Reformism, the united front and anti-fascist strategy

Phil Tsappas, July 2013 Recent events have sparked a number of debates about the dangers of fascism and how we defeat it. Fascism is a movement of despair and the last card in the bourgeoisies hand. The working class cannot rely on social democracy to defeat it. The fourth congress of the Comintern made this useful statement: Fascists do not merely form narrow counter-revolutionary fighting organisations, armed to the teeth, but also attempt through social demagoguery to achieve a base among the masses in the peasantry, the petite bourgeoisie, and even certain sectors of the working class. To achieve this, they cleverly utilise the masses inevitable disappointment with so-called democracy for their reactionary purposes. This disappointment with reformist organisations in Britain has been growing. The organisations have declined dramatically in size (between 1971 and 2008 Labour Party membership declined from 700,000 to 166,000), even though reformist consciousness among working class people has not. This could mean that even though far more workers identify with the Labour vote, if not its individual membership, it remains rare for the Labour Party to lead workers in other fields of struggle. At the same time, its also not surprising to learn the contempt workers have for reformist parties. No credible alternative based on collective action is presented to the class from mainstream parties. My experience on the industrial sales is that activists have no organisational allegiance allegiance being the key word and this may feed growth of hostility to all political organisations. The classic reformist parties have been weakened at their very base. A feature of the current period has been the inability of the usual reformist organisations to give a lead or mobilise around the central political issues of today and the past decade. This absence of reformist partners, which aim to build resistance movements, has created difficulties for revolutionaries in trying to develop united front campaigns. The lack of activity from the Labour party has meant that united front work in Britain seems to have developed in two ways. Either the revolutionary party (the SWP) has had to play the role, usually filled by the reformists, of being the driving force inside broad united fronts. (The Stop the War Coalition was an impressive example of this, but a section of the leadership was then not willing to act independently inside of

Stop the War as a revolutionary party.) Or there is another problem the social forces involved in a campaign have been so weak that they are effectively a party front (eg Right to Work). It is important we look at these issues when building the fight against fascism. The key organisation for mobilising that fight recently has been Unite Against Fascism (UAF). Numbers matter and the object of UAF is to increase the numbers we can stand against the fascists. But that does not mean that we never differ with the direction UAF takes. One member in a party meeting a few weeks back referred to the way the SWP in Lewisham 1977 chose to directly confront the National Front rather than join the 5,000 marching elsewhere. He contrasted this with Birmingham where the SWP was pulled into compromises in UAF that allowed the EDL to march unimpeded (see this 2009 article in Socialist Worker). The SWP remains in the united front to argue a strategy of confronting the EDL and making sure this happens. That might mean breaking police lines if need be. That may be what is happening on the ground, with or without us. But what about the arguments at the top by reformists and leading revolutionaries who direct the organisation? Ian Allinson in his 2011 IB piece Party and class today outlines the difficulties we can face when working with reformist leaders with a weak base, and what can occur if we stop being a revolutionary current arguing its position in broad organisations. He wrote: Our orientation is on the self-emancipation of the workers. Leadership is exercised at many levels within any campaign. We always seek to lead at the grass roots. Being part of a formal leadership at the top is optional; it could help or hinder our work A movement led at the top by reformists can sometimes win despite them, while a movement can still lose despite revolutionaries leading at the top. Workers have a mixture of ideas, uneven confidence and imperfect organisation at a grassroots level. Workers arent always ready to fight, and replacing corrupt or reactionary leaders at the top is not sufficient to guarantee victory. Our work in the anti-fascist movement provides an example of the difficulties. Fascists are best defeated by a mass movement which includes significant sections of the organised working class. The SWP plays an important role in UAF, which has an excellent record of taking a principled stand against the BNP and EDL. UAF has support from significant layers of the union bureaucracy, which is a great strength.

However, this can make it harder for UAF to campaign in favour of confronting the EDL on those occasions when this would require overcoming opposition from significant sections of the local labour movement. This hasnt prevented significant numbers of militant young people, particularly Muslims, organising independently of UAF to confront the EDL. Greater openness about the arguments inside UAF would make it easier for revolutionaries to relate to the independent militants and to convince them to help us win the argument inside the labour movement and UAF to confront the EDL, delivering the forces necessary for a decisive success. The weakness of reformist organisation makes it harder to pressure reformist leaders we work with within our campaigns. We must win their grassroots supporters to our method and position, and allow them to put pressure on their leaders to shift. Pressure is less likely to be felt if we just engage with the leaders and not the grassroots.