Index - Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four - Part Five |
One of the most disturbing features of the political scene in Europe today is the growth of semi-mass parties of fascism and the extreme racist right. After World War II it seemed that these forces had been put in the graveyard of history, yet they appear to go from strength to strength, sometimes at the expense of the traditional parties of the Left. In this series of articles, JOHN TULLY analyses the reasons for the rising fascist menace. The first article looks at the underlying economic reasons for the growth. Although the series focuses on Europe, we cannot be complacent about similar developments here, particularly since the launch of Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party, which may well act as an umbrella organisation for the far right.
Western Europe, through the European Union (EU), is one of the three most powerful trading and industrial blocs in the world, with an enormous concentration of industrial and financial muscle. Yet, in common with the world as a whole, Europe is racked by economic and social crisis.
Nineteen-ninety-three was the year of the European Single Market and promises of millions of new jobs. In reality the worst recession in twenty years wiped out five million jobs in twelve months and in Spain, Portugal and Italy, between five and eight percent of all workplaces closed. There has been a weak recovery since the 1993 'recession', but this has not translated into better times for the working people and nor is it likely to do so in the foreseeable future. Average unemployment runs at almost twelve percent in the EU and is higher in some individual countries. In Germany this year, for instance, unemployment leapt within the space of a month to its highest level since the Great Depression.
European government is largely an affair of crisis management and another recession is inevitable. There have been twenty two such crashes since 1825 and so according to the law of averages there will be another soon after the turn of the century. Bourgeois economists are predicting another crash in 2001. This is not just a statistical probability: periodic 'crises of the overproduction' are inevitable within the capitalist mode of production.
These boom/bust cycles also have to be seen in the context of what the Marxist economist Kondratiev called 'long waves'. Since the late 1960s, the economy has been on a long downswing, unlike during the post-war boom years which saw profit rates of around 13.75 percent in 1968, when economic growth was over 5 percent per annum.
Yet whilst growth rates remain sluggish, profit rates soar. There are at least three explanations for this contradiction. Firstly, the rich have engaged in an orgy of spending on luxury goods. Secondly, the continuing wave of privatisations of state assets has yielded windfall profits for the capitalists. Thirdly, wage cutting has boosted profit levels. Fascism, weapon of last resort
It is important to understand the political consequences of this continuing profit boom. As will be discussed later, this makes it unlikely that the bourgeoisie will have recourse to unleashing fascism, its weapon of last resort, within the near to medium future. Yet just how long this profit boom will continue cannot be safely predicted, and Marx's analysis of the laws of capitalist production shows that it will not last indefinitely. These laws dictate that profits will decline towards the average; that over time the tendency of the rate of profit to decline will reassert itself. This is due to the need to both increase production and to sell at lower prices.
Moreover, this must be seen in the context of what Marx called 'the organic composition of capital'; that is the ratio between fixed capital (plant and machinery) and variable capital, or that used to buy labour power or pay wages. The value of the former remains and only the second produces surplus value, or profits. Thus we can expect that the return on the new technology introduced over the past ten or fifteen years will decline in future. When that happens, and the bourgeoisie needs to take even stronger action to discipline the working class and extract higher rates of surplus value, fascism might seem a more attractive proposition. This process, which unfolded in Germany in the early 1930s, is brilliantly analysed in Daniel Guerin's classic Fascism and Big Business, a work which should be consulted afresh by Marxists today.
For the moment, the policies of free market Thatcherism have served the capitalist system too well for it to need the unappealing fascist alternative. As Trotsky put it, the 1930s German bourgeoisie liked fascism as much as a trip to the dentist - necessary but painful. Moreover, free market 'neo-liberal' policies today enjoy the 'bi-partisan' support of both conservative and social democratic governments. So why ride the same fascist tiger which led the German and Italian ruling classes in particular to ruin in World War II?
Another problem confronts the fascists. Classical fascism recruited overwhelmingly from the middle classes. Those social layers - small businesspeople, little shopkeepers and the like - are much smaller tofay than they were in the 1920s and 30s. This has forced the far right to focus on the working class much more than in fascism's heyday. They have been able to make some headway with their simplistic 'solutions' to unemployment and poverty - that is deport immigrants, particularly those with black and brown skins.
The chronic economic crisis has generated a social crisis of a depth unseen since the 1930s; and one which may yet eclipse the 1930s in terms of its capacity to devastate the world. Politically, this latest crisis has occurred simultaneously with, and has been worsened by, the bankruptcy and collapse of both Stalinism and Social Democracy. The dictum of The Transitional Programme that the crisis facing humanity can be reduced to the crisis of working class leadership is as true today as it was of 1938, and, moreover, has a new and frightening content. The Stalinist and Social Democratic leaderships of the 1930s proved inadequate, but the workers' movements remained largely intact and it is more than conceivable that they could have crushed fascism given the correct programme.
Today, we are in a highly contradictory situation.
On the one hand, the vote for the Left parties has declined together with a contraction of union and party membership. Large numbers of workers in a variety of European countries have voted for the far right.
On the other hand, we have witnessed recently an upsurge of workers' struggles across Europe, sometimes against the wishes of the leaders of the unions and Social Democratic parties, as in the case of the Liverpool dockers. It is that resurgence of workers' struggles which will create the only real barrier to the advance of fascism and racism.
(To be continued in the next edition of Militant.)