Anti-fascism – a new horizon

Warm thanks to the Stuart Hall Foundation for providing me with this opportunity to take part in this, its fifth annual conversation. Panellists were each asked to give an example from our own involvement in a solidarity action and draw links between past and present. And, in line with Stuart Hall’s life-long commitment to an inclusive Socialism, we were asked to consider, ‘how can difference be expressed within a collective fight whilst maintaining cohesion’.

This is a stimulating brief indeed – to move from the personal to the political in a public conversation is not easy. And the times are so urgent. Any conversation we are engaged in has to be concrete, it needs to address the authoritarian legislation that immediately threatens us, such as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, and the Nationality and Borders Bill, as well as a deep-rooted and underlying social crisis, homelessness, hunger, atomisation, despair. How to juggle so many things at once: my own political background, the nature of state power today and the challenges for resistance – and all in just eight minutes – it’s a tall order!

I decided that I wanted my contribution to the conversation to be provocative – to ask, are we living through a period that is open to fascism – and, if so, could anti-fascism serve as inspiration for diffuse struggles to come together in ‘communities of resistance’, to use Sivanandan’s term.

In what follows, I hope to show how my understanding of both fascism and anti-fascism has grown from the 1980s, when I was first active in Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) combating the neo-Nazis on the streets of London. Grown is the key word, because neither our identity nor our politics are static, and, in my view, consciousness and political identity expand or contract depending on whether we grasp the challenge of personal growth or fail to grow politically − falling into the trap of travelling from left to right of the political spectrum as we grow older.

For me, identity informs our route into politics. After the second world war, millions of ordinary people across Europe were forcibly displaced, deported or resettled. My parents who were from Hungary and Romania were part of that exodus, they came to London under an official resettlement programme. As someone who always felt like a cultural outsider, I was attracted to militant anti-fascism, first active in support of self-defence movements in Newham in the 1980s and then in AFA.

One of the first activities of AFA was when the British National Party with its ‘Rights for Whites’ programme was emerging as a very real threat. In 1986, AFA mobilised a demonstration on Remembrance Sunday, to stop a fascist parade to the Cenotaph and the laying of a wreath. I can remember that, as fights broke out on the streets, we were accused of defiling a solemn occasion. Today, the Colston Four are derided by the New Right culture warriors as ‘woke’. But, just like the Colston Four, we believed we were on the right side of history. ¹

During the trial of the Colston Four, the legal defence of an ‘indecent display’ likely to cause distress was used. Those anti-fascists demonstrating in 1986 also saw the fascists’ laying of a wreath at the Cenotaph as an ‘indecent display’ they had every right to oppose. Now, as we witness the passage of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Court Bill through parliament, and the tussle between the House of Lords and the Commons, particularly over the legislation’s criminalisation of the right to protest, I really fear for young activists. Some of us involved in AFA now have respectable jobs. I am sure we would probably all have been jailed if this new legislation had been the law then.

When I propose, then, that we could cohere around a fight against fascism, I am not just talking about the Nazis, or Nazi parties. I am not just talking about fascism as a specific ideology. What I am really talking about is fascism as an attitude to human life – an attack on human dignity itself. Cedric Robinson, a late colleague of ours on Race & Class and archaeologist of the Black Radical Tradition, did not see history as linear. The logic of fascism did not just belong in the past and fascism was also not anomalous to modern western civilisation. The pathology of racism was always there, in slavery, in the exterminatory logic of settler colonialism, in eugenics and scientific racism. All this existed prior to what is regarded as ‘the fascist period’ and is still around today. To put it another way, fascism, like colonialism, is a structure of domination that leaves its mark on the structures, processes and political culture that govern us in the present.

By using my own personal examples of opposing fascism, I also want to challenge some aspects of identity politics, the idea that ‘who we are’ is what we are born into, rather than ‘what we do’, what we grow into.

My identity as an anti-fascist grew out of an instinctive response to the trauma of forced migration and the feeling that, as a child, I was an outsider. I had left school at 16 with six O-levels, ending up at a polytechnic with a working-class and multicultural intake, at a time of ferment in education over race and gender issues. All those things formed me. Identity that becomes fixed, dogmatic, self-righteous cannot grow into an identification with all those who experience trauma, whether it be the stigmatisation and dehumanisation of migrants and those in receipt of welfare, the deprivations of hunger, homelessness, poverty, or the deep structural trauma of imperialism, apartheid or patriarchy. Being part of a wider politics of solidarity connected me to the universal, to understand the underlying logic of a society that endlessly creates and recreates trauma across time and space.

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Let’s look at the UK today and the echoes from history of the way fascisms operate. When I look at the erosion of parliamentary democracy at Westminster, I see parallels between the constitutional arguments of the Conservative Revolution movement in Germany, in the period just after the first world war – its support for untrammelled executive power – and Boris Johnson’s draconian package of laws today which seek to govern through regulation, minimise parliamentary scrutiny, and reduce the role of the courts and judicial review in ensuring legal accountability, and exposing the unlawful dealings of ministers. When we look at Clause 9 of the Nationality and Borders Bill (which can remove someone’s citizenship for ‘the public good’ without informing them) it might be worth remembering that one of the first acts of Hitler on coming to power was to deprive Jews of their citizenship, though, crucially, he did this legally, through the 1935 Reich Citizenship Law (part of the Nuremberg Laws).

To compare is not to say that things are exactly the same, but it can illuminate, help us to understand the underlying logic and continuities that oppressions share. For example, across Europe today we see militarised police forces emerging, both at the borders and in the interior, the creation of ever more offences and the railroading of people through the courts. (Remember all fascist systems are also police states that regulate all aspects of life.) While the Third Reich created special courts (freed from the influence of independent judges), to oversee the selection of people for the concentration camps, today we see prisons used to warehouse social problems; together with the increasing use of solitary confinement and indeterminate sentences, incarceration constitutes a form of social death. So, our opposition to the Police Bill does not go far enough if it limits itself to opposition over the right to protest, as there are other aspects to the legislation that mirror the fascist logic of regulating and controlling all aspects of working-class life. I am referring specifically here to the introduction of a new Serious Violence Reduction Order, which allows for suspicion-less searches, the creation of a borstal-style system for ‘disruptive’ children, and the commanding role given to the police over other statutory agencies, such as local authorities and health boards, which are compelled to share data on young people suspected of involvement in serious youth violence, leading to the kind of racialised data profiling we saw under the Metropolitan Police’s unlawful (in terms of data protection legislation) Gangs Matrix.

Street life for young black people is now so regulated that even former black police chiefs are warning of the mental trauma of constant stop and search and excessive handcuffing designed to humiliate, with former Met Superintendent Viktor Olisa warning that misuse of stop and search exemplifies the notion of police ‘property’. In the process, this reinforces the stereotype that conflates black boys with dangerousness, thereby justifying humiliating and degrading restraints, ‘without a rational justification’. ²

But, as I said, fascism is not just an ideology but an attitude to human life itself – summed up in the phrase ‘life unworthy of life’.

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In the run up to the second world war, Hitlerian academics coined the term ‘life unworthy of life’ to denote those sections of the population (at first the mentally ill and then the physically disabled) who had no right to live. We may not have state-sanctioned euthanasia programmes today, but those refugees from war and environmental catastrophe, as well as the global incarcerated poor, have been stigmatised as worthless, failed consumers and characterised as disposable people. The view of hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer that an individual’s wealth correlates to their value to society is not so different from that of former chancellor George Osborne who told the Conservative Party in 2008 that the main threat to the British economy was the ‘unproductive residuum’, i.e. ‘millions of people’ ‘languishing on out of work benefits’ and ‘persistently playing the system’. ³

Resistance today to all the injustices that I have set out, and so many more, is diffuse. In the past, vanguardist socialist and communist parties provided a hierarchical, controlled organisational model and a political culture to create unity in action. But this came at a cost, the suppression of inconvenient historical facts, the subduing of individual conscience, the privileging of class over minority rights, race and gender, amongst other things. But, equally, today’s fixation with identity, coupled with the distractions provided by social media spats, comes at a cost. This is borne mainly by the most marginalised and vulnerable – whose suffering lies at the intersection of race, class, gender, citizenship status, economic security − which, if our focus becomes too narrow, too inward-looking, we betray.

The best of the socialist tradition also had a global consciousness, an internationalism – think of the International Brigades who came from all over Europe, from Africa, the Caribbean, the US, to fight fascism in Spain in the 1930s. As historian Olusoga reminds us, the action of the Colston Four was not a stand-alone event, but part of a global movement, with the global shift in consciousness, ‘translated into action across the world’, by young people. ⁴

It is those young people in Black Lives Matter, in movements against climate change, who, in translating individual consciousness into action, are opening up new possibilities that may provide the groundwork for a more unifying cohesive political culture that is not fixated on the flaws of our allies but open to the possibility of changing them. This can only be done in the course of a collective fight, where we are not blind to difference but, in addressing each other’s internalisation of harmful discourses, move closer to each other. In the process, we expand our political consciousnesses, develop a greater awareness of injustice, transforming each other even as we transform the system within a disciplined and collective response to the global epidemic of inequality, state racism and structural violence.

It is my hope that anti-fascism might be one framework, amongst others, that could connect past and present and draw us together in a disciplined and collective fight for transformative change. What has struck me over the years is how those working on the ground to actively protect human life and dignity have understood anti-fascism as an expansive concept, one that mobilises to protect the ‘wretched of the earth’ from the harmful doctrine of ‘life unworthy of life’.

Let me end with some of their words.

Madame Hidalgo, you want to award me a medal for my acts of solidarity in the Mediterranean Sea, because our crews ‘work daily to save migrants in difficult conditions’. At the same time, your police steal blankets from people forced to sleep on the street, while you repress demonstrations and criminalize those who defend the rights of immigrants and asylum seekers . . . I don’t see sea rescue as a humanitarian action, but as part of an anti-fascist fight.

(Pia Kemp, captain of the Iuventa, on refusing an award from the mayor of Paris)

Anti-fascism is a political struggle about the kind of life we want to live. It is fought daily by citizens, activists, civil society groups and migrant communities. It is a battle for democracy, solidarity and social justice. It cannot be won unless the systemic injustice of austerity is defeated.

(Greek anti-fascists, commenting on the arrest of Golden Dawn)