Anti-fascist programmes should have economic demands

[Die Neue Zeit]

Because of the increasingly working-class nature of the "far right," I think it would be prudent for antifa groups to include economic demands in whatever programmes they happen to have (if any).

Elsewhere on this board I have condemned the broad economism that plagues the class-strugglist left, but on this one particular set of politics there may be a most exceptional exception.

In contrast with Marx (http://csukblog.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/debating-the-marxist-programme-videos-from-communist-university-north/), Bakunin stated that workers couldn't gain consciousness unless they were engaged in some sort of "action" (a strike, a protest, or whatever) inspired by an "invisible dictatorship (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_dictatorship)." On the one hand, his particular "action" approach was propaganda of the deed and the associated crap. On the other hand, the other possible "action" approach is the broad economism that plagues the class-strugglist left today: reducing the political content of the "workers' power" program and even of the "class independence" program to a low economic level, thereby generating "action" responses.

However, I dare to venture the possibility of a most exceptional exception reserved for the most backward sections of the working class. Such people who vote for the BNP see their economic concerns being addressed by that party and not by the soc-fash Blairites. However, the presentation of a primarily economic programme like Trotsky's so-called "Transitional Programme" (as opposed to an economic programme revolving around "defensive struggles") - with first emphasis on the realizable-under-capitalism "sliding scale of wages" (http://www.revleft.com/vb/sliding-scale-wages-t98609/index.html) - would reveal the bankruptcy of the BNP's economic populism, recalling a caricature of Hitler saluting to receive money from financiers towering behind him.

In addition, such politics would definitely apply to the very non-proletarian lumpen classes.

Thoughts?

[jake williams]

I basically agree. The Left is obsessed with "fascist" enemies, that are very real but which it's easy to deny the real terrain of. Much of it is composed of a reactionary segment of the working class that needs to be appealed to with offers of real progress for them. I've been saying that again and again.

[Melbourne Lefty]

Yes everyone says the way to fight the ideas of racism and neo-fascism is to give the working class an alternative identity, a class identity.

but who is actually doing this? Most trot groups I know are out on universities constantly.

And while the anarchist groups I know personally do a lot of unheralded work in the community the nature of anarchist organising means that they have little chance of influencing large numbers of workers as the BNP does [prove me wrong guys and girls, seriously].

So, what organisation in the UK has a chance of educating the working class to its real interests?

[Pogue]

Jacob makes a very good point. We either need anti-fascism to be a major part in a general working class movement (fi we can get a big one going), or simply to reinforce in our currently excisting anti-fascist campaigns and groups that we have the true economic solutions and the fash are lying, trying to win them over etc. Anti-fascism and class struggle are of course inseperable because its the working class the fash try to pander too.

[Pirate turtle the 11th]

Its a good idea and something that could be discussed but one of the things to remember though is that antifa is quite a broad group.

[Pogue]

Its a good idea and something that could be discussed but one of the things to remember though is that antifa is quite a broad group.

I think the main problem is that like most of the far-left, Antifa is not huge and so what it can do is limited, and so with its current resources its best suited to the physical combat with fascists, whereas if it gre it could also dedicate more time ot educating the working class of fascisms evils and proposing an alternative. Although because Antifa is pretty loose as a group and most members will also be part of another far left group they'll be doing this anyway.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Jacob makes a very good point. We either need anti-fascism to be a major part in a general working class movement (fi we can get a big one going), or simply to reinforce in our currently excisting anti-fascist campaigns and groups that we have the true economic solutions and the fash are lying, trying to win them over etc. Anti-fascism and class struggle are of course inseperable because its the working class the fash try to pander too.

I wonder if the immediate economic "solutions" should be based on the long-forgotten classical political economy, notwithstanding Marx's critiques:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12418


The classical economists and American Progressives envisioned markets free of economic rent and interest – free of rentier overhead charges and monopoly price gouging, free of land-rent, interest paid to bankers and wealthy financial institutions, and free of taxes to support an oligarchy. Governments were to base their tax systems on collecting the "free lunch" of economic rent, headed by that of favorable locations supplied by nature and given market value by public investment in transportation and other infrastructure, not by the efforts of landlords themselves.

[...]

Individualists believed that all that shrinking central governments would shrink the control mechanism by which the vested interests extracted wealth without work or enterprise of their own. Socialists saw that a strong government was needed to protect society from the attempts of property and finance to use their gains to monopolize economic and political power. Both ends of the political spectrum aimed at the same objective – to bring prices down to actual costs of production. The common aim was to maximize economic efficiency so as to pass on the fruits of the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions to the population at large. This required blocking the rentier class of interlopers from grabbing the public domain and controlling the allocation of resources. Socialists did not believe this could be done without taking the state’s political and legal power into their own hands. Marxists believed that a revolution was necessary to reclaim property rent for the public domain, and to enable governments to create their own credit rather than borrow at interest from commercial bankers and wealthy bondholders. The aim was not to create a bureaucracy but to free society from the surviving absentee ownership power of the vested property and financial interests.

All this history of economic thought has been as thoroughly expunged from today’s academic curriculum as it has from popular discussion. Few people remember the great debate at the turn of the 20th century: Would the world progress fairly quickly from Progressive Era reforms to outright socialism – public ownership of basic economic infrastructure, natural monopolies (including the banking system) and the land itself (and to Marxists, of industrial capital as well)? Or, could the liberal reformers of the day – individualists, land taxers, classical economists in the tradition of Mill, and American institutionalists such as Simon Patten – retain capitalism’s basic structure and private property ownership? If they could do so, they recognized that it would have to be in the context of regulating markets and introducing progressive taxation of wealth and income. This was the alternative to outright "state" ownership. Today’s extreme "free market" idea is a dumbed-down caricature of this position.

[Enragé]

the idea of anti-fascism is exactly that you don't pose economic demands since the anti-fascist front is a united front against fascism, nothing more. The problem only arises when certain revolutionary left groups are concerned only with anti-fascism and nothing else.

and

the increasingly working-class nature of the "far right,"

i dont think this is true.

[Tower of Bebel]

Our (LSP/PSL) main slogan is "Jobs, no racism!" (Jobs, geen racisme (http://www.socialisme.be/upload/photo/2008/0410molenbeekfdg/mb12.JPG)/Du boulot, pas de racisme (http://www.socialisme.be/upload/photo/2008/1904vottem2/vottem12.JPG)). Which can be interpreted as a transitional demand. And also "Everything that devides us, weakens us".

[jake williams]

the idea of anti-fascism is exactly that you don't pose economic demands since the anti-fascist front is a united front against fascism, nothing more.
I think insofar as we limit anti-fascist activism to "united front" type tactics where we ignore the root causes of the problem, we harm our anti-fascist activism.