When the Red Army marched into Berlin in 1945, it seemed that the dark years of fascist dictatorships and mass fascist movements were over. In the 1950s and 1960s it appeared that far right authoritarianism, at least in the 'advanced' capitalist countries, was a fleeting aberration never to be repeated. Fascism was apparently buried in wrecked Berlin bunkers.
Attempts to revive it, such as the abortive come-back of Oswald Mosley's Union Movement in 1960-1 and the antics of Lincoln Rockwell's US Nazi Party, were viewed as tragi-comic fiascos. Yet 50 years later in Europe, ethnic minority communities are once again the victims of pogroms; mass demonstrations give the Hitler salute and Italy has a government which includes people who trace their political ancestry directly to Mussolini.
How much of a political turnaround in the situation is this really, and what explains it?
Fascism and the far-right have a symbiotic relationship with antiimmigrant racism, and that has never gone away. Brought to Western Europe in the 1950s as cheap labour from the Caribbean, the Indian sub-continent, and Europe's Mediterranean fringe, immigrant workers (or 'guest workers' as they were delicately called in Germany) were always the victims of racist intolerance.
The racism which afflicted European society was not a product, as many liberals appeared to think, of ignorance or the fear of other cultures. Racism was deeply instilled in the major European countries through their imperialist past and present.
The myth of white superiority", indeed the whole of modern racism, has its roots in the origins of imperialist domination, going back to the slave trade. In Britain and France in particular an elaborate semi-official ideology of the 'white man's burden' - the civilising role of the West - emerged at the dawn of modern imperialism in the late 19th century. However, for a long part of the post-war period anti-immigrant racism was toned down in official capitalist ideology, for two reasons.
First, large numbers of immigrant workers were needed to fill low-paid jobs as post-war capitalism reconstructed its economies during the long boom. Second, important developments in world politics, in particular the national liberation movements and de-colonisation in the Third World, and the impact of the civil rights movement in the United States, made open racism no longer respectable.
Signs of a change in this situation were evident in the 1970s. In Britain for example, when Enoch Powell made his famous Rivers of blood' speech, warning of the dangers of immigration in 1968, he was almost completely isolated in official political circles. But by 1972 Heath's government was closing the doors to non-white immigration, and by 1975 the Tories had a leader, Margaret Thatcher, who completely accepted Powell's racist philosophy and programme. At the root of this change was the open emergence of capitalist crisis and mass unemployment. This had the effect both of reducing the need for immigrant labour and beginning a long process of driving official capitalist politics to the right, as the bourgeois class searched for new programmes and ideologies to reinforce its attack on the working class movement and working class living standards.
By the late 1970s the fascist National Front in Britain was gathering tens of thousands of votes; for example it scored 40,000 votes in the 1978 London local government elections, in a campaign almost entirely constructed around anti-immigrant racism.
Paradoxically, the electoral victory of Thatcher's Tories in 1979 proved to be of more lasting significance for the emergence of the far right in Europe than the temporary electoral scores of the National Front. For its was Thatcher's Tories in Britain who decisively 'broke the mould' in European politics of the post-war welfare state and mixed economy consensus, opening the door for various right-wing experiments and programmes, of which the Berlusconi government in Italy, elected in April 1994, has been just one example.
For in the balmy days of the post war long economic boom, it was not just fascism that was thought to be a thing of the past, but all the evils of the 1930s, especially mass unemployment, economic slump, deflation and mass poverty. Now all the sins of the 1930s are revisiting the European economies with a vengeance. It is this, of course, which creates the material basis for the re-emergence of mass extreme-right movements and anti-immigrant racism as a central question in politics. These general factors have however been given an important twist by developments in global politics, particularly the collapse of the Soviet Union and its associated eastern bloc. The fall of the USSR, and the attempt to restore capitalism, has brought an economic disaster. Tens of thousands of economic migrants from the former Stalinist
states have attempted to flee this economic disaster by moving westward.
The countries of the European Union, particularly Germany, have attempted to put up the shutters to this immigration by radically changing their immigration and asylum laws; and indeed this process has been deepened and intensified by the exclusivism of the Fortress Europe' policy itself.
Economic catastrophe in the east has been followed by social and political catastrophe, most notably the war in ex-Yugoslavia, creating a flood of refugees and displaced people and unleashing brutal ethnic conflicts. One ideological disaster of the Yugoslav war has been the way in which fascists, particularly in Germany, have taken up the extreme nationalist demand for 'ethnic cleansing' of their societies. Social catastrophe in the east has been matched by that in the Third World. World economic crisis has radically reversed the economic and social progress made by many ex-colonies. The capitalist class, in Italy and France in particular, argues that it is threatened by a 'flood' of immigrants from Africa.
None of the above factors however explain why the far right in European politics is a real threat, and why for example, it could become part of the government in Italy. After all, mainstream governments of all sorts have carried out racist immigration policies, without having to resort to support from the far right.
The extreme-right danger in Europe stems from a new stage of the capitalist crisis. The long wave of economic crisis which started in the early 1970s has never been fundamentally overcome. Now all European capitalist governments feel the need to attack fundamental gains of the working class, particularly the welfare state. It is an open question whether, in one or several countries, they will feel the need to resort to new, harsher, political regimes to win the gigantic class battles which stem from this need to crush the welfare state.
At any rate, the length and depth of the economic crisis, despite the mini-boom of the 1980s, has created a dangerous new instability in European politics which the far right could seek to exploit. It has of course to be explained why it is the far right which is on the offensive in this new period of profound crisis, and not the left and the workers' movement.
No one factor can explain this. However there is no doubt that the deep defeats suffered by the working class movement, in particular the decline of the trade unions, itself the product of a historic weakness of leadership in the face of the capitalist onslaught, have created moods of defeatism and scepticism.
Equally, it is undeniable that the collapse of the Soviet Union created a profound shock effect in the left and the workers' movement, temporarily giving capitalism a huge ideological victory and casting doubt on whether there can ever be a viable alternative to apparently all-victorious capitalism.
The rise of the far right is a terrible indictment of the role of the leaderships of the trade unions, and the social democratic and Communist parties over the past 20 years. For example at the very start of the austerity offensive in the late 1970s, the leadership of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), through its 'historic compromise' policy, in which they sought to share power with the right wing Christian Democrats, gave way on every central attack on the workers. With the PCI completely dominant at that stage in the Italian working class movement, this just rubber-stamped the capitulation of the trade unions, and has led directly to the shipwreck of Italian communism. The fruit of all this is that the old political parties have collapsed and the heirs of Mussolini are in the government.
The failure of reformist trade union and political leaders, and the 'Communist Parties' to hammer out a total economic, social and political alternative to capitalist austerity, with a totally new vision of society, has impacted on the whole of world politics. If the European working class movement had been in different shape, with socialist policies and leadership, we can be sure that the form of the collapse of the USSR would have been different.
The failure of a mass socialist movement to emerge in the exStalinist states is directly linked to ideological developments in the West. One result is that extreme-right nationalist and semi-fascist movements play an important role in eastern Europe, not least in Russia and ex-Yugoslavia.
The official organisations of the workers movement have also played a lamentable role over anti-immigrant racism. The spectacular collapse of the German social democrats (SPD) over the change of the constitution in 1994 to keep out asylum seekers enabled Chancellor Kohl to present this racist action as a 'national consensus'. This has given the far-right Republicaner party, which had long championed this policy, a dramatic victory and weakened the anti-racist struggle. Social democratic parties like the British Labour Party and the French Socialist Party, have themselves enacted anti-immigrant laws and done nothing to challenge racist immigration and asylum laws promoted by right wing governments. Even the French Communist Party has at times been tainted with anti-immigrant demagogy.
In Britain there is at present no mass far-right movement of the scale of the Alleanza National in Italy, the Front National in France or even the smaller German Republicaner or Belgian Vlaams Blok. This is arguably because the political space for such a development has been blocked by having a very right-wing Tory government in power since 1979.
But there is no room for complacency. The fascist British National Party has undergone a certain growth, and has directly inspired many murderous racist attacks. Anti-immigrant racism is a massive factor in national politics, both on the streets and in the racist asylum and immigration laws, which has generated a paraphernalia of special immigration prisons like Campsfield near Oxford and Haslar, near Portsmouth.
It would be a big mistake to imagine that we don't have a far- right threat in Britain. A new situation - for example the election of a Labour government - would create new opportunities for the BNP and probably strengthen hard-right trends in the Tory party.
It does not require a lot of analysis to work out that the issue of racism and the politics of the extreme right are going to be central issues in European politics - east and west - for many years to come. It is entirely appropriate then that the left should debate out what the new far right represents, and try to place it in the historical experience of racism and fascism, which is why this little book starts with the 1920s and 1930s.
Indeed, revolutionary socialism has a powerful arsenal of historical analysis of the most important fascist movement this century, the German Nazis, in the monumental writings of Trotsky, most notably those collected in The Struggle against Fascism in Germany. As the contribution to this volume from Ernest Mandel points out, Trotsky is the modern founder of the Marxist theory of fascism. To him goes the honour of having warned time and again, against the complacency and suicidal ultra-left policies of official 'communism', and of the danger to humanity represented by the Nazis.
History of course never repeats itself exactly. But a firm grasp of the history of fascism and the far right is needed for the working class to arm itself for the contemporary struggle.
Fascism and the far right represent a danger to the whole of human civilisation. Their victory in Europe would throw back the fight for social progress, for the democratic and egalitarian transformation of society, by decades. It would be a regression to a new period of barbarism.
It is then highly fitting that a book aimed at contributing to the
anti-racist and anti-fascist struggle be dedicated to the memory of our comrade Bob Smith. Bob, in addition to being a determined and dedicated anti-racist fighter, personally incarnated the qualities of personal generosity and human solidarity which are the opposite of everything that fascism stands for.
This book aims politically to explore the problem of racism and fascism: but we do so from the conviction that this threat can be combated and defeated. As on the previous occasions when the threat of fascism has loomed, there is an alternative: and that is the mobilisation of the working class, through its mass organisations, in collective action.
Too many times in history the voices arguing for this class struggle, socialist alternative have been drowned out: this book is part of our determined effort to turn the tide and prevent that happening again. We can end the nightmare: we must fight to do so.