Did Free Speech Allow the Nazis to Come to Power?

It wasn't UAF that did for the BNP

EXTRACT: The main political lesson of Marxism is that this state, at any and all times, is the main enemy - not “the Nazis”. Nick Griffin or any other far-right crackpot should be perfectly free - as far as the police and state are concerned - to expound their garbage. Laws against ‘extremism’ or ‘radicalisation’ are just as much a threat to communists as they are to fascists or political Islam - far more so, in fact, as we have a fundamental class hostility to the bourgeois state.

Yes, we in the CPGB are perfectly prepared to use the no-platform tactic under certain circumstances, but we oppose the traditional far-left approach, which boils everything down to often pointless displays of physical force or, in the shape of UAF, a liberalistic, ‘something must be done’ howl. But it is a profound mistake to elevate no-platform into a principle.

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Expel the Blairite Traitors

John Hutton and Alan Milburn: dead for the labour movement

EXTRACT: There is a precedent, naturally enough. In the early 1930s, the last decade when capitalism faced an economic crisis as serious as the present one, the incumbent Labour minority government found itself irretrievably split on cuts in unemployment benefit. Ramsay MacDonald, the prime minister, responded by forming a ‘national government’ with Tories and Liberals - he and the other Labour members of the new government were immediately expelled from the party, even if slightly reluctantly.

It is necessary to do this again when faced with the current crop of collaborators and traitors. OK, Milburn and Hutton may be political small fry compared to MacDonald, Philip Snowden and JH Thomas, but they clearly represent the sort of Blairite baggage that must be unceremoniously dumped if Labour is to have any chance of constituting itself as a serious oppositional force with resonance in the working class. In 1948 Aneurin Bevan memorably described the Tory Party as “lower than vermin”, as it “condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation”. Could you imagine even in your wildest dreams John Hutton or Alan Milburn saying anything even remotely similar?

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Victory Tainted by Right Populists

Homelessness is widespread

EXTRACT: What all this shows, needless to say, is that the question of the memorandum/austerity slices through Greek politics orthogonally, to the ‘normal’ or formal left/right divide. Therefore it is perfectly possible to be totally reactionary on virtually all social and constitutional issues, yet be militantly anti-troika and anti-neoliberal, as Anel amply demonstrates.

The dangers of going into coalition with a party that you can crudely describe as the Greek equivalent of the UK Independence Party are more than obvious (the major difference being that you cannot serious describe Ukip as ‘anti-austerity’, let ‘anti-neoliberal’). Imagine if George Galloway teamed up with Nigel Farage. The Syriza-led government may not be a classic popular front, but it certainly is a popular front sui generis - of a special kind. The determining characteristic of all popular fronts, including the unpopular kind like Galloway’s Respect, is that the minor or junior ally sets the limits of the governmental programme. Given that Anel is an outright reactionary bourgeois party, this is quite an alarming prospect.

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