Ruling Class Begins Its Cull of The Fascists

The ruling class has begun its cull of the fascists. The catalyst was provided by the fascist attack on the Capitol building, but that attack itself was a desperate last gasp gesture by Trump and his fascist mob to stave off the inevitable, and a vain hope to create conditions for them to prepare for 2024. The reality is that Trump's election defeat already paved the way for the ruling class to start to take apart the organisations of the fascists, and other right-wing populists and nationalists. As I wrote a while ago, it was time for the empire to strike back against the petty-bourgeois rebel insurgents that have been advancing for the last thirty years. 

Trotsky, writing about the rise of the Nazis in Germany, attacked the German Stalinists, and Social-Democrats for essentially believing that the rise of the Nazis could not be stopped, and that it would mean that Hitler would build an electoral majority. They wouldn't, Trotsky argued, because the contradictions inherent in fascism meant that, at a certain point, they would have drained the reservoir of petty-bourgeois and lumpen support from which their votes came. Seeing the possibility of no further electoral advance, they would have to turn their sights on a violent overthrow. 

"It is stupid to believe that the Nazis would grow uninterruptedly, as they do now, for an unlimited period of time. Sooner or later they will drain their social reservoir. Fascism has introduced into its own ranks such dreadful contradictions, that the moment must come in which the flow will cease to replace the ebb. The moment can arrive long before the Fascists will have united about them even half of the votes. They will not be able to halt, for they will have nothing more to expect here. They will be forced to resort to an overthrow." 

Trotsky was right. It was only the actions of the conservative parties in the Reichstag that allowed Hitler to be appointed Chancellor, but even by that point, the electoral support for Hitler had started to decline. Its why Hitler had to organise the Reichstag fire, so as to expel the Communists from parliament, giving him a majority, and allowing him to carry through a parliamentary coup to establish his dictatorship. The conservatives, thought they could control the fascists, and paid the price. Its a lesson that the bourgeoisie has learned, and having already been wary about resorting to fascism in the 1930's, it makes them even more loathe to have to do so today. Fortunately, for the bourgeoisie, the conditions of the 1930's are not those of today. Today, we do not have a large well organised and class conscious proletariat, organised by the million in communist parties, or progressive social-democratic parties, asserting their class interests. Rather the social class asserting its class interest is the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, and it is those interests that the fascists are mobilising around. In the 1930's, a small bourgeoisie, frightened by the industrial proletariat, sought the support of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, organised in the fascist mobs. Today, an even smaller bourgeoisie has its interests threatened by the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, and has so far constrained it by use of the capitalist state. 

As the petty-bourgeoisie has become ever more radicalised, as a result of the failure to push forward its agenda, so it has been forced to adopt more and more radical tactics, and to launch its own assault upon that state. Trump has done it piecemeal over the last four years. In Britain there has been a stealth civil war between the Brexiters and the capitalist state for those four years. In Hungary, Orban has been more successful in gradually eroding the power of the state to resist him, whilst that has provoked a movement against him within society - and from the EU. Only in exceptional cases, or where the bourgeoisie is weak, have the fascists actually been able to size power, as for example, with Erdogan in Turkey, but, even there, it is more a case of Bonapartism than an outright fascist regime. Similarly, it was the peculiarities of the counter-revolution in Russia that enabled first Yeltsin, and then Putin to establish their dictatorships. 

Nowhere have the fascists been able to mobilise more than 50% of the electorate. Across Europe, they have repeatedly failed to do so, despite repeated predictions that some fascist party was going to take over the government in one country or another. In Britain, when the fascists have come out in their true colours, their vote has been derisory. Yes, the BNP won some council seats, even some seats in the European Parliament, but, in each case, this was on the basis of extremely low turnouts, so that the small vote for the fascists became exaggerated. Whenever, turnouts were of normal size, the fascists true support was seen as minimal. The same is true of UKIP, which acquired additional support precisely by toning down the underlying racist nature of its politics, and distancing itself from the fascists. 

Its true that in 2016, those backing Leave, the project of the petty-bourgeoisie, and of these reactionaries won, but, again, it only secured the support of around 37% of the electorate. Its majority of the actual vote was tiny, winning by only 52:48, on what was actually a rigged poll. Had all EU citizens living in Britain, all British citizens living in the EU, not to mention the 16 year olds, whose lives will be most affected by the Brexit decision, had the vote, it would have gone the other way. Every opinion poll since, every election, has shown a majority against Brexit, and in support of staying in the EU. Support for the EU amongst British voters has never been higher than it is now, and, as the dire effects of Brexit continue to become clear, that position is likely to become even more apparent, despite the terrible collapse into jingoism by Starmer. 

Similarly, in 2016, Trump did not win more than 50% of the vote. Hillary Clinton got 4 million votes more than him. If the US were a bourgeois-democracy rather than a bourgeois republic, then Clinton would have become President, not Trump. Its true that, in 2020, Trump won 10 million more votes than he did in 2016, but that simply reflected a larger poll, as Biden secured 10 million votes more than Trump. The reality was that, once Biden took office, the assault on Trump and his fascist entourage was going to begin. Faced with that prospect, Trump and the fascists knew that their only hope was a turn to a violent overthrow, to prevent the inevitable. 

But, although that threat is not over, the reality is that the actual resort to violence was rather pathetic. It was weak, disorganised and unfocused. The latter is inevitable in any fascist insurgency, precisely because of the factors that Trotsky elaborates. The petty-bourgeoisie itself is an heterogeneous mass unable to form itself into a class for itself, as with the peasantry of which it is the modern day equivalent. The fascists having based themselves on it create even greater inherent contradictions, because of the lies they tell in order to build their support, saying one thing to one group, and one to another. When the Nazis created the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936, one of its most significant outputs was the 1936 international release Der Weltbolschewismus, in which it connected various anti-communist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories for the consumption of the international audience. The book was not released in Germany itself to avoid conflict between the book's varied accounts with German state propaganda. 

A look at the fascists that stormed the Capitol building showed a motley crew of white nationalists, and Nazi anti-Semites, along with Zionists, for example. Of course, such alliances are nothing new. The Zionists, in the 1930's, had connections with the Nazis and Mussolini's fascists. The Stern Gang, made clear its fascist nature, and intention of creating a totalitarian state in Israel. They sought an alliance with both Germany and Italy against Britain, and Stern studied in Italy, as well as other members of his gang being trained there by the fascists. The contradiction exposed is the lie that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are the same thing, whereas the reality is that it is Zionism and anti-Semitism that are twins separated at birth. The close alliance of Trump's regime in the US, and Netanyahu's Zionist regime in Israel is an obvious manifestation. Trump has won the support of Zionists, because of his support for Israel, just as Zionists have given support to reactionaries in Britain, for that same reason, but that comes up against an obvious contradiction, when they are then faced with all of the anti-Semites attracted to those reactionary nationalist and fascist movements. 

Mussolini's March on Rome, this assault on the Capitol was not. Had it been a serious attempt at a coup, then it would have involved not just a photo opportunity in the Citadel, but an armed attack on the functional centres of the state itself. It would have involved a takeover of TV stations, of banks, railways, and the state legislatures. Mobilisations in some state capitals were seen, but they were even more pathetic than the gesture in Washington. What is different, here, compared to the takeover by Mussolini, and by Hitler, is precisely the role of the state itself. In those cases, the capitalist state either backed the fascists, or at least stood by and watched. The same with the Spanish Civil War, where the Spanish bourgeoisie specifically called out Franco as representative of its state, to put down the working class, and to do so alongside the Falangist mob, drawn from the ranks of the petty-bourgeoisie. When the Bolsheviks carried out their coup, as the pinnacle of the insurrection, as described by Trotsky, it was done having won over a sizeable portion of the soldiers and sailors, and without whom the seizure of power would have been problematic at best. 

None of that exists. A sizeable number of racist cops, and even some support amongst the National Guard, is one thing, but the US state comprises millions of people. Its bodies of armed men are organised hierarchically and operate on the basis of discipline, and orders from above. There is going to be no mutiny in the ranks, and as far as the top brass of the military is concerned they are unanimously opposed to Trump. They have even come out collectively to say so. But, the state does not rely just on the bodies of armed men. Its most powerful weapon is ideology, and its transmission via control of the media. Again, almost entirely, that media has turned against Trump, even Fox News, which for years acted as his sycophantic mouthpiece, and it had done so long before the attack on the Capitol. 

I was recently reading some old clippings in my archives at a time when I used to write frequent letters to the local paper, back in the 1980's, contesting ideas with right-wing contributors. In one exchange, with a contributor, they had talked about the freedom of speech and of the press in Britain, to which I responded that, even my reply to him was in the gift of the Editor of the paper, a paper owned by capitalists. Today, that same argument applies, except that it applies in relation to access to the Internet, to blogs such as this, or, for those that use it, Twitter. Trump had several million Twitter followers, it was the main way in which he spread his idiotic statements to his followers, and provoked responses. The main TV channels in the US had for a long time continually highlighted the absurdities and outright lies of Trump and his cohort, but this was simply dismissed by Trump as “fake news”. Only Fox remained a mainstream vehicle for Trump, and even they abandoned him, when they saw the writing on the wall. 

But, now, Twitter, which for months had been blocking or severely warning against Trump's tweets, simply showed the power of the ruling class, by permanently closing his account. Trump switched to Parler, as many other extremists had been doing, but the ruling class simply responded again, as Apple and others withdrew the Apps for people to access it, by smart phone, and then Amazon withdrew its server, causing Parler itself to shut down. This is just an inkling of the power at the disposal of the ruling class, and today, unlike the 1930's, it is being used to smack down the petty-bourgeoisie, and their fascist representatives, not the working-class. 

But, there is a lesson there too. Alan Dershowitz is a liberal Democrat lawyer who has defended Trump in relation to the first impeachment. He is at best naïve, and at worst a self-publicist who takes defence of First Amendment rights to an extreme in order to promote a high profile in the media. However, the general point he makes is quite right. In the 1950's, he defended communists against the witch-hunt, but also defended neo-Nazis, some of whom made statements about wanting to kill him, on the basis of a right to free speech. His argument, which is one that the Left has always advocated, in the past, is that by supporting the state, or the media in censoring or silencing extreme views on the Right – or Left – it creates the basis for that state, or the media silencing any other views it chooses at some point in the future. 

The Left has always argued against calling for state bans of fascists for precisely this reason. Such bans and action by the state have far more often been used against the Left than they have against the Right. Its only necessary to look at the actions against BLM protesters to see that. As far as the media is concerned, then it is totally misguided for the Left to believe it will ever get equal treatment from it. Complaining about bias is pure moralistic whining, when what is required is for the tens of millions of workers, and their labour movement to create their own media, so as to be able to present and discuss their own ideas. But, we should learn from the actions of Amazon, Apple and so on, in being so easy to cut off Trump's megaphone. It is again necessary to produce Open Source alternatives, so that we can independently continue to communicate our ideas. Of course, better still would be for a progressive social-democratic government to change corporate law so that shareholders no longer had their unwarranted control over these companies. Instead, if the workers and managers of these companies controlled them, then we could ensure that they operated in the interests of workers in every possible way. 

But, nor is it simply a matter of access to that media. In the 1960's, socialists and liberal democrats had to fight hard against the censorship that existed at the time, and which prevented even the owners of publications from expressing ideas freely. Socialists and consistent democrats should never be in favour of allowing the capitalist state to act as censor, or being able to prevent free assembly and so on, simply because, in the immediate instance, it is opportune to do so. 

The US state, provided all of the ammunition to stop Trump. The investigations by the FBI, by Robert Mueller and so on, have provided the evidence that sent some of Trump's accomplices to jail, and which will inevitably be used to indict Trump himself after he leaves the Whitehouse. The FBI has started rounding up thousands of people associated with the attack on the Capitol building. That is something they probably could not have done so easily, right now, had it been simply a question of scuffles in the street outside the building. The actual invasion of the building has been a gift to the state, in being able to undertake this action, which is likely to go on for months if not years. Many of the organisations involved have now been classified as domestic terrorists. 

Nor is it just the state that is acting against Trump and his supporters. Whole swathes of big US capital has pulled out of business deals they had with Trump's businesses, and that will undermine his family's activities in the months ahead too, especially as Trump is said to be in debt to the extent of hundreds of millions of Dollars once again. 

The chess pieces of the ruling class for their strike back against the petty-bourgeoisie, and their fascist representatives are all in place. The FBI investigations undoubtedly have lots of information that has yet to be utilised, as they waited for Trump to leave the Presidency, before indicting him on criminal charges. The investigations over the least few years into Cambridge Analytica and so on, extend to a range of other right-wing organisations across the globe. Huge numbers of these right-wing organisations, involved in a range of activities, will begin to become published, and their leading lights brought to book. At the same time as this strike at the head, there will be continued policing actions against the thugs, and militia, as the state reasserts its monopoly of armed force. 

But the tentacles of this right-wing populist beast extend way beyond the shores of the US, linking up with the regime in Russia, in Turkey, in Israel, and with all of the right-wing populist movements across Europe, such as that behind Brexit. All of these reactionary petty-bourgeois movements and governments have been a thorn in the side of the ruling class over recent times. Now, the empire will strike back against them. We can expect to see revelations of the links between some of these elements in the US with Brexiters in Britain, including some at the heart of government. They will begin to collapse like a house of cards. 

How did we arrive at this position? In the 1980's, Thatcher and Reagan, represented conservative parties. For all of the post-war period, conservative parties in the majority continued to abide by the social-democratic consensus. Large-scale industrial capital ruled, and these parties, as much as the social-democratic parties themselves had to operate on that basis, protecting its interest, as being also the interest of the state itself. The major parties in all countries were essentially coalitions. Conservative parties were coalitions of reactionaries representing the petty-bourgeois base of those parties, along with conservative social democrats who represented the interests of shareholders, and owners of fictitious capital, whose revenues were dependent on the profits produced by the large scale capital. The latter predominated.

In the social-democratic parties the coalition was between conservative social democrats, who were effectively identical to those in the conservative parties, and progressive social-democrats who more rationally represented the interests of the large scale industrial capital itself, the need for increased state intervention for planning and regulation, the need for a larger welfare state to regulate the supply of labour, and to provide automatic economic stabilisers, the need for greater control over the industrial capital, usually by either nationalisation or via state planning bodies, such as NEDO, and so on. For the ruling-class, this was ideal, because the alternation between these two parties in government, gave an impression of real choice, and democracy, whilst in practice both parties implemented essentially the same agenda. In the post-war period, in Britain, it was called Buttskellism, and analysis of the actions of both parties showed that 90% of the measures of the outgoing government were simply taken over wholesale and continued by the incoming government. The same condition existed amongst all the developed capitalist economies. 

But, in the 1970's, as in the 1920's, a crisis erupted, as the long wave boom came to an end. The promise of social-democracy to more or less continually increase the living standards of workers, in exchange for annually rising productivity could no longer be met. Now revolutionary changes in productivity were required to raise profits and lower wages. Workers resisted, and the state as in the 1920's and 30's, increasingly came into conflict with the organised working-class. The 1972 and 1974 Miners Strikes, were an early example, with the workers winning on both occasions. It was followed by further strikes by car workers and others. The bourgeoisie was forced into an alliance with the petty-bourgeoisie, whose interests it had subordinated for the previous thirty years. 

Now, it mobilised that petty-bourgeoisie, primarily through the ballot box, but also actively on the streets. The fascists of the National Front grew, just as on the Left, organisations such as the SWP had grown, as the old social-democratic solution now seemed inadequate. Without the working-class actually overturning capitalism, or at least pushing forward to a Workers Government that would have pushed through the kinds of progressive social-democracy required to reorganise industry, and raise productivity, the workers were always going to lose, and be set back. As, Thatcher allowed large scale businesses to go to the wall, others to move overseas, and as new technologies replaced labour on a large scale, so unemployment soared. Various measures to encourage workers to accept redundancy rather than fight, meant that the organised labour movement, itself fighting on that same old social-democratic or syndicalist basis had no answers. 

The consequence was that the social weight of the petty-bourgeoisie increased. Its weight inside the conservative parties also increased, and the old coalition broke down. It did not break down immediately or easily. Thatcher was met by extensive opposition, not least from her predecessor Heath, but also from the so called Wets. As unemployment soared in the early 80's, it looked as though she would be ousted, especially as a Labour Party led by Michael Foot, after 1980, which was organising regular mass demonstrations soared to over 50% in the opinion polls, before it was demobilised by the split of the SDP. Thatcher moved steadily to the Right, representing this increased social weight of the petty-bourgeoisie, a social weight that her policies had itself contributed to. The fascists were relegated, many of them simply liquidating into the ranks of the Tory Party itself. 

Yet, the Tory party still had strong ties to the owners of fictitious capital, whose fortunes depended on the profits of big business, which in turn depended upon a social-democratic state, and upon the EU. When, the EU itself began to act in the interests of that large scale capital, by passing legislation that favoured it as against small capital, that was the point when Thatcher baulked and moved over decisively into the camp of reaction. At a rank and file level, in its Associations, the Tories were also now in the hands of the reactionaries, but its parliamentary representatives still had a majority of conservative social-democrats, still looking to the interests of large-scale capital, and to the EU. Thatcher was ditched, and Major replaced her, as the representative of that wing of social-democrats. Then began the period of internecine warfare. The reactionaries and the petty-bourgeoisie won. The ruling class switched its attention to their new champion – Blair. 

But Blair, was just another representative of conservative social-democracy whose prescriptions again could not provide a solution for the problems of the time, problems entirely different to those of the 1970's and 80's. The problem now was, not to raise productivity and profits and lower wages, but was how to stop high profits from encouraging rapid economic growth leading to rising wages, and interest rates, which would burst the huge asset price bubbles that had been inflated by low interest rates, and money printing. That dilemma was highlighted in the financial crisis of 2008. It is still the dilemma that the ruling class and conservative social democracy faces. 

The failure of conservative social-democracy over that period, its inability to be able to resolve this dilemma without a rise in interest rates, and large scale crash in asset prices – upon which the ruling class now depends for its wealth and power, rather than on revenues from those assets – is what caused the collapse of the political centre. It can only be resolved – short of a socialist revolution – by progressive social-democracy, which would have to extend all of the functions of the social-democratic state, and do so on a wider basis, at least across the EU, as far as Europe is concerned. It would mean that the ruling class would have to suck up an immediate collapse in its paper wealth, in exchange for higher revenues over the long-term. The ruling class is clearly reluctant to do that, but its impotence, has simply fuelled the petty-bourgeois drive for power, and to resolve the crisis in its own reactionary interests. 

The ruling-class is not going to allow that either. It knows that such a path would be economically disastrous. The ruling class is not going to turn to the proletariat for support, other than passively at the ballot box, because it knows from history the danger of that is that the workers go beyond the bounds that social-democracy sets for them. So, they are left with one alternative, that is to smash the petty-bourgeois upstart.