10.05.2000

Fascism - how to fight it

The recent electoral victory of Jörg Haider, the leader of the rightwing extremist, racist and populist Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Austria poses a number of very important questions about how the left can combat the kind of reactionary development this represents. It also, in a more general sense, poses a number of practical and theoretical questions about the nature of the historical period we are struggling in, about reactionary movements in general and the nature of fascism in particular.

It is crucial, in seeking to formulate a response to such a development, for socialists to have the clearest possible understanding of the political context in which Haider's movement gained its successes, about the configuration of social forces that produced those successes, and about the actual possibilities and objective situation in which both ourselves, and the reactionaries, are operating politically. Such clarity is essential, because, as will be seen, a faulty understanding of the political significance of the Haider phenomenon can lead to serious disorientation, rendering the left at best impotent in dealing with reality, and at worst simply ridiculous and bizarre.

First of all, it is necessary to understand that the context of Haider's rise to gain a share of power is very different from the coming to power of Hitler and Mussolini in the 1920s and 1930s. The slogan repeatedly raised by Socialist Workers Party comrades, that "Haider is Hitler" is a hysterical and catastrophist view of current events. The slogan itself implies that Haider leads an armed paramilitary-based fascist movement whose ascent to power threatens the workers not only of Austria, but all of Europe, with totalitarian mass terror and genocide against minorities - the kind of world historic defeats and bloody counterrevolution that happened in the 1930s.

For one thing this is empirically not true - Haider is the kind of 'respectable' racist politician who, whatever his personal proclivities, understands that for his project posturing with bonehead paramilitaries is the kiss of death. More generally, no serious commentator believes that, at this point in time, capitalism in Europe is facing the kind of historic threat to its existence that provides the conditions for the bourgeoisie to call the fascists to power. As was credibly described by Leon Trotsky in 1938, "Mankind's productive forces stagnate. Already, new inventions and improvements fail to raise the level of material wealth. Conjunctural crises under the weight of the social crisis affecting the whole capitalist system weigh ever heavier deprivations on the masses. Growing unemployment, in its turn, deepens the financial crisis of the state and undermines the unstable monetary systems" (The transitional programme).

Trotsky's description of the conditions that led to the rise of fascism in the 1930s, and which drove the fascist regimes themselves to war against their imperialist rivals on a world scale, could hardly be further removed from the present situation. Today the bourgeoisie, as a class, faces no revolutionary challenge from the working class anywhere in the world. As a result of the ideological backwash from the metamorphosis of the Stalinist states back to some sort of ersatz capitalism, and the concurrent collapse of the 'official communist' movement, the working class is hardly anywhere conscious, even in a mangled or distorted sense, of any historic mission to lead humanity away from capitalism in the direction of a better society.

Yet fascism in the classic sense of the term was precisely a reactionary response to the conditions, threatening to capitalist rule itself, that prevailed between the two world wars. Fascism as a movement had a specific goal for the capitalists - counterrevolution against the workers' movement, aimed at crushing the ability of a roused working class to threaten capitalist rule. In the absence of a historical situation requiring the carrying out of such a counterrevolution against the working class, to talk of 'fascism' in the same manner is meaningless. Such movements as represented by Haider, for all their deeply reactionary and dangerous anti-immigrant agitation, represent a different challenge in different circumstances for the left. Failure to understand these different circumstances can only mean, again, that the left becomes impotent, an object of ridicule, and certainly in no way able to politically combat and defeat the likes of Haider.

It is obvious that in this period, when the working class barely exists as a political force in most of the world, and certainly does not see itself as the bearer of a new society, that the bourgeoisie does not need to use extra-parliamentary methods to destroy any threat from the workers' movement to capitalist rule. Movements like Haider's and others, which have grown considerably in some European countries, do not reflect any mainstream bourgeois programme to erect a totalitarian fascist regime against the working class. Rather, they generally reflect the demoralisation of the labour movement, the loss of belief of many formerly socialist and communist workers in any progressive alternative to capitalism, whether of the reformist or 'official communist' variety. Such movements often have considerable working class support: for instance one of Le Pen's main strongholds is in the 'Red Belt' around Paris - working class districts that in previous decades were strongholds of French Stalinism. It is also evident that Haider has, somewhat similarly, gained considerable working class support from those who used to support the Austrian Social Democrats.

Can such movements be classed as being 'fascist'? Certainly not by the criteria laid down by Leon Trotsky in the analysis developed in his classic writings on the phenomenon concurrent with the rise of Hitler's Nazis. Abstracting from his specific understanding of Hitler's movement as a mass movement of enraged and ruined middle class petty traders and the chronically unemployed, Trotsky understood that Hitler's regime was above all aimed at crushing the most militant, class conscious and indeed often subjectively revolutionary workers' movement in Europe. Haider, on the other hand, is not leading a counterrevolutionary crusade against a dangerously anti-capitalist workers' movement in Austria - no such adversary exists.

Nor does Trotsky's sociological description of fascism correspond with Haider's movement. His social base is hardly a ruined petty bourgeoisie being driven to counterrevolutionary despair by its impoverishment at the hands of big capital in crisis, and turning its hatred against the proletariat. The Austrian petty bourgeoisie is hardly in a state of ruin, even insofar as some of it does support Haider. Obviously, Haider's movement is not fascist, if the word means anything other than a term of abuse for a reactionary political movement that the left and defenders of the rights of immigrants quite correctly regard as threatening. To be unclear about this is to engage in disorientating the left - which is itself dangerous when dealing with such reactionary movements. A realistic and sober assessment of what is really at stake in this situation is crucial in order to fight effectively against this reactionary development.

Dogma and denial

It is a characteristic of some on the far left to dogmatically insist that the analysis of fascism developed by Trotsky in 1930-33 is holy writ. Of course Trotsky's analysis of Hitler's movement as it concretely developed at the time was exemplary, and his call for a united front of workers' organisations and a struggle to the death against fascism pointed the only way in which Hitler's rise to power could have been stopped. However, this does not mean that the form which counterrevolution against the workers' movement took in Germany in that period is the only one in which such counterrevolution can emerge. Many other permutations are possible, as has been proven since over and over again.

But for some less thoughtful defenders of Trotsky's early 1930s analysis the only possible form that fascism can take is that of a mass movement of the petty bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat, which through terror on the streets acts to crush the organisations of the working class. This 'model' of what constitutes fascism is seen for such people as timeless. Many of them are devotees of Trotsky's Transitional programme, which is also for them timeless in its relevance. There are as many permutations of such views as there are Trotskyist sects, but a commonality is the view that 'fascism' is an ever-present threat under capitalism, irrespective of the particular economic and political situation and balance of class forces that prevails. Thus, movements such as Haider's reactionary racist/populist movement, which have a mass base in society, and are not primarily situated in the apparatus of the bourgeois state, are arbitrarily and falsely forced like a square peg into the round hole of Trotsky's analysis of Hitler's movement.

Yet paradoxically many such people - who misunderstand and, however sincerely, in fact distort the nature of contemporary racist-populist movements that come into being in the absence of any class-conscious challenge to capitalism from the workers' movement - manage to engage in sterile scholasticism that allows them to miss the true nature of some genuinely overtly counterrevolutionary regimes and movements, including some in the recent past. In particular, some of the more 'left' Trotskyists are so wedded to a schematic extrapolation of Trotsky's concrete analysis of Hitler's Nazis that they simply deny that any development with a genuinely and overtly counterrevolutionary immediate thrust and purpose that does not fit exactly this template can be called fascist, even though its consequences for the workers' movement may be indistinguishable from that of what they call fascism. For many of the more dogmatic Trotskyists, for instance, military dictatorship and fascism are two counterposed phenomena, and never the twain shall meet.

There are those who insist that neither the regimes of Franco in Spain nor Pinochet in Chile could accurately be called fascist, simply because the agency that actually carried out the pulverisation of the workers' movement in both cases was the armed forces of the 'normal' bourgeois state, and not some extra-legal auxiliary derived from a mass movement of the petty bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat.

It is not surprising that Trotsky himself, who was a revolutionary and not a scholastic, was not one of those who fell into this trap. Trotsky had no hesitation in characterising Franco's forces as fascist and his victory as the victory of fascism in Spain. Not simply for the fact that Franco's forces were militarily aided by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, but also because their directly counterrevolutionary, anti-proletarian purpose merited this characterisation, irrespective of the fact that the core of Franco's strength lay in the army. Scholastic Trotskyists are not satisfied with this, and consider it sloppy. Since political power is monopolised by the military caste, and not some bunch of upstart plebeian cultists, therefore for them these regimes cannot be characterised as fascist, but rather must be called 'Bonapartist'.

Here we have yet another classic example of forcing reality to fit a schema. For Marxists, the term 'Bonapartism' has generally tended to refer to a temporary, unstable but dictatorial regime that, while appropriating the lion's share of power to itself, has multiple social bases in both the contending camps in a deeply divided society. The precarious balancing act of the regime of Louis Bonaparte in mid-19th century France was vividly described by Marx:

"As the executive authority which has made itself independent, Bonaparte feels it to be his task to safeguard 'bourgeois order'. But the strength of this bourgeois order lies in the middle class. He poses, therefore, as the representative of the middle class and issues decrees in this sense. Nevertheless, he is somebody solely because he has broken the power of that middle class, and keeps on breaking it daily. He poses, therefore, as the opponent of the political and literary power of the middle class. But by protecting its material power he revives its political power.

"Thus the cause must be kept alive, but the effect, where it manifests itself, must be done away with. But this cannot happen without small confusions of cause and effect, since in their interaction both lose their distinguishing marks. New decrees obliterate the border line. Bonaparte knows how to pose at the same time as the representative of the peasants and of the people in general, as a man who wants to make the lower classes happy within the framework of bourgeois society. New decrees cheat the 'true socialists' of their governmental skill in advance.

"But above all, Bonaparte knows how to pose as the Chief of the Society of December 10, as the representative of the lumpenproletariat to which he himself, his entourage, his government, and his army belong, and whose main object is to benefit itself and draw California lottery prizes from the state treasury. And he confirms himself as Chief of the Society of December 10 with decrees, without decrees and despite decrees.

"This contradictory task of the man explains the contradictions of his government, the confused groping which tries now to win, now to humiliate, first one class and then another, and uniformly arrays all of them against him; whose uncertainty in practice forms a highly comical contrast to the imperious, categorical style of the government decrees, a style slavishly copied from the uncle" (The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 1852).

Trotsky expanded on this when talking of the "senile Bonapartism of imperialist decay" with regard to the pre-Hitler governments of Papen, Bruning, Schleicher, etc in late Weimar Germany (later he said essentially the same thing about the regime of Doumergue in France after the attempted fascist putsch of February 1934):

"Present-day German Bonapartism has a very complex and, so to speak, combined character. The government of Papen would have been impossible without fascism. But fascism is not in power. And the government of Papen is not fascism. On the other hand, the government of Papen, at any rate in its present form, would have been impossible without Hindenburg who, in spite of the final prostration of Germany in the war, stands for the great victories of Germany and symbolises the army in the memory of the popular masses.

"The second election of Hindenburg had all the characteristics of a plebiscite. Many millions of workers, petty bourgeois, and peasants (social democracy and centre) voted for Hindenburg. They did not see in him any one political programme. They wanted first of all to avoid civil war, and raised Hindenburg on their shoulders as a superarbiter, as an arbitration judge of the nation. But precisely this is the most important function of Bonapartism: raising itself over the two struggling camps in order to preserve property and order. It suppresses civil war, or precedes it or does not allow it to rekindle.

"Speaking of Papen, we cannot forget Hindenburg, on whom rests the sanction of the social democracy. The combined character of German Bonapartism expressed itself in the fact that the demagogic work of catching the masses for Hindenburg was performed by two big, independent parties: the Social Democracy and National Socialism. If they are both astonished at the results of their work, that does not change the matter one whit ..."

"Objecting to our characterisation of the government of Hindenburg-Papen-Schleicher, the Brandlerites refer to Marx and express thereby an ironic hope that his authority may also have weight with us. It is difficult to deceive oneself more pathetically. The fact is that Marx and Engels wrote not only of the Bonapartism of the two Bonapartes, but also of other species. Beginning, it seems, with the year 1864, they more than once likened the 'national' regime of Bismarck to French Bonapartism. And this in spite of the fact that Bismarck was not a pseudo-radical demagogue and, so far as we know, was not supported by the peasantry. The Iron Chancellor was not raised to power as the result of a plebiscite, but was duly appointed by his legitimate and hereditary king.

"And nevertheless Marx and Engels are right. Bismarck made use in a Bonapartist fashion of the antagonism between the propertied classes and the rising proletariat overcoming in this way the antagonism within the two propertied classes, between the Junkerdom and the bourgeoisie, and raised a military-police apparatus over the nation. The policy of Bismarck is that very tradition to which the 'theoreticians' of present German Bonapartism refer. True, Bismarck solved in his fashion the problem of German unity, of the external greatness of Germany. Papen however so far only promises to obtain for Germany 'equality' on the international arena. Not a small difference! But we were not trying to prove that the Bonapartism of Papen is of the same calibre as the Bonapartism of Bismarck. Napoleon III was also only a parody of his pretended uncle" (L Trotsky German Bonapartism October 1932).

These 20th century inter-war Bonapartist regimes that Trotsky was analysing using the tool of historical analogy were all regimes that sought to manoeuvre between the sharply counterposed poles of the society they ruled - the fascist-plebeian movement on the one hand, and the proletarian movement on the other - and therefore in a sense based themselves at different times on both of them, though ultimately in the interest of preserving the 'stability' of their real masters - the bourgeoisie.

But in what sense could the regimes of Franco and Pinochet be said to have leaned on the proletariat, even episodically? In what sense could these regimes be said to have had as their purpose the 'avoidance' of civil war between the fundamental classes of society? The answer is obvious - not at all! The relationship between these regimes and the proletariat was identical to that of the Hitler regime - they simply crushed the workers' movement without pretence of doing anything else, by methods of 'civil war'.

For class conscious workers, there was every difference between the Bonapartist, non-fascist regimes of Schleicher, Von Papen, Bruning and Doumergue on the one hand, and the regimes of Hitler, Franco and Pinochet on the other hand. But there was no operative difference whatsoever between the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini on the one hand, and Franco and Pinochet on the other. All of the latter regimes, of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and latterly Pinochet were fascist regimes, based on the annihilation of the organised proletariat.

Fascism is not only capable of coming to power as a result of a plebeian movement of the non-proletarian masses. That is only one possibility. Fascism is in fact a phenomenon whereby the bourgeoisie finds it both necessary and politically possible to carry out a counterrevolution against the workers' movement, resulting in the annihilation of that movement and the crushing and atomisation of the proletariat as a political force. The forms which such a counterrevolution can take are varied, and reality cannot be forced into the template of what even as eminent a revolutionary as Leon Trotsky wrote about one particular instance of fascism nearly 70 years ago.

Such attempts to fit reality into a preconceived model only disorient the left, and lead to absurdities such as the equation of Haider's parliamentary advance with the catastrophic situation the world working class faced with the victory of Hitler in 1933.

Class politics v posturing and snobbery

Such movements as Haider's find their support to a very large extent in workers who have lost all trace of class or socialist consciousness with the ideological defeats of the left triggered by the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the rightward drift of social democracy towards neo-liberalism. We cannot make effective use of the 'no platform' method of dealing with the far right (perfectly acceptable, and indeed obligatory, in the right circumstances) when dealing with often strategic layers of the working class that have been demoralised to the point of supporting racist demagogues like Haider and Le Pen. It is not possible and indeed bizarre to even consider the idea of 'acquainting with the pavement' such sections of the working class. They have to be fought for politically - and in some circumstances this must involve communists politically confronting and debating with racists and even Hitler cultists in front of such workers, in order to destroy their influence.

For that influence exists, either actually or potentially, in the spontaneous consciousness of many workers (particularly of the dominant ethnicity of an advanced capitalist state) facing harsh economic conditions and the sense of a lack of a future under capitalism in the absence of a socialist alternative, or even the faintest glimmer of consciousness of the potential progressive power of the workers as a class, which is common in this period. The task of socialists is to intervene to change that consciousness, to defeat the influence of spontaneous and sometimes organised nationalist and chauvinist consciousness on these sections of the working class, in favour of a class consciousness, ultimately a revolutionary consciousness.

The logic of refusing to do so leads to such absurdities as some cracked ultra-sectarians, such as the Spartacists, refusing to participate in the recent Rover workers march in Birmingham, because of the presence of nationalist-influenced workers carrying union flags and anti-German, anti-BMW slogans on the march, and denouncing those leftists who did march as chauvinists for participating and intervening with socialist views and propaganda. Who knows what such middle class political snobs would think if they had to take a bus ride home on a Saturday night from central Birmingham to the Castle Vale or Chelmsley Wood housing estates, with scores of working class youth bellowing 'Rule Britannia' at full throat - they would probably think they had walked into a fascist rally. Such attitudes lead logically to writing off the working class as being the agency of fascism.

One wonders what these moralists would have made of the march by Russian workers on 'Bloody Sunday' in January 1905, led by the priest-provocateur Father Gapon. The whole thrust of the petition thousands of Russian workers presented to the tsar was not so much pro-capitalist, as overtly medievalist: "Sire! We workers, our children and wives, the helpless old people who are our parents, we have come to you, Sire, to seek justice and protection. We are in great poverty, we are oppressed and weighed down with labours beyond our strength; we are insulted, we are not recognised as human beings, we are treated like slaves who must suffer our lot in silence. And we have suffered it, but we are being driven deeper into beggary, lawlessness and ignorance. Despotism and arbitrary rule are strangling us, and we are suffocating. Sire, our strength is at an end! The limit of our patience has been reached; the terrible moment has come for us when it is better to die than to continue suffering intolerable torment.

"These, Sire, are our greatest needs which we bring before you. Command and swear that they will be satisfied, and you will make Russia great and glorious and imprint your name eternally on our hearts and the hearts of our descendants. But if you do not grant them, if you fail to hear our plea, then we shall die here, in this square in front of your palace. We have nowhere else to go and no other cause to serve. Before us lie only two paths: to freedom and happiness, or to the grave. Sire, point either of those paths to us and we shall follow, even if it is the path towards death. Let our lives be sacrificed for long-suffering Russia. We are not sorry to make this sacrifice: we shall make it willingly" (quoted in L Trotsky 1905, Harmondsworth 1971, pp89-90).

Our moralists, had they been present on this occasion, would have no doubt denounced the Bolsheviks as accomplices of tsarism and medieval reaction for participating in this march (as they did), which, despite the craven illusions of most of the participants, was in fact the beginning of the 1905 revolution.

All the conditions exist in many of Britain's depressed cities for the rise of a Haider or a Le Pen. But to equate such a possibility with the rise of Hitlerism is utterly disorienting. This is a phenomenon of the demoralisation of the working class. Reality has to be analysed concretely, based on the material logic of current developments. Neither scholasticism, nor Spartacist/Living Marxism-style middle class moralism and snobbery can have any impact whatsoever.

What is needed, above all, to undercut the Haiders and Le Pens, and their potential imitators in Britain, is the forging of a real working class alternative. And that requires both a realistic and concrete analysis of present-day reality, tempered by the experience of the past, but not mangled to fit some spurious schema, and the courage and willingness to struggle of many socialist militants.

That is the only way to defeat the racist right and the Hitler cultists - by posing a real alternative to the capitalist system itself.