UNITED AGAINST RACISM & FASCISM by Communist Party

CP BRItAIn communist-party.org.uk

Workers of all lands, unite!

UNITED AGAINST RACISM & FASCISM s

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‘Since at least 2015 we have seen that the demise of the electoral far right in the UK has been giving way to something far more sinister, which is evolving from the embers of the two betterknown far-right groups operating in the UK, the electorally dead and insigniﬁcant British national party (BnP) and the moribund EDL (shaken by a paedophile scandal involving one of its leading members). Although both spawned cheaper imitations upon their demise, they also spawned a million angry voices on social media.’ Matthew Collins head of research for Hope not Hate

Big money behind the racists AGAINST RACISM

voice of the ‘white working class’. tony Conway, convenor of the Communist Party anti-racist, antiIG MOnEy from the United fascist commission said: “Former States alt-right is backing a dangerous street movement of BNP activist Robinson came to home grown British fascists. Boosted prominence as front man for the violent English Defence League and by the racist right in the USA and with attacks on Muslims and across Europe a mixed bag of migrants. tattooed nazis, former members of “Internationally the far right are the fascist BnP, alt-right poseurs and football thugs are taking to the streets mobilising behind him. Donald Trump’s ex-chief of staff Steve in an attempt to grow the fascist Bannon and racist Dutch politician fringe into a mass movement. Geert Wilders campaigned for his the release of convicted criminal tommy Robinson on bail is release. US officials have denied reports that Trump’s ‘ambassador hailed as a victory by a reactionary for religious freedom’ lobbied the band of far-right figures. British government to let Robinson In Britain the assorted miniout of gaol.” groups of the fascist right, the the right-wing US Middle East Democratic Football Lads Alliance Foundation (MEF) and Bannon’s (DFLA), shadowy alt-right figures former employer Breitbart funded and the UKIP rump are rallying Robinson’s defence. And behind Robinson. the convicted thug and fraudster reportedly “played a key role in legally and diplomatically” lobbying Stephen yaxley-Lennon, trading our government for Robinson’s under the made-up name tommy release.the head of MEF is Daniel Robinson, is free without bail Pipes, son of CIA analyst Richard conditions following his arrest for contempt of court after he failed to Pipes – the theoretician behind Donald Rumsfields’s Middle East derail the successful prosecution of war project. a paedophile ring. Last June tommy Robinson’s newly-enriched poser Robinson Hitler-saluting goons attacked antiis making a mint from his internet racists and clashed with the police. notoriety as a champion of ‘free this was followed by attacks on speech’ and as the self-appointed

MAX LEVITAS ASt EnD antifascist Max Levitas has died. Communist Party general secretary Robert Griﬃths expressed “great sadness at the passing away of our dear comrade at 103, the oldest and longest serving member of the Communist Party.” Former communist councillor

trade unionists and the ransacking of the left wing Bookmarks shop. Fuelled by big money donations driven by his well-funded social media operation the tommy Robinson roadshow has netted him a country house and a globetrotting life style. His bid for fame and fortune ﬁts into a new broad spectrum operation by the far right that takes in squads of street ﬁghters and mobs of football hooligans. the boundaries between the tory right (now reinforced by UKIP defectors), UKIP itself, the fascist formations and a newer, more middle class, ‘identitarian’ movement with Continental and US links are blurred. the core belief of this racist alliance is virulent Islamophobia. this is not mere rhetoric but translates directly into arson attacks on mosques and Muslims. Echoed by UKIP’s latest leader and sparked by Boris Johnson’s attack on Muslim women’s right to dress how they choose the fascist right is emboldened. tony Conway, said: “Defeating modern day racism and fascism in our communities requires a wide range of approaches. This month a mass turnout in Liverpool sent

fascists scurrying home protected by a police cordon. But everyday activity in working class communities to defend our public services, schools and NHS is very important. We need practical activity to unite workers rather than name-calling Winning decent pay and conditions for all workers, including migrants, will help take the poison out of the immigration debate which is why breaking free from the European Court of Justice combined with Labour’s pledge to restore workers’ rights is so important.” H

Antifascist counter protest Sunday 9 December 11am Downing Street London SW1A2

We need to talk a bit about fascism FASCISM nICK WRIGHt

HILE WE face growing racism, Islamaphobia and anti-semitism, the indiscriminate use of the term ‘fascist’ doesn’t help us strengthen the movement fighting racism and real fascism. It doesn’t help us understand the true nature of fascism for the word to be used as an all-purpose term of abuse directed at right-wing politicians in general or to label arbitrary abuses of power. there are real and dangerous fascists in Britain. they are organised in small and fractious groups deeply penetrated by anti-fascist activists, police and the intelligence agencies. Recent convictions show that violent elements exist in the underground British Resistance group, while more media-savvy operators get blanket media coverage and massive funding. After a short-lived rise to prominence the fading English Defence League is now seen more as the first vehicle to subsidise tommy Robinson’s extravagant lifestyle rather than a mass movement with a future. But there is a wider circle of right-wing nationalist, xenophobic, and racist organisations — some of s Workers of all lands, unite! which have intellectual pretensions — and all of which feed of the atmosphere enabled by state racism, sets out a progressive and realistic millionaire media manipulation and racist throwback labour movement policy on migration, labour and refugees. £2 ideas about race, heredity and genetics, often imported from the US. Racist organisations, even when electorally successful (like the BnP in previous EU elections), are Jeremy Corbyn said he was Max Levitas was a veteran of the 1936 Battle of Cable Street (above), “deeply saddened by the passing of often short lived. And it is clear that groups like the latest — the ‘Democratic Football Lads Alliance’ my friend Max Levitas. when police protecting Oswald “Max was one of that wonderful which include real fascists in their ranks - can on Mosley’s British Union of Fascists occasion break out of their isolation. But experience generation that helped to defeat were defeated in their attempt to shows that with mass action and unity they can be fascism in the 1930s. force a way through. Irish president Michael D. Higgins beaten back. Dublin born son of Jewish the big danger is when these groups get a hearing said: “I have heard with great immigrants who had fled the antiin working class communities and it is here that we sorrow of the passing of Max semitic pogroms of tsarist Russia, need to be absolutely clear what kind of danger they Max Levitas inspired generations of Levitas, anti-fascist and defender of pose and the best way to defeat them. anti-fascist activists and communists. democracy and its core values.” H We have history to help us find clarity. Fascist political movements grew up, principally in Germany and Italy, but also in most European countries and in north America in the desperate conditions after the 1914-1918 Great War. the early fascist organisations were violent and were used by the ruling class as a counterweight to working class revolt. CONTINUED OVERLEAF

Jeremy Corbyn “The Morning Star is the most precious and only voice we have in the daily media” £1 weekdays, £1.50 at weekends. From newsagents or online at www.morningstaronline.co.uk

‘Millions stand behind me’: 1930s anti fascist montage by John Heartfield on the cover of the AIZ Workers Illustrated Newspaper

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Fascism CONTINUED Proto-fascist groups of right-wing military veterans were mobilised to defeat the socialist revolution in Germany, (the notorious Black and tans used by the British government to suppress the Irish manifesto were similar). In Italy, faced by working class revolt, the www.manifestopress.org.uk banks and big business backed Mussolini to form the first fascist administration. In the 1920s Hitler and his fledgling nazi party were mocked but when, in the 1930s, the votes of the left and especially the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) surpassed the nazis, the ruling circles in Germany appointed Hitler as Reichs Chancellor. to begin with the social base of fascism was small proprietors, state functionaries, smallholders, former officers and the middle class millions whose marginal s Granite and privileges and savings were undermined by the honey Kevin Marsh economic collapse and inter-war financial crises. and Rob Griffiths tell What changed the fascists from a dangerous but the story of Phil minority political force was the decision of the ruling Piratin, key figure at class in key countries — frightened by working class the Battle of Cable revolt — to make them into government parties. Street and Communist By the time war loomed fascist parties were the MP. £14.95 government in Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Romania and Finland while the governments of the Baltic states and Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria could hardly be distinguished from fascism. In France, Holland, Belgium, norway and Denmark fascists formed administrations that collaborated with the nazi occupation. In every country big business, bankers, big landowners and state bureaucrats backed these regimes. (In the Channel Islands, the only part of s The imperial the UK under occupation, the same pattern appeared. controversy Like the rest of occupied Europe it was the communists Andrew Murray and workers who led the resistance.) subjects the leading Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists had the pro-imperial support of some groups in the ruling class, mostly big historians, including landowners, top civil servants and industrialists and in Niall Ferguson, to a the media principally Lord Rothemere’s Daily Mail. But withering analysis. fascism, despite its upper class support in royal and £12.95 ruling class circles, and its well-funded squads of thugs, never triumphed in Britain. For the left in Britain the 1936 fascist revolt against the Popular Front government in Spain was a warning of what was to come. thousands of anti-fascists, mostly workers and communists, volunteered to fight in Spain. In Britain – against the opposition of the Labour Party right wing, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the establishment press – the left wing took action. s Freedom A Popular Front that included the Independent from Tyranny Labour Party, the Communist Party and the Labour Phil Katz surveys the Party’s Socialist League was established with victory over fascism in widespread working class and important sections of Europe and warns of middle class opinion backing decisive action. A turning the danger posed by point was the Battle of Cable Street, when thousands a right-wing rewrite of East Enders defeated the police trying to force a way of history. £5.95 through for Mosley’s marchers. manifesto

The Empire and Ukraine Andrew Murray

Preface by John Foster

It was a split in the ruling class – with Churchill worried at that point more by the nazi threat to the British empire than by communism – that saw the Chamberlain government replaced by a wartime coalition that included Labour. It took a World War in which our ally – the Soviet Red Army – in the words of Churchill “tore the guts out of the nazis” to defeat the fascist Axis. today our ruling class is split again over membership of the EU and, true to form, both sides in that debate are mired in racism and xenophobia. the big business Remainers are happy with the Fortress Europe strategy which condemns migrants to drown in the sea, their opposite numbers among the hedge fund Brexiteers unashamedly use racist and anti-migrant rhetoric to play on the fears of working people. Only the left-wing Lexit campaign stood for both working class internationalism and solidarity. But we face a new danger. If the clear decision of the British people to leave the EU is subverted, the racist right wing will be given a big boost, UKIP will be turbo charged into an electoral recovery and the fascist fringe will ﬁnd new opportunities to promote race hatred, Islamaphobia and anti-semitism. Fascism is never the main instrument of the capitalist class until it has no alternatives left. But the battle for working class power takes an easier road when fascist ideas remain on the margins and fascist organisations ﬁnd little support in the working class. H nICK WRIGHt IS EDItOR OF UnIty!

Beat the Brexit bigots with solidarity and working class internationalism BREXIT

militarism and war. When necessary and possible, it has turned to fascism to protect itselfK against ROBERt GRIFFItHS revolution. Since the Communist Manifesto, nE HUnDRED and seventy years ago Marx and universal suffrage and other democratic rights have been won in Engels argued in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that Britain by the Chartists, by the the working class in every nation must suffragists and suffragettes, by trade unionists, liberals, social democrats, first of all settle matters with its own socialists and communists. bourgeoisie, must win the battle of the ruling capitalist class has democracy, must replace the capitalist long had to confront the challenge class as the ruling class in society. By every analysis and definition, — and the potential power — of the majority of working-class voters working-class democracy. It has done this mostly at in Britain voted in June 2016 to national level, where state power leave the European Union. lies, always successfully, so far, but the biggest single reason for doing so was a popular desire to re- often at the cost of compromise establish sovereign self-government and concessions. What the major capitalist classes here, in practice. of western Europe have now People wanted our developed, however, is a model democratically elected parliaments which puts vital areas of decisionand governments in Britain to be free to decide the policies that have making beyond the reach of democratically elected parliaments such a profound impact on most and governments. people’s lives. Authority has been transferred yes, many voters also wanted to to an international apparatus of see that sovereignty used to limit unelected and unaccountable immigration from eastern Europe, institutions designed to protect wrongly believing that this is the capitalist interests against any biggest single factor undermining democratic threat to them. terms and conditions of yes, the working class and the employment, putting debilitating people can elect their local, national pressure on public services or pushing Britain’s welfare bill beyond and central councils, parliaments and governments. they can even the bounds of affordability. elect a sham European Parliament. But the proper response to But all elected bodies must act these concerns is not to brand 17.4 within the ever-tightening rules, million people as undereducated, ignorant bigots and racists who can directives and treaties of the European Union, policed by the be led by the nose by nigel Farage European Commission, the and Boris Johnson. European Central Bank and the the proper, progressive response is to explain how Britain’s European Court of Justice. Furthermore, the basic treaties deep and long-running social and of the EU are irreformable, unless economic problems — poverty, left and progressive governments gross inequality, chronic insecurity, can win office in all the most underfunded public services, powerful member states at around underinvestment in productive industry and modern technology — the same time and can survive the arise from the capitalist class system enormous pressure that big business would bring down upon itself. them. Communists well understand, In Britain, the immediate reality capitalism is based on the is that a largely pro-EU tory exploitation by a few of the labour government is set on a bogus power of the many. as a system it Brexit deal with the European breeds sexism, racism, crisis,

Union’s hard-line pro-market, antisocialist bureaucracy. It has carried out the wishes of the most powerful circles of monopoly capital in Britain — the banks, the giant corporations, the CBI, the Institute of directors — represented in the business advisory council set up by Prime Minister theresa May and Chancellor Phillip Hammond. Big business wants to keep Britain as closely aligned as possible with the EU single market and customs union and their big business “freedoms” — the freedom to export capital, to establish in business anywhere, to trade with minimal regulation and to super-exploit migrant labour. For the capitalist class, a bogus Brexit is better than a real Brexit, although the ﬁrst choice would be no Brexit of any kind. that’s why, should May and Michel Barnier’s bogus Brexit be defeated in the House of Commons, big business will throw its weight fully behind the campaign for a second referendum. the Morning Star has already exposed how the so-called People’s Vote cabal is run by the same political shysters and moneybags who directed and bankrolled the Remain campaign in the EU referendum. their aim, ever since, has been to denigrate, block and overthrow the People’s Vote that the ruling class didn’t like in June 2016. they believe, in true European Union fashion, that the people must vote, vote and vote again, until they come up with the only acceptable answer. the tragedy is that, for more than two years, the Labour Party has utterly failed to defend democracy and popular sovereignty, despite Jeremy Corbyn’s call on the morning of the referendum result for the people’s vote to be implemented without delay. His principled stance on that day caused the large cohort of pro-EU, pro-nAtO, pro-nuclear weapons, pro-austerity Labour MPs to trigger

a second Labour leadership contest. And ever since, those same elements have been waging a lowlevel war inside the Parliamentary Labour Party to defend the interests of the ruling class in its struggle against Corbyn, John Mcdonnell, democracy, popular sovereignty and the working class majority. these anti-democratic, antiworking class, anti-socialist Labour MPs understand only too well that the rules of the EU single market and customs union present a major barrier to many of the left and progressive policies of a leftled Labour government. As the Communist Party has pointed out in detail, Labour’s plans for renationalisation, statebacked investment funds, direction of capital investment, regional development policy, regulation of trade, an end to compulsory competitive tendering, the restructuring of Vat and legislative equality for migrant workers all run counter to existing EU statutes. the tory government’s business advisory council, the CBI and the City know this and they have been reminded of it by the European Commission. that is why they fear a real Brexit — a People’s Brexit — and want a bogus Brexit or better still no Brexit instead. these are the class politics of the European Union question. the EU represents the common interests, the reactionary “internationalism” — indeed the imperialism — of the capitalist classes of western Europe. Against it stand the common interests — the proletarian internationalism — of workers and their families everywhere, of their trade unions and their Communist and workers’ parties. yes, we want social, educational, scientiﬁc, environmental and cultural cooperation not only to continue — but to ﬂourish. ROBERt GRIFFItHS IS GEnERAL COMMUnISt PARty

SECREtARy OF tHE

sThe Empire and Ukraine Andrew Murray sets the Ukraine crisis in its global and local contex. £11.95

Caribbean Labour Solidarity www.cls-uk.org.uk info@cls-uk.org.uk

s Marx’s Das Kapital and capitalism today by Robert Griﬃths Illustrated £8

s China’s new era Kenny Coyle strips away the layers of myth and misunderstanding about China’s growing role in the world. £2

s The EU, Brexit and class politics Which way for the labour movement? by Robert Griﬃths £2 www.communist-party.org.uk

Bangladeshi Workers Council www.facebook.com/BWCInUK /

IWA Indian Workers Association GB Contact: Sital Singh Gill iwagb@hotmail.com 07779664845

s State Monopoly Capitalism by Gretchen Binus, Beate Landefeld and Andreas Wehr. Introduction by Jonathan White £4.95

Join Britain’s communists name s Challenge is the magazine of the young Communist League. Britain’s revolutionary youth organisation. ycl.org.uk

s Women & Class by Mary Davis has become the standard text for the labour movement’s engagement with the issues. £2

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