Liam Mac Uaid argues that while Britain does not have a mass fascist movement the votes for the far right and the durability of groups like the BNP point to their potential.

The far right in Britain has put down deep roots in some working class communities. Former Labour supporters and younger people who have never felt any reason to vote for Tony Blair or Gordon Brown are now willing to give their support to the British National Party (BNP). Its 300 candidates won 514,819 votes in the general election. Its share of the vote nationally was 1.83% but this low headline figure conceals pockets of much stronger support. All anti-fascists will have celebrated the party’s failure to win a parliamentary seat and its humiliation in Barking, Stoke Central, Sandwell and other councils where it suffered lost deposits and also ran status. Hard and consistent campaigning by anti-racists smashed the BNP electorally.

However the BNP and English Defence League (EDL) have been more successful in building and sustaining campaigning and electoral organisations than any of the left’s initiatives in the past decade. The growing strength of these organisations, together with the adoption of parts of their policies on immigration by the mainstream parties, have been important factors in a growth of racist and homophobic attacks on our streets. They have had an electoral setback but they are not going away.

A less violent but just as poisonous version of their message, directed at a different audience, comes also from UKIP.

One of the ways in which left has organised against the BNP and the EDL is to describe them as Nazis and fascists in literature and slogans. But while organisations like the BNP, UKIP and EDL have the capacity to develop into a fascist movement, at the moment it is more accurate to describe them as proto-fascist. They still lack several of the features of hardened fascist parties and that this has implications for how we should respond.
A fascist movement, as understood by Marxists, combines a number of elements. To a certain extent these are independent of each other but a full understanding of the phenomenon requires that they be grasped in their totality.
Classical fascism of the sort that arose in the 1920s and 30s is the expression of a severe social crisis of late capitalism. It can coincide with a crisis of overproduction but more fundamentally it reflects the impossibility of a “normal” accumulation of capital in the world market. This is tied to very specific factors such as wage levels, labour productivity and access to markets and materials. A fascist seizure of power is intended to brutally and radically change the conditions of capitalist exploitation to the advantage of the key groups in monopoly capitalism.

For a prolonged period in Britain the balance of forces in workplaces has overwhelmingly favoured the employers. The organised working class is not a major threat to the productivity of British capitalism at the moment.
From the point of view of the ruling class in a society like Britain bourgeois parliamentary democracy is the most efficient way to run the state. The general election campaign was fought on the terrain of offering strategies to manage the capitalist crisis. At issue was merely how much and how quickly the working class would have to pay to resolve it.

But other forms of bourgeois rule are available when society’s equilibrium is disturbed.

These usually involve a greater centralisation of powers for the executive branches of the state, even if this means that parts of the bourgeoisie are forced out of political activity. Yet these options, such as military dictatorships or police states, are not enough by themselves to atomise and demoralise a working class with millions of members and strong organisational traditions.

To do this the ruling class needs a fascist movement which can wear down and politically defeat the workers’ parties and unions through violence and terror. After it has seized power this movement obliterates the working class organisations by banning them and killing or imprisoning key leaders so leaving the formerly most militant and conscious parts of the working class resigned, deprived of a sense of their collective strength and unable to formulate a political challenge to the fascist state.

The old infrastructure of the working class is replaced by corporate staff associations, worker employee councils in which the bosses dominate and a massive range of sporting and cultural groups which reinforce the new ruling ideology. All this is cemented with the destruction of both dissenting bourgeois media and the socialist press.
The ruling class is a numerically insignificant part of society and it needs allies in its assault on the organised workers. It finds these allies in sections of society which are affected by economic crises, the collapse of businesses, inflation and unemployment.

Fascism is also a pole of attraction for small business people or workers in managerial jobs who are frightened by a conscious and militant working class. It offers some rhetorical anti big capitalist flourishes to console the small traders and to appeal to the most alienated and disaffected workers.

Universally fascism speaks the language of racism and extreme nationalism, argues that women’s place is in the home and perpetrates homophobia. In Europe today Islamophobia has largely replaced the anti-Semitism of the Nazis.
A fascist movement develops autonomously, slowly building support and articulating in a reactionary way the discontent of those in society with whom the left has failed to connect. However it can only come to power when part of the ruling class decides to back it. This has to be preceded by a period of a type of civil war in which the fascists must destroy the workers’ movement. Whether or not they succeed depends on how the workers’ organisations resist.

Having smashed the organised workers the mass fascist movement, from the standpoint of the capitalist class, has served its purpose. Parts of it are incorporated into the state, the more radical elements of its demagoguery are forgotten and the most violent and combative individuals are purged. Without the resistance of the workers’ parties and unions the political, industrial and social conditions have been decisively changed to the benefit of the bourgeoisie which then has a free hand to force down wages and increase the rate of exploitation of the working class.

Seen from that perspective fascism serves the class interests of the big capitalists and not the unemployed or the small business people. It is clear that no section of the British bourgeoisie currently considers the BNP as an ally in its struggle with the working class although in a situation of sharp class conflict that could change overnight.

At the moment the growth of the BNP and the EDL is directly attributable to the Labour Party’s neo-liberal record of increasing the gap between rich and poor; pricing less well off families out of the housing market and its privileging of City financiers over the interests of working people.
While it is right to point an accusing finger at Labour, the left outside it also has much to answer for. One of the things the BNP has understood is that it can take years or decades to develop a national profile and find a resonance for its message. By contrast the non-Labour left has staggered from one short term project to the next. Consequently working class voters who should be receptive to anti-capitalist messages are seduced by the easy answers of racism and Islamophobia when they wonder why they are forced to live in poverty and squalor.

Britain still does not have a mass fascist movement. It has relatively small but growing proto-fascist organisations that are now certain to expand as state spending on housing repairs, education and social services is pared to the bone. As well as confronting them with demonstrations and on the streets we need to mount a strong, united and democratic political challenge.