Fascism or right-wing populism? | Wessex Solidarity

Antifascists need flexibility above all, precisely because fascism, though practiced by the most unyielding people, has never been a coherent ideology. The rank and file is by definition the most confused part of any population, but a crowd of confused people is dangerous; a few years ago a confused but presumably well-meaning mob attacked a pediatrician’s office. This story tears me apart; there was a brass plaque on the door – as if you could… I have to laugh out loud at how stupid some people can be, and then become enraged that members of my own class have been so poorly served by the education system we all paid for, and are so ill-equipped to live in the modern world.

Mussolini, starting in the labor movement, began by incorporating it into capitalism, “vertical syndicalism,” and the bourgeoisie into the state apparatus. This he called “Corporatism, a fusion of corporate and state power,” everyone in their place, placed from above. It requires a closed system, situated within a single geopolitical entity, or nation state.

Mussolini set the tone for the 20th century, he read widely: Hegel, Kant, Kropotkin, Nietzsche, Marx, but instead of adopting a particular moral philosophy, he learned the technique of creating inspiring, wise-sounding slogans that appealed to the masses. So for Hitler and his National Socialist Workers Party; stung by the humiliation of Versailles and paranoid anti-Semitism, the Great Depression gave them the popular support they needed to seize power. Full employment was achieved through military Keynesianism.

During the Comintern period, when “class against class” reigned, the phrase “social democracy equals social fascism” was their excuse for waging war against the parties of the Second International rather than the emerging fascist movement – ​​with catastrophic results for both tendencies. However, the phrase is entirely appropriate. Under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, who followed Mussolini’s example, the socialist trade union leader Largo Caballero of the UGT collaborated with the government in compulsory arbitration commissions, which eliminated the Spanish working class from any role in labor disputes. So between the wars, Europe and the USSR rearmed and rebuilt with centralized economies. It turns out that the only viable way to wage industrial mechanized war is to make everyone work for the state, and so it was for the next party.

The Cold War was a replay of ‘class against class’, with fascists in Britain able to regroup unchecked, apart from periodic direct action by the working class. Meanwhile, Atlee’s authoritarian government clung to the corporatist model, building a social democratic settlement by ruthlessly plundering Britain’s colonies as they struggled to break away, using conscripts to undermine strikes and introducing repressive anti-working class legislation. The bourgeoisie were not happy either, as they wanted unlimited capital accumulation – for that is what capitalism demands. ‘Corporatism’ was still used without irony by Labour politicians in the 1970s to describe the mixed economy.

The problem with all this is that the citizen is both a client and an opponent of the state. This is deeply felt and populism recognizes it. Wage labor is an abusive relationship no matter how you dress it up, and nationalized industry means your boss has his own army and police force, an unattractive proposition. If bureaucrats set prices as well as wages, no one is going to be happy with their decision, so for many a free market was an easy sell by bourgeois politicians.

This is why 20^and The politics of the century have lost their relevance; populism is right wing by definition because no party offers credible redistributive economics, the only meaningful designation of ‘left’. Corbyn’s attempt at left wing populism failed because it didn’t go far enough – and couldn’t go far enough. People wanted bloody Brexit, not free broadband! “We want our country back” and they didn’t believe he could run the trains on time.

But what about ‘social justice’? Well, that was always nonsense, justice is a bourgeois concept related to paying a debt, it is based on transaction and coercion, which undermines both morality and utility. The only way to achieve freedom and equality for all is collectively, through working class solidarity, but end-stage capitalism has atomized class into a socio-economic continuum, so that workers no longer identify with their class, but with those who share their language, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, religion or football team.

Right-wing populists like to define their positions as ‘conservative’; it has a tinge of respectability and implies defence rather than attack, or even a return to an earlier time. It is instructive that many AFD supporters in East Germany are nostalgic for the GDR. They have no ideology, they want a wage, a roof over their heads, food and drink, and not to work too hard for it. If that means they have no say in the composition of an executive body, why should they care? Can you honestly say that it has helped you? While the old regime struggled to keep people in, the AFD – whose support is strongest in the least diverse areas – has pursued a sinister policy it calls ‘remigration’, a euphemism for deporting German citizens of non-German ethnicity; that will not end well.

But just as an old gang of authoritarian demagogues liked to call themselves ‘communist’, conservative no longer means anything. Their opponents are characterised as ‘liberals’. Liberalism is simply the postulate of theoretical freedom and equality before the law, with private property and the enforcement of debts, most modern vote-beggars take this with them, but anarchists see it as the fraud that it is. In the UK historically all fascist and proto-fascist groups have emerged from the Conservative and Unionist Party, or the Young Conservatives, briefly took to the streets and then returned to electoral politics in some other form. This has been the case for over a century.

One of the pillars of populism is artificial scarcity, an invention of the bourgeois state. If you want a hierarchical society, in which power is expressed by denying the needs or desires of others, you have to convince your citizens that the necessities of life are scarce, that they must be rationed or negotiated. Even that the state could “run out of money” – that is another catastrophic failure of our education system! The communists used artificial scarcity too, in a vast empire that produced unimaginable quantities of wheat, rice, coal, oil, minerals and manufactured goods. Better to export these to buy weapons than to let the workers enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Does it matter whether the gang we encounter on the streets are National Socialists or right-wing populists? Not really, what matters is whether they can stand in the way of us acting collectively as a class. However, we could draw a line between the sellers of this stuff and the gamblers. That will take thousands of individual conversations between working-class people, and will have to wait until the fighting is over, or ideally, before it starts.

The arguments are simple: firstly, there is no shortage of anything on this island; there are a million empty homes and millions of tons of food thrown away every year. Healthcare is only rationed because this social obligation has been turned into a commodity, for profit. Secondly, borders only serve the bosses, not us, they exist to maintain differences in prices and wages to keep the price of raw materials low and increase the profit margin on production. Gentrification creates borders, even within the territory; we all know districts where we could not afford coffee, let alone accommodation, but you still might have to commute there to clean offices.

Remind your audience that capital, unlike labour, flows freely around the world. Should the term “economic migrant” come up, I’d like to introduce vacuum cleaner salesman James Dyson, who was given all the privileges of the social democratic system, free education paid for by the working class, even free school milk, and is now known as the fifth richest person in Britain. He moved hundreds of jobs from Wiltshire to Malaysia to pay them £3 an hour, which begs the question: if we all worked for that rate, who would buy their bloody vacuum cleaners for £500 each? Imagine the outrage if Malaysians came here to take advantage of our meagre minimum wage, and if they were given a visa to work as a doctor or midwife, that was just a rich country sucking the education system of a poor country dry, and they weren’t allowed to bring their children.

“What about all those asylum seekers?” Ask the criminal gangs that bombed five countries to maintain their oil supplies. “Radical Islam,” promoted by NATO (yes, including bin Laden and Hamas) during the Cold War, proved more successful at exploiting the grievances of marginalized and ill-informed populations than Marxism-Leninism, and has come back to bite the West in the ass. Refugees are small in number compared to the Ukrainian middle class and the Hong Kong Chinese, who have been allowed to work and pay taxes and are smoothly integrating into the economy.

Of course, the real fascists don’t want them either. The whining of Tory politicians about children drowning in the canal doesn’t cut it with those who want to burn the survivors in their beds. I have no hesitation in calling such people fascists, regardless of their affiliation. They must be eliminated, not by the state, but by the working class.

That just leaves the plethora of weird online cults devoted to misogyny, transphobia, conspiracy theories, mad science and the like, who are fighting against windmills. They are in good company with the self-proclaimed Western jihadists. I can’t imagine these fantasists being defeated in their natural habitat, but eventually they have to come out of their holes in the real world, and where they resort to violence, they must be met with violence. I always advocate that vulnerable people form affinity groups with others in similar circumstances. These can form defence committees, and take on anyone who is willing to lend a hand. As always, let the boots do the work.

September 12, 2024
Categories: Anarchist, Antifa, Germany, Italy, Russia, Weymouth. Tags:Antifascist, anticapitalist, Class struggle, fascist, International, No Borders. Author: wessexsolidarity

Leave a Reply

No comments yet.

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI