Irreconcilable differences / positive intolerance
As a result of the debates about the fascist BNP, there are currently several websites linking to Though Cowards Flinch which suggest that my ‘intolerance’ of the BNP is hypocritical. I would complain, they say, if Marxists were suddenly victimised by the State for merely holding political beliefs. So it is a bit rich for me to say that card carrying fascists should be excluded from teaching our children, or holding policing authority over a multi-racial community.
One even goes so far as to argue that, just as Marxists can work professionally alongside “the middle class”, so racists and fascists can work professionally alongside other colours and sexual persuasions and religions etc. Effectively this equates all intolerance, values it as equally bad and rules it as being unfair. I would link to these sites but some of them are of dubious quality and of nationalistic origin so you’ll just have to take my word for it.
I think these arguments are bullshit. First of all, not all violence is the same. People accuse both Marxists and fascists of wanting to overthrow the state – but to what end? Some liberals might argue that it doesn’t matter, but then these liberals probably wouldn’t argue against me beating up a rapist if it stopped an attack on a woman. We judge violence according to its end, not according to the violence itself. Marxism and fascism are clearly delineated in this regard.
It’s interesting that Marxism struggles for the abolition of classes and thereby would abolish the existence of institutional violence altogether, whereas Fascism turns violence into a cult.
Yet these are not merely ideas to be compared to an idyllic checklist. Marxism and fascism, as with all ideologies, are possessed of a class content. In Marxist praxis, the aim is to build a working class capable of abolishing the class which expropriates surplus, determining democratically what to do with that surplus. Fascist praxis is the destruction of the organised working class and the neo-feudalisation of surplus expropriation, where coercion is added to competition.
Marxism and Fascism are, therefore, precisely opposites when viewed in class terms.
This class content, of course, is not abstract. It is set against real historical circumstances, such as modern Britain. In Britain, a healthy capitalism renders coercion unnecessary from the point of view of employers. However for sections of the working class, capitalism exists in a permanent state of break down. While the expropriating class finds fascism unnecessary, it is among these groups that fascism will survive.
Marxist praxis aims at their incorporation into a project of emancipation from the power of capital, fascist praxis aims to turn them against other workers – whether immigrants or Muslims or whatever other subsection can be routinely blamed for the “break down” of capitalism. We see this inverted class consciousness often turned against the political elite itself, in rhetoric about political correctness etc.
Moments of capitalist crisis can create or be created by powerful socialist movements aimed at reducing the burden born by the exploited classes. Reducing productivity and profit, these movements are anathema to employers who, naturally, want to increase the rate of exploitation and so save themselves from the crisis to hand. It’s no accident that the BNP is in a more dangerous position now than it has been for years.
This is because ever more workers are seeking alternatives – and either they will choose socialism or they will choose fascism. In a bid to stave off a socialist victory accomplished by trade unions, left-wing political parties and councils of workers’ deputies, employers can easily find their interests aligning with those of the fascists. This has been the character of every anti-socialist counter-revolution, from Kornilov to Pinochet.
The ruling class attempts to use the fascist movement to break the power of the socialists. In Britain, even the General Strike of 1926 provoked a reaction like this. All sections of the bourgeoisie threw their support behind the organisations set up to break the strike – and these organisations were drawn from the right-wing sections of the working class, ex-military, the petit-bourgeoisie etc. I’m trying to convey just how plausible all of this actually is – and that it could happen again.
In all of these struggles, the State is not neutral. Just as, in regular times of capitalist exploitation, the State is the guarantor of the property rights and contracts upon which capitalism survives, so in times of heightened class struggle, the State takes sides. The actions of the Courts, the Security Services and the Police against the Miners in 1984 demonstrate just how politicized the State can be.
Now the world is entering a new phase of “upswing” in class struggle, as the contradictions inherent to capitalism make themselves felt through the urgent need of capitalists to expand the rate of exploitation and increase profit. I mention “contradictions” because obviously these things are not in the interests of the working class, though there are several capitalist ideologies which suggest that they are (e.g. neo-liberalism). This means that class struggle is more likely to become open.
Should a powerful working class movement be forged out of this more open class struggle, it will find itself confronted by the fascists. Indeed confrontation between socialists and fascists is ongoing, as Searchlight reports regularly. Intimidation of trades unionists, attacks on anti-fascist activists…these things aren’t that uncommon – and that’s not even mentioning the attacks on ethnic minorities sparked by the BNP and their ilk.
The great danger arises where this confrontation is broadened by the participation of others who oppose the goals of socialists – by which I mean the ruling class, or despairing sections of the petit-bourgeoisie who are watching capitalism eat their small businesses for breakfast. This, with the complicity of the police, can represent a great threat to any working class, socialist movement. Whether one’s stance is evolutionary or revolutionary, a threat to the organs by which the working class represents its class interests needs to be halted.
In securing the complicity of the police, it probably helps if sections of the police are openly racist or, worse still, openly members of fascist parties. The exclusion of such people from the police is a strategic victory for any working class movement – even if it is instituted as a result of the fear of bourgeois liberal politicians. It should be telling that fascists find it permissable to be members of an organisation charged with upholding all the property laws which sustain capitalism, and which are often called upon to break strikes. Marxists don’t.
This should indicate just how similar fascism is to the ideologies of liberal capitalism. It possesses no structural critique of capitalism, instead resorting to conspiracy theories and to endorsements of ever-more draconian measures of crime control. Denuded of detailed analysis, the fascist is left with little other than a desire and respect for order – order which, as the situation progresses, will lose it’s anti-capitalist baggage and will shape itself around the fascist ‘section’ of the ruling class.
Hitler’s butchery on the Night of the Long Knives was just this – a purge of those who clung solidly to the (grossly distorted) workerist wing of the National Socialist Party. Mussolini’s party underwent a similar transformation, going from anti-capitalist to corporatist.
Set in the modern British context, socialists and their anti-fascist allies wage the fight to have fascists excluded from the police because it reduces the efficacy of the police as a weapon to turn against socialists. This requires the institution of a law because, let’s face it, the police are never going to be best buddies with people who view the State as an instrument of class domination. We should also fight against fascist teachers – though this should involve different methods.
Having had some time to think about it, a law banning fascists from public service altogether would probably be counter-productive. As witnessed with Nick Griffin in the national media, the BNP don’t care if they hypocritically invoke the Human Rights Act to protect them, despite their vocal denunciations of it just a month ago as the most pernicious piece of legislation ever passed by parliament. Presumably that includes the laws which foresaw the internment citizens of this country for left-wing political beliefs.
With regard to teachers specifically, socialists have a duty to connect with young people. Conditioning for depoliticization starts young these days. Sixth form seminars on politics often don’t revolve around discussion of ideology and policy, mostly around policy, which helps young people to fit in, when adults, to a world where ideology-neutral politics, post-politics, the politics of administration are often lauded against broad and sweeping ideologies which seek to harness the tools of the Enlightenment to better humanity.
Students should be awoken to the dangers of fascist teachers. Our teaching unions should be equally alive to the threat – and indeed the National Union of Teachers has a fund which it created at national conference to use in fighting the spread of the BNP. During anti-war protests, the NUT and others issued directives to their members not to punish any student or supervise any punishment of students staging a walkout from classes on Day X, the day bombing began. We need a return to that solidarity.
Teachers and students should, together, force school administrations to sack teachers found to be members of the BNP. This should be an explicitly political act, inspired by a desire that fascists should not be able to spread their lies to young people. Far from saying that our kids are too stupid to understand and counter fascist ideas, I’m saying that they’re intelligent enough to lead a movement which demands that in class there be no chance of a teacher deliberately and to political ends lying to the class.
On the subject of lies and fascists, I believe I’ve been clear enough; Griffin obviously has no problem covering up his Party’s views on the Human Rights Act if it will help them fit the media narrative of the BNP as underdogs. In other posts I’ve discussed how Griffin has flagrantly lied to the press and his Party in order to suppress the violence undertaken by members of the BNP at different times. Fascists in general and the BNP in particular lie about the scale of the Holocaust. Why would fascist teachers be any different?
If, as a progressive movement, we’re against the idea that religions should have the right to indoctrinate pupils on school time, we should be against fascists doing the same. Teaching, as my chosen profession, and policing I have the strongest feelings about. The other professions, the activists within those professions and their trade unions should make the call regarding fascists working in public service. My instinct is to have them hounded out. In professions demanding applications of the sciences such as nursing, surely the “racialist science” of the BNP is antithetical to professional conduct in those services?
Laws on these matters may be counter-productive, and in this I disagree with Miljenko who demands the support of the law if we’re going to proceed against BNP members. A law takes the place of awakening socialist consciousness. If we can build a movement opposed to these fascists, that movement will be more valuable than any number of laws – and more importantly will remove the possibility of such laws being used to attack socialists.
None of these thoughts are value-free or politically neutral. Nor should we think it a virtue if they were. We live in political times. Many of the liberals who post on this subject (or BNP members posing as free-speech liberals, not as uncommon as you might think) will try to represent their views as being fair or neutral in regards to either ideology. They aren’t. Liberalism in these circumstances becomes not an absence of intolerance but tolerance of intolerance.
When considered from the thoroughly political point of view each of should have, as we seek to build the very movement that will secure the future we seek, we should acknowledge that our fight against fascism is a more desperate fight than any we’re ever likely to face. Tolerance of the BNP lets them openly set up shop – such as in Welling, London. After they set up there a bunch of Asian and black kids ended up getting stabbed in racially motivated crimes: Rolan Adams, Orville Blair, Rohit Duggal and Stephen Lawrence.
This is a repeating phenomenon. Not simply the law but our communities need to be awake to that – and ready to organize and drive them out and soon as they arrive, peddling their hate-filled lies. The BNP thinks nothing of telling the most blatant lies, such as having the nerve to call Labour “fascist” when their founder John Tyndall described “Mein Kampf” as his Bible. Without community links to fight such rubbish, without a reorganisation of the working class to struggle for a real salvation through community services, better welfare systems and higher wages, we stand to lose all that we have gained from socialist struggle and more besides.
If fighting for that is intolerant then I’d call it a positive intolerance.
Other posts worth a look on this subject: Liberal Conspiracy, Ian Bone, Nation of Duncan (several posts), Tygerland, Charlie Marks, Shiraz for a class picture, An Open Letter published on Socialist Unity, the Miserablist, AVPS, LOLGriffin blog and last but far from least, Paul from the Bickerstaffe Record. And for a bit of deliberate self-satirization, see below.
I wouldn’t be too bothered about it – it’s just the usual suspects selectively picking who they highlight as usual. I note no links from right-wing blogs to my post on the matter, for instance…
Of course you’re right, but actually I was mostly writing this article to debate with Miljenko and for myself, to clarify what I was thinking. My last two posts on the subject are somewhat conflicting and I wanted to iron out my thoughts.
Hi Dave – life, keeping two jobs down and working till 9 in the evening sometimes interferes with my ability to keep up with you effervescence.
Back in blogging mode now.
I think, firstly, we must be prepared to draw lines in the sand, as you most certainly do. And there I do agree. We must be intolerant of certain intolerances, without feeling that we have no right to this logical inconsistency. Life is sometimes necessarily inconsistent. It’s patently ridiculous to equate fascism and racism – two examples of “thought” you mention – with Marxism, just because all three can come under the linguistic set of “-isms”. There is clearly no comparison. Marxism – perhaps I should say Marxists – can be intolerant too but their intolerance is of a different ilk.
Your intolerance of racism would, I guess (perhaps you can correct me here), not be an intolerance to the individuals per se but rather to the beliefs they falsely hold. Their intolerance, on the other hand, is an intolerance to a humanity they actually, viscerally, despise.
Nevertheless, where I think we part ways is that you seem to be happy for – and even prefer – extra-legal and extra-constitutional structures to be used to achieve your aims – in this case, to excise racism from the British labour force. I do not see laws as substituting an awareness and consciousness of oppression but rather as supporting that awareness, where of course those who promote (from Parliament) and implement those laws (from other organs of the State) do so in good faith. For is it not possible to believe that our society is moving in the right direction, even if slowly, and that the vast majority of its members, to some degree or another, is more left-leaning – more socially aware of its place in the class system you describe – than it was a hundred years ago?
I suppose my problem, as always, is that find myself reacting emotionally. I really do find resistible the idea of anything which smacks of witch-hunts. And maps like those the Guardian published, which reminded me of others the Sun published not long ago on the subject of terrorist cells “near you”, do remind me of the first steps of a witch-hunt. And even if the witches are demonstrably evil (which in this case is clearly the case), I find their hunting resistible. It seems to me that although you have a full quiver of arguments to back up your Marxist positions, arguments which I find convincing and sincere, there is an emotional edge to the flurry of media activity over this matter – and in this flurry I include our own bloggers – which hardly befits a movement of the left. By all means let us have our emotions – but, please, let us act more coolly when we wish to act to exclude others from everything that what we might understand to be a “normal” society and its intercourses.
I fear a lynching – whether verbal or indeed literal – ennobles no one. I also believe that no behaviours, however awful, can possibly justify any such lynching. That is why I would prefer to bring the force of law to bear on this matter. And that is why I am suspicious of the fact that no one cared to bring to light this membership list through entirely legal means.
I am, however, open to the views of others on this matter.
Well, several points occur to me immediately. Firstly, the areas in which you discern an “emotional” reaction which smacks of a witch-hunt, such as the Guardian, I would mark down as areas which have little relevance to people of genuine principle.
What I’m arguing for is not an autocratic crack down upon fascists; I’m advocating the constructive praxis of building an oppositional movement from the ground up. This would involve turning people from the knee-jerk reactionaries the Guardian is attempting to pander to into reflective participants in an open political gesture.
It’s important that people recognize that I’m not proposing a mob or even a crowd descend on the schools where fascist teachers work. I’m proposing a structured, organised campaign that would channel people’s energies into the pre-existent nexus of the organised working class: trades unions and political parties, not to mention places of work.
This movement, having discussed courses of action and taken democratic decisions regarding them, would then present its demands to the managers of the school, with whom teachers have an oppositional arrangement. A failure to comply with demands could be met with a staff and student strike. Even if this failed to oust the fascist, it has raised consciousness and literally – both through argument and action – destroyed any potential influence that teacher might have.
Rightly so.
Secondly, I have no faith in Parliament. I especially have no trust in the (often self-declared) representatives of Capital such as the Conservatives in their mealy-mouthed denunciations of fascism. As any study of history shows with stunning clarity, the British political establishment in the era when fascism was rampant, was riddled with supporters of Mussolini and Hitler etc.
This is not coincidental. These people shared with the fascist movement a genuine hatred for the working class movements that both Hitler and Mussolini explicitly aimed to destroy. They occupied a position relative to the working class that meant they would hardly be sympathetic to the demands of that class, organised into fighting cadres.
Indeed the best the Tories have ever managed in that regard is a benign paternalism disguising attempts to roll back the victories which were achieved in the creation of the welfare state.
The same instruments which turn people into a mob and turn a protest into a lynching, by depoliticising the content of their protest, can be used to equate a Marxist and a fascist – and there is a large section of Parliament which could easily find rationale to do so. The myths of Tory libertarianism would soon evaporate should Parliament find its rule challenged by an active working class – and one might suggest the active Tory incitement of the Army to rebellion and anti-labourism during the early 20th Century as analogy.
So no, I see no use for the rubber stamp of parliament.
But I still feel the democratic process you describe could easily degenerate into a witch-hunt. The initial presenting of demands could easily lead to a subsequent whiffing of blood. Don’t you see the danger of a sudden unspooling of the order you describe as recommending itself to easily to fascism? As fascist anti-capitalism can so easily convert itself into corporatism, so democratic engagement of the type you describe could easily mutate into self-righteous vengeance. People suddenly drunk with power after years of oppression might only see the wrong in others and the right in themselves. Surely not a healthy position to find oneself in, whatever one’s political persuasion.
I don’t think I’m disagreeing with your overarching thesis. But I am worried about the realities and practicalities of transition.
You’re absolutely right – probably more than you know. After the October Revolution, for example, the Russian army disintegrated in orgy of unfocused violence and looting. Released after years of being brutally treated, suddenly free from the yoke of their noble oppressors, the Russian peasants which made up the army went crazy.
Of course, in comparison to the ferocity unleashed by the peasant war which liquidated the control of the landlords in the countryside whilst the Bolsheviks were doing the same in the city, this military orgy of violence looked positively restrained. Nonetheless it happened – and we should admit that openly.
However that is not to say it necessarily had to happen. History is not a mechanic process, it takes into account human agency and not to mention the circumstances in which it is played out. These soldiers had been routinely beaten, half starved and had been put through the rigors of war. It seems almost natural that they should react to their new-found freedom in such a way, after so much oppression.
Thankfully in the 21st century UK, things aren’t quite like that. In such circumstances, and bearing in mind the vast majority of our population is urbanised and their lives aren’t close to being as brutalised, I think any such Marxist praxis as I suggest above is a rational and well-judged harnessing of working class energies rather than a dangerous ploy which would open Pandora’s box.
I tend to side with Dave on this one. There is no need for a campaign to have, say BNP health staff, removed from their positions to become any kind of witch-hunt. The mass eneegy that Mil fears may veer into mass thuggery can and should be focused on winning on the principle that health staff with BNP membership are not appropriate the health service. There need be no emotion at all at the point of implementation, since this can be process can be undertaken technocratically. Just as every member of the health service in the UK (apart from doctors) has gone through a dispassionate process of job evaluation and rescaling in the last three years, so to can any BNP staff member be required by the authority – once that authority is convinced of the need – to go through a job comeptency and suitability process. The bottom line is that, where BNP memvership is proven, the new criteria campainfged for by the union would mean termination of contract on the grounds of ill-competence for the job required, this ill-competence being the incapacity to respect people’s right as per the person specification.
I,like Mil, crave the certainty and sanctity of the legal process. But I do believe that legal process should be dynamic, and (with appropriate checks and balances) should reflect the will of the people.
The role of the left is to ensure that the will of the people is a socialist will, and thence that the laws reflect that will – sich that ASBO laws are developed to the poin where, in cases where teenagers run amok, the resulting ASBO can equally as well be applied to any statutory authority which, according to the court’s findings, did not provide adequate life opportunities to that amok-running and dislocated teenager.
the best moment so far has been the accusation by a BNP member that it is a disgrace that people are being persecuted for being a member of a legitimate political party (sic) – what is this? a fascist country?
I kid you not!! this is what the left has to deal with! stalin had it right!
Socialist revolution would be different in 2008 UK or US, to 1917 Russia. The countries are already developed, and Stalinism is dead.
I agree with the thrust of your post. I would add to be careful of whatever the state can do to the BNP, it can turn around and do it on the left. If they are denied a permit, you can be next.
Are you implying that despite agreeing with the thrusts, you disagree with several specifics?