LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Dear Editor,

The article on “Democracy, et cetera” in the September ‘Labour Affairs’ helps to put Fascism in its historical context.

In political discourse today it is treated as a transcendental source of evil that can be related to any situation irrespective of time and place and therefore becomes a meaningless term and just a term of abuse.

In essence it was a means by which European states following the destructive effect that WWI had on these states to make themselves functional again. They sought to do this by mediating class conflict and other conflicts within them.

The crucial fact that is relevant from a Marxist perspective was the collapse of the 2nd International on the outbreak of the war. The assumption of the International was that the working class would revolt against their ruling classes in the event of such an inter-imperialist war and establish socialist states. That did not happen and the working classes supported their states in the war.

The Marxist perspective of the International proved not fit for purpose and thereby created a political vacuum in that there was not a unified Socialist response to the war.

Marxists such as Liebknecht treated the German state as causing the war and called in effect for its destruction and regarded those who supported it, such as Roger Casement, as traitors! This despite the fact that the state was the most socially progressive in the Europe of its time and was a victim rather the cause the war.

War is about the destruction of states – period. But society cannot function without states and all classes need them to function. Otherwise we have a state of nature and that cannot, and will not, be tolerated. All classes have an interest in avoiding this and conflicts between them must be mediated to ensure survival of the state when that becomes an issue and it is THE issue for states and their peoples that are defeated in war.

The European Marxist perspective of the period did not appreciate this and promoted unmediated class struggle which was inevitably seen as endangering the state. (The most successful of the Communist Parties, the Italian, later concluded that a Historic Compromise was necessary for their success.)

The role of fascism in creating a functional state in the post war Europe period was recognised and fully supported as a means of doing this by, among others, Churchill. He fully supported a state’s right to be fascist when necessary and therefore his advocating of war against Germany was not on the basis of fascism. It was the balance of power principle that mattered and was the justification for him and Britain for both World Wars. As he bluntly and brutally put it to the US Congress “The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet” (19 May 1943).. 

So WWII was not an anti fascist war for him or indeed for Russia who fought it as the Great Patriotic War. The war was in reality a collection of wars each with its own dynamic and retrospectively treated as one. It is misleading in the extreme to see it through the prism of fascism which is now the standard view. This leads to a totally squinted view of the history/politics of the period and the war.

It was the latest and the last act of Britain’s balance of power strategy towards Europe whose result this time was to remove Europe from the centre of word politics, i.e., the destruction of Europe as a political entity.

The case of Connolly in Ireland is very instructive as an example of a true Marxist of the 2Nd International who was faced with the dilemma of the collapse of the International. He decided, no doubt after much soul searching, that the only alternative for him as a socialist was to ally with radical nationalists in the creation of a state that would acknowledge the role of the working class and have a socialist input as the basis of that state, hence his leading role in the 1916 Rising. 

Despite its connotations he could therefore be accurately described as a national Socialist. Realities cannot be reduced to labels which can obscure as much as they can enlighten situations.

And the labelling of some political activities today in the terms of the inter war period is assuming that history is repeating itself and is predictable and at best this is intellectual laziness and bankruptcy and at worst can lead to delusional and dangerous conclusions.

Yours etc

Jack Lane

4/9/2026