The last two months have seen weekly demonstrations across the UK called by a group calling itself the “great british national protest”, outside of hotels that the government uses to house asylum seekers. Fascist protestors have shown up in inconsistent numbers in Newcastle, espousing slogans like ‘stop the boats’ and ‘refugees not welcome here’, displaying symbols ranging from union jack flags to totemkopf t-shirts.
Counter-demonstrations have also been called weekly by Stand Up To Racism and a broad antifascist coalition of members of other local left-wing groups. Red Storm Collective has attended these counter-demonstrations in Newcastle. Our aims going into these were primarily the defence of the hotel and its inhabitants, surveillance, and intimidation of fascist protestors.
To what extent these aims were possible was not only determined by left-wing and fascist forces, but also by the state. We expected to play a bigger defensive role than we have done. Instead, a large number of police assembled outside of the hotel entrance, keeping fascist protestors a significant distance away from the hotel. On the ground, the defender of the hotel was the state. To be clear, the state does not assume this role out of concern for its inhabitants, but out of a desire to protect state interests, ultimately concerning the protection of property, and the detainment and economic control over refugees. A large police presence has meant we have been restricted to our surveillance aim, which, while broadly successful, has demanded a reevaluation of our aims and strategies.
The role of the police has so far been to prevent direct confrontation between fascists and antifascists. Nowhere was that clearer than September 27th. Antifascists assembled near the fascist march with the intention of stopping it in its tracks, and were immediately kettled by police. While police redirected the fascists through the city on an alternative route, those of us still kettled were brutalised while trying to break out, suffering injuries and arrests. Arrestees were detained until the fascist march was over, and released without charge. For further details, read this account of the events of September 27th by another Red Storm comrade.
The counter demo on the 27th went very differently to the previous counter demos at the hotel. The difference was that, while our aim of hotel defence aligned with the police (despite our conflicting motives), our aim of stopping the fascist march along our streets on the 27th put us in direct opposition to the state.
The fascists love to accuse the state of being left-wing, of ‘two-tier policing’. The 27th saw evidence to the contrary, with police violence directed entirely towards the militant left, resulting in four comrades arrested and many more injured. This must be exploited to make explicit our anti-state position. On the day, police acted as escorts to the UKIP-led demonstration, calmly walking alongside the racists through Newcastle city centre along a visible, city-centre route given to them by the state. Make no mistake, even with the diversion we created, the state had no intention of preventing this march.
It is not contradictory, however, to also say that the fascists are not allied with the state. Although, on the 27th, it was in the interest of the state to protect the march, the ultimate goals of the fascists differ from those of the state. In many cases, fascism is repressed by the state, such as by the heavy policing and prison sentences faced by racist rioters last summer.
Fascism is not willed by the bourgeoisie, but imposed upon them. We must move away from viewing fascist movements as a militarised wing of the capitalist state and towards viewing it as revolutionary, in the sense that it is both anti-state and anti-police, and wishes to restructure the class system according to their ideology1.
We have to recognise, and incorporate into our strategy, the tacit cooperation we enter into with the police in situations like the hotel counter-demonstrations. The suppression of fascism in Newcastle at recent counter-demonstrations should not be considered a victory, because it was achieved through reliance on the state. This is precisely the reason why we must present both revolutionary anti-fascist and anti-state politics. Anti-fascism must not be content with the easy victory of providing a visible, peaceful opposition to fascism. Rather, it must provide a revolutionary alternative to both the state and to fascism. We must remain steadfastly anti-imperialist in the face of both fascist and counterinsurgent liberal forces on the left that simply want wealth in the hands of the British working class at the expense of the global proletariat. Without anti-state, revolutionary politics, we hand strategic victory to the fascists, as they are then the only side presenting an alternative to bourgeois capitalism.
1. Fascism & Anti-Fascism (Don Hamerquist) – Kersplebedeb. Available from: https://kersplebedeb.com/posts/fascism-anti-fascism-don-hammerquist/