Though Cowards Flinch

This is a guest (re-)post by Bob From Brockley.

I originally posted a version of this post last Autumn. I have asked TCF to re-post it for me (slightly edited) because I posted it at a very busy time at my blog, so it got very little debate, and I wanted to test it out away from my comfort zone. But I am asking now because I think the situation is becoming more and more critical for anti-fascists. The continued decline of the BNP is a positive but it has opened the space for the re-emergence of more emphatically Nazi sects, while its ideas and narratives have infected the political mainstream as authoritarian xenophobic politics spread beyond the fascist fringe. Meanwhile, the English Defence League has seen a continued violent rise based on a style of politics the BNP long ago abandoned, and could well form the nucleus of a new far right alignment. These changes pose the questions of militant anti-fascism more urgently than ever.

Waterloo Sunset has published a very helpful critique of Searchlight’s announcement of a brave new era for anti-fascism. Searchlight call for a re-thinking of the reality of fascism, and a step away from some of the old orthodoxies of militant anti-fascism. Like WS, I agree that there is some truth in the analysis of the changing situation put forward by Nick Lowles and Paul Meszaros, and like WS I am far from convinced of either the newness or the wisdom of the new course they chart. But I am far from sure what the right course is.

As WS points out, the aspects of the new Searchlight analysis which are correct were actually set out very clearly a decade and a half ago by London Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) in its Filling the Vacuum document, which led eventually to the self-dissolution of AFA and a turn to community politics. In short, the battle against the BNP on the streets had been won by the early 1990s, but the BNP were winning a cultural war in the communities where white working class people felt let down and abandoned by mainstream society, and in particular by the left and the Labour movement.

But, as WS also points out, the way to engage those communities is not to enter the political mainstream, or to do the Labour Party’s business and re-connect the electorate in those communities with the political machine which abandoned them. That only further sacrifices our credibility.

The way to fill the vacuum, instead, is to build the grassroots initiatives that take seriously the real concerns of such communities – especially now, in an age of rising unemployment, financial crisis and unfairly imposed austerity. (These grassroots initiatives look different in every locality. The relationship with the Labour Party, trade unions and so on will be negotiated differently depending on local circumstances. Meszaros and Lowles are right about the need for flexible, local solutions informed by local knowledge.)

Related to this is the issue of who the constituency of this sort of activity should be, something which, as WS notes, is skirted around in the Searchlight text. They talk about “the community”, “real people”, “real communities”, “ordinary people”, “real ordinary people”, “the mainstream”, “the anti-BNP voter”, “Mr and Mrs Smith”, “the public mood”. But this vagueness contrasts to the more specific constituency identified in the analysis of the BNP’s growth: “The BNP was building inside communities and tapping into widespread discontent with the political system. More significantly, and often ignored by many, the BNP was engaging in a cultural war that was successfully drawing upon a loss of identity and meaning among many white working class people. By carefully nurturing an image of itself as victim and speaking up “for the silent majority” the BNP could offer a new white nationalist identity to people who felt let down and abandoned by society.” Those who are experiencing a loss of identity and meaning, who feel let down and abandoned by society, are a very specific constituency, and it is them, and not “Mr and Mrs Smith” that anti-fascists need to engage with.

But where does that leave militant anti-fascism? Is its job over? The key problem with the Searchlight analysis of militant anti-fascism is to reduce it to the philosophy of “No Platform”. In my view, this is simplistic and misleading.

“No Platform” is a policy that relates primarily to student unions and trade unions. For a student union, for example, No Platform means using the power of the union to keep fascists off campus – denying them a platform in the college or university. For council workers, it might mean stopping council premises being used by fascists.

No Platform is sometimes counterposed to “free speech”, but No Platform is not historically a policy of calling upon the state to ban fascists, but rather of using one’s own resources to deny them a platform in one’s own institutions. If I tell someone that in my house, in front of my kids, they should refrain from swearing, I am not infringing their free speech in general, just saying what the rules are in my house. No Platform, historically, was never about bans and police actions; it was about people setting the rules in their own houses.

What happened was that No Platform took on the status of a fetish, an absolute value, and a life of its own, in ways that had absolutely nothing to do with the wider ethos of anti-fascism. We see this reflected in two very different ways. For many anti-authoritarians, anti-fascism became a lifestyle choice; the hoodie and scarf became a uniform; and anyone outside the charmed circle of the antifa milieu was not trusted.

On the authoritarian left, in the white collar unions and student unions dominated by the SWP, we see calls for BNP teachers to be sacked, or agencies like the EHRC taking the BNP to court over its membership rules – meaningless, bureaucratic, legalistic interpretations which rely on the state and disempower citizens, while allowing the BNP to paint itself as the heroic victim of censorship.

Meanwhile, in the real world – in the world of the internet and YouTube and Facebook, where platforms for hate endlessly proliferate; in the a period when the BNP have achieved a wider support base of people who are in no sense fascist; and in an age of increasingly sophisticated policing and surveillance – the ideal of No Platform has become meaningless.

Ironically, coinciding with the concept’s irrelevance, the SWP front Unite Against Fascism (UAF) has re-discovered it with a vengeance, probably noting that they can gain competitive advantage in the anti-fascist market by making “militancy” their USP. Hence childish actions like throwing eggs at Nick Griffin, which might be fun but have zero or negative effect.

Militant anti-fascism, however, never meant just street fighting. AFA, for example, saw it as a two-track strategy: physical and ideological confrontation, the latter less spectacular but taking up at least much of the organisation’s energy. To list just a few examples I can recall, in London and elsewhere, we did a huge amount of work with football fans, organised carnivals and local history workshops, developed a political response to knife attacks in London, did estate-based work in issues like housing transfer and anti-social behaviour. This approach was also that of our predecessors, as you can see if you read the autobiography of Joe Jacobs for instance.

Another challenge for militant anti-fascism is how to deal with forms of fascism that don’t look like the old NF did – forms of fascism that fester among “oppressed” minorities, among people that hate the BNP. When this challenge was recently posed by Carl, it was totally failed by both UAF and Searchlight. But when it was posed in the East End in the summer of 2010, more positive results were seen. Whitechapel United Against Division mobilised working class white and Bangladeshi local people to protest both the Islamists and the EDL. And the statement “Against fascism in all its colours”, condemning both, was signed by a wide range of local organisations, from the Bangladesh Welfare Association to the Brick Lane Mosque to the Whitechapel Anarchist Group.

This points to a neglected part of the militant anti-fascist story. A large part of the history of militant anti-fascism in Britain, from the Jewish East End in the 1930s to Southall and Brick Lane in the 1970s and 1980s, has been communities defending themselves from violent attacks. With the BNP’s turn in the 1990s from the battle for the streets to the battle for the ballot box, that sort of violence was less common. But with the rise of the EDL since 2009, Asian communities are once again under attack. If anti-fascism is to have any credibility with these communities, and especially their youth, an appeal to “Mr and Mrs Smith” is not the right approach. And this opens a space that reactionary jihadi groups are happy to move into. Anti-fascism, then, needs to fill the vacuum in white working class communities, but also drive a wedge between angry Muslims and the far right Islamist political entrepreneurs appealing to them. Doing both at once will be no easy task.

In conclusion, I agree with Meszaros and Lowles that we urgently need to re-think the old dogmas in new times. But I don’t think they offer us the tools to do so.

Recently I wrote:

An anti-Semite by the name of Sheikh Ibraheem Zakzaky will be addressing an otherwise very respectable Mosque tonight in my local area of Kilburn.

He is the head of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN), the website of which has an article clearly demonstrating the extent to which he views Jews as plotters. An article on that website details a recent seminar given by a deeply dubious character Sheikh Yusuf Ali who talks about the Zionist plot against Muslims; then clearly details Zakzaky noting “the Jewish plot against Islam is manifested in Iraq as they sent Bush to capture Iraq for them”. There is of course the obligatory reference to the “protocols”.

According to his biography on the official website of the IMN:

The goal of the Islamic movement is to enlighten the Muslims as to their duties as individuals and as a community. The movement owns more than three hundred primary/secondary schools located in different places mainly in the northern part of the country. They are known by the name of Fudiyyah Schools. This is in addition to many Islamic centers and other institutions. The movement also owns the Nigeria’s most widely circulated newspaper, Al Mizan, in the Hausa language.

It also details Zakzaky’s arrests, which the site claims were “for his ideas”.

The Jerusalem Post – one of the few publications with details of Zakzaky’s visit – mentions details of the host of the conference, the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC). They say:

The IHRC is a Hezbollah and Islamic Republic supporting organization. At an anti-Israel rally in Hyde Park during the Second Lebanon War, its chair Massoud Shadjareh wore a Hezbollah flag as did research director Reza Kazim, who was seen chanting phrases like “We are all Hezbollah” and “Bomb, bomb Tel Aviv.” At a pro- Israel rally in London’s Trafalgar Square in 2008, Kazim was ejected by the police for filming within the roped off area.

According to an article written by the Middle East Strategic Information written in 2009:

• Zakzaky’s IMN is growing popular among impoverished Nigerian Muslims
• He believes Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden do not exist, acts of terrorism in the west are organised by western intelligence services, and that Tony Blair was behind the 7/7 bombings
• He claims Nigeria’s secularist leaders perform ritual sacrifices removing unborn babies from their Mother’s wombs by ripping them out
• He believes Jews are “”dastardly infidels” and draws inspiration from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the deceased Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin

He has been and gone now, but came almost unnoticed.

I hate to come across all Eustonite or “decent” but if Geert Wilders or Le Pen or someone dreadful like that came to our town, we’d be all over them like a rash, but with figures such as Zakzaky – who is not small beer by the way, he is the head of Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) – we give it a miss.

Some may say that Zakzaky has never committed terror himself, which is why it is not important, but this does not disprove his threat. Some may say, in his words, he does not cause terror. This is questionable, but I’m careful not to make claims I cannot substantiate. During the conference season, the Quilliam Foundation held an event on how non-violent extremism can be just as dangerous as violent extremism. Whether directly or indirectly, Zakzaky has sounded off to the tune of racial discrimination and religious violence, and this should not be sniffed at.

Some will perhaps accuse me, and have done before, of making straw man of whom to knock down. The point here is that I’m not accusing anyone of supporting Zakzaky – though there obviously are some who do - and I’m certainly not saying that in the absence of an anti-fascist picket of him, that I should therefore deduce the anti-fascists in fact support Islamic fascists. It is not true. But I have difficulty understanding why people like Zakzaky don’t wind them up to the point of protest, whereas smaller targets like David Irving, do.

Now let me quickly qualifiy this before I get myself into trouble. Of course Irving is bad news, and has dangerous ideas, but at least he is an army of one; him and maybe some idiots in the National Front or Combat 18. His words are largely ignored by the vast amount of thinking human beings, and are taken on board by a small group of twits that if they express their counterfactual opinions, land themselves in court. Zakzaky, on the other hand, is the head of a church, has many followers and is fiercely anti-Semitic – context, here, is all.

In my quest to get more airplay on Zakzaky, I wrote to three individuals/organisations that I thought could maybe help; Peter Tatchell, Hope not Hate and Unite Against Fascism.

I requested their help in numbers to picket the arrival of Zakzaky and ask questions of the mosque why they felt it responsible to invite someone with a evident history of anti-Semitism and crime.

I saw something on him at the Jerusalem Post and some bits on Harry’s Place blog here and here, as well as a cross-post on the Spittoon website, but when I read next to nothing about him in the mainstream press I wrote to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jewish Chronicle – as well as tweeting Martin Bright and Stephen Pollard – Hampstead and Highgate Express and the Kilburn Times.

The only response I got from any of these places was Peter Tatchell to tell me he was ill and had no campaign funds. Tatchell in his email recommended I contact the Board of Deputies of British Jews and contact local news sources – which I had done. It is a great credit to the man for at least writing back to me and taking my email seriously; there indeed is someone who will not allow sentimentalities affect his principles, and I can’t talk highly of him for doing so.

Tatchell’s first line said it all: “I share your anger about Mosques hosting extremist clerics and preachers. It is no better than having a right wing white racist speaking.”

There is no such thing as a “decent” left. There are leftwingers and rightwingers, with some mixing in the middle, and there are hypocrites and those who allow confused politics affect principles. I do not level this charge at anyone in particular, but in the fight against fascism in all its forms, we can’t just sit on our hands, we should be pulling our fingers out.

In the end I went down to the mosque by myself, and I was ineffective and nervous about getting on the wrong side of anyone. But were I backed up with the same level of energy certain organisations reserve for other far rightwingers, we could have told a number of people what we think about foul ideas infiltrating vulnerable communities.

Party affiliation is a key organisational question for a Marxist, not one of sentiment. This is why, when New Labour published a sentimental campaign video hijacking half a century of social democracy, the reaction from many was disgust. We could not believe that New Labour saw itself as part of the pro-welfare state tradition even while dismantling it. Processes like this define the primary question for socialists: in or out of Labour?

Social processes and Labour’s role
There are two struggles worth speaking of and in both of them the Labour Party has played a negative role. The first is in the marketisation and privatisation of public services, essentially redistributing public funds into private coffers, with the added bonus of undermining workers’ rights. The second is in the prevention of a class based response to these and other pressures of capitalist retrenchment, resulting in an impetus towards right-wing populism and anti-politics.

I think these things are pretty obvious, so I’m not going to dwell on them. Equally evident, however, is the desire of many Labour Party members to oppose their leaders. There are several dozen MPs who signed the EDM demanding a TU Freedom Bill, who’ve opposed privatisations, illiberal terror laws, protested the dissolution of the welfare state and the victimisation of claimants as being lazy reprobates deserving of our moral judgment.

These MPs, and the number of internal factions which advocate certain policies, have failed to achieve them and on the vast majority of occasions failed even to moderate New Labour’s agenda. The choice to join the Labour Party is thus the choice to be considered part and parcel of a Labour government widely seen as corrupt, unaccountable and actively working against the material interests of the vast majority of its members.

As Labour moves towards opposition, the contradiction here will lessen and finally disappear. Labour will not be the Party demanding sacrifices from the electorate, on behalf of business, nor imposing tax rises and service cuts. If the 1994-1997 period is anything to go by, whatever survives of New Labour will roll around in radical rhetoric and proceed to criticize the Tory government for things they will do themselves if elected.

This can make membership of Labour easier to consider, but the realities of power within Labour won’t have changed.

Unions and the Labour Party
Labour is, or should be, in hock to the unions. This should be extremely evident from the progressive collapse of New Labour’s base of personal donors and loan merchants. Yet the unions themselves look preposterous. In 2004, the Warwick Agreement was negotiated between Labour the the unions, as being key to what the unions wanted from this parliament: the demands themselves are pitiful, and some, as with Royal Mail, were plainly ignored.

Bureaucratic conservatism has been a key arm of the New Labour ‘coalition’. Within those unions, impressive heads of steam have built up specifically centred around moves to disaffiliate from Labour. In at least one union, combative non-Labour activists have been specifically targeted for expulsion. The fragmentation of the Labour-union link is also evidenced by the disaffiliation of the RMT, the FBU and the recent strong call from the CWU.

These moves are class-driven: if the unions and Labour cease to adequately represent the working class, then there will be moves first against union bureaucracies and the Labour Party, then away from unions and/or politics in general or worse, towards fascist politics. This is not going to be corrected merely by skilled political argumentation; it must be corrected by a change in the objective anti-working class processes sustained by Labour in government.

Here too, of course, there is an element of confused consciousness. Once the Tories get into power, unions will simply blame all the world’s ills on them and advocate a vote for the opposition – Labour – a position not open to them when Labour is in government. Yet this dissipation of pressure will serve to cement the union bureaucracy and centrist panderers rather than take the challenge further.

The only ray of hope I can spot is that at an Electoral Reform Society poll of TUC delegates back in late 2006 resulted in a majority supporting John McDonnell over Gordon Brown for leader of the Labour Party. It would be interesting to see how this has developed since then, so we have some idea of the direction political consciousness is going in.

Composition and Constituencies
My most intense experience of Labour was while at university in England. Particularly considering that one of my two fields of involvement was Oxford, this may not make for the most representative sample. Yet my experience of these young people, supposed to be the future of the Party, was almost universally negative, up to and including the point where I actually had to argue with one person that inequality was a bad thing.

There are reasons beyond my own parochial experiences for assuming that all is not necessarily well in Labour constituency organisations. Most obviously, the Labour heirarchy has recently felt free to assert its authority, ousting people selected as candidates by local parties, suspending local parties and continuing practices of ideological vetting for national selection lists. It’s difficult to see what a small trickle of activists back to Labour can do.

We should bear in mind that a large number of people (including former members) now refuse to have anything to do with Labour, and when even openly socialist Labour MPs can worry about the collapse of a 10,000+ majority, because of New Labour’s policies. For all the ‘resilience’ of Labour’s core vote, these aren’t the faces in charge of local constituency parties. Many CLPs are dormant in any case, lacking engagement beyond Voter ID.

Returning to my own experience, over vast swathes of the country, Labour simply isn’t competitive. It has no engagement (nor empathy for) local union needs, though it bears saying in turn that local union organisations have largely atrophied as well, and are maintained or established in many cases by the force of will of individuals whose dedication is not to the Labour Party. Local unions aren’t everything, of course, but Labour’s disengagement from collective community politics, rather than the occasional nimbyism, is visible round ‘ere at least.

Inside CLPs, it also seems that the party is visibly ageing.

Anti-fascist work
A lot of Labour members are engaged with groups like Love Music Hate Racism and Hope Not Hate, or supporting Unite Against Fascism. Yet even Labour members fully acknowledge that it’s Labour government policies which currently sustain the atrophy of Labour support and the concomitant growth of BNP support in areas like Dagenham.  Lee Walker, a Labour councillor in the area, has a lot to say on the subject.

Though Lee is part of Labour (and presumably advocates socialists joining) and though he attests that Dagenham is ‘very firmly Old Labour’, he reaffirms the view that with the wrong type of politico ensconsed in Westminster, the practical effect even of conquering the council is relatively small compared to what needs to be done to hold off the BNP, and provide the jobs and housing which that part of London cries out for.

Lee is convinced that through arguing the toss, that Labour members on the ground aren’t represented by their parliamentary cadre and national policies, we can stem the BNP and cites his own ward as evidence. I think there’s some evidence, such as from Nuneaton, to support this. Plenty of Labour members are also involved with counter-demonstrations against the BNP and the English Defence League, which help to mobilize local sentiment.

Yet even while some Labour members are doing this, there are Labour MPs, and the elements of the Labour Party they represent, which essentially buy into the BNP narratives on issues like immigration, calling for tighter laws, and fewer benefits, rather than advocating a massive house building programme, universal provision of services and jobs (to everyone, including the “white working class”).

This contradiction hinders the grassroots Labour attempt to stop the BNP, even if that effort mitigates them in some areas some of the time. As the Hope Not Hate map (left) shows, it’s in working class areas that the fascists really gather support – and its working class areas that do now and will continue to bear the brunt of New Labour and Tory attacks, for which some Labour figures and supporters prefer nationalist rather than class-based answers. Short term, joining Labour will not change that.

The argument from the Socialist Party, that standing ‘proper’ socialist candidates from independent parties can bring in votes unreached by Labour, potentially denying the BNP votes, is one I regard as unconvincing. What I do consider important is the intervention in local strikes and struggles, to force the unions to act against harmful council decisions and to give the working class confidence in its own power to drag change kicking and screaming out of local government.

In some areas, Labour is pretty good on this, and we should respect and support their efforts – but these efforts will pale when it comes to disrupting the agenda of a Tory government that will decimate social spending and push deprived former manufacturing areas towards fascism all the quicker. Labour is institutionally opposed to such efforts, preferring instead the straight-jacket of parliamentary activity.

Labour and the alternative
In recent struggles however, it is groups outside Labour which have been playing the key role – whether it’s the Socialist Party at Lindsey or engagement with the National Shop Stewards Network, the SWP’s Right to Work Conference, independent greens and socialists at Vestas and ClimateCamp and so on. Labour, on the other hand, seems to vary between declining to a slow ‘death’ and the determination to kill itself by squeezing out its last drop of left-wing credibility.

This inclines me to think that what pull on the working class that Labour exercises is residual, a phenomenon readily evident in countries like Germany, where ‘newer’ social-democratic parties have emerged to challenge the neo-liberal capitulations of the older parties. On the current trajectory, Labour may end up a model of the old Liberal Party remade for the 21st Century with ‘social justice’ as the new non-conformism.

I do not believe that the Labour Left, even impelled by a surge in working class militancy as a result of a frontal Tory attack on the last remnants of the welfare state, has numbers to rival the days of the height of its power in the 1970s never mind to bodily seize control of the Labour Party from New Labour, which has had years to entrench its favourite sons in ‘safe’ parliamentary seats.

Class struggle proceeds regardless of party affiliation of course. Labour is no longer in a position to be the sole – even the main – beneficiary of a new impetus towards class struggle, of workers linking up. I may be wrong, or the Labour Left fightback may be so impressive – bucking the trend hitherto – that our calculations are upset, and we’re called on to join Labour and battle even for the social democratic redistributive policies of old, in a climate of still further global capitalist retrenchment and greater demands for deeper neo-liberal reforms.

My impression, however, is that the Socialist Party is well positioned amongst activist elements in the unions and working class, and that most of the Labour Party will simply act as a conservative deadweight to those elements of the Labour Left who are similarly positioned – putting a brake on potential change coursing through CLPs, selection processes and so on. This is a direct refutation of a stance I held a few years ago.

With all this in mind, I don’t quite understand the decision of Phil, lead blogger at A Very Public Sociologist and long-time Stoke Socialist Party member to resign from the SP and join Labour, especially since he was a key person who I consulted before joining the SP myself.

I share his sentiments against standing candidates against moderate Labourites, and on the dismal prospects for the Socialist Party’s rather silly and opportunistic-looking Trade Union and Socialist Coalition electoral front. I can even surmise that, with him being in a very heavily Labour area and me being in a very lightly Labour area, our respective views on the ‘smaller links’ between Labour and the working class should be added together and divided by two to come to a proper appreciation.

What I can’t understand is how Phil reaches the conclusion that Labour’s direction of travel is an improvement on what it is currently. My generation has grown up not knowing ‘Old’ Labour, one element of which is more attracted by the flashy political campaigns of Bono and “Make Poverty History” than by the government, and another element to which is the product of persistent refusals to engage with real social ills: joblessness, poverty, terrible housing and crime, and couldn’t be more disillusioned if it tried.

If ever there was a time to explode the old trope that Britain hasn’t had a revolution because the British character is too moderate, now is the time to build the organisation for it.