What is fascism—and how should we fight it?

Mussolini marked the advent of fascism in Europe (Photo: twitter/@0xAlaric)

We are closer to the 1930s than any of the intervening decades. But this article is not a gospel of despair.

The 1930s itself was not simply an inexorable march of fascism, war, ­genocide, and so on. It was also a decade marked by moments of mass ­working-class resistance.

We again live through a crisis of polarisation. There’s a coexistence of reaction and resistance, of revolution and counter-revolution.

In other words, we’re not simply doomed to repeat the disasters of ­history. It’s an open-ended question.

So what is fascism? There is immense confusion on this topic. The most highly developed and brutal expression of ­fascism was German Nazism.

But one of the most prevalent ­misconceptions about the Nazi Party was that it was simply a direct creation of the German ruling class. It was much more dangerous than that—it developed as a mass movement.

In 1933, when it entered into power, you were not simply looking at a traditional military coup or police state. It had this mass movement which Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary, described as ­a battering ram directed at its enemies.

Fascism is a counter-revolutionary mass movement from below that aims at the complete destruction of working class organisations, trade unions and the left.

So where are we with the 21st ­century fascists? In the European elections in June, fascist parties made an electoral breakthrough, and in Britain there are fascist riots on the streets.

But the road to these ­breakthroughs have been paved by centrist, ­mainstream, liberal, conservative forces, and ­sometimes, frankly, social ­democratic forces.

For instance, the intensification of Islamophobia, the militarisation of borders against refugees. The authoritarian tendencies that we see, increased police powers, increased powers against ­protest, increased police violence, and so on. These all create a favourable ­environment for the Nazis to feed on.

I want to talk about the two “masks” that fascists wear. There’s the first mask of legitimacy.

They are capable, and Hitler’s ­movement did this at points, of ­concealing this anti-democratic agenda with a degree of respectability and ­legitimacy. And they put on a mask, partly through standing in the electoral process and so on, hiding their aims.

What do Marine Le Pen and the Rassemblement National talk about? You might have heard this phrase, “dédiabolisation,” (de-demonisation)—they’re trying to pitch a certain legitimacy and a certain respectability. It means trying to mask some of the open ­antisemitism and racial hatred—and here the ­Islamophobia of the French state has been a godsend to them.

Le Pen says the French state bears no responsibility for the Holocaust. This is a lie. The French state was utterly complicit in deportation of French Jews, so it’s a form of Holocaust denial-lite.

But the second mask is essential—it ­disguises a counter-revolutionary ­movement as revolutionary. The Nazi’s programme, and some of its rhetoric, will talk about opposing the system, ­plutocrats, big business, even high finance and so on.

They are taking some of the anger at the system and the tensions of ­capitalist society and displacing that onto the ­international plane. It’s not healthy German capitalists, it’s international forces that must be blamed—this is then equated with the Jews.

There’s a pseudo anti‑­establishment language, even sometimes a pseudo ­anti‑­capitalism, particularly organised around their denouncements of “globalism”.

The left talk about being opposed to globalisation in the sense of capitalist globalisation. But for the fascists, the fault line they’re trying to draw attention to isn’t between labour and capital, worker and bosses—it’s between the national and the international.

They point to a few big tech firms or to finance, and this can easily then slip into antisemitic conspiracy theories. Look at Le Pen. She won’t openly attack Jewish people, but when she lists those her party opposes it is always Jewish names that she gives.

So again, it’s that ­ambivalence and plausible deniability—they can retreat from but it sends a signal to their supporters.

Nazi street gangs do exist today, though they are far weaker than the German gangs of the 1930s. They are being emboldened by far right rhetoric employed by people like Le Pen, so they will grow. This is an important point, because sometimes you get an argument that says yes today’s far right are fascists, but do they still need the street gangs and the storm troopers? Aren’t the forces of the state, like the police, enough?

The idea of Jordan Bardella or Le Pen in charge of the police is terrifying—we must have no complacency about this. But to carry out shattering defeat of the organised working class, to liquidate any possibility of resistance, I think they still have to have a mass force of ­ideological street fighters.

I don’t think that the using the state is a substitute for that. I think the danger is that the fascists can use the state to further broaden their base, not just the legitimacy of being prime minister, but attempts to recast the state along more authoritarian lines.

But the key point is that their votes rest on quite a small hard fascist nucleus. It’s bigger than we want, but their nucleus is still relatively weak compared to the 1930s. And that means they’re vulnerable to ­sustained anti-fascist pressure.

So I think there are six important ­strategic imperatives we need to focus on.

Firstly, the fascists wear masks so we have to unmask them. In the late 1970s with people such as John Tyndall, former leader of the National Front, you could dig out photos of him wearing Hitler-era uniforms in the 1960s and just hold them up.

But they’re cleverer than that now. They’ve learned to make it harder to trace their links, and you have to decode their language.

Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia youth group is riddled with open fascism and ­celebration of the Nazis—these things have to be used to win the argument that this is not a normal party.

The second argument is that if they’re not a normal party, then they have to be denied a presence in the public arena.

They shouldn’t be on television. Now that’s quite hard when they’ve got 33 percent of the vote, but let’s start with having a protest at their media appearances. And when they book the town hall for an election meeting in your community, there needs to not just be a ­protest, but an attempt to shut it down.

The next strategic imperative is don’t ally with the liberal centre.

We must not form electoral ­combinations with the liberal centre in the belief that it’s the lesser evil. It’s the liberal centre that’s often the engine of creating the environment in which ­fascists can grow.

Critically, the ruling class and their political representatives have a theory of the lesser evil too. For them, the lesser evil is the fascists as the left is their real enemy. Ultimately, the liberals will do deals with the fascists.

In 1932, the labour-like Social ­Democratic party in Germany ­withdrew its presidential candidate and told people to vote instead for president ­Hindenburg. He had been the ­co-dictator of Germany during the First World War.

The party said vote Hindenburg to stop Hitler. Hindenburg won, and seven months later Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor.

The lesson is that we need to build a mass movement against the fascists, rather than rely on the state or the ­liberal centre.

We have to understand that for all their millions of votes, we are the ­majority on the streets. Think about the recent anti-racist protests, the Palestine demonstrations, the climate strikes, Black Lives Matter and the pension strikes in France. Again and again, in country after country, the left has been able to mobilise vastly bigger numbers than the right.

The strategic challenge is to win people in those movements to the necessity of building direct opposition to ­fascism—not just protesting against racism.

Fighting racism is crucial of course—but winning the argument that we have to directly target fascist organisation and isolate the hard nucleus from their softer, wider support is vital. Only this can break their organisation.

So there is a crucial responsibility on the radical left to not focus on elections or parliament. Our stock in trade is building movements and struggle from below.

Fifth, I think that you cannot fight ­fascism in what I’d describe as an ­economistic way. That is a way of ­fighting which simply points out that the fascists have right wing policies, that they’re ­neoliberals in disguise.

And you cannot fight fascism just by ­solving the economic material issues.

You have to understand the role of racism—this is one of fascism’s central glues. If we are utterly unequivocal, not just in word but in practice, in ­fighting racism then we can win the trust of ­communities and build stronger resistance.

Finally, the radical left cannot build that movement alone. We cannot put barriers up to the involvement of people who don’t share the full anti-capitalist programme. There must be  a sustained attempt to win alliances with the wider left and the trade union movement.

In other words, it has to be a united front. It’s not just about unity—it’s about unity in action. It’s about building a mass mobilisation that says these people are fascists, we have to drive them out of the public arena and put pressure on their organisation to break it.

There’s a very rich experience in Britain of confronting the fascists. And we have beaten many different ­organisations—the National Front, English Defence League, British National Party and so on.

Why? Because the far left, and by that I mean the Socialist Workers Party, has acted on this tradition. We have ­repeatedly won an argument with the left and the wider trade union ­movement about this kind of strategy.

And that means we have repeatedly smashed the fascists because they’ve never been able to consolidate themselves. This is the kind of thing that we have to think about strategically.

If we act with an understanding of confidence, if we build on this tradition, recognise that this has been done before, we can break them again.

• This is an edited transcript of Mark’s talk at the Marxism Festival 2024. To watch the whole talk go to tinyurl.com/M24Fascism