28.08.2002

How to beat the fascists

The Anti-Nazi League recently claimed a major victory over the fascist British National Party. Seasoned observers on the left could be forgiven for wondering when it has ever claimed anything else

All sides boasted of success at the August 17-18 'Red, White and Blue' festival staged by the fascist British National Party in Lancashire. On the BNP's website, the report of the event crows that the "unwashed rabble of the ANL" were unable to prevent "about 1,200" people enjoying a "tremendous weekend" of bouncy castles, five-aside footie and political events. To give a tantalising glimpse of the fun, the site features photos including one of two blokes queuing at a stall serving "wholesome rolls filled with British bacon and beef" - no nancy-boy veggies welcome, presumably. Like Hitler, for instance. Just a quick click and up comes the ANL's site, which tells us that the two days were a debacle, a small disaster for the fascists. According to this report, "Fewer than 400 Nazis turned up for the Lancashire event "¦ some 100 ANL protestors broke through the five-kilometre exclusion zone imposed by the police and mounted a picket next to the rally site." This was described as another important "setback" for the Nazis and BNP leader Griffin was "visibly rattled during his 'keynote' speech". The event "flopped in the face of ANL protests", the comrades brag. Skirmishes such as the RWB event are useful in two ways. First, they remind us just how peripheral the BNP are to British politics. Secondly, however, they also highlight how marginal the revolutionary left also is, its potential notwithstanding. Despite its relative riches in terms of cadre, resources, intellectual talent, organisational resources and its universalist message, the Marxist left's growth remains stunted by sectarianism. A pristine example of this is the reality of the ANL itself, of course. Despite its website claim to be a "broad-based, mass organisation", the ANL is a front for the Socialist Workers Party, pure and simple. It has no democratic structures, no regular publication, no life outside the campaigning priorities set by the SWP apparatus. It is a particularly dim component of the constellation of 'united fronts' (Stop the War Coalition, the ANL, the Socialist Alliance, Globalise Resistance, etc) that revolve around the SWP, perceived of as the revolutionary party in miniature by the organisation's leadership. Thus, far from dealing decisive blows to the micro-BNP, the SWP's fractured, sectarian approach, as embodied in fronts such as the ANL, ensures that the revolutionaries cannot even fight the eccentric fascists effectively, let alone take on our main enemy, the Blair government. To do that, the working class needs a party. The one element of the SWP's 'united front constellation' that resembles in outline the type of organisation we need is the Socialist Alliance - even leading members of the SWP concede that it "does some of the things that parties normally do" (Alex Callinicos Socialist Review April). However, despite the claim in the same article that the SA is "developing a broader campaigning profile", the SWP has been at pains to ensure that the SA's remit is strictly limited to fighting elections and not much more. As Callinicos puts it, "the SA takes as its starting point a more specific facet" of the process of political radicalisation the SWP sees sweeping Europe by "seeking to provide an alternative to New Labour, especially "¦ at elections "¦ and thereby offer disaffected Labour Party members and supporters a new political home" (ibid). The ANL's concentration on the BNP "Nazis" chimes in with the SWP's farcical characterisation of this period as "the 1930s in slow motion", defined by growing poles at the extreme left and right of the political spectrum and a disintegrating centre. If it put forward this nonsense in the Socialist Alliance - precisely because the SA is not under the sect discipline of the SWP, but is actually an alliance of the vast majority of the revolutionary left in Britain today - it would face challenges to this ludicrous political prognosis and would be forced to theoretically justify it in open debate with other Marxists. Positions would have to be argued, meetings convened and votes taken. That is, precisely the sort of inconvenient democratic procedures the SWP leadership has disposed of inside its own sect. In truth, active identification with the BNP will remain low. Occasionally, around very specific issues in particular areas, it may be able to plug into the reservoir of reactionary opinion that exists in British society. But by and large the mainstream parties are able to set and dominate the terms of political discourse and maintain the class and social stability needed for accumulation. That will only change when the working class is able to organise itself not only in defence of its interests under capitalism but against capitalism itself. Only under such conditions would sections of the capitalist class look towards fascism - in essence non-state counterrevolutionary fighting formations - as a solution. Ideologically that would require a very different organisation to the one run by Nick Griffin - openly Nazi past, rabid anti-semitism, secret Hitler worship, etc. Meanwhile, Griffin's group is and will continue to be marginal (although the ANL can claim no real credit for this). The fascists have had some tiny successes. In the May local elections, the party won three council seats in Burnley - an important breakthrough. (Characteristically, the ANL statement at the time claimed that the BNP would be "particularly devastated by the result in Oldham" where it failed to win a seat, rather than encouraged by the Burnley results!) However, it is not a serious threat to our class. In truth, we will deal with the BNP scum as a by-product of building a viable political alternative to Blair's reactionary Labour government. However, this requires a little joined up political thinking by the left. For instance, the major intervention of the ANL at election times - ever since Derek Beakon won the BNP's first council seat in east London's Isle of Dogs in 1993 - has been the call, 'Don't vote nazi!' Before the advent of the SA, this was normally taken as a call to vote Labour at best, or any other bourgeois party at worst. Thus, in 1993, it implicitly told a white working class constituency who had been so alienated by the decades of Labour rule that it had actually turned to home-grown nazis, to "¦ well, go back to voting Labour again. The development of the SA represents a potential way to break this impasse. An SA party would be able to campaign on all the issues facing the class, to undercut the electoral support of the right by presenting a comprehensive programme. Through consistent work - coordinated in a regular newspaper - it would be able to sink roots in local communities and start to represent real layers of the class itself, not just a few isolated sects. Of course, this would represent a threat to the SWP as presently constituted. The ANL is simply a transmission belt into the ranks of the SWP; its role in fighting "the nazis" is entirely secondary. If anti-fascist campaigning were integrated into the work of a genuine party formation, the first task would be a give an account of the balance of forces in contemporary Britain - the real strength of the fascists, the hold of reactionary ideas and the true weight of the left. The first duty of working class politicians is to look reality in the face. Otherwise they are useless to our class. All of which brings us back to the idyllic English countryside and the tame stand-off between the BNP and the ANL. Whatever the truth of the conflicting claims on the size of the event and the effectiveness of the anti-fascists protest, one thing is clear. Even if we accept the premise that the event "flopped", there is no way the ANL could feasibly claim responsibility for this. How? Did arriving fascists take one look at the huge and militant counter-demonstration and head back home? Has the ANL destroyed the popular base of the BNP in Burnley through consistent propaganda and campaigning alongside people and making real advances for their common interests? Is the BNP membership cowed, intimidated and on the run in the face of a rampant ANL? So a sense of perspective is key. We should note the small-scale successes of the BNP without becoming hysterical. Token protests such as the ANL's at this year's RWB are worthy, but should not be overblown. Britain is not about to be won to fascism, let alone see "a repeat of Hitler's terror" (ANL website). The urgent necessity of the British left is to unite into something that can be built into a party that can counterpose itself as a viable alternative to Blair's Labour, not to 800 or so losers in a field in Lancashire. In his speech to the fascists' final rally, Nick Griffin dubbed the BNP "the only socialist party in Britain". This is nonsense of course, but indicative of the fact that even the fascists have worked out that there is a vacuum in British politics that can only be filled by a party of the working class. Griffin's claptrap about the "socialist" BNP is about as convincing as Hitler's commitment to his version of 'socialism'. But the question is - where are the genuine socialists? What is holding us back, comrades? Mark Fischer