was originally coined (Benito Mussolini adopted the fasces - a bundle of sticks with an axe at their centre, the symbol of state power in ancient Rome - as the emblem of his movement). For the record, Mussolini formed the Italian Fascisti of Combat in March 1919, when 54 people - demobilised soldiers, pro-war former syndicalists and extreme social chauvinists - signed up to his programme. Fascism, in the immortal words of Il Duce, stood opposed to liberalism, the “exhausted democracies” and the “violently utopian spirit of Bolshevism”.12

Nowadays, of course - and not only on the left - the word ‘fascism’ is too often little more than a political swearword. London’s Met police are regularly dubbed ‘fascist’ by overexcited protestors; the guerrillaist left in Turkey describes all the country’s governments as fascist since the foundation of the modern state by Kemal Atatürk in 1923; fascism is also casually equated with bigoted prejudices, restrictions on civil liberties and any and every manifestation of national chauvinism. So, for many, fascism is not a future danger. It is a past which permeates the present.

The F-word certainly provides emotional catharsis for the user and provokes a rewardingly spluttering response from the target. Yet that hardly helps reveal the true nature of fascism - not least how it emerged historically and functions as an extraordinarily dangerous counterrevolutionary weapon in capitalist society. This is not a matter of pedantry or semantics. Shearing fascism of history, reducing fascism to a cuss word denoting something hateful, regressive or threatening, an object of opprobrium - means one cannot distinguish between the state oppression imposed by fascism during the 1920s, 30s and 40s, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, normal capitalism: eg, the 1794 suspension of habeas corpus, the banning of the London Corresponding Society and the regular use of yeomanry to suppress ‘Jacobinism’ by William Pitt’s Tory reaction.

Then there is America’s late 19th century Jim Crow legislation; Woodrow Wilson’s 1918 anti-sedition laws; 1950s McCarthyite witch-hunting; the 1956 Federal Constitutional Court ban on the Communist Party of Germany; the barrage of anti-trade union laws introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government and her defeat of the miners’ 1984-85 Great Strike. All, despite their wide variations, normal capitalism.

Needless to say, giving fascism a clear, definite meaning by rooting it in history has nothing to do with any softness towards the Pittite Tories, sympathy for senator Joe McCarthy, admiration of the Turkish state or fond feelings for Thatcherism, etc. On the contrary, labelling fascist what is not fascist muddles, weakens, disorientates the workers’ movement.

In the late 1920s and early 30s, ‘official communism’ dogmatically insisted upon classifying everything and everyone from the Labour left to Ramsay MacDonald’s national government, and from German social democracy to Franklin D Roosevelt, under an ever expanding rubric of fascism … or tendencies towards fascism. Eg, Roosevelt’s New Deal was described by R Palme Dutt - Britain’s foremost ‘official communist’ political thinker - as a “transition to fascist forms, especially in the economic and industrial field”.13 Fascism supposedly grew organically out of bourgeois democracy.

According to Dmitry Manuilsky - a trusted member of Comintern’s presidium - in his report to its executive committee, only a liberal “can accept that there is a contradiction between bourgeois democracy and fascism”.14 Stalin summed up the approach by coupling together social democracy and fascism as “twin brothers”.15

This ‘third period’ theory led the Communist Party of Germany to reject making any serious united front proposals to the “social-fascist” Social Democratic Party. Not that the SPD tops were ever going to willingly accept any offer of uniting in elections, in parliament and in self-defence units on the streets - leaders such as Rudolf Hilferding, Otto Wels and Arthur Crispien wanted an “antagonistic line” towards the communists. They feared that they, that is the communists, were just about to “obliterate” them electorally.16 Their determination was to defend the Weimar republic and fight the Nazis and the communists alike within the bounds of the constitution and established legality. The rank and file might have proved to be a different matter. In other words, a united front from below could have forced a change of course above. We will never know. But we do know what actually happened.

Despite the Nazi vote falling by 4%, Adolf Hitler - supposedly not especially dangerous - got himself lifted into power with the reluctant help of president Paul von Hindenburg, the recommendation of conservative chancellor Franz von Papen, a coalition with the German National People’s Party and the active backing of a big-industry, big-finance and big-agriculture coalition. The Nazis were generously financed.17 After January 1933 the Communist Party and the SPD were both subject to eviscerating Nazi terror: firebombing, beatings, assassinations, arrests and killings ‘while attempting to escape’. A legal ban on both quickly followed. In March 1933 Hitler was able to pass an enabling bill through the Reichstag - purged of social democratic and communist deputies - which in effect gave him dictatorial powers.

In 1934-35 Stalin’s Communist International ‘corrected’ its analysis of fascism - first at the 13th plenum, and then at the 7th Congress. Georgi Dimitrov delivered a new formulation, which was universally adopted by all ‘official communist’ parties. Dimitrov redefined fascism as the “open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital”.18 His cure was, though, not much better than the original ‘social fascist’ disease. Fascism was still viewed as an outgrowth of capitalism. But overcoming fascism was now completely divorced from the revolutionary class struggle against capitalism. It had to be fought as a unique thing in itself - an existential threat which had to be overcome by putting everything else, socialism included, aside.

Besides blessing cooperation with social democrats, the door was held wide open for popular fronts in every country - Britain, India, US, France, Spain, Chile, etc - which saw communists attempting to align themselves with all and sundry ‘others’, including the less terroristic, less chauvinistic and less aggressive representatives of the bourgeoisie.

The clever idea was to rely on simple arithmetic. Together the communists, social democrats, radicals and liberals add up to a greater sum total than the fascists. The popular front, therefore, promised bigger street demonstrations, a higher vote in parliamentary elections and a lot more MPs. After that there would come anti-fascist coalition governments committed to achieving reforms within the existing social system … sold to the rank and file as a ‘step in the direction of socialism’. Predictably, those who dared criticise this line of march were not only denounced as ultra-leftist sectarians, but fifth-column agents of fascism.

To keep their real and imagined allies onside, the ‘official communists’ had to stress unity, had to suspend, forget or disown previous criticisms and divisive political positions. Broadness became the ruling mantra. However, inevitably, abandoning anything resembling working class political independence led not to stunning success, but defeat - first in Spain and France in the 1930s and then, eventually, on a global scale in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The SWP takes the exact same approach except on a far, far, smaller scale. So, where the ‘official communists’ had in mind forming governments, the SWP concentrates on single-issue campaigns - that and broad-left alliances, which it hopes will bring it enough recruits, so that one day it can break through into the ‘big time’: Anti-Nazi League, Stop the War Coalition, Respect, Unite Against Fascism and now Stand Up to Racism. It never happens, but the fundamental problem is exactly the same as with the popular fronts of the ‘official communists’.

It is the right which sets the programmatic limits. Neither narcissistic VIPs nor British-Asian businessmen, neither Labourite exiles nor the Muslim Association of Britain will fight capitalism - well, except rhetorically. However, to keep such allies from simply walking, socialist principles and aims are abandoned - that or put on hold: in Respect is was republicanism, international socialism, secularism, free movement … even woman’s abortion rights. Hence the result of the SWP’s little popular fronts is not greater strength: rather programmatic liquidation.

During the 1930s Trotsky damned the ‘fourth period’ as a headlong descent into naked class collaboration. He ranked Comintern’s new line on a par with social democracy’s abject failure, faced with the challenge of inter-imperialist war in August 1914. In a phrase, The Marseillaise is drowning out the Internationale. The Communist International was entering the “social patriotic camp”, he declared.19 Instead of abandoning, putting on hold, the struggle for socialism, he was of the view that, on the contrary, only the struggle for socialism, aggressively, confidently pursued - using tactics such as the united workers’ front - could bring over wavering social democrats and even those workers who, in desperation, looked to fascism as a solution to their problems.

Trotsky’s writings on the rise and triumph of fascism count amongst his best and retain much relevance. Fascism, Trotsky argues, is a product of capitalist crisis and capitalist loss of control over society. Fascism, as a system of government, sees the effective removal of the bourgeoisie from political - not economic - power. Instead of well- educated, good-mannered responsible statemen, strutting thugs, psychopathic murderers and rabble-rousers take over the leading offices of state. True, military dictatorships can see traditional liberal and conservative parties disbanded or reduced to mere decoration. But army generals are unmistakably members of the ruling class. The same cannot be said of Mussolini or Hitler (though it can of Oswald Mosley).

However, for the capitalist class - or at least key sections - the loss of political power is a price worth paying. Fascism organises, militarises and unleashes a mass plebeian force - the crazed petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, embittered former soldiers - against the parties and organisations of the working class. This is surely the key defining characteristic of fascism. Not only is the communist vanguard annihilated: the mass of the working class is held in a “state of forced disunity”.20

Precursors

Doubtless fascism’s intellectual origins lie in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Social Darwinism, the pseudo-science of race, state worship, romantic national history, anti-Semitism, and the vilification of international socialism and the organised working class were the dominant ideas of the European ruling classes prior to the outbreak of World War I. Colonial empires found justification in race theory. Romantic national history bound masses of people at home together in the imagined community of the state. Social Darwinism served to reconcile them to the ‘natural’ hierarchy.

Nevertheless, although fascist leaders and their cynical publicists freely deployed such ruling ideas, they did so in an entirely demagogic fashion. The intention was to carry out a (counter) revolution. Clearing the path to power always took priority. Any ideological manoeuvre, any pose could be justified. Hence with fascism there is no logically sustained reasoning of the kind found in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, Hegel and Marx. Read Mein Kampf, Mussolini’s My autobiography or Mosley’s My life. Leave aside the lies and half-truths, the writing is banal and full of contradictions. In fact, no fascist leader has ever written anything of any worth. Tommy Robinson’s Manifesto simply underlines the point. It is a long rant against the 1% and their financing of Black Lives Matter, transgender surgery, jihadists and self-proclaimed Nazi militia in Ukraine. The central idea is the elite’s ‘great conspiracy’ to replace the ‘white race’ in Europe with Muslim migrants.21 Dumb, or dumb?

No surprise - according to Franz Neumann - fascist ideology “is constantly shifting”: “Every pronouncement springs from the immediate situation and is abandoned as soon as the situation changes.”22 Fascism holds to certain vague beliefs - leadership, the force of will, manly discipline, national salvation - but there is no fascist theory systematically linking proposition to practice. Irrationalism is the defining characteristic.

By the same measure, however, I would contend, attempts to brand Marine Le Pen a fascist because of her father’s “fascist roots”,23 describing Viktor Orbán’s regime as “soft fascism” due to the demonisation of Muslim refugees,24 or claiming that Narendra Modi’s BJP government in India is “fascist” because of the “arrest of leftist intellectuals” and the “overturning the country’s constitution” is to indulge in more than hyperbole.25 It is irrationalism, albeit of the liberal variety.

It is certainly true that the lineage of many of today’s far-right parties can be traced back to fascist organisations operating back in the 1920s and 30s. Yet - and this should matter - hard-core holocaust-deniers, non-state fighting formations and unrepentant Hitler fans are often shunned, cold-shouldered, even suppressed. Marine Le Pen expelled her father in an attempt to cultivate a less toxic image. Modi’s split with the paramilitary RSS has “widened to become a deep chasm”.26 Orbán’s Fidesz government pushed through the state ban on Magyar Gárda Mozgalom. It is similar tale with Reform: “As Nigel Farage has repeatedly made plain, people who belong or used to belong to the BNP are not welcome.”27

Not a few Marxists have drawn an analogy between Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s movement and fascism. While perhaps pushing his case too far, August Thalheimer - a former top leader of the Communist Party of Germany - did just that in his 1930 essay, ‘On fascism’. Thalheimer took as his “starting point” the profound insights he found in Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and The civil war in France. There is, in these two works, besides “the analysis of the social and historical class roots of Bonapartism”, a recognition of “not only the presence of specific classes in a given society, but also a specific relationship between these classes in a specific historical situation”.28

In 1848 the “citizen-king”, Louis Philippe, was overthrown. A popular, working class-led revolution restored the republic. However, neither the workers nor the bourgeoisie proved strong enough to establish their rule. The Cavaignac dictatorship could arrest Auguste Blanqui and suppress the workers, but could not establish a stable order. There ensued an inherently unstable revolutionary-counterrevolutionary stand-off between the two classes. Under these circumstances the French bourgeoisie surrendered “its political existence in order to save its social existence and abandons itself to the dictatorship of an adventurer and his gang”.

Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte - nephew of emperor Napoleon I - and his henchmen gathered together an amorphous layer of decayed elements: those whom the French call la bohème. Backed by this volatile but manipulatable social base, he skilfully constructed a grand coalition. Before the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat he spun out well-crafted revolutionary phrases; he won over the peasants with traditional family values and grand promises of renewed national glory. Meanwhile, he quietly aligned himself to high finance. Clearly Charles Louis was no “grotesque mediocraty”. In December 1851 he seized power with the help of the French army in a self-coup. The Bonapartist state, thereby, decisively raised itself above society and made itself into an “independent power”. Yet, while bourgeois political power had been destroyed, bourgeois economic power had been saved.

Trotsky, it should be added, likewise thought that there “is an element of Bonapartism in fascism”. State power rises above society in both cases. However, for Trotsky, “pure Bonapartism” is associated with the “epoch” of the rising bourgeoisie; fascism with “imperialist decline”. Therefore, to say that fascism is a mere “repetition of Bonapartism” would, he said, be “very muddled and stupid”, to say the least.29

The Boulangist movement was also something of a prefiguration. General Georges Boulanger was the model of the man on horseback appearing before a society which longed for a saviour. A social demagogue controlled by the reactionary right, he could, though, appeal to the working classes. He shot to a fleeting fame during the late 1880s. Mixing strident nationalism with mass agitation against parliamentary corruption, influential members of the French Workers’ Party - including Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue - succumbed to the illusion that the Boulangist third way represented a “genuine mass movement”, which could, if encouraged, develop a socialistic character. Like so many impatient leftists, Lafargue tried to hitch a ride.

We see the exact same phenomenon today. Championing petty nationalism - Scottish, Irish, Catalan and Québécois - immediately spring to mind. But there is just about every other ‘ism’ though. From feminism to pacifism, the soft, the broad, the impatient left adapts to and in the final analysis adopts politics which are those of the bourgeoisie. Working class political independence is abandoned for all practical purposes, that is for sure. ‘After them, us’ is the unacknowledged slogan. Friedrich Engels, for his part, would have none of it. He urged the French comrades to “fight under their own flag” - against both the bourgeois political establishment and the Boulangists.30

Action Française, established in 1899, has for good reason been called the “thesis” of fascism (Ernst Nolte).31 It combined anti-Semitism with nationalism and dynastic royalism. Of key importance, though, we have the first ‘shirt movement’: ie, rightwing fighting squads. The Camelots du Roi began as Action Française’s street goons and in 1917 became a full-blown mass, counterrevolutionary militia.

In February 1934 it was part of a royalist-fascist bloc - armed with revolvers, clubs and razors - which invaded the parliament building in Paris and put “the smiling, somewhat senile” Gaston Doumergue into power as prime minister.32 Financed by big capital - including tycoons such as Ernest Mercier, director of one of France’s biggest electrical and oil trusts - the Camelots du Roi fought to end the third republic in the name of ‘France for the French’.

The Union of Russian People, formed in 1905, likewise mobilised declassed elements into fighting squads - assisted by tsarist officialdom. In the name of tsar, god and country, the Black Hundreds launched vicious pogroms against striking workers, revolutionaries and Jews - “Beat the Yids, save Russia” ran their “famous slogan”. Russia’s ‘pre-fascist fascists’ wanted to “encourage” Jews to “emigrate to Palestine”.33

Turning point

World War I marked an epochal turning point. Capitalism morphs into state monopoly capitalism. The law of value, competition and other essential laws decline and can only be sustained through organisational measures, such as state intervention and the arms economy. Market forces are partially demystified. They are exposed as political. Socialism is imminent. When it must do, collective capital puts off the transition by elevating state power above the immediate interests of profit.

Official Europe, especially in the defeated countries, emerged from the mayhem of World War I thoroughly discredited, weakened and riven with internal divisions. Our class was presented with an unprecedented historic opportunity. Bolshevism brilliantly led the way. Tragically, elsewhere the organisations of the working class either proved inadequate or wretchedly backed away from the task and sought to reconcile themselves with capitalism. Bourgeois society was exhausted and chronically split, but the working class lacked the necessary leadership with which to deliver the final, revolutionary blow. Fascism erupts as a counterrevolutionary movement under these conditions.

Following World War I, virtually every country in Europe spawned its clutch of fascist groups and grouplets. At first they were entirely marginal. Mussolini secured not a single MP in the 1919 elections. Polite society looked down on them with barely concealed contempt. Hitler was dismissed as a crank. However, the unresolved class struggle and economic crises produced a constitutional disjuncture. The malign aura of fascism vanished. Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts appeared before the ruling class as saviours … albeit not riding on a horse.

Mussolini took power in 1922 at the invitation of king Victor Emmanuel III - with the active encouragement of big capital and the benign neutrality of the army assured. The famed March on Rome was pure theatre. Mussolini knew beforehand that the establishment would give him a hero’s welcome. A decade later, in the aftermath of the 1929 crash, Hitler formed his coalition government with the conservative right.

Not surprisingly, the initial response from Marxists was somewhat confused. At the 4th Congress of the Communist International in 1922 - the last attended by Lenin - the victory of fascism in Italy was blamed in part on the inability of the communists to resolve the revolutionary situation positively - which had in 1919 seen the widespread seizure of factories by workers. “Primarily”, however, fascism served “as a weapon” in the “hands of the big landowners”, or so went the argument. Italy presumably was going backwards down a fixed evolutionary ladder from capitalism to feudalism. The bourgeoisie escaped blame in this clumsy schema. They were said to be horrified by Mussolini’s “black Bolshevism”. Crucially though, Comintern failed to come to terms with the fact that, with fascism’s triumph, the working class had suffered a strategic defeat. Fascism was dismissed as a passing terror, a revenge exacted upon the working class, and, as such, could not hold for long. A renewed rising by the working class must occur - and very soon at that.

Inevitably there were those who merely imitated Mussolini and his cod dramatics - eg, the National Romanian Fascia founded in 1923 by Titus Panaitescu Vifor, and Rotha Lintorn-Orman’s British Fascisti of 1924. However, the global failure of the working class to continue and extend the revolution begun in Russia, plus the continued grip of a deep capitalist crisis, stimulated the growth of serious fascist movements. These fascisms were deeply rooted in the national chauvinist ideologies of their own countries and involved “broad social strata, great masses which reach down into the proletariat” and, therefore, argued Clara Zetkin, will not be quickly vanquished “merely by military means”. No, “we must also overcome it politically and ideologically”.34

So, Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party was no mere clone of Mussolini’s fascism. The same goes for the Austrian Heimwehr, Hungary’s Arrow Cross, Spain’s Falangists, the ABC and Falanga in Poland, and the Croix de Feu and Solidarité Française.

Naturally the German conquest of much of continental Europe after 1939 created not only a clutch of quisling collaborators, but an allure for Nazification amongst fascist groups. Only in Poland did the native fascists resist for any time. In general, however, the Germans did not elevate their fascist impersonators into governing satraps. They preferred to deracinate them. Many were packed off to serve on the eastern front with units such as the Waffen SS.

A vague anti-capitalism was sometimes advocated. Gregor Strasser’s wing of the Nazi Party dreamt of a return to pre-monopolistic conditions and a kind of feudal national socialism. Suffice to say, the organised working class - trade unions and leftwing political parties - along with the ideas of Marxism and international socialism, were always the real enemy, not capital.

Having obtained power, fascism is obliged to restrain or even silence its mass base. Capital has no fondness for unofficial armies. The Blackshirts were therefore incorporated into the state by Mussolini. Hitler massacred untrustworthy Brownshirts. Gregor Strasser was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives on June 30 1934. Fascism is thereby bureaucratised and becomes what Trotsky calls “Bonapartism of fascist origin”.35

But, if you think about it, this definition is inadequate. There is more to fascism in power than its origins. Fascism in power surely needs to be categorically distinguished from Bonapartism in power. Though Napoleon III imposed rigorous press censorship, suppressed socialist newspapers, imprisoned large numbers of red republicans and sent thousands more into exile, nonetheless he presided over what has rather generously been called a regime of “reasonable freedom”: eg, he introduced the constitutional right to strike, re-established universal male suffrage and allowed opposition parties to run in elections, albeit to an emasculated national assembly.36

Fascism in power has shown itself to be qualitatively different. Communist and social democratic activists were ruthlessly hunted down, strikes banned and trade unions dissolved. Nor is oppression eased with the consolidation of the regime. The iron heel is never removed. The whole unmediated power of the state machine remains directed against any manifestation of working class independence. Those found circulating communist or social democratic literature found themselves in concentration camps. Even telling the wrong type of joke could lead to the same dreadful fate.

Simultaneously, fascism suppresses contradictions within the ruling class - if need be, using state force too. Property is usually left untouched, but the traditional parties of the bourgeoisie are turned into mere husks, dissolved or absorbed into the body of the fascist movement. Elections, when they took place, were mere referendums/plebiscites designed to legitimise the fascist regime and its leader. Moreover, when German fascism was combined with total war, it organised an elaborate system of racist exterminationism within the borders of its newly acquired empire: Poles, Russians, Roma - and, above all, Jews in the ‘final solution’. Fascism then was a terroristic, absolutist and, in Germany, a deranged form of counterrevolution.

Explaining away

Not surprisingly, once fascism moved from the obscure fringes to the storm centre of big-power politics and world conflict, it had to be explained - and urgently. A wide range of theories have been produced - most of which are deeply flawed and deserve to be dismissed out of hand.

Christian apologists see fascism as the direct result of secularisation. By rejecting god, humanity is visited by evil. The antidote is obvious - take up the cross and restore religion. Conservative aristocrats paint fascism as a revolt by immature masses - the common herd, who have been freed from the constraints and responsibilities of a properly ordered agrarian society. Forlornly they yearn for the days when they constituted the natural class of governance.

Liberal-leaning evolutionary biologists put fascism down to the aggression and pack instincts supposedly hard-wired into the male brain by the harsh conditions of a largely imagined African Palaeolithic some 1.5 million years ago - a viewpoint shared by some radical feminists.

Psychologists have sought to locate the rise of fascism either at the level of some mass psychosis or in the warped personalities of its leaders. Wilhelm Reich argued that humanity is “biologically sick” and should free itself by discarding sexual repression.37 Most Freudians disagreed. They insisted on entirely speculative clinical examinations of fascism’s leaders - Mussolini, but most of all Hitler. Raymond de Saussure believed Hitler exhibited a strong Oedipus complex and needed to channel his sexual energies in order to conceal his impotence from the public: the German Reich was a penis substitute. Obvious crap and nonsense.

An altogether more insightful, semi-Marxist, psychological approach is to be found in Erich Fromm’s Escape from freedom (1941). Fromm sought to understand how millions of Germans were captivated by Hitler. Capitalist alienation and the reduction of the human subject to a mere cog in the production process is blamed. Fascism answers the need in the human soul for a sense of belonging. The fact that the working class in Germany never reconciled itself to Nazism seems to run counter to the thesis. Worse, Fromm can offer no effective solution, no escape from the dilemma.

Theodor Adorno, amongst others in the so-called Frankfurt school, claimed to have discovered the ‘authoritarian personality’, which was apparently rife amongst all classes in Germany. This was an integral part of a general theory of the period. Liberalism was in decay. Capitalism and mass culture were producing an overarching totalitarian society. The Soviet Union was essentially no different. Herbert Marcuse believed that fascism was the almost inevitable result of monopoly capitalism - a view he subsequently modified by claiming that, although post-World War II western capitalism still maintained a democratic outer shell, the tendency was towards a grey conformity and complete subordination of the personality to the needs of capital: ie, a totalitarian society. New Left radicals in the 1960s US gleefully denounced ‘fascist Amerikka’!

Establishment figures such as Hannah Arendt and Zbigniew Brzezinski readily adopted totalitarian theory. Its great virtue lay in the fact that it directly linked Nazism and Stalinism. However, they gave the theory a none too subtle twist by disaggregating capitalism from totalitarianism. Capitalism, in this rightwing version of the totalitarian theory, is equated definitionally with freedom, democracy, choice and personal liberty. That capitalism flourished under Mussolini and Hitler is guiltily ignored.

As readers will know, mainstream bourgeois society now propagates this intellectually barren explanation for fascism over the electronic and print media and in schools and colleges. What began as a leftist critique of existing conditions has been thoroughly colonised by the right and turned into its opposite.

Joining together fascism and bureaucratic socialism into a single phenomenon admirably suited the needs of the cold war. Capitalism was excused of all blame and the Soviet Union was made into a culprit. In the hands of Karl Popper, totalitarianism became truly superhistorical. Sparta, Ch’in China, the empire of Diocletian and Calvin’s Geneva are all classified under that heading, of course, along with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Plato, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche form a totalitarian human chain that joins the periodic culling of the helots to the gas chambers.

Such a philosophy was vital for the capitalist system, above all in Europe. Fascism was beaten not only by the armies of the Soviet Union, the USA and Britain: there were communist partisan movements and popular risings throughout the German empire, Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, etc. Equally to the point, the capitalist class was deeply compromised. Almost without exception, the bourgeoisie collaborated with fascism, often with great enthusiasm. For example, in France it welcomed the German invasion. Since 1936 the working class had made huge gains at the expense of capital. The forces of the left were feared and hated, but could not be crushed by the upper classes - the Nazi jackboot would do that job for them though.

The situation in other countries was substantially the same. After 1945 bourgeois Europe was forced, therefore, to reinvent itself. Hence totalitarian theory, the holocaust industry and the anti-racist, anti-fascist declarations of Unesco - such as the July 1950 declaration on race, which scientifically supported the “ethic of universal brotherhood” and the warning that “men and nations alike” can “fall ill”.38 World War II became Britain’s our finest hour - a crusade for freedom. The motive was to save the Jews, not the British empire.

Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orbán and Nigel Farage are reactionary rebels against the carefully constructed post-World War II consensus ideology. The mainstream bourgeois establishment reacts with such hostility, because their crude chauvinism, rejection of liberal multiculturalism, demonisation of migrants, etc, reminds capitalist society of its shameful, pre-1945 past. Few establishment historians or other paid persuaders care to recall how mainstream bourgeois opinion promoted social Darwinism, race theory, anti-Semitism and arrogantly upheld their ‘civilised’ rule over their ‘immature’ colonial subjects. And how these ideas were blessed from the pulpit and enforced using police batons, salvoes of army bullets and judges imposing stiff prison sentences.

At this present juncture, we have neither a revolutionary nor counterrevolutionary situation. There is no working class threat, no rising working class movement ... no, not even in “slow motion”. Sad to say, the working class exists as little more than a slave class. Yes, Trump, Le Pen, Meloni, Orbán and Farage have definite sympathies for fascists and have fascist admirers, allies and outliers. However - well, at least for the moment - their prime focus is on elections. Fascist fighting formations are not assuming anything like a mass scale, let alone being unleashed to crush the organised working class. Tomorrow, of course, all that might change.

A necessary aside. The 1920s and 30s show that fascism does not originate from the far right alone. Mussolini adhered to a Sorelian direct-action socialism and general strikism. He edited the Socialist Party’s paper Avanti. In Britain Oswald Mosley served as a Labour minister - one of the first recruits to his New Party being AJ Cook, the famed miners’ leader. Józef Piłsudski made a similar journey: he went from Polish left nationalism to carrying out his “revolution without revolutionary consequences” rightwing coup.39

Today, doubtless, we have similar candidates, but none are at all obvious. The Socialist Labour Party, the former Revolutionary Communist Party/Spiked, the various British red-brown ‘national Bolsheviks’ and the social-imperialist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty could all be mentioned. However, each appears, in their own unique way, to be at an evolutionary dead end. Extinction, not glory, beckons. George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain comes to mind as a possibility. He does, after all, talk of a corporate alliance between managers and workers, how the WPB are “patriots” and the “globalists” are “traitors”.40 But there are a thousand different ways Galloway could go. So to call him “a wannabe fascist” is premature, to say the least.41 It was, for example, right to back him in the February 29 2024 Rochdale by-election in the name of solidarity with Palestine. Rishi Sunak took to his Downing Street podium to denounce the stunning result.

As for Trump, he did indeed summon, fire up and unleash gangs of boogalloos on January 6 2021. Not that we should categorise him as a fascist either. No, he was an aspiring Bonaparte who was willing to flatter, promote and use America’s third-rate fascist grouplets. None of the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Takers, etc, etc, were about to come to power on January 6. No, the storming of the Capitol was about Donald Trump remaining the US president, presumably through imposing a state of emergency and the willingness of key sections of the army, the police, the secret state to back him. An unlikely scenario.

Naturally, in America Bonapartism would take a strictly American form. Donald Trump is a blue-blooded redneck who uses his millions of followers and billions of dollars in a self-promotional culture war against ‘cat-eating’ Haitian migrants, BLM ‘thugs’, women’s rights and trans people … as already mentioned, the working class threat is noticeably absent. There is no mass left party, no crippling strike wave, no danger of the class struggle running out of control.

Much, however, is lost in translation. Although an alumni of the New York Military Academy, Trump is no Napoleon. Whereas the first Bonaparte was a military genius and fought 60 (still much studied) battles, Trump dodged the Vietnam draft five times - once pleading bad feet, four times pleading college studies. Yet through sheer chutzpah and an almost instinctive ability to articulate popular grievances, resentments and phobias - and offer easy solutions - Trump became the uncrowned emperor of the GOP and a saviour hero-worshipped by a whole swathe of the US electorate.

History has already judged: Mar-a-Lago has proved not to be his St Helena, but his Elba. November 5 could be his Waterloo … or it could be his Austerlitz.

Either way, the well that Trump drew on for three successive election campaigns - 2016, 2020 and 2024 - is deep and will not evaporate, if - and it is a big if - there is, on January 20 2025, Kamala Harris with her hand on the inauguration Bible.

There exists a profound disenchantment with the old order. For millions the American dream has long turned into an American nightmare: insecure gig contracts, massive social inequality, squeezed incomes, student debt, opiate addiction and above all fear … fear of ill health, fear of unemployment, fear of crime, fear of homelessness, fear of competition from migrant labour, fear of uppity women, fear of elite conspiracies, fear of national failure:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
WB Yeats The second coming (1919)

The centre-ground - Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz and now Keir Starmer - finds itself ineffective, vulnerable, easily swept away. Factor in prolonged economic stagnation, unstoppable mass migration, the danger of proxy war phasing into World War III and the eminently predictable failure of the market to tackle the climate crisis, then the choice before humanity could not be starker.

  1. www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2024/10/18/betting-markets-presidential-election-odds-trump-harris.↩︎

  2. See T Snyder The road to unfreedom London 2018; CR Sunstein (ed) Can it happen here? Cambridge MA 2018; M Albright Fascism: a warning New York NY 2018; J Stanley How fascism works New York NY 2018.↩︎

  3. D Lazare, ‘Assault on democracy’ Weekly Worker May 20 2021: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1348/assault-on-democracy.↩︎

  4. The Guardian January 16 2021.↩︎

  5. X, July 15 2024.↩︎

  6. Quoted in The Independent October 11 2024.↩︎

  7. A phrase repeatedly used by Tony Cliff, the SWP’s founder-leader, since the early 1990s. He writes: “The 1930s were a decade of extremes. Anyone sitting on the fence was only helping the reactionary forces. The fact that the film of the 1930s returns, but in slow motion, means there is much greater opportunity to stop the film and direct it in the way we want” (T Cliff Marxism at the millennium London 2000 - see www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/2000/millennium/chap14.htm).↩︎

  8. SWP Pre-conference Bulletin October 2024, pp8,10,12.↩︎

  9. This has, unusually, caused something of a debate in SWP ranks: see the contributions of Rob (Dorset), Alex and James (Glasgow), Mike (Walthamstow) and Candy (Dorset). As for the CC, it seems to be sticking to the ‘Zionist racists are welcome’ line. Its formulation is that “SUtR is right not to make anti-Zionism a ticket of entry into the movement” (Pre-conference Bulletin October 2024, p12). Incidentally, because the SWP tries to keep its internal disputes hidden away, it would be a great service to the left if our web editors put the whole of the Pre-conference Bulletin No1 up online (there is, I can assure you, no security risk involved).↩︎

  10. standuptoracism.org.uk/statement-unite-against-tommy-robinson.↩︎

  11. Both phrases taken from the SWP’s Pre-conference Bulletin: the first from Candy (Dorset), the second from the Central Committee itself.↩︎

  12. B Mussolini My autobiography London 1938, p65.↩︎

  13. R Palme Dutt Fascism and the social revolution London 1934, p251.↩︎

  14. Quoted in M Kitchen Fascism London 1983, p5.↩︎

  15. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_fascism.↩︎

  16. D Harsch German social democracy and the rise of Nazism Chapel Hill NC 1993, p219.↩︎

  17. See D Guerin Fascism and big business New York NY 1973.↩︎

  18. G Dimitrov The working class against fascism London 1935, p10.↩︎

  19. L Trotsky Writings 1935-36 New York NY 1977, p129.↩︎

  20. L Trotsky The struggle against fascism in Germany New York NY 1971, p144.↩︎

  21. Manifesto: free speech, real democracy, peaceful disobedience is written jointly with Peter McLoughlin. Published in October 2024, and despite costing just a tad under £25, the ‘Tommunist manifesto’ briefly became Amazon’s No1 best-selling publication - before, that is, being withdrawn by the transnational retailer (serving, of course, to confirm charges of suppressing ‘free speech’).↩︎

  22. F Neumann Behemoth London 1942, pp39-40.↩︎

  23. J Orr ‘The many faces of Marine Le Pen’ International Socialism 2020.↩︎

  24. vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/13/17823488/hungary-democracy-authoritarianism-trump.↩︎

  25. Arundhati Roy interview: dw.com/en/arundhati-roy-were-up-against-a-fascist-regime-in-india/a-45332070.↩︎

  26. National Herald June 1 2024.↩︎

  27. Reform statement quoted in The Guardian June 24 2024.↩︎

  28. www.marxists.org/archive/thalheimer/works/fascism.htm.↩︎

  29. L Trotsky The struggle against fascism in Germany New York NY 1971, p444.↩︎

  30. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 48 London 2001, p197.↩︎

  31. E Nolte The three faces of fascism London 1965.↩︎

  32. W Shirer The collapse of the Third Republic London 1970, p254.↩︎

  33. SD Shenfield Russian fascism: traditions, tendencies, movements Armonk NY 2001, p32.↩︎

  34. M Jones and B Lewis (eds), ‘Clara Zetkin: letters and writings’ Revolutionary History No1 (new series), London 2015, p89.↩︎

  35. www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1934/340715.htm.↩︎

  36. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_III.↩︎

  37. W Reich The mass psychology of fascism New York NY 1946, p273.↩︎

  38. Unesco, Paris 1952.↩︎

  39. web.archive.org/web/20080503141011/http://encyklopedia.pwn.pl/haslo.php?id=3957301.↩︎

  40. Interview with Russell Brand - www.youtube.com/watch?v=nze_y9SNfWo.↩︎

  41. H Kennedy ‘Gruesome George Galloway and the Paris Olympics: medalling in red/brown transphobia’ Tempest August 26 2024. The US-Canadian Tempest collective is remarkably coy, like so many left groups, about making known its real political origins. Tempest seems, though, to be one of the many fragments that came out from the 2019 terminal blow-up of the Cliffite International Socialist Organisation. If I am wrong, readers might put me right.↩︎