03.09.2026

Standing for open debate

‘No-platforming’ and speech controls are rooted in the cross-class politics of popular frontism and only serve to strengthen the right, argues Mike Macnair. This is an edited version of his talk at CU 2026

Back in October 2024 I wrote an article in this paper, ‘Crushing it in the egg’.¹ This was addressed to the view on the left that sufficiently violent action against the fascists at an early stage of their development could crush fascism “in the egg” and prevent it developing rapidly. I looked at where that idea came from.

It comes from a writer called Daniel Guérin, writing about the rise of Nazism in Germany. He quotes Hitler and Goebbels as saying that, if the opponents of Nazism had crushed it in the egg by sufficiently violent force in the 1920s, then it would never have succeeded. In reality, this Hitler and Goebbels story is complete nonsense, because actually the Nazi Party was one of a number of far-right parties that organised veterans’ groups to beat up leftists. They acted as external auxiliaries of the German state, with the support of the police and the judiciary, who protected them against the leftists who wanted to organise self-defence against them. So, even supposing Hitler and Goebbels had been assassinated, some other far-rightist would have emerged.

Daniel Guérin’s book was translated by the US Socialist Workers Party in 1939. And in 1953 we see a leader in the SWP’s Militant, and in 1954 Murry Weiss of the SWP (later a Maoist), saying of Senator Joe McCarthy (who the SWP characterised as ‘proto-fascist’): “Our conception of fighting the fascists is to crush them in the egg.” This was a seriously unrealistic assessment of what was going on in the United States.

By 1975, SWP leader Farrell Dobbs, who had been an important trade unionist in the Minneapolis Teamsters’ strikes of the 1930s, recognised that this ‘crush fascism in the egg’ line was simply wrong. What it does is take small groups of the left and throw them into adventurist confrontations with small groups of the far right (and with the cops), which diverts attention from actually building up the mass organisations of the workers’ movement. When it really comes to a threat of fascism, it is the strength of the mass organisations of the workers’ movement that matters.

However, from Murry Weiss it was taken up by the Spartacists. It became one of the big differences between the Spartacists and the US SWP in the 1970s, and was picked up by the Ligue Communiste in France. LC leader Alain Krivine - standing in the ruins of the Ligue’s office, which had just been raided by the police after a petrol-bombing of a far-right organisation - said in 1973: “You cannot avoid your responsibilities … 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 have shown the way.” And from Krivine, I think, this spread and became a dogma of the far left.

What has ‘crush fascism in the egg’ actually achieved? In Italy, the Fratelli d’Italia government of Giorgia Meloni, is post-fascist, but it is the descendant of the MSI (Italian Social Movement), the post-1945 successor of Mussolini’s fascist governing party. In France, the Rassemblement National, far-right in its origins, is the leading contender in the next presidential election. In the United States we have the Trump administration - not fascism proper, but a far-right government. And so on.

This dogma is completely misconceived, and not just for the reason given by Farrell Dobbs. Fascism poses two sorts of threats to the workers’ movement. The first is the threat of physical violence. The second is the threat of ideological poison - nationalism, racism, culture-war politics of one sort or another. The threat of physical violence is something the workers’ movement can defend itself against through united-front action, without regard to anything other than the need to exercise self-defence - you can agree to defend the movement against far-right violence without agreeing on anything else.

But that logic does not extend to the ideological poison. The ideological poisons are just as much presented by the Labour Party. Burnham is right now playing the game of ‘immigration is why there isn’t enough housing - I’m going to stop the boats’ and all of that.

Equally, the SWP in Britain, starting in the late 1970s, created the Anti-Nazi League, which was a unification with the Conservative Party and all forces to the left of the Conservative Party against the National Front, identified as ‘the Nazis’. The ANL was enormously successful. The reason was actually that a bunch of rank-and-file SWP members had organised Rock Against Racism, a musical anti-racist initiative, and the ANL essentially rode on the success of Rock Against Racism. This success meant that the ANL was succeeded by Unite Against Fascism, then Stand Up to Racism, and the latest iteration is Together. They all have the same characteristic: you try to draw a clear line between the far right and the Conservative Party, treating the latter as a ‘constitutionalist’ party.

But this is the same party that, in the 1914 Curragh Mutiny, attempted to organise a military coup to prevent Irish Home Rule. It is the party of Enoch Powell, when he gave his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968. Going back further, it is the party which promoted the 19th century ‘hooligans’ scares against Irish immigrants to Britain; and the agitation against Jews in the early 20th century, against French refugees in the 1790s, against Jews in the 1700s and 1750s, and against Huguenot refugees in the 1680s. This is a party not only of nationalism and anti-migrant sentiment, but also of the organisation of physical-force violence. The Tory press is the main promoter of anti-immigrant campaigns and other varieties of culture-wars poison. So it is extraordinary for the left to identify the Tory Party as a potential ally against the far right - an aspect of the logic of the people’s front.

Witch-hunt

The second element of how this policy strengthens the right is the anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism witch-hunt. This is conducted on the basis that opposition to Zionism, and in particular opposition to the Israeli state’s genocidal operations, amounts to anti-Semitism and is therefore racist and hence to be no-platformed - leading to cancellation of pro-Palestine speakers and various meetings. Activists in Labour Against the Witchhunt had to move from venue to venue, and finally wound up in an obscure council-estate community centre, because of threats and cancellations on the basis that holding meetings opposing the witch-hunt amounted to harassment of Jews under section 26 of the Equality Act 2010.

The other side of this is that the attacks on Kathleen Stock - the anti-trans, conservative, feminist academic, at Sussex University - was on the basis that Stock’s comments about trans people amounted to harassment of trans people, also under section 26 of the Equality Act 2010.

If we go back to the debates about that section of the act when the government was briefing parliament, opponents were saying this new section is an immense interference with freedom of speech. The government said no, the courts will read it down by reference to the right of freedom of expression under article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. No such thing has happened, partly because nobody has been prepared to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds at the Court of Appeal (or millions at the UK Supreme Court) testing the relationship between the Equality Act and article 10. This, of course, is itself a sale and denial of justice, in violation of Magna Carta, produced by the free market in legal services.

Nonetheless, what we have, essentially, is anti-harassment rules used as a limit on freedom of speech, and used primarily against the left.

And it turns out that the no-platforming of ‘transphobes’, as a tactic adopted by the trans rights movement, has not ended prejudice against and persecution of trans people. It has, if anything, been followed by the no-platforming of trans activists on a much larger scale, by individual US states and by the US federal government.

This in one sense is exactly the same issue as the utter failure of the policy of no-platforming fascists. Imagined to be a soft-target policy, it diverts attention from the actual tasks needed to fight fascism - or to fight the oppression of trans people. And no-platforming and cancellation/dismissal campaigns not only do not work, but lend real political support to the state’s no-platforming the left.

A comrade in the discussion following my talk at CU argued that repeated failure is not a reason to abandon no-platforming: the project of communism has also failed over the last century, yet we do not abandon it. The difference is, firstly, that communism is a goal, while no-platforming is a tactic. Secondly, as I said at the outset, there were never any grounds for believing that fascism could be ‘crushed in the egg’ by no-platforming. Fascism is an external auxiliary to the state, which protects the fascist bands. It can be defeated - by full-dress civil war and/or international war. Either needs broad mass support.

The same comrade argued that the anti-Semitism witch-hunt would have happened without the left’s popular frontism. Probably true, because the capitalist state and the political and media representatives of the capitalist class identify and strike at weak points of their enemy’s front. But it is perfectly clear that popular frontism radically weakened the left’s response to this witch-hunt: visible in Corbyn and his advisors, in Momentum, in David Renton’s 2021 book, Labour’s antisemitism crisis (these are merely examples).

Popular front

Why does the left keep pursuing this policy in spite of its plain repeated failure over the last 50 years? The essence of the no-platform policy is the popular front. The idea is unity of the left and workers’ movement with the liberal bourgeoisie to defeat the far right.

There is another form of popular front: unity of the workers’ movement with the ‘national’ bourgeoisie - that is, support for nationalists; this was a common policy of the majority of the left through the cold war period in the semi-colonies, and continues in dilute forms, without its underlying strategic grounds, to this day (as, for example, in ‘Lexit’ advocacy and in the widespread left tailing of Scots nationalism). But nationalists are generally (not invariably) politically closer to the far right, and commonly advocate social conservatism on, for example, gender issues; obviously then, unity with the ‘national’ bourgeoisie does not produce ‘crush it in the egg’ no-platforming.

Trotskyists imagine they are not popular frontists, because they endlessly tell the story of the failure of the Spanish Popular Front in the Spanish Civil War, the failure of the French Popular Front, which issued in conservative governments, and then the treason of the generals in 1940 and the victory of fascism in the form of German occupation and Pétain’s Vichy regime in France. Trotskyists then leap forward in history to the Popular Unity government in Chile, and its efforts to unite with ‘constitutionalist’ generals against fascist generals - and then it turns out it is the ‘constitutionalist’ general, Augusto Pinochet, who organises the military coup against Popular Unity.

But there is an enormous gap here, and it leads to a real misunderstanding of why the left keeps pursuing popular frontism. The gap is that the fall of France, the Benelux countries and Scandinavia in the spring of 1940 destroyed the strategic position of British imperialism. In consequence, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1941, the ‘democratic’ imperialists - Britain and the USA - were led to ally with Moscow. That alliance amounted to a global popular front between the workers’ movement and the Soviet Union and ‘democratic capital’. Under the banner of this popular front we get the extension of the Soviet ‘socialist camp’ across the whole of eastern Europe, and into China, North Vietnam, and North Korea - an extension which included Cuba and South Yemen and continued down to the 1970s with the fall of Saigon. All of these apparent victories were conducted under the banner of the popular front.

It is this history of apparent major success that has led the left to be gung-ho for the popular front. And not just the ‘official communists’ and the Maoists. The Trotskyists thought of themselves as opponents of the popular front. But they imagined that the US ‘New Left’ and trends influenced by it offered a way out of their isolation. As a result, they came to imagine ‘liberation movements’ as strategic allies of the working class, much as ‘official communists’ and Maoists did. The result is that the left, including the large majority of Trotskyists, has been and still is under the spell of the US left, and specifically of the 1950s-60s civil rights movement.

This movement was itself a form of the popular front, because the idea is that the working class as a class subordinates itself to the project of black civil rights - limiting demands to those which could be common to the black middle class as well as the black working class. This was a policy the Communist Party of the USA developed in the 1930s, as a way of attempting to pose the popular front policy.² The theory underlying the popular front is that there are uncompleted democratic-capitalist, ‘bourgeois-revolutionary’ tasks. It was hard to argue that there are uncompleted tasks of the bourgeois revolution in the 20th century USA; but the race and sex issues could be claimed as posing necessary allies, to which the working class must subordinate itself.

Then Vietnam intersected with the civil rights movement: the US army nearly fell apart in Vietnam, to a considerable extent because of the endemic racism within its own structures. In consequence, between the mid-1970s and the rise of Trumpism in the 20-teens, the US Department of Defense, and the American state more broadly, actively promoted anti-discrimination politics.

The US state turned towards anti-discrimination as a response to defeat in Vietnam; but also as a policy directed against the left. This idea was already there, when Gary Becker, the Chicago economist, wrote his 1957 book, The economics of discrimination, arguing that racism arises from the workers rather than from the bosses; it was already there when the US Libertarian Party was founded in 1971 on a manifesto combining the defence of the rights of ‘minorities’ - women, black people, and so on - with the defence of millionaires as a minority.

Meanwhile, out of the US ‘New Left’ Students for a Democratic Society there issued (among other things) the western ‘soft Maoist’ movement, influenced by the ideas of the Chinese Cultural Revolution without being fully orthodox Maoist. This movement provided the ideological framework for black power movements and for women’s, gay and lesbian liberation ideas. In the 1970s the movements smashed themselves up through what Jo Freeman called ‘trashing’ - accusations of privilege in relation to competing oppressions.³ It later turned out - when the files were disclosed - that, although the FBI did not invent trashing, it picked up on it as something to amplify, as part of the Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Program) infiltration projects to undermine and destroy the left.

We wind up with what was, in the 1960s, the genuinely virtuous popular front of the US civil rights movement, mutating into the much more ambiguous popular front of the left together with the human resources departments of corporations, the equalities departments of local councils, and - via Cointelpro’s infiltrators, or the British spy cops - the state security apparat.

No alternative

The left has to fight fascism in two ways. One is united-front physical-force self-defence, on the broadest possible basis of people who are actually willing to defend the right to meet, the right to march, the right to hand out leaflets, without getting beaten up for it.

But, on the other hand, we have to pose a political alternative to the far right’s posturing as opponents of the existing establishment ‘elites’, and we are not currently posing one. We cannot pose an alternative to the ideological influence of the far right in the form of practical unity with the Tories, or indeed practical unity with the Labour Party. We need to pose a positive alternative.

Now, the problem with posing a positive alternative is that the left, as it is now, is a very small minority. That is why people hide behind formulas - SWP members constantly describing themselves as ‘a speaker on behalf of Stand Up to Racism’, or ‘I’m speaking in a personal capacity as a member of Unite at such-and-such workplace’, and so on. The left is a small minority because we are still in the shadow of the failure of the USSR. This is something taught to every child in school at GCSE level - everyone is taught about Europe in the ‘age of the dictators’ - with Hitler and Stalin as twins. There is endless ideological and literary production about the failures of Stalinism, and in a sense that could be overcome.

I have given an analogous example before: the medieval Italian city-states all collapsed into factionalism and tyranny, with the exception of Venice; and dramatists and writers endlessly taught the lesson that republicanism and democracy inevitably lead to faction and tyranny. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is one of the most famous examples; Thomas Otway’s 1682 play, Venice preserv’d, is a Tory drama denouncing the parliamentary opposition by analogy with factionalists in Venice. The idea that democracy and republicanism only lead to faction and tyranny was utterly dominant from about the 15th century to the late 1680s. It only ceased to be dominant, once first the Netherlands, and then Britain, showed that you could organise politics in a way that was not absolute monarchy, but did not rapidly collapse into factionalism and tyranny.

The left, however, has not shown a superior alternative to the way the Soviet Union ran things - it actually continuously promises to reproduce the same crap. It promises to reproduce it in the form of bureaucratic centralism: the SWP and the ‘Comrade Delta’ affair - the cronyism in the apparatus, the top-down management, the fact that the Comrade Delta affair involved sexual abuse by the woman’s own line manager. How on earth did it come to be the case that the party’s organising secretary had that role? Because they had adopted the Soviet model of top-down appointment of district organisers by the centre.

The same thing happened in the Socialist Party in England and Wales: Peter Taaffe and his associates expelled the majority of SPEW’s international organisation because they were not prepared to lose a vote. The same, in reality, occurred in the Revolutionary Communist Party - I do not think we have examples in the RCP in the recent past, but it certainly has a history of the same kind of thing, with the same consequences of cronyism and top-down managerialism, in its precursor, Socialist Appeal, and its co-thinkers in the International Marxist Tendency.

Equally, there are trade-union-style bureaucratism and rule-of-law regimes, where you have elaborate rules and standing orders, and people playing procedural games at the expense of allowing the membership actually to take a decision. Left Unity worked like that. The trade unions, of course, work like that. The Labour Party worked like that until it became even more centralised and bureaucratised.

Then there are the latest devices: legal control, where you have something that is essentially a political brand with no rights for the membership, because the brand is legally owned by an individual or small group, the finances are legally owned by an individual or small group, and data-protection rules are used to suppress the availability of information. This is how La France Insoumise works, Podemos in Spain and, in this country, previously Momentum and now Your Party.

Bad words

A fourth form of bureaucratic practice is speech controls. ‘Safe spaces’ policies were an endless source of fighting in student unions 10-15 years ago, and in the same period Left Unity saw numerous denunciations of people for disagreeing. In Manchester Left Unity, one of our members, Laurie McCauley, was charged with violating the safe-spaces rules for reporting what happened in the Manchester branch - though they did not actually charge him with the reporting itself, they charged him with bullying other members in Manchester. When we finally got the charges thrown out, it was because new people were put onto the disputes committee, and (I was there as a sort of McKenzie friend for Laurie) the disputes committee members dealing with this case explained that there were hundreds of vexatious complaints of misconduct that were being brought merely because of political disagreement. The committee was totally overwhelmed; the previous members had resigned because they could not see any way of dealing with all these complaints fairly and reasonably.

Last year we debated ‘civility’ rules as a bar on political characterisations like calling people ‘opportunist’, or calling those who promote naive policies which benefit their opponents ‘useful idiots’. Nick Wrack and his co-thinkers broke off unity discussions with us, ostensibly on the basis that we would call them opportunists - ‘we can’t unite with you if you call us opportunists’. In reality, they were opportunists (in the ordinary English-language sense, not in the technical sense of being rightwingers): they thought more opportunities would open up for them in direct relations with Your Party. Surprise, surprise: what actually happened, very shortly afterwards, was that Nick Wrack was himself no-platformed in Manchester by the Your Party proto-branch, for being ‘rude’ about the SWP people running that proto-branch.

The latest version is the ‘N-word scandal’ - and this one, in my opinion, is peculiarly dishonest. We participated in setting up a Socialist Education and Debate Association (emphasis added). Alex Green and Tony Collins suddenly announced that it is a matter of principle that the word, ‘nigger’, cannot be used, even in a quotation from Marx, and that Ian Donovan must be excluded on account of his (genuinely) left anti-Semitic views; they used their legal control of the e-list to exclude dissentients. Debate?

Alex and Tony are ex-Spartacists. I see no reason, given this political history, to believe that they honestly believe in the ‘principle’ that 19th century quotations must be falsified. This, of course, is merely a branch of popular frontism of the 1970s western soft Maoist variety, and an excuse for 1970s-style ‘trashing’.

Rather, the Spartacist method is at work: persuade less experienced comrades you are in contact with that an issue of principle requires an organisational split in the very short term, and corral your contacts in a separate organisation. Back when Tony and Alex were recruited from the International Marxist Group to the Spartacists, the issue of principle was immediately that you had to call out the Mandelites as ‘centrists’ and, behind that, you could not be in the same organisation as people who supported Solidarność in Poland. With other operations, a succession of matters have been the issue which demands a short-term split; it is really about the method of corralling and separating people, so that internal discussion is blocked.

It is not the CPGB’s ‘bad culture of demanding the right to give offence’, or standing on this as a principle, that is at stake. Take us out of the picture and the problem would be as bad or worse. Rather, the problem is the left’s ‘western soft Maoist’ bad culture of taking offence and demanding speech controls and purity. I said that Nick Wrack was no-platformed by Manchester Your Party proto-branch. More recently, Richard Gerard, who participated in witch-hunting the CPGB over the ‘N-word’ issue online, has been forced out of the leadership of the Socialist Federation - a frankly trivial grouping arising out of Your Party’s left wing - because he does not toe the line on Judith Butler’s theory of gender.

Comrades who pursue these politics are effectively saying to the broad workers’ vanguard - the broad layer of militants who pay some limited attention to what the left says - that nothing is possible beyond either Stalinism or managerialist capitalism. In reality, they are saying there is no alternative to managerialist capitalism, because we have committed ourselves, we have committed the movement, to this regime of managerial control: exclusion of people for incorrect speech, safe-spaces and civility rules, and so on, controlled by a bureaucratic apparatus, leading to endless splits into smaller and smaller fragments on the basis of purity. By telling the broad vanguard this, they are indirectly telling the mass of the working class that there is no alternative to managerialist capitalism.

An alternative

I will not go into the positive alternative here at any length, but the basic principle is: one vote, one voice for everybody; freedom of communication and freedom of information; freedom of association, the right to enter into blocs and organise in order to amplify your voice.

Nobody gets a prior right to amplify their voice simply by virtue of property rights - which is essentially the regime of the bourgeois press, where Rupert Murdoch’s wealth allows him to amplify his political voice through The Times, The Sun, Sky News, and so on.

Nobody gets a veto. The safe-spaces regimes commonly involve the idea that the caucuses of the oppressed have a veto. The claim being made by Alex Green and co is that black people would veto any quotation of the ‘N-word’ by somebody else. They are not saying that black comrades are vetoing it - they are saying that hypothetical black people might.

We call for: no vetoes, no bureaucratic control, majority voting, one vote, one voice, freedom of association and organisation, freedom of communication and information. Those give you the fundamental principles (I wrote at greater length a few weeks ago about the general principles of democratic-centralist decision-making⁴). But these basic principles, as opposed to bureaucratic mechanisms (whether bureaucratic centralism or trade-union-style legalistic bureaucratism, and so on) are principles which actually pose an alternative to the regime of managerialist bureaucratic socialism. And they therefore pose an alternative to capitalism.

By showing that we could make our collective decision-making better, we also show that the socialism we propose would be better. And by showing that we could do socialism better, we can potentially pose an alternative that mobilises the working class as a class to counter the influence of the far right - and even potentially reaches the layers currently influenced by the far right.

October 24 2024: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1512/crushing-it-in-the-egg. References for points in this section are in this article.↩︎
For references, see my article, ‘Intersectionalism: the highest stage of western Stalinism?’ Critique Vol 46 (2018), pp541-58 (preprint at ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4e207cae-a7bb-4327-a0b9-2e0ba8332b95/files/rqr46r0842).↩︎
www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm.↩︎
‘Centrality of democracy’ Weekly Worker June 18 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1590/centrality-of-democracy); ‘Time is on our side’, June 25 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1591/time-is-on-our-side); ‘Legalism and labyrinthine rules’, July 2 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1592/legalism-and-labyrinthine-rules); ‘Principles and guidelines’, July 16 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1594/principles-and-guidelines); ‘Break from failed nostrums’, July 23 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1595/break-from-failed-nostrums).↩︎