The UN estimates that the world now contains 71 million displaced people, 29 million of whom are refugees displaced from their home country, including 3.5 million registered asylum seekers.[1]

These are the most high-profile – and also the most vilified – of the victims of the global crisis. Their displacement is the result of some combination of four factors: war, genocide, poverty, and climate change. People leave their homes either because they are in fear of their lives or because they face destitution if they stay put. They leave their homes because they have no hope if they do not.

The world is like this because capitalism is geared to private profit, not human need or ecological balance; because it is a system of competing corporations and rival states whose purpose is to enrich the 1%. Greed and power are all that matter.

The ‘inadmissables’ are the system’s collateral damage. Not only that: they are also its ideological shock-absorbers.

As the system wrecks people’s lives, it leaves behind great pools of social despair. This might crystallise into anger against the system – against the asset-strippers, the privatisers, the landlords, and the corporate debt-collectors. So the system allocates a special role to its ‘inadmissables’. Let them, the poorest of the poor, the most powerless of the powerless, take the blame.

So important is this role that demand quickly outruns supply. So valuable are ‘inadmissables’ that more are created. Take the case of the Indian province of Assam.

Indian state fascism

The Hindu chauvinist regime of Narendra Modi has just deemed 1.9 million residents of the north-eastern province of Assam to be ‘illegal’. Hindu chauvinism – as my colleague Seema Syeda has explained in the second edition of our book Creeping Fascism – is the Indian form of fascism. ‘A new revolution, to defeat the alien enemy, is beckoning,’ proclaims a promotional song of India’s National Register of Citizens (NRC). ‘Bravely let us shield our motherland.’

The NRC leaves no-one in doubt as to the identity of the ‘alien enemy’. The official NRC Facebook page displays a message from an Israeli woman that reads: ‘This Israeli sends her love to India: I stand with India in their fight against Pakistani terror.’

Modi has just put mainly-Muslim Kashmir – a territory in dispute between India and Pakistan since Partition, and contested in three subsequent wars between the two countries – under martial law.

The NRC is turning Assam Muslims who fled Bangladesh in 1971 into ‘illegals’. At the same time, Modi’s BJP party is considering a bill to enshrine the rights of Hindu migrants in law. Pakistan is the external enemy. Muslims are the internal enemy. The long-term aim is an exclusive Hindu state.

What will happen to the newly created Assam ‘illegals’? They have been given a right of appeal – a grotesque travesty given India’s expensive, clogged-up, and increasingly chauvinist courts. ‘Everyone will be given a right to prove their citizenship,’ Assam’s BJP law minister told the BBC. ‘But if they fail to do so, well, the legal system will take its own course.’ Pressed further, he explained this meant deportation.

To where? Bangladesh has said it will not take them. So they will be locked up. The BJP regime is building new camps for the mass incarceration of Muslims deemed ‘illegal’.[2]

The regime is also giving the green light to Hindu-fascist pogroms.

An estimated 24,000 Rohingya Muslims were murdered, 18,000 raped, and 116,000 beaten in state-backed pogroms in Myanmar in 2017. Around 700,000 Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh.

A wave of Islamophobic violence by state police and communal mobs in Hindu-chauvinist India, a country of 1.4 billion people, where Muslims account for 14% of the population, could turn the Rohingya Genocide into a historical footnote.[3]

American state fascism

Take another example: Trump’s America.    The US operates the world’s largest migrant detention system. Around 20,000 people are held on the US-Mexican border by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), more than 50,000 elsewhere in the country by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and more than 11,000 children by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

As well as deporting around a third of a million people at the south-western border each year, the US state is currently targeting around one million ‘illegals’ inside the country in paramilitary-style raids, arresting and incarcerating hundreds of workers at a time, many of them with children at home, who are then left abandoned.   Conditions inside US concentration camps can include: families separated and children either incarcerated apart from their parents or left to fend for themselves; hundreds of sweating men held in wire pens in the heat; lack of access to showers, washing facilities, and toothbrushes; lack of access to private toilets; lack of access to clean clothes; lack of hot meals or even enough food.

At a camp in El Paso, Texas, 900 migrants were ‘being held at a facility designed for 125. In some cases, cells designed for 35 people were holding 155 people.’ One observer described the facility as a ‘human dog pound’.

Children at a facility in Clint, Texas, were reported sleeping on concrete floors. Observers described ‘children as young as 7 and 8 … wearing clothes caked with snot and tears’. A doctor described camps he had visited as ‘torture facilities’.[4]

European state fascism

Now let’s take a look closer to home.

The EU currently has around 900,000 asylum seekers in limbo, their applications for entry pending, most of them incarcerated in detention centres. The rejection rate has risen from 37% in 2016 to 64% in 2019. So a majority of the people held will, in due course, be deemed ‘illegal’ and deported back to the violence and poverty from which they have fled.

Around 9,000 of these people are living in a concentration camp at Moria on the Greek island of Lesbos. Here, people live in metal containers or tents surrounded by rubbish. More than 70 people share a toilet. Raw sewage seeps into children’s mattresses. Suicide attempts are at epidemic level. Traumatised children held in the camp draw pictures that show stormy seas dotted with terrified faces, lifeless bodies floating in the waves, planes dropping bombs, and eyes that weep blood.

Around 140,000 people reached Europe across the Mediterranean last year. But many who tried failed to make it. Some were drowned: an average of six a day. But many were herded back by EU-funded Libyan coastguards, many recruited from warlord militias, and many of these ended up among the estimated 5,400 held in Libyan concentration camps. Crowded into huge breezeblock and corrugated iron warehouses, hundreds together, they sleep on bits cardboard. Most are considered by refugee agencies to be ‘at risk’, and there are reports of murders, rapes, suicides, and deaths from disease and starvation.[5]

In another part of the Med, the EU has paid the authoritarian regime of President Erdogan £4.6 billion in aid to prevent Syrian refugees reaching Europe. Around 3.5 million are living in the country. Some have been shot dead by Turkish police and army. Thousands have been driven back across the border into the war zone. Only 200,000 are accommodated in camps, though some of these are little more than giant warehouses for surplus people. The rest are rooting for themselves on the margins of society and dodging police raids against the ‘unregistered’ (another of the terms favoured by state racism). A measure of the extreme marginalisation of the refugees is that an estimated 80% of Syrian children in Turkey do not attend school.[6]

Britain holds about 25,000 people in detention centres. The Guardian described conditions thus: ‘In some senses, they look, sound, smell, and taste just like prisons: bland food, bleak corridors, standard-issue tracksuits and blue flip-flops, and the mechanical clunk at 9pm when everyone is locked in for the night. But Britain’s network of immigration removal centres are a case apart for the 25,000-plus people who pass through one each year: there is no rehabilitation, no criminal sentence, very often no time limit on the loss of liberty. Many of those incarcerated say the conditions are far worse than actual prison.’[7]

The British state – under the Brexit regime of Boris Johnson – is promising further repression. The Tories are talking about raising the income threshold for immigrants from £30,000 to £36,700 per year – this being the amount they must earn to secure residence rights. This, one assumes, will now be applied to a new category of ‘illegals’. Around 40% of the 3.6 million EU citizens resident in Britain are being denied permanent residency in the run-up to Brexit on 31 October. Their plight was encapsulated by the televised plea on 29 August of a Portuguese woman who has lived and worked in Britain for 20 years. ‘I have no voice… The resettlement scheme is not working… I can’t just be kicked out… I am very angry,’ she told a Sky News reporter.[8]

This is the true meaning of Brexit for the working class: the division of the population into ‘nationals’ and ‘illegals’. This is the face of state fascism.

This is what fascism looks like

The ‘illegal’ Muslims of Assam and the ‘illegal’ Europeans in Britain have not actually done anything to earn their new status: it has been imposed upon them by the state. They have not murdered a black man in a cell like some police do. They have not stolen public money by fiddling their expenses like some MPs do. They have not sexually abused children like some celebrities do. They have not dodged their taxes like some corporations do. The Muslims of Assam and the Europeans in Britain have not done any of these things. Instead, simply by virtue of who they happen to be, they have been designated ‘illegal’, reclassified as ‘unregistered’, turned into ‘inadmissables’, by a nationalist-racist state.

How many people were held in Nazi concentration camps in 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War, more than six years after Hitler first came to power? Compared with what was to come, not many. One estimate puts the number at 21,000.

When the war ended, of course, there were three-quarters of a million in the camps, and some 12 million had been murdered. It was the war, and in particular the Nazi conquest of Poland and western Russia, that created the context for interwar fascism’s hideous culmination in the Holocaust.

Fascism is a process. It has begun again.

The people of the world must organise, mobilise, and fight – by any means necessary – to stop the wave of nationalism, racism, ande fascism that is now threatening to engulf us. And we must face the hard and simple fact that the main enemy is the state itself.

The upsurge of mass resistance to the Brexit Coup has to be seen as part of a global struggle to smash second-wave fascism.

Never again! Onto the streets!

Stop the Coup! Stop Brexit!

All Migrants are Welcome Here! No-one is Illegal!

Neil Faulkner is the author, with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse, and Seema Syeda, of Creeping Fascism: what it is and how to fight it.

[1] https://www.unhcr.org/uk/figures-at-a-glance.html

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-45002549

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-49520593

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/world/asia/india-muslims-narendra-modi.html

3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-49460386

[4] https://www.globaldetentionproject.org/countries/americas/united-states

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/14/politics/ice-raids-undocumented-immigrants/index.html

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/12/politics/mike-pence-border-immigration/index.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-facilities/593239/

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/25/asylum-seekers-limbo-eu-countries

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/03/trauma-runs-deep-for-children-at-dire-lesbos-camp-moria

https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/press/2019/1/5c500c504/six-people-died-day-attempting-cross-mediterranean-2018-unhcr-report.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/31/un-calls-for-evacuation-of-libyan-refugees-amid-dire-conditions

[6] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pictures-of-life-for-turkeys-25-million-syrian-refugees-crisis-migrant-a6969551.html

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/turkey-6000-refugees-arrested-istanbul-crackdown-190724113011835.html

[7] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/11/life-in-a-uk-immigration-removal-centre-worse-than-prison-as-criminal-sentence

[8] https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/priti-patel-migrant-minimum-salary-threshold-home-office-a9056846.html

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/30/eu-citizens-uk-settled-status-alarm

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2019/aug/29/i-need-a-voice-portuguese-womans-brexit-plea-video

Let me summarise our argument and its relationship to events:

The election of Donald Trump in the US and the Leave victory in Britain’s EU Referendum formed part of a rising global tide of nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and authoritarianism.

In the absence of a strong labour movement with its own armed militias (as in the interwar period), we should not expect paramilitary organisation to feature heavily in modern forms of fascism.

Fascism is a political process, not a done deal. Anyone who takes a tick-box approach to defining it belongs in a sociology seminar. Activists engaged in the class struggle have to grasp that everything is motion: it is the dynamic and trajectory of mass political phenomena that matter.

The principal agent of fascist repression has always been the existing state apparatus. There are no historical examples of fascism overthrowing the liberal-bourgeois state and creating a new fascist-totalitarian state. Without exception, fascism takes over the existing state and, by a process of purge, coercion, and indoctrination, turns it into the main instrument of its dictatorship. Therefore, if fascists can take control of the state by electoral means, they will do so.

Nor does fascism necessarily require its own party form. Just as the state can be transformed and made fascist, so might existing right-wing parties be taken over and made fascist. There are many historical examples, but in this regard we do not need to delve far into the past. The Far Right has now taken over both the Republican Party in the US and the Tory Party in Britain.

The EU Referendum and the Leave Campaign represented the first stage in a slow-motion coup by the Tory Right. The second stage was the election of Boris Johnson as Tory leader and prime minister. Long before his election, we argued that Johnson was the British Trump in waiting.

For anyone on the Left to back Brexit is a catastrophic mistake. It means, at a time when the labour movement and the Left are very weak, supporting the flagship project of the Far Right instead of challenging head-on the nationalism and racism at its core. It means, in practice, abandoning internationalism, anti-racism, and solidarity with the oppressed.

By peddling Lexit, the degenerated sects of the Far Left have cut themselves off from the progressive vanguard of the working class. Far worse, by attempting to ‘triangulate’ between reactionary Leave voters and progressive Remain voters – a policy engineered by backroom Lexiters – the Labour leadership has a) failed to challenge the nationalism and racism of the Far Right, b) split the progressive vote (facilitating, in particular, a massive Liberal-Democrat surge), and c) laid the basis for possible electoral collapse

As soon as Johnson was elected, we made a further prediction: that he would be forced to go for a general election to secure a stable working majority, and that he would fight this on a ‘People versus Elites’ platform. The proroguing of Parliament is preparation for that: for stage three of the slow-motion coup that began in 2016.

Some sort of lash-up with Farage and the Brexit Party remains highly probable, and if this is done, Labour, on current showing, is liable to be smashed. At the moment, we have an unstable Far Right regime. If the Johnson regime crashes out of the EU on 31 October and then wins a general election, we could have a stable regime able to govern for a full term. The implications of that are spelt out in the Public Reading Rooms editorial ‘Defend Democracy: Stop the Coup’ (https://prruk.org/johnsons-coup-fight-for-mass-action-to-re-open-parliament/).

The prospect would be fast tracking towards a low-wage sweatshop and tax-haven in the edge of Europe; becoming a colony of American-based corporate asset-strippers and privatisers; turning into a country where wages stagnate, public services are sold off, the poor are left to rot, and minorities are hounded by the police in a context of moral panics around crime, migration, and terrorism; evolving into a nationalist-racist silo filled with hate, repression, and misery.

Is this what fascism looks like?

Despite the creeping fascism thesis, and the accumulating evidence of its accuracy, I have generally avoided applying the term ‘fascist’ to politicians like Trump, Johnson, Farage, Le Pen, and Salvini. I have tended to assume that they represent stages on a road towards fascism, and that other, harder, nastier, more fully-fledged fascists would in due course emerge. I no longer think this.

Modi, the Hindu chauvinist leader of India, has put mainly-Muslim Kashmir under military occupation. Erdogan, the nationalist-Islamist leader of Turkey, has shut down the independent media and sacked tens of thousands of academics, teachers, and lawyers. Bolsonaro, the racist-misogynist leader of Brazil, is destroying the Amazon rainforest.

Tens of thousands are held in concentration camps on the US-Mexican border. Thousands more are held in detention centres elsewhere. Seven US states have made abortion effectively illegal, and the Far Right is poised to try and extend this to the rest of the country.

Tens of thousands more are held in concentration camps in Libya, Turkey, and Europe. These include detention centres in Britain, where people deemed by the state to be ‘illegal’ are incarcerated by private security firms in deference to a nationalist-racist definition of who is and who is not entitled to their liberty.

These things are happening now. They are being normalised, and then augmented in further attacks, by a global Far Right that is surging, confident, empowered. Creeping fascism is not a matter of moving slowly towards a still-distant destination; it is a matter of gradually implementing the fascist programme in the here and now.

So when Ilhan Omar, the Democratic congresswomen for Minnesota, says that Trump is a fascist, she is right to do so. This is not casual abuse: it is an accurate description of Trump’s politics, in theory and practice.

To describe the new generation of Far Right politicians as ‘fascist’ is not to describe their power, but a) their intent, b) their base, and c) their trajectory. Their power is not yet absolute. It is not the power of Hitler in 1934, let alone in 1944.

By advancing directly on state power by electoral means, the new fascists find themselves confronting the deeply-embedded liberal parliamentary systems of the post-war era without having the assistance of an activist mass party of hundreds of thousands like the Nazis and the Brownshirts of 1932.

Though they have gathered the ‘human dust’ of capitalist crisis into a electoral base motivated by ‘the shit of ages’ – nationalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, authoritarianism, militarism – they lack the means to batter their liberal opponents into immediate submission. Events unfold more slowly.

But they are playing a carefully calculated game. It is a new game, with new rules, and they are playing in deadly earnest for the highest stakes. Everything is discussed, planned, thought through. Nothing is left to chance. And in this regard, in relation to their opponents, the new fascists are way ahead of the curve.

What is to be done?

In this sense – in the only sense in which the term becomes meaningful in the early 21^st century – Johnson is a fascist. He is now leading an acceleration in the slow-motion coup that began in 2016. To repeat, it is the process, the dynamic, the trajectory that define the project. To repeat, it is the state that is the main enemy, the main instrument of repression, the main mechanism for increasing authoritarianism, nationalism, and persecution.

The label matters, because if Johnson is, to all intents and purposes, a fascist, then building active mass resistance by any means necessary becomes an immediate and overriding political priority. Before it is too late. Before we are in Putin’s Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey, or Sisi’s Egypt, where resistance is effectively illegal.

The liberal centre will collapse. This is what happened in Germany and everywhere else in the 1930s. The liberals never fight. In Germany, in March 1933, in the Reichstag, they voted for the Enabling Act that made Hitler a dictator.

The Left must lead the resistance. The workers, the renters, the women, the minorities, the whole mass of the exploited and the oppressed, must be organised and mobilised in all-out struggle.

But that requires leadership, and that is so woefully lacking. The leaders of the Labour Party and the TUC should be calling for and organising for mass resistance. But they are not. Corbyn has appealed to the Queen. A modern socialist leader, confronting a Far Right coup, turns to a feudal relic. Others place their faith in legal challenges and constitutional manoeuvres.

What is perhaps most pitiful is the craven submission of the liberal political elite in the face of the prorogation order. It is the act of an unelected prime minister who is a rank political chancer, a serial liar, and a man who owes his position to the votes of 90,000 members of an ageing party of Islamophobic bigots. It has been underwritten by the ludicrous anachronism of the British monarchy, a racket currently run by a family of reactionary toffs with a long record of racism, snobbery, and sleaze. Why does the liberal political elite not do the obvious thing: ignore the prorogation order and continue sitting as the leadership of the popular resistance?

More specifically, why does Labour not propose this, setting itself up as the leadership of a popular, progressive, pro-democracy, anti-Brexit mass movement? The fascists have a plan and a goal. The Left is in desperate need of leadership that is equally serious and determined.

Neil Faulkner is the author, with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse, and Seema Syeda, of Creeping Fascism: what it is and h

“You are welcome, Mr President,” says the Guardian‘s Simon Jenkins: “No conceivable purpose is served by 200,000 people coming to London.” 

‘No conceivable purpose is served by 200,000 people coming to London to shout insults at him,’ he loftily intones. But the logic immediately begins to break down. ‘I cannot think what possessed Theresa May to invite Donald Trump in the first place,’ he continues. On the other hand, this, it seems, is just what Britain’s rulers do. After all, explains Jenkins, they invited Romania’s Ceausescu, Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, and Zaire’s Mobutu.

The implication is clear: entertaining dictators, bigots, and thugs is normal. A mind-spinning non-sequitur follows: ‘That is no reason for childish protests against a guest invited in Britain’s name.’

The choice of adjective is interesting. We, the anti-Trump protestors, are ‘childish’. The implication is that we are somehow infantile, in need of guidance and correction. Fortunately, we have grown-up Guardian commentators like Simon Jenkins to assist, people with the education and intellect to know better.

The quality of argument does not improve as the article proceeds. Anti-Trump demonstrations, Jenkins avers, will create a bad impression in America. ‘In my experience, Americans do not understand boorishness in foreigners. They are by nature a courteous people.’

There is so much to unpack here. Where to start? Note another term of abuse: ‘boorishness’. As in: ‘I am critical, you are intemperate, and he/she is boorish.’ When we protest against the nationalism, racism, misogyny, and creeping fascism represented by Trump, that is ‘boorish’. Unlike Jenkins’ rant against us, which, presumably, is not ‘boorish’ – just measured critique.

And I love that sweeping generalisation about ‘Americans’ – all 330 million of them. Jenkins knows them. He knows them ‘by nature’. He must have got around a lot. Because the modern United States is a complex class society criss-crossed with division and conflict, and for every Trump supporter who will be outraged by anti-Trump protests in London there will an African-American, a Hispanic migrant, a trade unionist, a feminist, or an LGBT activist who will want to punch the air if the TV shows mayhem on the streets of London in early June.

For this is a global struggle. Unlike Jenkins, we do not operate in a series of nationalist silos, making ignorant, sweeping generalisations about Americans (or Germans, or Muslims, or any other ‘imagined community’; we see ourselves as internationalists engaged in a global struggle against a rising tide of nationalism, racism, and fascism – of which Trump is the global brand leader.

The argument doesn’t improve. Next twist, we learn that demonstrations are an attack on democracy. I cannot divine any other meaning to this passage:

‘People yearn to express themselves when they feel the conduits of democracy blocked. From Sudan to Paris to Oxford Circus, the street has lost none of its potency. It appeals to the most basic social instinct, that of like minds congregating. But unless there are consequential gains to such action, it is mere self-indulgence. Those fortunate enough to live in a democracy should not lightly short-circuit its institutions.’

I will pass over the deliberate choice of language designed to imply that we, the protestors, are primitives, exercising some primeval need to ‘congregate’. What really threw me was another breathtaking non-sequitur.

I thought the threat to democracy came from the fascists. I thought that’s why we were planning to go onto the streets to contest the state visit. But no: it turns out that we are the threat. For Jenkins, those who exercise their democrat right to protest a decision imposed upon them by the political elite – for the planned state visit is a decision of the Tory regime and no-one else – apparently they are ‘short-circuiting’ democracy. Really? How does that work exactly? I thought even liberals believed that public protest is part of democracy, not its negation.

But no, I’ve obviously got that wrong: demonstrations are bad, ‘debates’ are good. ‘The operative word is debate,’ Jenkins informs us, as if these were pearls of philosophical wisdom handed down from Hegel’s Heidelberg.

‘No-platforming never wins debates. Abandoning the debating chamber is always dangerous. It invites reaction.’

Wrong, both historically and theoretically. This is the stupidity of liberalism. Unlike Jenkins, I choose my words carefully. I do not accuse him of ‘childishness’. But I do accuse him of stupidity – stupidity founded on ignorance of political history and social theory. Let me explain.

Nationalism, racism, and fascism are not rational. Nations are imagined communities founded on invented traditions. Racism is a corollary, inextricably linked to the division of the world into artificially constructed ‘nations’. Fascism is an extreme, a more proactive and threatening form of nationalism and racism. That is why you don’t ‘debate’ with the Far Right. Mussolini and Hitler, Trump and Bolsonaro, Salvini and Farage are not open to ‘debate’. They are building movements based on ignorance, bigotry, and hate.

And no-platforming is the very essence of anti-fascism. The Vienna workers’ uprising of 1934 was an entire city no-platforming the proto-fascist Dollfuss regime. The Spanish Revolution of 1936 was an entire people no-platforming Franco’s fascist coup. These struggles went down to defeat. Here, for Simon Jenkins’ education, are two no-platform struggles that did not.

In October 1936, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists wanted to march through the Jewish quarter of Whitechapel. The East London working class mobilised to stop them. The police spent an afternoon trying to baton-charge a way through the barricades for the fascists. They were defeated. The workers, not the fascists, controlled the streets. The BUF went into decline. Britain did not go fascist – unlike virtually the whole of the rest of Europe.

In August 1977, John Tyndall’s National Front wanted to march through Lewisham, home to a large Afro-Caribbean community. Protesters mobilised to stop them and reduced their march to a shambles. The NF went into decline. The Anti-Nazi League was founded in the wake of the Battle of Lewisham. The central strategy of the ANL was no platform. The aim was mass popular mobilisation to stop the fascists marching, meeting, operating. Our aim was to destroy their organisation ‘by any means necessary’. This we did.

Jenkins ends his piece with a sentence of sickening obsequiousness: ‘You are welcome, Mr President.’

That is liberal stupidity writ large. An unopposed visit will be a carnival of reaction, giving confidence to the Tory Right, the Brexit Party, UKIP, and every flag-waving nationalist, racist, and misogynist in Britain.

Do we need lessons from Simon Jenkins in how to fight fascism? I think not. History certainly suggests not. Join the protests in June against the Trump state visit to say, not in our name.

Neil Faulkner is the author, with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse, and Seema Syeda, of Creeping Fascism: what it is and how to fight it (Public Reading Rooms).

Creeping Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It
By Neil Faulkner with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda

How can we stop a ‘second wave’ of fascism returning us to the darkest times? How do we prevent the history of the 1930s repeating itself?

READ MORE…

Trump is a nationalist, a racist, a misogynist, a climate-change denier, and a billionaire corporate bully.

Typically, these pro-Nazis were hardened anti-Semites and anti-Communists. Many peddled conspiracy theories about a sinister connection between Jews and Communists to take over the world – with Fascism the only force able to prevent it.

Media baron Lord Rothermere – the Rupert Murdoch of his day – was a staunch supporter of Mussolini, Hitler, and Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. Germany had been ‘falling under the control of alien elements,’ Rothermere explained. ‘Israelites of international attachments were insinuating themselves into key positions in the German administrative machine. It is from such abuses that Hitler has freed Germany.’

Tory support for Fascism was based on class interest. Hitler had smashed the German labour movement, destroyed democracy, and created a totalitarian dictatorship in which all forms of resistance were crushed by police terror. In consequence, profits doubled and wages fell. This counter-revolutionary class war – for that is what it was – was dressed up in medieval blood-and-soil mysticism.

Except that the fancy dress took on a life of its own. Fascist fantasy about nation and race triggered a world war in which 60 million died – the great majority of them in fascist genocides in either Eastern Europe (under the German Nazis) or China (under the Japanese Militarists).

Tory ‘appeasement’ – as it was called – paved the way for Fascism’s world war on humanity. This has special relevance now. The Tories have invited Trump to Britain for the D-Day commemorations. My guess is that the irony is completely lost on them.

As Brexit Britain prepares to retreat into a nationalist-racist silo, as Fortress Europe pays Libyan warlords to operate gunboats and concentration camps to stop migrants crossing the Med, as uniformed thugs meet ‘the wretched of the earth’ with clubs, dogs, and teargas on the US-Mexican border, the Tories invite Trump to be guest of honour at their D-Day commemorations. They seem to have forgotten that in 1944 the Waffen-SS were on the other side.

Appeasement

Appeasement, of course, reflects class interest. Corporate Britain has a ‘special relationship’ with Corporate America. May has justified the invitation to Trump on the grounds that the UK and US ‘have a deep and enduring partnership that is rooted in our common history and shared interests’. And what are those ‘shared interests’? ‘The state visit,’ explained May, ‘is an opportunity to strengthen our already close relationship in areas such as trade, investment, security, and defence, and to discuss how we can build on these ties in the years ahead.’ Or, decoded, it’s about profit, empire, and the arms trade.

Forget the vexed question of whether or not Trump is a fascist. It is the wrong question. Fascism is not a thing, fixed and fast-frozen, it is a process, a political trajectory.

For one thing, in the early 21^st century, with labour movements broken-backed and the organised Left tiny, fragmented, and riddled with sectarianism, you don’t need to march down the high street in uniform with banners and clubs. You don’t need a paramilitary ‘battering-ram’ to smash the opposition. You can advance directly on state power as an elected right-wing ‘populist’ in a suit.

Except they are not ‘populists’ of course. They are the opposite. They are funded by big business, they have an ultra-neoliberal corporate programme, and they draw upon deep wells of ignorance, bigotry, and psychotic rage at the base of society. They are the diametric opposite of the common people organising, mobilising, and fighting for their own emancipation. The diametric opposite of ‘people power’.

The nationalism and racism, the xenophobia and scapegoating, the misogyny and homophobia, and all the other sewage they are siphoning from the social depths, this has as its purpose deception, disorientation, and division – so that the people do not understand their common condition and shared interests – so that they do not unite in struggle from below against the corporations, the elites, and a failed political system – so that they do not become active agents of history, but remain its passive victims.

A Clear and Present Danger

Fascism is a clear and present danger. The global surge of nationalism and racism represented by Trump has the political function of neutralising resistance on climate catastrophe, growing militarisation, and the social crisis. It has the function of further weakening the labour movement, the social movements, and the Left.

Trump is a nationalist, a racist, a misogynist, a climate-change denier, and a billionaire corporate bully. The Tories don’t care. The Tories have a long history of appeasing dictators, bigots, and thugs. What matters, in a Tory Party increasingly dominated by the Far Right, is their ‘special relationship’. So they are making a second attempt to organise a state visit.

Last time they were defeated. The people took control of the streets of the capital, and the Tories were forced to move Trump around the countryside in a helicopter.

Now they are trying again. They want the full works: Buckingham Palace reception, address to Parliament, carriage ride down the Mall. Trump is to be normalised and mainstreamed. Make no mistake: if this state visit goes ahead as planned, it will be a carnival of reaction. It will underwrite the nationalism and racism of Brexit. It will embolden the Tory Right, the Brexit Party, UKIP, and every bar-room bigot who wants to punch a Muslim, a migrant, or a feminist.

It’s our job to stop them. We must take control of our streets so they cannot use them to put Trump and all he represents on a pedestal. We must imitate the brilliant example of Extinction Rebellion, but multiply it ten-fold. We must block the streets, create mayhem, and turn Trump’s visit into a shambles for them and a carnival of diversity and resistance for us.

When the popular militias defended Madrid against Franco’s Fascists in 1936, they adopted the slogan No Pasaran! When the people of the East End – Cockney bus drivers, Irish dockers, Jewish tailors, and every other variety of the richly tapestried London working class – defended Cable Street against Mosley’s Fascists later that same year, the streets rang with the English translation: ‘They Shall Not Pass!’

Let it be our slogan in 2019. Nationalists, racists, and fascists: They Shall Not Pass! All out to Stop Trump on 4 June! See updates on Together Against Trump events…

Neil Faulkner is the author, with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse, and Seema Syeda, of Creeping Fascism: what it is and how to fight it (Public Reading Rooms).

Creeping Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It
By Neil Faulkner with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda

How can we stop a ‘second wave’ of fascism returning us to the darkest times? How do we prevent the history of the 1930s repeating itself?

READ MORE…

Source: Pluto Press

A Radical History of the World is a contribution to the ideas that we need if we are to achieve a world of equality, democracy, peace, and sustainability.

The First World War was a collective human tragedy. Fifteen million were killed because the world was controlled by corporate and political elites competing with each other for wealth and power. They were killed by imperialist rivalries and a dysfunctional geopolitical order of nation-states. They were killed because the products of human labour, instead of being used for the social good, had been transformed into monstrous war-machines. They were killed because the rulers of the world conscripted millions of workers and peasants to fight a war in the interests of the rich.

Equally pernicious is the almost total invisibility of the revolution that ended the war. Another flagship BBC TV documentary, broadcast in October 2017 to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution, rehashed another old lie: that the whole thing was a conspiratorial coup designed to establish a dictatorship. Again, dominated by ‘revisionist’ commentators, the audience was treated to a succession of fake facts laced with right-wing vitriol. No-one watching would have guessed that the October Insurrection represented a mass popular revolt from below that trigged a global revolutionary wave that not only ended the First World War, but almost ended the world capitalist system that had given rise to it.

That revolutionary wave had ebbed away by 1923. The Russian Revolution – left isolated, besieged, impoverished – eventually succumbed to Stalinist counter-revolution. The last vestiges of the great mass movement of 1917 were destroyed in the winter of 1927/8. This re-set the European stage for a second great upsurge of imperialism, nationalism, and war. This time, between 1939 and 1945, some sixty million died. The great German revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, who was murdered by right-wing paramilitaries in 1919, had said that humanity faced a choice between socialism and barbarism. She was right: the defeat of the world revolution in the early 1920s was followed by the barbarism of Stalingrad, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima.

Are we heading towards another such cataclysm today? In the context of the 2008 Crash and the advent of the Age of Austerity, a wave of nationalism, racism, and fascism seems to be sweeping across the world. It is as if we are watching the film of the 1930s re-running in slow motion. A kind of creeping fascism is represented by Trump, Brexit, and a host of far-right politicians across Europe – Le Pen in France, Weidel in Germany, Salvini in Italy, Wilders in Holland, Orban in Hungary, and many others. Mainstream conservatives are mimicking the fascists, ramping up racist attacks on Muslims and migrants, while liberals and social-democrats at best say nothing, at worst echo the ‘strong borders’ rhetoric of the right.

We learn grim lessons from history about nationalism, racism, and fascism. We learn that ignoring it, let alone capitulating to it, puts you on the road to war and genocide. That is why history matters so much. That is why right-wing ‘revisionism’ – the neutering of criticism of the system – the burying of popular struggles for radical change – the distortion of history in the interests of wealth and power – has to be fought with a different kind of history: one that foregrounds the mass activity of ordinary people and shows our capacity to change the world.

Nation-states and nationalism are rooted in the bourgeois revolutions of the 16^th to 19^th centuries, above all in the French Revolution of 1789-94. But other ideas were forged in the same crucible – ideas about social equality and political democracy. And since the first emergence of mass working-class movements in the early 19^th century, those ideas have been underpinned by social forces capable of realising them. For almost two centuries, working people across the world have engaged in mass struggle against the elites with ‘equality’ and ‘democracy’ inscribed on their banners.

Because of this – the threat of socialist revolution from below – nationalism has become something more than an expression of the interests of national elites: it has become an ideological device for dividing working people and discouraging them from uniting against the rich and powerful. Since the French Revolution, and especially since the emergence of the working class as an organised force – organised in trade unions and socialist parties – the elites and the masses have been represented by two sharply contrasting sets of political ideas. The Right has promoted nationalism, racism, militarism, and authoritarianism, the Left internationalism, peace, and equality. It is no exaggeration to talk in terms of a 200-year ‘war on democracy’ – a war of global elites against people power.

In periods of crisis – periods of economic stagnation and social decay following major financial crashes like those of 1873, 1929, and 2008 – this deep ideological fracture-line, reflecting underlying class antagonisms, is liable to become toxic. The long depression of 1873 to 1896 was ended by imperialism, an arms race, and finally the carnage of the First World War. The Great Depression of 1929 to 1939 culminated in fascism, war, and genocide. We appear to have entered another period of protracted capitalist crisis with similar potential. With great pools of despair and bitterness festering at the base of society, the right is again holding aloft its national banners, banging its war drums, and spitting bile at vulnerable minorities.

History, in this context, is not a form of entertainment. We do not study history simply as a pastime, because we are curious, because we are awed by the spectacle and the drama. We study history to learn from the past, to guide action in the present, and to change the future. For the future is not predetermined. Everything in history is contingent: alternative outcomes are possible, and what happens depends on what we do. We make our own history, albeit in the circumstances in which we find ourselves; we are subject to numerous constraints, but we always have options. So it was in 1914 and again in 1933. If the European socialist parties and trade unions had acted on their countless peace resolutions and called for mass resistance to war – for workers to strike, soldiers to refuse to answer the call-up, activists to block the railway lines, and so on – the carnage might have been prevented. If the socialist and communist leaders of the German working class had done something similar to stop fascism in 1933, Hitler might never have come to power.

We have to learn from the history of both successful struggle from below – the Russian Revolution, the great unionisation battles, the Civil Rights Movement, the campaign against the Vietnam War, the struggle of women for equality, and so many more – but we also have to learn from the defeats. We need to learn from history both how to fight and how not to fight, who to trust and who not to trust.

I am an academic archaeologist and historian, so my Radical History of the World is a serious attempt to understand how history works and how our world has been formed and re-formed by thousands of years of economic development and social struggle. But I am also an activist, and that is more important.

I know that we are at one of history’s great crossroads, and that one direction leads to nationalism, racism, fascism, and war, while the other involves mass struggle from below by hundreds of millions of people, organised democratically, acting collectively, armed with a vision of the world transformed. The new book is intended as a tiny contribution to supplying the ideas – the understanding of history – that we need if we are to achieve a world of equality, democracy, peace, and sustainability.

A Radical History of the World is available from Pluto Press.

Neil Faulkner is a leading historian and archaeologist. He is the author of numerous books. His new and updated version of Creeping Fascism: Brexit, Trump, and the Rise of the Far-Right will be published by Public Reading Rooms in early 2019.

If the left does not learn how to fight – and learn fast – it is liable to be engulfed by the tidal wave of nationalism and racism that is now sweeping the world.

There are now seven million Israeli Jews, the vast majority of them immigrants or the descendants of recent immigrants who arrived in the country at some point during the last century. Israel can therefore be accurately defined as a ‘colonial settler-state’. Most of the indigenous population were forcibly removed – as we might say nowadays, ‘ethnically cleansed’ – mainly in 1948 and 1967. The replacement population comprises recent immigrants from other parts of the world. This necessarily violent process has been funded, armed, and sustained by foreign powers, principally the United States.

The dispossessed comprise ten million Palestinian Arabs, some two million still living in Israel, a further five million in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and another three million or so in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Most of these people are refugees or descendants thereof. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are, effectively, ‘bantustans’ – that is, they are comparable to the small, impoverished, overpopulated ‘homelands’ where black labour was corralled under South African apartheid.

The oppression of the Palestinian people by Zionism and US imperialism has continued unabated for 70 years. The new Nationality Law declares ‘the development of Jewish settlements nationwide’ to be a ‘national priority’. In other words, the seizure of Palestinian land to provide homes for foreigners is an ongoing process. Donald Trump, the far-right US President, has recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and relocated the US embassy there. He has also cut off funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine – funding on which millions of desperately poor Palestinians depend.

This is not simply a reaffirmation of the long-standing alliance between Zionism – the US watchdog in the Middle East – and Western imperialism. It is a new twist on that arrangement. For this is an alliance of the far right – an alliance between a far-right Israeli leader and a far-right incumbent of the White House.

Trump may be a boorish, bigoted, bullying narcissist. But we should not overstress his bar-room banality. He represents a wave of nationalism and racism that has a hard fascist core. The latter is best represented by Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart chief and Trump advisor, who has appointed himself roving ambassador for an emergent fascist international. Bannon’s vision of the world is as crazed as Hitler’s once was. He imagines a global struggle between ‘the Judeo-Christian West’ and the rest – the rest including, most notably, Muslims, Chinese, and Latinos, but ultimately the entire mass of non-white humanity. Note the new fascist dichotomy: no longer Aryans versus ‘the international Jewish conspiracy’ – oh, so 1930s! – but the Jews and the Christians of the West versus what Bannon avoids calling (though this is what he means) ‘the international Islamic conspiracy’.

What was it Bannon said at the Zionist Organisation of America’s annual dinner? ‘I am not a moderate, I’m a fighter. And that’s why I’m proud to stand with the State of Israel. That’s why I’m proud to be a Christian Zionist.’

This is the new far-right alliance. Anti-semitism was the primary expression of racism in Germany, France, Britain, and many other countries in the 1930s. Not any more. Now it is Muslims, Latinos, migrants, and, more generally, the people of the Global South who are targeted. The Zionists, by contrast, are inside the tent, reconfigured as ‘one of us’, recast as leading protagonists of a 21^st century crusade for ‘the Judeo-Christian West’.

We should not underestimate the threat posed by anti-semitic forms of fascism. Bannon has an anti-semitic record which he now downplays and his new-found Zionist friends choose to ignore. In much of Eastern Europe – notably in Hungary and Poland – anti-semitic racism has been a prominent feature of the politics of the neo-fascists. But anti-semitism – for the time being at least – is not the ideological driver of far-right movements in America and Western Europe: it is anti-Muslim and anti-migrant racism.

The informal alliance between Zionism and fascism, on the other hand, is a reality of early 21^st century politics. In the face of this – and, specifically, in response to a massive attack by Zionists, Blairites, Tories, and their media echo-chambers – the Labour Left has capitulated. The Labour Party NEC has signed up to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-semitism. This includes the following as an example of anti-semitism: ‘denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour’. In other words, it equates anti-semitism with anti-Zionism. The IHRA definition is not ‘internationally agreed’ – as widely stated by right-wing commentators. On the contrary, it would be better described as ‘highly contested’, since it amounts to wholesale endorsement of the policies of the Israeli state, including the dispossession of the Palestinian people of their land, their civil rights, and their nationhood, none of which the IHRA considers to be ‘racist’.

A qualifying statement passed at the same time may contradict the sense, if not the literal meaning, of some of the IHRA definition, but this appears to be a transparent face-saving exercise, and it cannot alter the damage done by the substantive decision to cave into political pressure on a central question of socialist principle: that one stands with the oppressed (the Palestinians) against the oppressor (Zionism, the Israeli Defence Force, and US imperialism).

If you don’t run, they can’t chase you. But the Labour leadership has been running on this question ever since it first came up in 2016 in relation to Bradford West MP Naz Shah’s suggestion that Israel might be relocated to the United States, followed, in the context of the ensuing row, by this remark of Ken Livingstone on the radio: ‘When Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism, before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.’

Naz Shah was alluding to the fact that modern Israel is largely a construct of US imperialism. It has been reliant on massive levels of US economic and military aid throughout its existence as an independent state. Ken Livingstone was making reference to a simple historical truth: the Nazis wanted to get rid of the German Jews, the Zionists wanted to create a homeland in Palestine, a secret agreement was therefore made between – the Haavara Agreement signed on 25 August 1933 – to facilitate German Jewish emigration to Palestine, and around 60,000 German Jews did indeed emigrate to Palestine between 1933 and 1939. Neither Naz Shah nor Ken Livingstone were being anti-semitic. The truth is not anti-semitic. What is at stake here is not simply the fate of ‘the wretched of the earth’ – in this case, the Palestinians – but the historical truth about the (racist) Zionist project that has created the modern state of Israel.

When the onslaught on the Labour Left started, the right tried to twist anti-Zionist statements into anti-semitic statements. Now, gaining confidence, they have abandoned all pretence, openly proclaiming that anti-Zionism equals anti-semitism. This has been the basis of a ferocious smear campaign against Corbyn, who, of course, has a long record of anti-war, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist activism. It is spearheaded by an unholy alliance of Zionists and New Labourites, cheered on by the Tories, the BBC, and The Daily Mail. Its purpose is not only to undermine solidarity with the Palestinians, but to weaken the left and terminate the Corbyn leadership, even at the risk of wrecking the Labour Party’s chances of winning the next general election. Corbyn – the red cuckoo in the neoliberal nest – is to be evicted by any means necessary.

Some on the left have argued that the Labour Party should drop ‘unpopular’ issues – like opposition to nuclear weapons and defence of migrant rights – in order to win support by focusing on bread-and-butter economic and social issues. This is what the leadership appears to be doing. They are largely silent on the mounting tide of anti-Muslim and anti-migrant racism fostered by Brexit and the War on Terror. They are endlessly apologetic about an issue – anti-semitism in the Labour Party – that is almost entirely media fabrication. Instead of ducking and diving, they should have stood their ground and stated the simple truth: to be anti-racist is to be anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian; to be anti-racist is to be anti-Brexit and pro-migrant; to be anti-racist is to be anti-war and pro-Muslim. They should have faced down the legion of right-wing charlatans who have made a mockery of historical truth and the meaning of words by labelling Jeremy Corbyn a racist on the basis of his record of solidarity with the oppressed.

They are out to smash the Corbyn leadership and the left’s tradition of international solidarity. And make no mistake: the hostile political alliance that is engaged in this project stretches all the way from Steven Bannon to Stephen Kinnock. The fascists, the neoliberals, the Zionists, and the Tory media are all singing from the same hymn-sheet.

If the left does not learn how to fight – and learn fast – it is liable to be engulfed by the tidal wave of nationalism and racism that is now sweeping the world. The Corbyn/Momentum leadership has just revealed a disastrous lack of political backbone. You cannot fight for radical change by ducking arguments, peddling lies, and running panic-stricken when the enemy attacks. To change the world, we have to win over the masses. To do that, we have to confront every shabby right-wing argument they throw at us and expose it for what it is.

If the Labour leadership thinks that capitulation on the question of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism will end the crisis, they are wrong. The faster you run, the faster the chase. The right will just keep on coming. Their end-game is the destruction of the Corbyn leadership and the reassertion of untrammelled neoliberal control over the Labour Party. The left has to stop running and start fighting.

Neil Faulkner is the author of Creeping Fascism: Brexit, Trump, and the Rise of the Far Right and A Radical History of the World.

Creeping Fascism – Brexit, Trump, and the Rise of the Far Right

This book is an urgent call to arms. It argues that the film of the 1930s is running in slow motion, and that we face the clear and present danger of ‘creeping fascism’.

Available from Public Reading Rooms.

The danger is that we do not recognise what is happening – that we do not wake up to the form of fascism in the early 21^st century – until it is too late.

Capitalism crashed in 1929, the ruling class imposed austerity, and the world economy was plunged into the Great Depression. One in three German workers was unemployed by 1932. Capitalism crashed in 2008, the ruling class imposed austerity, and the world has been plunged into what might be called the Great Stagnation. But there are differences.

Ten years after the 1929 Crash, the Second World War began and the Great Depression was ended by state arms expenditure. Ten years after the 2008 Crash, the world economy remains stagnant. The crisis this time is shallower, but more protracted.

There are other differences. In the 1930s, the massive working-class movement created in the great revolutionary upsurge of 1917-23 remained strong enough to contest austerity and fascism. Especially fierce class battles erupted in Austria (1934), France (1934 and 1936), and Spain (1936-39).

The situation today is radically different. The power of the labour movement has been eroded by a generation of defeat and retreat. Union membership in Britain is half what it was in the 1970s. Rank-and-file workplace organisation is virtually non-existent across most of industry. Unofficial strikes are unheard of. The strike rate has been rock-bottom since the 1980s, and is now at a level not seen since the 1890s. Wages are falling and the welfare state is being destroyed, but organised resistance is minimal.

We argued in Creeping Fascism, published a year ago, that the weakness of the labour movement means that ‘battering-ram’ fascism is largely unnecessary. We also argued that, even in the 1930s, this kind of fascism was far from universal.

By ‘battering-ram’ fascism we mean the recruitment and deployment of mass paramilitary formations to physically destroy the unions, the socialist parties, and other forms of opposition. In fact, there are really only two ‘pure’ examples of this in history: Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

‘Classic’ fascism

In Italy, with the working class in retreat after the Biennio Rosso (‘Two Red Years’), the Blackshirts (squadristi) grew rapidly and succeeded in winning the battle for the streets across large swathes of the country and destroying the workers’ and peasants’ mass movements, preparing the ground for the ‘March on Rome’ of October 1922, when Mussolini was elevated to power by King Victor Emmanuel.

In Germany, a divided but potentially powerful working class found itself under attack by a Brownshirt (SA) movement that swelled to around 400,000 in number between 1929 and 1933. Again, the success of this movement on the streets, its ability to smash working-class organisation by violence and intimidation, proved the value of the Nazis to the ruling class, and Hitler was elevated to power by President Hindenburg in January 1933.

A process of gleichschaltung followed – that is, the construction of a totalitarian state by a process of merging of party and state and the purging of state institutions of oppositional elements by a mix of dismissal, intimidation, and indoctrination. The process was more protracted and incomplete in Italy than in Germany, but in both cases we can speak of a one-party fascist state.

But even in the 1930s, these are the only ‘pure’ or ‘classical’ fascisms. Yet, by 1939, virtually the whole of continental Europe was under some form of far-right authoritarian rule. Let us consider two examples among the many other variants of interwar fascism – Spain and Romania.

The Spanish fascists – the Falange – grew with exceptional speed during the Spanish Civil War. At the time of Franco’s coup (July 1936), they had about 75,000 members, but this had grown to around a million within six months, some 80,000 of whom were under arms. The Falangists functioned as Nationalist militia and death-squads. Most of the estimated 200,000 to 400,000 Republicans murdered by the Nationalists during the conflict were probably killed by Falangists. Despite this, the Falangists were only ever auxiliaries; they never controlled the Nationalist movement, they did not take power after 1939, and they were not able to construct a Falangist totalitarian state. Spain became a right-wing military dictatorship. Nationalism, Catholicism, and social conservatism were central to the ideology of that state, but it was not ‘classically’ fascist.

The main fascist party in interwar Romania was the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Its paramilitary wing was the Iron Guard (Greenshirts). This viciously racist mass organisation was involved in exceptional levels of violence against the Left, the Jews, the Roma, and sometimes against liberal and conservative opponents. Its activity both reflected and augmented Romania’s sharp shift to the right in the 1930s. King Carol II installed a far-right government in 1937, then banned all political parties and assumed dictatorial control of the country in 1938. He in turn was overthrown in 1940 and replaced by a pro-Hitler general, Marshal Antonescu, who took Romania into the Second World War on the Nazi side and unleashed the police and the paramilitaries against the Jews. Half a million Romanian Jews perished in the death-camps. But again, at no point did the Romanian fascists succeed in taking state power on their own account; the Romanian fascist programme was implemented by the old ruling class and the existing state apparatus.

The Spanish and Romanian examples are not exceptions; they are two among a range of variants. If anything, Italy and Germany, are the exceptions, in the ‘purity’ of their fascism and totalitarianism.

What are the implications of these historical comments for the present?

Defining fascism

Fascism cannot be defined in relation to a checklist of distinguishing marks. Politics is a social science, not a natural science. Theoretical understanding follows from observing two rules of interpretation: that the truth is the whole; and that the whole is motion.

That is why we argued in Creeping Fascism that fascism can be defined only in the context of a specific historical conjuncture, in terms of the fascist movement’s interactions and collisions with other social forces; and why we also argued that we have to see fascism not as a thing, fixed and fast-frozen, but as a process, a dynamic, a development, a movement always in a state of becoming, never in a state of being.

This understanding brought us to our definition. This is what we said last year:

Fascism can be understood as the active mobilisation of atomised ‘human dust’ around the right-wing nexus of nationalism, racism, sexism, and authoritarianism – just as socialism can be considered the active mobilisation of an organised class around the left-wing nexus of internationalism, equality, and democracy.

   Formed of human dust, spewing the shit of ages, bloated with psychotic rage, fascism is the mechanism by which a deeply dysfunctional, crisis-ridden system of exploitation and oppression seeks to smash democracy, civil liberties, and any effective resistance to the rule of the rich and the corporations.

We stand by that definition. But I want to push the argument a stage further. Our analysis seems to have been confirmed by events, but perhaps we should now insist that no meaningful distinction exists between forces that tend to be labelled ‘right-wing populist’ or ‘far right’ and forces labelled ‘fascist’.

We are dealing with a spectrum where there are no hard lines, either in theory or in practice, and it is essential that we view the Far Right as a whole, as a form of fascism in motion, since the inner dynamic and long-term trajectory represented by suited politicians like Trump, Farage, and Wilders is the same as that represented by the street thugs of Golden Dawn, the Ku Klux Klan, and the English Defence League.

That does not mean that different expressions of fascism do not require different responses. We need close analysis of fascism’s many faces, and nuanced strategy and tactics when we act. But that is not the same as endorsing the fiction of the mainstream media (and, regrettably, all too many left-wing commentators) that we face something more moderate, something more mainstream, something less dangerous than fascism.

So I will say it again: the enemy is fascism, it has already assumed a mass social scale and accumulated much political power, and if the Left does not recognise it for what it is and develop strategies appropriate to confronting and defeating it, the world is likely to be plunged into an abyss of barbarism.

The fascist international

The signs are there. An estimated 20,000 joined the Free Tommy Robinson demonstration in Central London on Saturday 9 June. If this estimate is correct, it was probably the biggest fascist demonstration in British history, larger than any single mobilisation by either the National Front in the 1970s or the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s.

The slogans, the rhetoric, and the online posts from that demonstration confirm that Islamophobia is now playing the same role today as anti-semitism in the 1930s. Visceral racism is at the core of the new mass fascist movements. Platform speakers declared that ‘The enemy is Islam’, ‘The Koran is a licence to kill’, ‘The Muslims are colonising the West’, and ‘Freedom ends where Islam begins’. The echoes with interwar Nazi claims of an ‘international Jewish conspiracy’ are obvious.

Note that the headline speaker was Dutch fascist leader Geert Wilders. Here is an example of a politician that many commentators prefer to call ‘right-wing populist’ or ‘far right’. So let me reiterate the point: Wilders should be described as a fascist. You do not need Brownshirts and swastika flags if you can enter the mainstream without them. You do not need paramilitaries if there is no mass organised opposition on the streets. You can wear a suit and talk about ‘freedom of speech’.

Wilders’ pitch was to present himself – in ‘classic’ fascist style, incidentally – as ‘a man of the people’, speaking up for the excluded, the marginalised, the despised, against ‘them’, the powerful, the Establishment, the corrupt cronies of the System. ‘Our governments have sold us out with mass immigration,’ he proclaimed to cheers, ‘with Islamicisation, with open borders. We are almost foreigners in our own lands.’

The presence of Wilders tells us something else about modern fascism: it is international in character. A message of support was sent by former Trump advisor Steven Bannon, who has become a roving ambassador for the global ‘Alt-Right’ movement. Last week, interviewed on Channel 4 News, he announced that in the ‘popular nationalist revolt, Europe leads’. A message of support was also sent by the Front National in France. The fascists are, of course, holding regular international meetings and conferences. We face not just national fascisms, but a fascist international.

Far-right parties now control or participate in national governments in Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland. Across most of the rest of Europe, they have established themselves as mass electoral formations. Nationalism and anti-Muslim/anti-migrant racism have become mainstream politics. In this context, more extreme, violent, street-based fascist organisations are growing fast.

The EU is paying Turkey to prevent migrants moving to Europe. Others are detained and held in camps inside Europe. Even the Pope has described European migrant centres as ‘concentration camps’. Others have been victims of sometimes murderous rampages by police and right-wing thugs. The new fascist interior minister in Italy, Matteo Salvini, wants to deport half a million migrants.

In the United States, despite everything, polls show that Trump regularly has approval ratings above 40% and sometimes as high as 45%. This and the consolidation of far-right electoral blocs across Europe points to a deepening of nationalist-racist opinion. In this context, state racism becomes more visceral. There are reports from the States, for example, that courts are processing ‘illegal immigrants’ in batches, and that children are being separated from their parents in detention centres. Equally alarming are reports of a gleichschaltung process under way, with liberal administrators being driven out of senior positions and replaced by Trump loyalists.

A very British fascism

Tommy Robinson is the founder and former leader of the English Defence League. He was jailed for 13 months for contempt of court after filming and live-streaming pictures of defendants in a court case over the grooming of children. An online petition calling for his release on ‘freedom of speech’ grounds has attracted 600,000 signatures.

If Robinson represents the booted Far Right, Nigel Farage and Aaron Banks represent the suited Far Right, along with Tories like Jacob Rees-Mogg. This is the global pattern. The advance of fascism is meeting minimal resistance, so the politics of the sewers comes perfumed. Instead of the ‘battering-ram’ fascism of the 1930s, with its Blackshirts and Brownshirts, we face a ‘creeping’ fascism of street thugs, right-wing politicians, and increasingly militarised policing, surveillance, and internal security. The danger is that we do not recognise what is happening – that we do not wake up to the form of fascism in the early 21^st century – until it is too late.

Neil Faulkner is the author, with Samir Dathi, of Creeping Fascism: Brexit, Trump, and the Rise of the Far Right. A new and updated version will be published early in 2019 by Public Reading Rooms.

09 December 2018 Unite Against Fascism and Racism | Details…

09 December | No Pasaran
United Against Fascism and Racism
Stop Tommy Robinson
Assemble 11am BBC Portland Place
March to Whitehall.

Details…

An attempt to provide a Marxist analysis of the Far Right in the US and Europe and to argue that it represents a modern form of ‘creeping fascism’.

It was one of those moments when the world changed. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the bombing of the Twin Towers in 2001, and the financial crash of 2008, the election of Donald Trump as US president in November 2016 sent shock-waves across the globe.

Commentators struggled for words. A billionaire tax-dodger, a ranting racist, a misogynist and self-confessed abuser of women, a bully who taunts the disabled and the bereaved, a serial liar, a man proud of his bigotry, his hatred, his contempt for most of humanity, this man had just been elected to the most powerful political position on the planet. Sixty-three million Americans had voted for a political psychopath.

The election of Trump is the most significant breakthrough so far in the advance of a global movement. Trump, anticipating victory on the eve of his election, bragged it would be ‘Brexit plus, plus, plus’.

He was referring to the victory of the Leave campaign in the British EU referendum. Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and other right-wing politicians, backed by the gutter press, had secured a narrow win on the basis of vacuous ‘take back control’ rhetoric and vicious anti-immigrant racism.

Creeping Fascism: Brexit, Trump, and the Rise of the Far Right is an attempt to provide a Marxist analysis of the Far Right in the United States and Europe and to argue that it represents a modern form of ‘creeping fascism’.

Creeping Fascism: Brexit, Trump, and the Rise of the Far Right is published by Public Reading Rooms.
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Fascism could have been stopped in the 1920s and 1930s, and it could be stopped today. It all depends on what we do.

A number of leading thinkers were asked to respond to the single question: Is Fascism making a comeback? All the contributions are availabe on State of Nature. The response by Neil Faulkner, author of Creeping Fascism: Brexit, Trump, and the Rise of the Far Right, is reprinted below.

What does seem true is that the film of the 1930s is re-running in slow motion. We face a world capitalist crisis that is probably more intractable than that of the 1930s, with economic stagnation, growing social decay, a breakdown of the international order, increasing arms expenditure and war, and imminent climate catastrophe.

The political and business elite has no solutions to any of the major problems confronting humanity and the planet. Parliamentary democracies have been hollowed out by corporate power. Authoritarian nationalist regimes are in control elsewhere. Fascist organisations are gaining in electoral support.

Labour movements – the unions and the mass socialist parties – have been weakened by 35 years of neoliberalism. Most working people, battered by the crisis, lack effective mechanisms for fighting back collectively. Social life is characterised by atomisation, alienation, and anomie. This is the seedbed for nationalism, racism, fascism, and war.

The Right has no solutions and nothing to offer. The essence of its politics, therefore, is to turn working people against each other, making scapegoats of women, the poor, the disabled, ethnic-minority people, Muslims, LGBT people, migrants, refugees, and so on. It takes different forms in different places. Trump in the US. Brexit in Britain. Le Pen in France. The AfD in Germany. But the essential message is the same. And this has the potential to harden into all-out fascism – the violence and repression of armed thugs out to smash the unions, the Left, and the minorities.

But fascism could have been stopped in the 1920s and 1930s, and it could be stopped today. It all depends on what we do. The challenge is extreme: we need nothing less than a radical programme of economic and social change to reverse a generation of financialisation, privatisation, austerity, and the grinding down of working people.

To stop the fascists, we have to show the great mass of ordinary working people that an alternative is possible: that if we unite and organise and fight back, we can challenge the grotesque greed of the super-rich rentier class that is currently leaching the wealth of society to the top, and remodel society on the basis of equality, democracy, peace, and sustainability.

Creeping Fascism – Brexit, Trump, and the Rise of the Far Right

This book is an urgent call to arms. It argues that the film of the 1930s is running in slow motion, and that we face the clear and present danger of ‘creeping fascism’.

One could have made a strong argument for abstention. It would have run like this. This is a dispute between two rival factions among our rulers about how best to organise exploitation and the accumulation of capital. It is an argument about how best to make profits. Either way, we get ripped off and they get richer. Working people are deluded if they think that either side represents them, or that either choice, in or out, benefits them.

In theory, this argument is sound. But, as Goethe said, theory is grey and the tree of life is green. What is true in an abstract sense – that there is nothing to choose between the City of London and European Central Bank – is not true when you translate it into the concrete terms of a live political debate. I will come back to this. Before doing so, I want to say something about Lexit.

While one could have made a strong argument for abstention – albeit an abstract one – the same cannot be said for the argument for voting Leave. It did not matter that the EU is a bankers’ club, that the EU is undemocratic, and that the EU is imposing austerity and privatisation. All true, and all irrelevant. Because exactly the same can be said for the alternative: the City of London.

A somewhat more sophisticated version went like this. The EU is the mega-project of Europe’s political and corporate elite, including its semi-detached British syndicate. Brexit will throw this project into crisis. The crisis of their system will be our opportunity. We welcome the crisis of European capitalism caused by the breakup of the EU.

Similar arguments have been presented in the past. The German Communist Party, under orders from Moscow, welcomed the crisis of the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s, refused to form an alliance against fascism with the German Social-Democratic Party (dubbed ‘social fascists’), and claimed that a Hitler dictatorship would be a stepping-stone to socialist revolution. We know the outcome.

Let me spell out the basic underlying mistake here: it is to assume that any crisis – and any outbreak of mass discontent – must somehow benefit the Left. In fact, as Lenin explained, the ruling class can survive any crisis if the workers let it, and, as Trotsky explained, there are two parties in a crisis, the party of revolutionary hope (the socialists) and the party of counter-revolutionary despair (the fascists).

I cannot condemn comrades on the Left who got this wrong during the Referendum campaign. They include many friends whose commitment, idealism, and decency are beyond question. But they must now stare reality in the face. So too must any abstainers who sought refuge in abstraction.

If the monster of nationalism and racism incubating inside the Brexit camp was less than wholly apparent during the campaign, it is undeniable now. Yet I have seen revolutionaries whose opinions I used to respect claiming that the EU Referendum result represents ‘a class vote’ and that, because working-class communities voted heavily against the Remain camp, we are witness to a popular revolt against austerity and inequality.

This is breathtaking stupidity. It is to make a nonsense of any distinction between ‘class in itself’ and ‘class for itself’: a vital distinction for Marx, who knew the great difference there was between the mere fact of class position – a matter of sociological description – and conscious mass struggle by working people acting for themselves to change the world. Indeed, in some sense, the whole of socialist activity is accounted for by this distinction.

For socialists to think that millions of working people voting for Johnson, Gove, and Farage – who conducted the most racist election campaign in recent British history – can somehow be interpreted as ‘a class vote’, or, as the Lexit website claims, that the result constitutes ‘a left-wing victory’ leaves me struggling for the words.

In a crisis, the Centre cannot hold, and popular discontent can be captured and channelled by the Right or by the Left. The Left has no hope if it cannot even tell the difference. So let me spell it out.

The Brexit campaign was an anti-EU, anti-Westminster, anti-Establishment campaign – just as Hitler’s campaign was anti-Weimar in 1932. The Brexit campaign drew upon great pools of bitterness among those at the bottom of society, the victims of globalisation, neoliberalism, and austerity – just as Hitler was supported by the unemployed, the unorganised workers, the broken small businesses, the ‘little people’ who felt forgotten, ignored, and abused. And the Brexit campaign fanned a great upsurge of anti-immigrant racism – just as Hitler blamed the Jews.

So the Brexit victory means a sharp lurch to the right. UKIP is surfing a wave. The Tory Right will take the leadership. New Labour has its slow-motion coup to get rid of Corbyn back on the rails (and those who doubt the right-wing trajectory of British politics should note that the line here is that Corbyn is disconnected from the Labour base because he is soft on immigration). Across Europe, the Far Right is toasting Brexit and demanding their own in/out referenda. The EU may well break up (pulled apart, please note, not by ‘the party of revolutionary hope’, but by ‘the party of counter-revolutionary despair’).

We are living in dangerous times. Despite the juggernaut of corporate power, the grotesque greed of the rich, and the mounting social crisis afflicting working people and the poor, resistance is minimal and the Left – blighted by autonomism, sectarianism, and, in some quarters, a blank refusal to face reality – effectively irrelevant.

Yet the Left must act. The global crisis is deep, intractable, and set to get worse. The historical stakes have never been higher. The Left has to build a fighting alternative based on mass struggle from below. A good start might be the simple recognition that the Brexit vote represents a right-wing tidal wave – a triumph of Trumpism – and that if we don’t get our act together soon, the danger is that the Far Right, here and across Europe, will harden into all-out Fascism.

Neil Faulkner is a revolutionary socialist, a Brick Lane Debates activist, and the author of A Marxist History of the World: from neanderthals to neoliberals.