No platform for fascists? What are the BNP?

Daniel J (PR)

Whether we call the BNP fascist or not depends fundamentally on our definition of fascism. There have been different debates about exactly what fascism is, but a general outline, the definition which came out of the discussions around the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, was that it is an ideology which espouses populism and nationalism but the thing that makes it stands out is that it uses street violence, not just the violence of the state, to repress the workers movement and immigrant and ethnic minority communities.

When these movements were at their height in Italy and Germany, they had street gangs attacking the trade unions and immigrant and Jewish communities at that point they were the party of civil war. In terms of the BNP there has been a shift in the way they come across compared with 20 years ago. It is generally accepted that the BNP started as a Nazi organisation.

 John Tyndall who was their founder was open about his Nazism and holocaust denial but in the power struggle for the BNP leadership between Nick Griffin and John Tyndall, Griffin coined the phrase “suits not boots”. Griffin was saying that the BNP needed to change the image of the party.

He told the membership that in public at least the membership had to drop the language of fascism, he has recently said that they had to drop the idea that they are holocaust deniers. Griffin is trying to form a fascist front in a similar way to Le Pen in France, where in 1980 the Front National had 180 members but by 1983 was getting 2.2 million votes and has been permanent fixture of mainstream politics ever since.

But the Front National (FN) has never lost its fascist core, the FN has had swings between anti-semitism, overtly fascist politics and at other times they have hidden their fascist politics and presented themselves simply as a populist organisation. But Le Pen has ensured that the fascist leadership has always remained in place and the more populist leaders are a definite minority.

There is a good quote by Nick Griffin which summarises what the BNP are trying to do, he said;

“ Why do nationalists (meaning fascists) alone insist on spelling out in words of one syllable where they are coming from and where they want to go. Is it really honesty or is it just plain stupidity? This is a life and death struggle for white survival not a fancy dress party. A little less banner waving and a little more guile wouldn’t go amiss. As long as our cadres understand the full implications of our struggle there is no need for us to do anything to give the public cause for concern. We must at all times present them with an image of moderate reasonableness. Of course we must teach the truth to the hard core, for like you I do not intend this movement to lose its way, but when it comes to influencing the public forget about genetic differences, historical revisionism or Zionism, holocaust denial and so on, all that people want to know is what can we do for them that the other parties can’t or won’t. Politics is always the art of the possible so we must judge every single policy by one simple criteria is it realistically possible that a decisive proportion of the British people will support it, if not scale it down to our short term ambitions, to the point where the answer becomes “yes”. This is not a sell out but the only possible step further towards our goal.”

Griffin is quite clear he wants to establish a Fascist Front, but this is a change of form, their Nazi core remains in place their youth organiser Mark Collett was coming out with openly racist anti Semitic rants when he thought he was off camera. Griffin’s bodyguard has a tattoo with a quote from Hitler in a BNP social a couple of years ago they were singing Nazi songs.

So the BNP has changed on the surface, it doesn’t have openly Nazi or even racist rhetoric and they’ve smartened themselves up, not because they’ve ceased to be fascist, but because they want to be a fascist front. Many people who vote for them aren’t fascist, but their cadre has remained just as it always was. There may not be fighting squads but that doesn’t mean there isn’t violence. There are examples in Oldham, in Huddersfield recently a student was attacked and called a “red lesbo”, a Galloway Respect meeting in Swansea had to be moved because of threats of attack. So that hardness is there. Griffin is giving them a nod and a wink to use violence in opportune moments.

It’s a bit of a shallow definition of fascism to say that because they haven’t got fighting squads at all points then they are no longer fascists, there may be periods when they hide that tactic. Under different economic conditions all of this could change quite quickly, it is important to remember Griffin’s quote and that the BNP have an analysis of peak oil and think that capitalism is going to go into deep crisis very soon, their project is to build mass support now to take a radical shift under different circumstances. Indeed, why would the BNP even bother at the moment forming fighting squads in places like Barking and Dagenham, when there is no left opposition at all, the trade union movement is in crisis, even in Stoke there is a minimal left presence. So they don’t have to do it because of the weakness of the left and the trade unions, but as soon as they had to I have little doubt that that would happen again given that their leadership is still in place.

So in terms of no platform, if the BNP took control of Stoke in the next five years, which is a definite possibility, there is little doubt that they would use racist propaganda to stir up violence, they will use their members to carry out racist attacks. That’s why it would be dangerous to drop no platform. That is why the definition of whether they are fascists is important, it determines whether we as the left and in the workers movement should support no platform - to organise to physically defend ourselves and to take the fight to the fascists where necessary. In a place like Stoke that could well be very important.

It is complacent to just believe what Griffin and the leadership are saying, that we are not fascists; we shouldn’t just take their word for it. When Le Pen came over and the recent debate at Oxford, the mobilisations of anti-fascists against them didn’t make the left looked bad, but showed the strength of the left to oppose them, when they were trying to appear respectable and hide their core politics.

So where next?

Theoretically there is a possibility that if the BNP take on front politics they could become the politics of the leadership, but for that to happen to the BNP there would need to be a split.  The comparisons with the Countryside alliance are not credible. The BNP has the fascist core and if there is to be a fascist organisation it is from there that it will grow. No platform is not just smashing up a stall and a meeting, really effective no platform means working within the unions to refuse to deal with the BNP to radicalise the working class and provide a poll of attraction against fascism.

I hope I’ve outlined why the BNP are still fascist and no platform is still a necessary tactic, but what we need to remember is that we need a political alternative to expose their politics to the working class, but no platform has its place and it is naive to drop it, when the BNP are as they still are.

 Mike McNair (CPGB)

I am speaking to the CPGB majority position; there is an ongoing debate in the CPGB on this question. I think if we ask the question is the BNP still fascist we are asking the same type of question as is the Labour Party still a bourgeois workers party, which leads people who think it is not down a false tactical line the CNWP etc. or is the SWP still a Trotskyist organisation? The SWP has spent such a long time pretending to be a Stalinist organisation that it is in the process of becoming a Stalinist organisation or a soft Maoist organisation.

However, the question is in my view actually diversionary and the reason is the point of these definitions is to be a guide to action and the reason why its important to decide the nature of the Labour party is still a bourgeois workers party is because it leads us to consider whether to have a united front orientation towards it, or whether to have a third period Bernsteinist orientation like the CNWP or Respect, which is the call for the setting up of a new party on the basis of totally and utterly useless politics which might as well be we’re just going to go into the Labour Party. So the real question under debate is no platform.

Is no platform a principle or is it a tactic? I’m glad that Dan has said it’s a tactic, but its important to understand the effect of regarding no platform as a principle is, as the only, the essential, the vital tactic in tackling the fascists, no platform is not a principle, and in reality no platform is straightforward popular frontism as it is in the UAF or the ANL or the campaign around the Oxford Union invite, or popular frontism with bother boots or petrol bombs in the case of the LCR and Action Francaise.

If there were a mass fascist movement emerging the task of the working class movement would be to unite the working class movement as a whole with a view to short term civil war. That would imply the united class front fighting independently of the bourgeoisie and workers self defence organisations, the organisation of the best armed and organised workers militia to engage in street self defence and pre-emptive self defence.

It was Trotsky’s absolutely correct critique of Otto Bauer and the Austrian Social democrats that they could have pre-emptively brought down the Austrian social democrats with their militia when the Austrian Social Democrats first brought the fascists into government. They waited until it was clear that they were acting in self defence, but by waiting so it was clear that they were acting in self defence they gave the fascists and the government in combination the time to mobilise their forces. And as a result they were crushed because they refused to engage with pre-emptive self defence. So pre-emptive self defence is justifiable.

There is however, an alternative approach to fascism and that is the approach of Dimitrov who argued at the 7^th Congress of the Comintern for the anti-fascist peoples front. The essence of the anti-fascist people’s front is to create unity of the working class with the democratic fraction of the bourgeoisie, with the fraction of the bourgeoisie which is not now committed to fascism, to create that broad wide ranging unity which will exclude the fascists from political life. In Spain it is familiar that under conditions of revolutionary crisis the people’s front was a catastrophic failure, in France it took rather longer the People’s Front had the effect of demobilising the working class movement and resistance against rising fascism so that when it came to 1940 the bourgeoisie could introduce fascism by other means, by sabotage in the face of the German attack.

But the people’s front nonetheless was the banner under which the Second World War was fought. The unity of the working class movement and the democratic bourgeoisie and the consequence of that is the ascendancy of Stalinism and popular front politics through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The consequence of that in turn is that when the Trotskyists came to confront or talk about the question of fascism they did so within the frame work of the ascendancy of the doctrine of the peoples front, within the framework of the explicitly popular frontist initiatives of the CP. The Trotskyists responded to that not by trying to draw the class line in these initiatives but by attempting to draw the line between direct action and reliance on the state.

No platform requires us to draw a political line rather than one based on whether there is immediate violence between the fascists and the democratic bourgeois parties in order to make an alliance with constitutional Tories and constitutional liberals. The no platform line as a principle as a general line, which requires us to ask the question whether the BNP is a fascist organisation now, is precisely within that framework.

It should be blindingly obvious that we are not in the political situation in Britain of the rise of a mass fascist movement. The rise of votes of the BNP does not represent the rise of a mass fascist movement, in the sense that the working class needs to unite to create workers militias to defend the right of working class organisation of working class political representation, we are not in that situation.

That is equally true that is not the situation in France, as in Austria, even the inclusion of the MSI in the Berlusconi coalition does not mean that the workers movement has to fight arms in hand for the right to organise which is what the tactic of the united front workers self defence against fascism which Trotsky and Thalhemier argued against the Third Period Stalinists is, a tactic for the working class faced with the immediate military threat to their right to organise itself.

Where we are is somewhere different. The normal condition of bourgeois politics involves the existence of far right organisations, it also involves the existence of episodic mass, right populist, Poujardist votes which don’t have a mass organised base. The presence of this far right politics carries with it, the ideology of the nationalist and religious far right which advocates purity against women and sexual deviants, which advocates xenophobia against migrants, state power against liberalism. This is a permanent feature of capitalist politics. What goes alongside this is disorganised violence, not militias which threaten the right of the working class to organise, small groups of people attacking isolated left activists, attacking sexual minorities, feminists, minority sexual groups, religious minority groups, it is an endemic feature of capitalist politics back to 1689. It is not the same as the existence of a mass fascist force. The presence of the BNP promotes this disorganised violence. But the Daily Mail and the Sun promote disorganised violence of this sort on a much bigger scale.

So faced with this situation we have two tasks. The first is self defence, but its not self defence necessary on the scale for pre-emptive self defence, its routine self defence it means the organisations of the left, we should have a service d’ordre, we should have security measures taken, we need to conduct an ideological struggle against the ideas of the far right. So we need them up front openly talked about means not the same thing as routine no platform party. The Oxford Union debate is a classical example of that, if there was a mass fascist organisation in this country, then the Oxford Union would be a component of that movement, the Oxford Union is an organisation of the far right, the alliance which was made of the opposition to the society, was an remains an alliance primarily lead by the Zionists in Oxford. The Zionists are using the principle of Oxford to no platform anti-Zionists. We have political tasks and tasks of self defence, no platform is a viable tactic under circumstances but at the moment it is a popular frontist diversion.

Mike Mcnair (CPGB) Summing up

Expel them from the unions absolutely, in principle I’m for expelling Tories from the unions as well, that is not a question about the fascists are somehow different it’s a question of whether we should have trade union organisations which are independent of the capitalist class via its state and its parties.

The core of this is absolutely simple, does it work crushing fascism in the egg? No it doesn’t. They are back. The reason why they are back is not because the left abandoned street fighting. They were wiped out politically by Thatcher who stole their votes. They are back because there is an objective basis in capitalist society for far right groups. If there is, which there isn’t at the moment, an objective basis for a mass fascist movement in Britain it will be a British nationalist movement and not a German nationalist movement. The fascist core of the BNP is a German nationalist movement. It will be a British nationalist movement that appeals to the countryside, to Protestantism, unionist like the loyalist in Northern Ireland, it will grow from a split in the Tory party, from UKIP or the Countryside alliance if there is to be a mass fascist movement. The German nationalist core of the BNP will be swept to one side. The Lefts focus that we do not want 1933 will precisely lead us to not addressing the actual grounds for the rise of a mass fascist movement, it will lead us to political disarming the working class and that’s what this idea that the BNP is beyond the Pale does. We are not at present in a situation where we need to fight for the working class to defend itself with force and arms in the absolute near future. We are in a situation where we need the working class to prepare by undertaking regular stewarding by taking security measures at that level. We have to fight for the workers movement to understand that the major threat of mass street violence against the working class comes from the core of Toryism, from the right wing of the Tory party, which has been just as prone to organise street violence against the workers movement as the far right when the time has been right. The line which says no platform for fascists which says the BNP is different from the other bourgeois parties is political disarming.

Daniel J (PR) summing up

I’m slightly confused because I thought that the CPGB majority were saying that the BNP weren’t fascist? But I’m confused because the CPGB seem confused. Griffin is not confused, he said it clearly. And yet the CPGB are saying that he’s not doing that. The CPGB are saying that the BNP are no longer a fascist organisation. Griffin even says it about Zionism, the idea that the Jew is the enemy for us is over, Islam is the real struggle. Fascists aren’t stupid, to say that the BNP will just stick with anti-semitism is a mistake, that’s not to say that they aren’t anti-semites, but if they see the opportunity to turn the Muslims into the new Jews then they will have no qualms doing that.

Fascism hasn’t got one fixed enemy.

I really don’t understand the argument about kicking Tories out of the unions, where would draw the line? Kick Lib Dems out of the unions? Kick Greens out? Where would it stop? If the CPGB majority are saying that they aren’t fascist, why don’t they oppose the RMT line of kicking them out of the unions? If you are saying they are not fascists then there are consequences from that.

Griffin recently went out to the USA and stated that they would drive homosexuals back into the closet, that they would ethnic minorities out of the country.

It is a caricature of our position to say that we only want to smash fascists, I clearly said that we wanted a political alternative as well, when you say go up to fascists and argue with them, that isn’t where the real debates will happen, the reason there aren’t more confrontations with the fascists is because the left are so weak. If the Left developed a real presence in Dagenham and Barking and Stoke there is no doubt that the fascists would start physically confronting the left, so why are we saying wait now? If we can get a foothold now to stop them organising we should do it. If we are to have a physical opposition to them we need a political presence as well. The two go hand in hand. Why say because we are not in a situation of civil war we don’t implement self defence? Part of the argument is that we have to win the political arguments and about what the BNP will do as soon as it is confronted by the left opposition.

The MSI in Italy for years they put the squads on hold and then they organised an attack on the steel union HQ, they were recently doing El Duce salutes on the steps of the town hall, when fascists need to do it, we know what they will do. They will organise attacks against ethnic minorities and the left.  When they stop having a free reign that’s when confrontation will happen. To abandon no platform is complacent and will leave us disarmed.

 

Wed 23, July 2008 @ 17:45