Black working class culture then, is more threatening to the likes of Heston and his class, than white racial murder. However, fear of the working class youth of whatever ethnicity, has also led to numerous campaigns for restrictions to be put on violent films and video games as these supposedly could endanger the fabric of society when the lower classes are ‘over stimulated’. Censorship then, no matter what the protagonists might think, always has a distinct bias within it.
The bourgeoisie in general and as a result, do not see or acknowledge the antagonistic nature of class society, preferring to see only differences between the haves and the have-nots. Therefore, the middle class idealists see only differences in ideology, the No Platform policy being an example of intolerance of other people’s opinions. More important however, are the class forces that lurk beneath. As Mao Tse-tung observes:
“In class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.”
Consequently, because every ideology has a class character, and while fascism is the ideology of the bourgeois attack on the working class, militant anti-fascism is the ideology of working class self-defence. In class struggle there is no rulebook, nor indeed anyone to enforce any generally accepted rules, the state setting the parameters for mainstream debate depending on its own class character. Struggles for power between different class forces thus tend to be either in conjunction with, or in opposition to, the state.
It was the Italian semiologist Umberto Eco that said, “I see no real difference between the skinheads and neo-Nazis of today and the Nazis of a generation earlier… There is the same kind of stupidity and determination to destroy; the same hatred of others and the will to destruction.” This class prejudice that refuses to see that all fascists are not ignorant working class skinheads carries over to the working class opposition. Viewed by most within AFA as nothing more than a flimsy guise to cloak indolence, the aftermath of an AFA activity is always hallmarked by the previously mentioned, much posting across the internet as many step forward to blindly grope in the darkness of inexperience and intellectual drudgery for a stick to beat AFA with.
At the centre of the Nicaraguan city of Managua stands a statue. Fashioned in the soviet style, it depicts a worker holding a pickaxe in one hand and brandishing a Kalashnikov above his head. Etched in the statues plinth are the words of Augusto Sandino declaring, “Only the workers and peasants will fight to the end”. Sandino was no socialist, being himself a revolutionary nationalist fighting US domination of his country. The cold reality of political struggle however, moved him to recognise and acknowledge this fundamental truth.
The middle class idealists then; want the rain but fear the thunder and lightning, clinging desperately to the idea that harming another person devalues any struggle, irrespective of how much harm is inflicted by the status quo. Such an approach however, issues from the reality that the cause of anti-fascism is not as important to the middle class as to the proletariat. This leads to laziness and a lack of serious ambition, another result of liberal anti-racisms class make-up, ensuring that there is much theory with no real or effective practice. The upshot of this is that when one person’s idealised theory is set against another’s practice, the latter inevitably bears birthmarks, errors and the scars of first attempts. To the middle class liberals, their ideology is a precious commodity, requiring protection from the realities of the world we all have to live in. Preferring then to pursue a ‘less abrasive’ path, whether or not this brings defeat; such forces, in their denunciations of AFA, ignore the cause and concentrate purely on the form that militant anti-fascism takes. This inherent fear of getting blood on their hands permeates the class character, and as anyone who has avoided work may tell you, “If you do nothing, you don’t get your hands dirty”.
The field of liberal complaint as a result, becomes a vocation more than an all-important struggle, the middle class’s generous attitude towards fascism and the tendency to cite Voltaire in the defence of the fascists’ freedom of speech being due to the fact that they do not feel under threat, either from racial attacks or class-based political oppression. With the same intonation as a teacher would adopt when admonishing a young pupil who comes to them complaining of bullying, the solution is ““to just ignore them”. Given what history has taught some of us, such advice would fall heavily on the shoulders of a near dead concentration camp victim.
In attempting to foster a climate of tolerance, in a society where racial frictions are rife, the same forces that concentrate on making the public at large feel sorry for refugees also tend to be those that will condemn any who attempt to resist their own or another’s oppression through violence. Desiring victims with which to sympathise, if these do not peacefully make themselves into the passive, non-threatening victims that are required, interest rapidly wanes.