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Index - Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four - Part Five |
Racism is not only repulsive in its own right, but also acts as a force to divide and rule working and middle class people in times of social and economic crisis. This is true of the present time in Australia and elsewhere in the world when society is plagued by permanent and chronic levels of unemployment and poverty. (See front page.)
In this article, JOHN TULLY looks at the rise of the extreme racist right in this country -- a phenomenon which can be traced in part to persistent levels of unemployment and to social despair and breakdown. The article argues that unless the Left can fill the vacuum left by the disintegration of the old Communist Party and the rightward drift of Labor, then racism and indeed overt fascism will continue to grow and to form the "last line of defence" for the ruling class.
It is time to sound the alarm against racism and fascism in this country, not in order to cause panic, but to prepare ourselves for action. The last few years have seen an ominous upsurge of extreme right wing and fascist groups in Australia and abroad. The open racists Graeme Campbell and Pauline Hanson have been elected to parliament, both, significantly, in former safe Labor seats.
The oldest fascist group in the country, Eric Butler's anti-Semitic League of Rights, has considerable support in the country and there is an overlap between the League's membership and that of the National Party. The Citizens Electoral Councils (CEC), followers of the American right wing crook Lyndon La Rouche, are a relative newcomer to the lunar right in this country, but their 20 page weekly paper, The Citizen, can be found in many mainstream news agents. The CEC and its front organisations also have considerable support in the countryside and have targeted suburban areas and even the trade union movement.
The gun controversy which followed the Port Arthur shootings has also spawned a plethora of very nasty rightist groups, again particularly in the countryside. These include the Confederate Party, which boasts 20,000 armed fanatics, the Shooters' Party and Ted Drane's "Reform" Party, which is modelled on a successful party of the same name in Canada. [1] Finally, there are a number of Nazi organisations, including the National Action gang. (See accompanying article.)
Although attempts at creating a single far right organisation have so far foundered on the reefs of doctrine and ego, it is quite possible that these forces will sink their differences in future. Pauline Hanson and Graeme Campbell are working to build up party organisations in Queensland and West Australia. These rightist groups and individuals clearly have wide appeal. And no wonder. People are hurting as a result of government policies and the economic crisis and they feel betrayed by the mainstream parties. There is a vacuum on the Left following the collapse of the old Communist Party and the transformation of the Labor Party into the 'Alternative Liberal Party'. Moreover, many people have bought the idea that there can never be a socialist alternative to this system. As the old saying goes, "politics abhors a vacuum". Unless the Left can get its act together, we face the very real possibility of being crushed under the iron heel.
Nor is there any real hope for an improvement in the economic situation. The "recession" has been over for a number of years, but unemployment continues at a high level. Officially around 10%, it has been estimated more accurately at over 21%. We must also take into account the rapid growth of under-employment and casualisation and the effects of government cuts to social services, health and education. The countryside, too, is racked by stagnation and depression. Economists are predicting another cyclical recession in 2001 and this will provide grist to the extreme right's mill.
Given these sobering facts, it is at least premature to write off the Pauline Hanson phenomenon as a media creation! Worse still, we should not confuse Hanson, Campbell and others of their ilk with genuine fascism. To do so is to cry wolf. Fascism ought not be used as a convenient catch-all phrase or political swear word. As we shall see, it has a precise meaning. Whilst the success of Pauline Hanson certainly reflects the growth of a racist, pre-fascist culture, these people are more properly described as extreme right wing rather than fascist. It is the dialectics of the situation which are important: the people who vote for far right candidates may not have stopped moving rightwards yet. The danger is that the Hanson/ Campbell/ Drane parties will act as half-way houses for genuine fascist parties. This happened in Germany in the late 'twenties and early 'thirties when millions of right wing voters transferred their allegiance to the Nazis from the Nationalists, the People's Party, the Stalhelm, and other "traditional" rightist organisations. The same process occurred in Italy before Mussolini's seizure of power in 1922.
What, then, are the features of classical fascism that mark it off from the more traditional parties of the Right? There are, to be sure, dissimilarities between the various national brands of fascism (eg German nazism, Italian fascism, Spanish falangism, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Rumanian Iron Guard) but they share a common essence. All of them were mass extra-parliamentary movements of the middle classes, with para-military formations (eg the Italian Blackshirts, the German Brownshirts or SA) which were dedicated to utterly smashing the workers' movement and socialism and crushing social liberties.
They were also racist, scapegoating ethnic minorities for the shortcomings of capitalism and their ideologies were heavily laced with mysticism and irrationalism.
Although they recruited from the Lumpenproletariat (see article on National Action this issue), they derived their mass character from their middle class following and membership. The German Nazi Party was largely a party of small shopkeepers, petty traders and businessmen, office employees, peasants and students. [2] These people had suffered terribly from social conditions and, caught between the two "social stones" of the capitalist class and the workers, flailed around in a frenzy to find scapegoats. Hitler pointed to the Jews and the Marxists who had allegedly stabbed Germany in the back in 1918 and who had supposedly conspired to bring about the country's economic and social ruin.
But there is another vital element in the equation, namely the attitudes and needs of the capitalist class itself. Without the unstinting financial support of heavy industry in particular, [3] it is doubtful whether Hitler's minions could have come to power. The Nazi Party was kept on a tight leash by the German ruling class for much of the 1920s. They doled out just enough funds to keep it alive. The ruling class much preferred to wield power via the parliamentary democracy of the Weimar Republic. They turned to the "Little Drummer" Adolf Hitler as a last resort.
In Leon Trotsky's vivid words, they liked fascism about as much as a person likes having their teeth pulled -- they regarded it as a distasteful necessity. By the early 1930s the crisis of German society was so deep that it could be resolved only by socialist revolution, or fascist counter-revolution. Krupps, IG Farben and the other big industrialists knew which to choose!
But what about the other major player in the German tragedy, namely the working class? How was it that the world's most powerful labour movement collapsed without firing a shot in 1933? We can discount the common fallacy that the workers went over, en masse, to the Nazis. It is often asserted, for instance, that the unemployed flocked to the Nazi banners, yet the truth is that most of them, along with lesser skilled workers, supported the Communist Party (the KPD). The majority of highly skilled workers tended to support the Social Democrats (the SPD), and if voters deserted one ofthe two mass workers' parties it was to go over to the rival Left party . The Nazis, it is true, called their movement "National Socialist", but it didn't fool the workers. They knew it was a cheap trick. [4] The workers supported their own parties right up until they were dissolved and even afterwards they were a sullen but powerless part of society, often preferring permanent unemployment, persecution and the concentration camp, or the filthiest of work, to cooperation with the hated Nazis. [5]
The problem was that the powerful workers' movement was split into warring camps. The Communist and Social Democratic leaders simply refused to join their forces in a united front against the common enemy. The KPD was affiliated to the Communist International based in Moscow, ruled with an iron hand by Stalin. In 1928 Stalin imposed the disastrous policy of the "Third Period" on the world's Communist parties. This held that socialist revolution was immediately on the agenda and that the main enemies of the working class were the Social Democrats, whom they dubbed "social fascists". According to this "theory", the Nazis would only last a brief time in office before being ousted by the victorious Communists.
For their part, the reformist SPD leaders wanted nothing to do with the KPD. They felt that perhaps an accommodation could be made with the Nazis. Both the KPD and SPD leaders were totally ignorant of how bloodily repressive and totalitarian the Nazis would be. They conveniently overlooked the essence of Nazi political theory as expressed by Hitler, that; "Cruelty impresses. Cruelty and raw force. The simple man in the street is impressed only by brutal force and ruthlessness. Terror is the most effective political means." The SPD apparatus pathetically continued to circulate pamphlets on how to operate in town councils after the Nazi putsch!
Yet the leaders of the workers' parties were warned quite explicitly of the terrible danger facing the German workers. Leon Trotsky poured out a torrent of brilliant words, exhorting, begging and warning them to take heed of the fact that Nazism would "ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank". Make common cause, he warned, before it is too late. Yet shackled by their respective dogmas, and dismissive of the beginnings of cooperation at the grass roots level, both parties refused to form a united front. [6] The results were horrendous, not just for the German workers, but for all of humanity, as is shown by the World War II and the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
It is a moot point whether the German capitalists would want to see fascism again. In the end they had let a lunatic genie out of the bottle and Germany was embroiled in a war it could not hope to win. But then they had mixed feelings about it in the first place and were impelled to support it out of fear of socialist revolution. There is no evidence, either, that any significant section of the Australian ruling class wants to see an authoritarian, extreme right wing or fascist solution to the crisis here, at least at the present time. For one thing, the Left is presently so weak as to present no threat. Also, they are making vast profits. Yet, despite this and perhaps because of it, the extreme right will continue to grow. Ominously, it may even take some of the Left's traditional constituency - we should not forget that Hanson and Campbell ran as right wing independents in formerly safe Labor seats, and won. There is also evidence to suggest that a disturbingly large number of blue collar workers voted for the Coalition in the last federal elections. There is a possibility that these votes might trickle further away to the right unless the Left stops the rot. This process has already begun in Europe, with the fascist Vlaams Blok (Flemish Bloc) taking votes away from the Socialist Party in Belgium and a similar pattern in what has long been known as "Red Vienna" in Austria. In France, the racist National Front has made inroads into the "Red Belt" of eastern Paris and recently won the council elections in the industrial town of Gardanne, near Marseilles.
In the final analysis, the only way of stopping the march of the fascists and racists is to build a strong socialist labour movement, capable of uniting workers of all races and creeds and of sheeting the blame for unemployment and other social ills right where it belongs -- on the capitalist system and its political servants.
(The next issue of Militant will carry an article examining the growth of fascism and the extreme right in Europe.)
Notes