Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 119, June/July 1994
The electoral victories gained by fascist parties in Europe, argues MAXINE WILLIAMS, have lent urgency to the debate on how to fight fascism. Guardian columnist, Martin Kettle has solved these problems to his own, if nobody else’s, satisfaction by saying that these parties are not fascist at all. For example, Italy’s MSI now with five seats in the cabinet, 105 deputies and 43 senators:
‘While it undoubtedly attracts a significant number of genuinely fascist nostalgics and mimics, it is an altogether more modern right-wing party. In particular, it is an electoral rather than a military force.’
He appears to have forgotten that both in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 30s, fascism used electoral methods very successfully. More significantly, Kettle has forgotten that the MSI leader recently called Mussolini ‘the greatest statesman of the century’. And that in many parts of Italy, the MSI following does not merely engage in nostalgia but in very contemporary assaults and murders of immigrants.
For Kettle the way to avoid the Italian experience is to follow the British path of consensus. Consensus about welfarism and:
‘…the combination of strict immigration controls, equal rights laws and the marginalisation of the ultra-Right has held together quite well…’
Quite well if you are Martin Kettle but not quite so well for Joy Gardner, killed by police and immigration officers who enforce Kettle’s consensus, founded as it is on racism.
Kettle’s proof that this works is that the British economy has been more thoroughly restructured and its welfare system cut but still no right-wing force has emerged on the scale of Europe. But if we look more closely at the Italian experience we find just what Kettle’s consensus represents.
Fascism today
With the ruling Christian Democrat party ruined by scandals which also embroiled the Socialist Party, the Italian ruling class faced political crisis. Step forward instant politician, Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi, who owns most of Italian TV, put forward a programme of virulent anti-communism and the safeguarding of Italian capitalism by public spending cuts, privatisation and low taxes. To gain a majority he allied with the fascist MSI and regionalist Northern League.
The Italian ruling class has based its post-war rule on ‘historic compromise’ (could this be Kettle’s consensus?) the most concrete result of which is a huge public sector. Faced with economic crisis the ruling class has broken the compromise. In allowing the fascists their first post-war voice in government, it is clear that more than just the ghost of working class opposition still menaces the Italian ruling class. The working class must be made to pay for the crisis. As Daniel Singer writes in New Statesman:
‘Compromise means give and take. The labour movement is being offered no-give all-take; all over Europe its conquests, won in the 30 years of unprecedented prosperity, are under attack.’
Nor have the French or German ruling classes yet succeeded in dismantling all post-war gains. When the French government tried to introduce a cheap labour scheme for youth, it faced demonstrations and riots which forced it to back down. Germany has not yet managed to significantly curtail a welfare system which makes British Social Security look like the Poor Law.
But in Britain, the Conservatives have succeeded in delivering a devastating agenda of cuts, labour casualisation and unemployment with little effective opposition. The lynch-pin of Kettle’s consensus is a reliable, social democratic Labour Party which has flattened even such small stirrings of opposition as the last 15 years have seen.
Given this, the encouragement of fascism would be an unnecessary risk for the ruling class. As long as the consensus delivers the cheap labour and strong state policies their profits require, why rock the boat? Of course fascism does not merely require the passive or active support of the bourgeoisie. It grows in conditions of instability, social and class conflict which terrify the middle classes. Here again, the Labour Party has shored up the consensus by successfully encouraging a deadening passivity in the British working class. Thus far British fascism has grown mainly among sections of the white working class who, in the face of unemployment and cuts, recognise that Kettle’s consensus offers them nothing. In the absence of any left movement, they have turned instead to a more radical brand of racism than the Labour Party supplies.
Kettle’s very British consensus, on which he rests his hope for the failure of fascism, has turned out to be not a consensus against fascism but against the working class. A consensus that holds as long as the working class does not fight against the attacks made on it. The path that Mrs Thatcher embarked on 15 years ago is now being taken elsewhere in Europe and they will use an alliance with fascism should it prove necessary, as in Italy. The European working classes, have proved a far tougher nut to crack and bourgeois political systems weaker than in the older and, until recent times, stronger imperialist power, Britain. The imposition of Thatcherite programmes in Europe may therefore require a more radical break with bourgeois democracy.
This is not to be complacent about the BNP who, although they lost their East End seat, increased their votes. The future may produce strains so great that the consensus fractures. Britain is no longer the dominant imperialist power it was. The ruling class requires more widespread cut-backs, there may be a resurrection of working class struggle in Britain and a turn to fascism by larger sections of the population. All the more important that we should learn some lessons from the history of the fight against fascism.
What is fascism?
Bourgeois ideas about fascism must conceal their guilty secret — they supported it. Thus while they have to admit that fascism is tyrannical, militaristic and anti-Semitic/racist they must also present it as standing outside and opposed to bourgeois democracy. Unconnected with capitalism, a mass psychosis. In Britain, with a ruling class that used the ‘antifascist’ banner to defend its imperialist interests in 1939, it is also seen as foreign. Hence the choice of title, ‘Anti-Nazi League’ and the characterisation of British fascists as ‘unpatriotic’.
The socialists and communists who led the struggle against fascism in the 1920s and 30s had no such illusions. In his classic study Fascism and Big Business, Daniel Guerin makes clear that both fascism and war ‘grow out of the same dungheap … the monstrous products of capitalism in decline’. A system which, having brought the productive forces to a point where they could meet the needs of all people, denies this possibility in the interests of private ownership and profit. Political systems — bourgeois democratic or fascist — exist merely to safeguard this system. In different conditions each has its function. And as long as this situation persists, humanity’ is trapped in a circle of hell — crises, poverty and war. Capitalism has outlived its time but socialism has not been achieved. Which is why Guerin writes:
‘For what is fascism, at bottom, but the direct product of the failure to achieve socialism? Behind fascism, the shadow of socialism is ceaselessly present.’
The rise of fascism in Europe after the First World War was directly related to the crisis faced by capitalism. That crisis of profitability had fuelled the inter-imperialist rivalries which led to the First World War. The war did not resolve the crisis nor did it solve the issue of the hungriest imperialist power, Germany. To add to the problems faced by capitalism, the war triggered a wave of revolutionary outbreaks of which the 1917 Russian revolution was the most far-reaching.
Mussolini broke from Italian socialism in 1915 over the issue of socialist opposition to the war and moved rightwards with meteoric speed. In 1919 and 1920 as the economic crisis deepened there were strikes and riots throughout Italy, factories were seized, banks attacked and soviets set up and many areas passed into the hands of the Communists. Mussolini’s fascist squads began systematic attacks on left-wing workers and communist organisations killing at least 3,000 people. State forces took an active part and while leftists were gaoled the Minister of Justice sent a note to magistrates telling them to ‘forget about cases involving fascist criminal acts’. In the fascists, the ruling class saw the ability to crush the working class. In 1921 bourgeois politicians went into an alliance with them and the fascists were given 35 seats in Parliament. The parallel with the Berlusconi pact is clear.
Although Italian fascism presented itself as a radical solution to the problems of the middle and working classes, the key factor in Mussolini’s rise to power in 1922 was the support of the big industrialists, landowners and banks. They financed the March on Rome which secured fascist power. Likewise in Germany it was the Thyssens and the Krupps who backed the Nazis. Bourgeois democracy first accommodated and then surrendered itself to fascism in the interests of restoring profits at the expense of the working class. Between 1927 and 1932 in Italy, wages were halved, women were driven out of work and the unemployed forced to do public works for a pittance. Militant labour organisations were crushed. Public money was used to refloat failed banks and finance huge private enterprises. Vast public works enriched the industrialists as did preparations for war.
There are not, despite the pretences of social democracy, painless methods of restoring profitability. Today as in the 1920s it requires that the mass of the population, especially the working class, pays for it. Hence the similarities today between capitalist parties throughout Europe — privatisation, abolition of the welfare state, deregulation of labour, low wages. Mrs Thatcher’s programme itself raised many fascist ghosts — the attack on unions, centralisation, direct shifts of wealth to the owners of capital, heavy subsidies to arms makers. Mrs Thatcher and Sr Berlusconi are not worlds away from Mussolini. It is merely that in certain conditions, especially those of active working class opposition, such a programme cannot be implemented without a fascist political movement and the abolition of bourgeois democracy.
Fascism and imperialism
It was clear both in Italy and Germany in the 1920s, that an anti-working class programme was not enough. Conditions of economic crisis afflicted capitalism worldwide and intensified the competition between imperialist powers. Nationalism was not merely an ideological form for fascism, it was essential if the population was to be mobilised behind the struggle to win a bigger share of world markets and colonies for its ruling class. Germany was defeated in its First World War attempt to win an empire to match its economic strength. Mussolini referred to Italy as a ‘proletarian nation’ in the international community. Both German and Italian fascism carried through a programme designed to gain colonial possessions at the expense of other imperialist powers. Italy looked to expand its African possessions by declaring a brutal war against Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Germany looked first to Eastern Europe then elsewhere. While quite happy to tolerate the crushing of the Italian and German working classes, the concentration camps and other barbarities, the other imperialists would not tolerate challenges to their colonies and markets. Hence war.
Although the First and Second World Wars took different forms, the essence remained the same — the urge to redivide the world amongst the imperialists. World War Two was conducted under both bourgeois democratic and fascist banners. Today as then, the imperialists rely on their strangulation of the oppressed nations. Today, the same divisions and rivalries exist between the powers. They eye each other warily whether it be on trade issues or the question of who gets influence in former Yugoslavia. The urge to colonial conquest and the danger of world-wide conflict remains.
Today’s MSI has temporarily abandoned its demand for Italian rule in parts of former Yugoslavia. Their nationalism takes a more immediately dangerous form with the whipping up of hatred for immigrants, black people and ‘foreigners’ which is the hallmark of the fascist organisations throughout Europe. But it is also the hallmark of most European governments whose ‘Fortress Europe’ policies reflect the intensifying divisions in the world between rich imperialist nations and poor, oppressed nations.
Imperialism and racism are twins. Imperialism and war are twins. Imperialism and crisis-driven attacks on the working class are twins. Can we seriously separate fascism from its source — decaying and imperialist capitalism? Can we pretend, like Martin Kettle, that fascism is something apart, something alien to the system under which we live? Can we imagine that the struggle against fascism can be conducted as an isolated struggle, that the BNP can be defeated by calling them Nazis? As Daniel Singer said of Italy:
‘The European left can now tackle the questions raised … in the 1960s (growth for whom, for what purpose, for whose profit, within what kind of environment?) … or it can resign itself to the role of the American Democratic Party. At this historical stage there is no scope for the reformist management of capitalism.’
Or as Guerin wrote in 1945 after fascism had scorched its path through the world: ‘… fascism … can be effectively fought and vanquished definitively only by the proletarian revolution. All anti-fascism that rejects it is but vain and deceitful babbling’.
Have we to learn all this again? Our struggle against fascism must also be a fight for socialism.
