Thirty years after RA was formed the need to bring the marginalised working class in from the cold is greater than ever. Just as predictably, conservative anti-fascism is moving in the opposite direction. Where previously we condemned the strategy of avoiding confronting the far-right physically, today the strategy for conservative anti-fascism is to avoid confronting the far-right politically.
And instead of politically engaging on the issues on working class estates, the most recent recommendation/boast of Hope not Hate is to establish ‘a firewall’ between the unskilled and unemployed sections of the white working class, where the BNP have some resonance, and the rest of the electorate. Not only is the plan to put significant sections of the population in electoral quarantine out of fear of how they might possibly vote redolent of the Six Counties prior to 1968 and the Jim Crow laws in the American Deep South, in this upside down world it is the middle class, fascism’s traditional social base, who need protecting from the contagion carried by the ‘people of no property’, who just as traditionally supplied anti-fascism’s doughtiest fighters.
Thirty years ago when RA railed against the SWP (the standard bearers of the time, lest not forget) for ceding a sales pitch to the NF in north London, we maintained that confronting the fascists remained ‘a key part of the class struggle’. This was not us being overly anxious about a localised capitulation: it was seen rightly as evidence of a readiness for further compromises down the line. Sure enough, three decades on, what is now being ceded is a core element of the British working class itself.
A Europe in economic crisis verging on the chronic, with societal intemperance matched by a loss of faith in democratic solutions among all classes, throws up at one end Greece, where unreconstructed national socialists are elected to parliament; and a less than shabby return of 6 million votes on a thirty year investment by the FN in France at the other. Meanwhile, as nationalist and proto-fascist parties climb all over the furniture near everywhere else (under PR even a struggling BNP would have dozens of MPs off the back of the results in 2010) the conservative Left remains hobbled with formations, priorities and tactics designed to fight the class war in a previous century, the chatter being all about international perspectives, buckled to a lordly disdain for any engagement in a sustained way with their titular constituency at home. As a snapshot of where we are now, it is as good as any.
And when comparing it to a snapshot of the 1930s it does initially reassure that generally (with Greece being a possible exception) we are nowhere near yet. But on closer inspection the apparent tranquillity might just be down to the fact that one of the previous protagonists - an organised and politicised working class - is missing; marked absent. And because in Britain as elsewhere at present the political centre, and by extension as they see it, the whole of society appears to be threatened from only one end of the spectrum it encourages an overweening anti-fascism to smugly believe that it enjoys the support of the silent majority, and will moreover always do so. It may well do for the moment, (though opinion polls suggest even that is debatable) but if push comes to shove, what the near total isolation of the anti-fascist militants in Germany’s Weimar Republic, or the mere 0.6 per cent of the French population who were officially registered as ‘resisters’ tells us, is that this sort of cross-class consensus is historically ephemeral or brittle and so the prudent always provision for a time where effective anti-fascism may once again prove to be a minority pursuit. It also tells us something else. Should the warning signs go unheeded and events do take a turn for the worse, it is unlikely the few who stood their ground will ever get to say ‘we told you so’.
Giving quarter in places like Chapel Market rarely has visible consequences in the short term. But tiny betrayals beget bigger ones. And even though wholescale capitulation might not begin with an immediate avalanche of support for the far-right – that’s how it invariably ends.
Just had a glance at the site and it looks excellent.
