Reformism, the united front and anti-fascist strategy

Phil Tsappas, July 2013

Recent events have sparked a number of debates about the dangers of fascism and how we defeat it.

Fascism is a movement of despair and the “last card in the bourgeoisie’s hand”. The working class

cannot rely on social democracy to defeat it. The fourth congress of the Comintern made this useful

statement:

Fascists do not merely form narrow counter-revolutionary fighting organisations,

armed to the teeth, but also attempt through social demagoguery to achieve a base

among the masses – in the peasantry, the petite bourgeoisie, and even certain sectors

of the working class. To achieve this, they cleverly utilise the masses’ inevitable

disappointment with so-called democracy for their reactionary purposes.

This disappointment with reformist organisations in Britain has been growing. The organisations

have declined dramatically in size (between 1971 and 2008 Labour Party membership declined

from 700,000 to 166,000), even though reformist consciousness among working class people has

not. This could mean that even though far more workers identify with the Labour vote, if not its

individual membership, it remains rare for the Labour Party to lead workers in other fields of

struggle.

At the same time, it’s also not surprising to learn the contempt workers have for reformist parties.

No credible alternative based on collective action is presented to the class from mainstream parties.

My experience on the industrial sales is that activists have no organisational allegiance – allegiance

being the key word – and this may feed growth of hostility to all political organisations.

The classic reformist parties have been weakened at their very base. A feature of the current period

has been the inability of the usual reformist organisations to give a lead or mobilise around the

central political issues of today and the past decade.

This absence of reformist partners, which aim to build resistance movements, has created

difficulties for revolutionaries in trying to develop united front campaigns. The lack of activity from

the Labour party has meant that united front work in Britain seems to have developed in two ways.

Either the revolutionary party (the SWP) has had to play the role, usually filled by the reformists, of

being the driving force inside broad united fronts. (The Stop the War Coalition was an impressive

example of this, but a section of the leadership was then not willing to act independently inside of

Stop the War as a revolutionary party.) Or there is another problem – the social forces involved in a

campaign have been so weak that they are effectively a party front (eg Right to Work).

It is important we look at these issues when building the fight against fascism. The key organisation

for mobilising that fight recently has been Unite Against Fascism (UAF). Numbers matter and the

object of UAF is to increase the numbers we can stand against the fascists.

But that does not mean that we never differ with the direction UAF takes. One member in a party

meeting a few weeks back referred to the way the SWP in Lewisham 1977 chose to directly

confront the National Front rather than join the 5,000 marching elsewhere. He contrasted this with

Birmingham where the SWP was pulled into compromises in UAF that allowed the EDL to march

unimpeded (see this 2009 article in Socialist Worker).

The SWP remains in the united front to argue a strategy of confronting the EDL and making sure

this happens. That might mean breaking police lines if need be. That may be what is happening on

the ground, with or without us. But what about the arguments at the top – by reformists and leading

revolutionaries who direct the organisation?

Ian Allinson in his 2011 IB piece “Party and class today” outlines the difficulties we can face when

working with reformist leaders with a weak base, and what can occur if we stop being “a

revolutionary current arguing its position in broad organisations”. He wrote:

Our orientation is on the self-emancipation of the workers. Leadership is exercised at

many levels within any campaign. We always seek to lead at the grass roots. Being

part of a formal leadership at the top is optional; it could help or hinder our work…

A movement led at the top by reformists can sometimes win despite them, while a

movement can still lose despite revolutionaries leading at the top. Workers have a

mixture of ideas, uneven confidence and imperfect organisation at a grassroots level.

Workers aren’t always ready to fight, and replacing corrupt or reactionary leaders at

the top is not sufficient to guarantee victory.

Our work in the anti-fascist movement provides an example of the difficulties.

Fascists are best defeated by a mass movement which includes significant sections of

the organised working class. The SWP plays an important role in UAF, which has an

excellent record of taking a principled stand against the BNP and EDL. UAF has

support from significant layers of the union bureaucracy, which is a great strength.

However, this can make it harder for UAF to campaign in favour of confronting the

EDL on those occasions when this would require overcoming opposition from

significant sections of the local labour movement. This hasn’t prevented significant

numbers of militant young people, particularly Muslims, organising independently of

UAF to confront the EDL.

Greater openness about the arguments inside UAF would make it easier for

revolutionaries to relate to the independent militants and to convince them to help us

win the argument inside the labour movement and UAF to confront the EDL,

delivering the forces necessary for a decisive success.

The weakness of reformist organisation makes it harder to pressure reformist leaders we work with

within our campaigns. We must win their grassroots supporters to our method and position, and

allow them to put pressure on their leaders to shift. Pressure is less likely to be felt if we just engage

with the leaders and not the grassroots.