A-Infos (en) Australia, Ancomfed: Picket Line - The fascist threat (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Around the world, the far-right is taking power. ---- In the United 
States, Trump's border force, ICE, acts as a masked gang, tearing 
immigrant parents away from their children and deporting legal residents 
who oppose Israel's genocide in Gaza. The courts are being filled with 
Trump loyalists, and left-wing organisations are being threatened with 
criminalisation.---- In France, the National Rally-founded by the Nazi 
sympathiser Jean-Marie Le Pen-is the largest party. Leading National 
Rally figures maintain links with banned fascist organisations like 
Generation Identity, known for violently targeting leftists and 
migrants. One of the party's key promises is to remove automatic 
citizenship for French children born to non-French parents.

In the United Kingdom, tens of thousands have taken to the streets in 
racist, anti- migrant protests. Over 100,000 attended a 'Unite the 
Kingdom' rally, organised by the known fascist Tommy Robinson. Nigel 
Farage, leader of the Brexit campaign, praised the rally, and his new 
party (Reform) is leading in the polls.

And now, in Australia, the far- right is gaining strength. On August 31, 
coordinated 'March for Australia' rallies were held across the country. 
Tens of thousands were mobilised by the demand to "end mass immigration" 
and "keep Australia white." These rallies were organised, and in many 
cities led, by the National Socialist Network: a Nazi organisation.

The involvement of the NSN was obvious from the beginning, but this 
didn't stop politicians like Pauline Hanson and Bob Katter from 
attending as speakers. As we prepare this issue of Picket Line, Hanson's 
One Nation party has risen in the polls from 6% to 12%.

None of these countries have reached the point of fascist dictatorship. 
But the threat of fascism is real and growing. To beat it, we have to 
recognise it, understand it, and organise against it.

The roots of fascism
Today, it's common for 'fascist' to be thrown around loosely as an 
insult. Some are happy to call any authoritarian political movement 
fascist, particularly if it's racist and right-wing. But if we want to 
oppose fascism effectively, we have to be precise about what it really 
means.

Fascism is a tool of last resort for the ruling class. When capitalism 
is in crisis and people lose faith in government, the bosses will always 
try to shift the blame. To avoid class war, they stoke the culture war 
instead.

Low wages, inflation, and rising house prices are blamed on mass 
immigration and other scapegoats. Workers are encouraged to think that 
they have more in common with their bosses and landlords than they do 
with migrant workers or other vulnerable groups.

If fascists ever blame the economic system, it's only in vague terms, or 
through the prism of racism. Bosses can't be blamed, but bankers 
(usually Jewish ones) can. Individual corporations can be criticised as 
greedy, unpatriotic, or 'woke', but never for being corporations.

But if workers continue to organise together against the real enemy-the 
bosses and the politicians-we become a danger that the system cannot 
tolerate. If there's unrest in the streets and class struggle gets out 
of control, the ruling class will empower nationalist movements to 
'restore law and order' through increasingly violent and anti-democratic 
means.

The far-right doesn't need the left to be strong to take power. But a 
fascist system is established when this takes the form of a popular, 
nationalist dictatorship, dedicated to crushing the left and all other 
scapegoated groups.

In Italy, capitalists embraced Mussolini's fascism out of fear over the 
massive strikes and factory occupations of 1919 and 1920. In Germany, 
the bosses were terrified that the Great Depression would spark a repeat 
of the 1918 revolution and so granted Hitler power to crush communism. 
And in 1936, the Spanish ruling class supported the dictatorship of 
Franco to prevent what they feared was an imminent anarchist-led revolution.

Fascism never begins with dictatorship and genocide. But those are the 
inevitable results of fascist politics. In Italy, Germany, and Spain, 
the fascists started as small groups of thugs on the street, beating up 
radical workers and ethnic minorities. Meanwhile, fascist political 
parties took part in democratic elections and denounced violence.

If we only think about fascism in terms of how it ended, we risk missing 
how it unfolded as a process-one we are seeing play out again today.

Could it really happen again?
Economic crises are built into the capitalist system. They're 
unavoidable. And because these crises are unavoidable, capitalists will 
always need fascism as an option in their toolbox.

The Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and the economic chaos of the COVID 
pandemic, cleared the way for fascism's reemergence. Governments around 
the world are stuck in gridlock, and people have rightly recognised that 
the mainstream parties have no solution to the issues facing ordinary 
workers. Most workers have simply disengaged from politics altogether. 
But many have also been won over by the lies of the far-right.

A key difference between today and the 1930s is that the resistance from 
the left is far weaker. Without the threat of class struggle, capital 
will place limits on the far-right's anti-democratic tendencies, 
preferring ordinary right-wing government to fascism. But wherever 
workers are rising up, the right and the bosses are radicalising against 
capitalist democracy.

In 2020, the murder of George Floyd sparked the largest protest movement 
in U.S. history. Months of riots caused billions of dollars in damages 
and lost profits. The movement called into question the racist 
structures so integral to American capitalism. In its wake, the 
Republican Party embraced new anti-democratic extremes.

Trump transformed ICE into an unaccountable security force under his 
personal control. And on January 6, 2021, he mobilised militia groups as 
part of an effort to overturn the election of Joe Biden-a fascist 
takeover still deemed premature by most of the ruling class.

France, meanwhile, is unique in Western Europe for its level of class 
struggle. From 2018 to 2019, the country was rocked by the Gilets Jaunes 
('Yellow Vests') demonstrations. In 2023, attempts to raise the 
retirement age resulted in months of strikes which paralysed major 
cities. Unsurprisingly, France is also one of the few countries in the 
Western world where the left has significant representation in parliament.

Now, France is locked in a political crisis. The ruling classes of 
Europe increasingly view the country as unsafe for capital. The strength 
of the workers has made it difficult to change labour laws, cut 
benefits, or reduce spending on schools and hospitals. And just like in 
the U.S., the bosses are turning to the far-right for salvation.

The threat in Australia
Here in Australia, the far-right doesn't have a major party in 
parliament, and Nazism is a fringe ideology. But the leap from fringe 
group to government is hardly impossible. Parties like the National 
Rally have their origins in these kinds of neo-fascist clubs, and Nigel 
Farage was influencing the British Conservative Party long before Reform 
led the polls.

The far-right has attempted to go mainstream before. In 2015, a 
hodge-podge group of neo-Nazis attempted to capitalise on Islamophobia 
with 'Reclaim Australia'. Posing as 'ordinary mums and dads', they were 
able to mobilise thousands of people in racist campaigns, like the one 
to prevent a mosque being built in Bendigo city.

Anti-fascist counter-mobilisations played a role in causing these 
campaigns to fall apart. But the truth is we also got lucky. Reclaim was 
disorganised and dominated by moronic leaders who couldn't stand each 
other. It was also relatively easy to figure out who was behind it and 
expose their real agenda. In the end, police crackdowns did the most to 
smash both the fascists and anti-fascists.

What we're seeing today is different. The general crisis capitalism 
finds itself in has caught up with us. Support for the major parties is 
declining significantly and people are being radicalised by the mass 
movement in support of Palestine. In this context, the NSN is a new kind 
of threat. Compared to previous far-right outfits, they're disciplined 
and well-organised.

They're also open about their politics. Unlike Reclaim, they aren't 
trying to trick people into supporting fascism. Their goal is to 
demonstrate their strength as a force to crush the left. They want to 
violently intimidate socialists, queer people, migrants, and Indigenous 
people (as seen by the attack on the Indigenous protest camp, Camp 
Sovereignty). By looking powerful, they aim to build their ranks and 
serve as the shock troops for a broader far-right movement. Judging by 
the response from many 'March for Australia' rally-goers, this wider 
movement is open to the idea of including Nazis in their coalition.

Anti-fascism means class struggle
Fascist scum taking over our streets isn't just something we can ignore. 
From little things, big things grow. This goes for our enemies as well 
as ourselves.

The working class has a common interest in defeating fascism, because 
fascism is at its core a conspiracy to destroy the workers' movement 
through mass murder. When the chips are down, and revolution is on the 
table, the bosses and capitalist politicians will be inclined to join 
this conspiracy.

So when fascists mobilise, we have to as well. Not as small groups 
decked out in black looking for a fight, but as masses of workers. We 
need to confront the fascists directly-as organised trade unionists, 
anarchists, Marxists, feminists, and community groups. Just like us, the 
fascists feel demoralised when they are outnumbered and prevented from 
marching. We need to demoralise them.

But in the long-run, just mobilising isn't enough. We need to organise. 
The roots of fascism are in the crises generated by capitalism. Fascism 
can never be defeated while capitalism survives. To all those workers 
who have given in to apathy-and even those susceptible to the fascist 
lies and scapegoating-we have to offer the real solution. That solution 
is class solidarity. It is the struggle against the bosses and 
government as a united working class. The solution is revolution.

https://ancomfed.org/2025/11/the-fascist-threat/
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