Bomber Harris Joins Anti-Fascist Action

The basic proletarian position on fascism and anti-fascism can be stated simply. Fascist and Nazi governments are anti-working class, and have murdered millions of working class people in the interests of capitalist accumulation. When not in government, fascists have often played an important role for the state in spreading racism, dividing and weakening the proletariat. Judged by these criteria, all other capitalist political tendencies are no different. Democratic governments have killed just as many people as fascist ones, and through nationalism, reinforce racist divisions. The left have used anti-fascism to persuade people to support democratic parties. During the Second World War, this was useful to the Allies. The main purpose of anti-fascism was to justify the war, and crush the working class. This was the central aim of the war effort, as shown by Britain's attitude towards resistance to Hitler inside Germany : the Foreign Office argued "the Gestapo and the SS have done us an appreciable service in removing a selection of those who would undoubtedly have posed as 'good' Germans after the defeat of a Nazi Germany" (Guardian, 23 July 92). When Milan's workers rose against the fascist government in 1943, Britain and the US bombed them.

In Britain today, anti-fascist fronts divert those who wish to fight racism towards the almost irrelevant tactic of chasing small groups of skinheads. There is no evidence that racist attacks on black people are primarily carried out by Nazis: ordinary British patriotism is the problem. Anti-fascists do not challenge patriotism, in fact they support it. They demonstrate every year against fascists marching with the other capitalist parties, who fully supported the World Wars, to remember the dead. They object to fascists tainting the patriotic ceremony with their nasty foreign ideas. On Remembrance Sunday 1991, a speaker from Anti-Fascist Action argued against burning the Union Jack, and instead set fire to an imperial German flag.

In Labour-controlled Camden, when the council started deporting Irish and Bangladeshi workers, the left pleaded with them to stop doing it, because it "played into the hands of the Nazis". It never occurred to them that the Labour Party were doing what the fascist groups could only dream about. In another London borough, Tower Hamlets, Labour and Liberal councils ran a de facto apartheid policy, putting Indian and Bangladeshi families in separate estates from whites. Targeting fascists is a deliberate strategy by icepick-heads to shield Labour politicians in local government, though the anarchists involved in anti-fascism lack the analytical ability to see that they are being used for this purpose.

The anti-fascist movement's analysis of the fascist resurgence in Germany today is basically that Germans have an inbuilt urge to wear jackboots and march around doing Nazi salutes. There are even anti-fascists in Germany who have internalized the democratic/Zionist guilt trip so completely that they defend the bombing of Dresden by the Allies! The following article hopefully goes some way towards explaining the problem of neo-Nazism from a more internationalist perspective.

So much for the situation in Britain. Beyond the white cliffs of Dover, things are a bit more complicated. Fascists supported by Germany have democratically taken power in Croatia and started a civil war. Fascist parties have gained 15% and more of the vote in Germany, France and Italy. Though these parties have little chance of winning power - their role is to help the state divide white workers from immigrants to keep wages down, rather than prevent immigration altogether - they are obviously more important than their counterparts in Britain or the USA. Here we publish an account of an anti-fascist demo in Germany by the German communist group Wildcat. We don't completely agree with it. For example, we don't like the conclusion that people join anti-fascist groups because communists have nothing better to suggest. We always have something better to suggest: as Wildcat know better than anyone, there is always some sort of class struggle going on. The relative downturn at present is no excuse for supporting the left.