UKIP and Labour: Anyone for “Social Fascism”?

Andy Pearmain writes:

The concept of “social fascism” has got a very bad name. It was coined by the Communist International in its “third period” of the late 1920s to attack social democracy. The communists were competing with the reformist and labourist political parties for the allegiances of the working class across the industrialised world. This was the time of the Wall Street crash and the onset of the Great Depression, of mass unemployment and hyper-inflation. In the heightened tension of capitalist crisis, which pitched “class against class” in a global struggle for supremacy, the social democrats were cast by the communists as “the left wing of the bourgeoisie”, delaying the historically inevitable onset of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”.

Further, they could not be relied upon to resist the blandishments of the ruling class, and would always betray the interests of the proletariat for the sake of their own governmental, parliamentary, municipal and trade union careers. Practical examples were not hard to find, from the SPD's role in suppressing the German revolution of 1918/19 to the 1929/31 National Government in Britain led by “turncoat” ex-Labourites Ramsay MacDonald and Phillip Snowden. 

But there were several problems with this line of thinking. In its strategic perspective of “class against class” it was hopelessly “economistic”, in that it reduced all analysis to simple polarities between capitalism and socialism, bourgeoisie and proletariat, reform and revolution. It privileged the economy as the sole determinant of history, and relegated culture and ideology and even politics to the status of irrelevant sideshows. It pitched actual and potential allies on the left into sectarian squabbles and feuds, turning them in on themselves and against each other and away from the broader struggle for socialism. Above all, it downplayed the emergent threat of actual Fascism and Nazism, already in control of the state in Italy and well on the way to it in Germany, and the much greater threat they posed to the “grand old cause” of international socialism and eventually world peace.

In the ensuing local controversies over “social fascism”, trade unions, cooperatives, cultural and propaganda organisations were riven with factional dispute. Real physical violence was widespread, in the form of street fighting and targeted attacks. The Communist Parties themselves, previously ascendant and basking in the “borrowed prestige” of the young Soviet Union, were confused, divided and distracted. Anyone suspected of deviation from the party line was summarily expelled, an early warning of the purges which would destroy an entire generation of “old Bolshevik” intellectuals and activists in the darkest years of 1937/8.

In reality, “social fascism” had far more to do with the vicious infighting inside the Communist Party of the Soviet Union than with the grand project of world communism. It provided the “theoretical basis” for Stalin's “left turn”, the vanquishing of former collaborators on the right (most notably Bukharin) who had worked with him to defeat Trotsky and the mid-1920s “Left Opposition”.  The substantive issues – the pace and scale of industrialisation, policies towards the peasantry and the middle classes – were less important than the imposition of the central authority of the “great leader”, who could tack to the right or the left as it suited him.  From then until his death in 1953, “Uncle Joe” would be the undisputed figurehead of Russian and worldwide communism.   

In the meantime, the ultimately embarrassing concept of “social fascism” was quietly dropped. The Popular Fronts of the mid-1930s saw considerable revival in the political fortunes of the left, including relatively stable and successful governments. Once actual Fascism and Nazism had been subdued by military conquest, forms of “left unity” provided the political basis for post-war reconstruction and the welfare state, adopted with varying degrees of radicalism by all the victorious powers, including the Soviet Union, Western Europe and even the USA. Even the prolonged stand-off of the Cold War tended to favour the domestic politics of left-wing social democracy and right wing communism in an undeclared but highly effective alliance right across Western and Eastern Europe.

Now, with the “post-war social democratic consensus” pretty much vanquished by Thatcher and Reagan and their disciples (including much of what remains of social democracy), and the almost total hegemony of neoliberalism and its project of capitalist globalisation, is it time to rehabilitate the concept of “social fascism” to explain the almost universal rightward shift of the centre of political gravity? In particular, does it aid our understanding of the new right-wing or nationalist “populism” which is taking social democracy's place across Europe and elsewhere as the primary vehicle to resist, protest or ameliorate the ravages of global capitalism?

We are struggling to understand it in any other terms, not least because it poses an all-round electoral threat to traditional parties of both left and right. Let's look at our own national example, the peculiarly British (or more exactly English) United Kingdom Independence Party, which looks set to attract around 15% of the vote in the forthcoming general election, and may gain sufficiently more in some constituencies to win 5 or 6 seats. What exactly are UKIP's politics, beyond its signature themes of opposition to Europe and immigration (not forgetting its denial of climate change)? In traditional political party terms, where can we place it?

Well, like all classically Fascist political movements, it doesn't fit easily into any single point of the political spectrum, and can be identified as much by its temper and style as programme or principle. What can be seen of its central leadership beyond Nigel Farage is almost entirely ex-Tory, based in London and the Home Counties, and disillusioned with their former party's apparent disavowal of full-blooded Thatcherism. They are viscerally disgusted by the more modern, socially liberal, “politically correct” Conservatism espoused by David Cameron and his metropolitan friends in the Notting Hill set (or have they all now decamped to the Cotswolds?).

But to their evident surprise, these traditional, dry as dust Thatcherites are drawing support from disillusioned segments of tribal Labourism, especially in the midlands and the north. The more far-sighted UKIP-ers are working towards a “2020” strategy, whereby second place to Labour in the 2015 general election in around 100 constituencies will pave the way for a concerted effort to win those seats five years later, and displace the Labour Party as the “true” voice of working class England. The loss of even a quarter of those northern English seats, on top of the massive losses expected in Scotland this year, would be utterly disastrous for Labour. Where else, apart from (weirdly) inner London, with its enclaves of white middle class hipsters and their multinational service-class underlings, would Labour then be able to call its own?

We are in murky waters here. The British proletariat, even at its late 19^th century zenith when manual labour occupied fully two-thirds of the whole population, was never clearly politically identified. Rather, it was collectively organised in the workplace through trade unions, with their “economistic” focus on squeezing better wages and conditions out of the capitalist bosses, and practical neglect of broader social and political concerns. In its “spare time” the working class was most passionate about essentially non-political pursuits like gambling, spectator sport, music and other forms of light entertainment, and emotionally focussed on the immediate concerns of family and street community.

Labour could never count on their unconditional support, even at elections. For much of its history since universal suffrage, large chunks of the working class voted Tory and sustained a culture of popular Conservatism with strong strands of unionism and imperialism. Its less respectable cousin British Fascism – real, declared fascism in the form of Mosley's blackshirts and the National Front and most recently the British National Party – has been largely a working class movement led by toffs; an alliance of the “top and bottom drawers” which has always set itself most stridently against the middle class enlightenment and liberal philanthropy of “progressive politics”.  

For all the self-serving triumphalism of the metropolitan liberal left – determined that “in the twenty first century there can be no place” for racism, sexism, homophobia and every other nastiness – these ideological impulses are all still there, successfully tempted out of the regional English undergrowth and coalesced by UKIP into a new historical bloc. UKIP has provided a contemporary and very plausible political vehicle for what I have elsewhere called “the fascist possibility”, always lurking like a bad smell on the margins of British political culture. With its appeal to disillusioned old Labour, it has taken on a “social” dimension which previous, predominantly business-orientated and ex-Conservative fascist movements never quite managed. Hence, the label “social fascism”.

Finally, if we are to fully grasp what all this means, we need a better understanding of what actual Fascism is and was, beyond the foul insanities and perversions of Hitlerism and the comic buffoonery of Mussolini. These were real social and political movements, which managed over decades to mobilise genuine historical grievances and popular aspirations. They won majority support, at least in their own countries (though they were also widely admired elsewhere, including the UK). While setting a firm profile towards the future, they also aimed to recreate an imagined, much better past. Their core support was the lower middle class and upper working class, elements of the petty bourgeoisie and the labour aristocracy. They were impatient with the niceties of the law, and contemptuous of the messy compromises of democracy.

Their political style can be described as “authoritarian populism”; their political project as “regressive modernisation”. These were terms commonly applied in the 1980s to Thatcherism, which was also described by some as a form of fascism (not very helpfully, because Thatcher unusually took over an established political party rather than creating her own; and by then the concept of fascism had been devalued by decades of caricature and name-calling). Above all these movements were angry, to the point of violence when necessary, but otherwise prepared to vent their anger through established legal and political channels if it got them their way. On all these measures, UKIP is fascist, and just possibly the most successful British incarnation yet of “the fascist possibility”.    

Andrew Pearmain's latest book 'Gramsci in Love', a novel set in Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy, is out now.