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OUR FLAG STAYS RED
BY PHIL PIRATIN
A REVIEW BY PHIL FRAMPTON
Thousands of workers forming human barricades, bus-drivers carefully parking their vehicles to add to the obstruction, policemen being fought by British Legionnaires and housewives dropping flour and cans on them, police handing over their batons and surrendering to the workers...Piratin vividly describes the great battle to stop the fascists at Cable Street in 1936. This book was written in 1948 and is most valuable for Piratin's account of such anti-fascist struggles in the 'thirties.
The Communist Party were able to play a leading role in the fight against Mosely because of the open hostility of the Labour leaders towards mass action. As a result Piratin and company, for a short time, found themselves at the head of the East London workers' struggles and drew behind them the small shopkeepers and tenants" groupings.
The Cable Street victory greatly lifted the morale of the workers. They had said, 'they shall not pass" and not even the might of the British state machine could break their will. "The terror had lost its meaning. The people now knew that fascism could be defeated if they organised themselves.
For the fascists cheir helpless prostration before the enraged workers meant only demoralisation. Their support slumped and stunned, they turned away from staging grand parades to organising isolated attacks on their enemies.
Hence the book illustrates how only vigorous mass working class activity can stop the fascist menace. But the irony of this 1978 reprint and new preface is it was published just after the battle of Lewisham and in the middle of the biggest
anti-fascisu movement since the 1930s. It appeared at a time when the Communist Party leaders were putting forward moralistic liberal slogans and opposing demands for mass action by the working class.
Even in the 1978 preface, Piratin was forced to conclude, "We should actively support organisations and committees which defend the interests and rights of black and coloured people and be prepared whenever necessary to fight alongside them against racist provocations or attacks ...once again as in the thirties, it must be the masses who oppose the racists and fascists "
A 'Broad Front'?
Contrast this with the sight of the Communist Party and church leaders turning their forces away from the Lewisham battle. They would rather leave the immigrant populace to suffer the fascist provocations than lose their new-found respectability.
The CP have argued for a 'broad front' against fascism. Marxists also strive to draw all the oppressed sections of society into the fight against reaction. But the CP have bowed down to the self-appointed leaders of other layers of society and imagine that they can win the support of the middle classes, for instance, by watering down their programme to accommodate the wishes of the leaders of the Church. the Tories, Liberals, etc. However, decisive action against fascism such as the mobilisation of the trade union movement to protect immigrants and individual trade unionists from the fascist terror, and workers'
control to keep fascism out of factories and schools, all threaten the ruling order. These acts would never be supported by the Liberal and Tory leaders. But history shows that the more backward sections of society will not support the workers' struggle unless they see that their organisations, through bold and decisive action, can achieve victory.
Piratin in the introduction calls for "the more vigorous implementation of the Race Relations Act" yet in the rest of the book hammers out time and time again that the police were not agents of peace and harmony but a barrier to anti-fascists, meting out brutal treatment to all who took action against the fascists. He also describes the successful battle he had to wage in the party to win over the members to the idea that the fascist support could only be seriously undercut by offering concrete solutions to the problems facing their desperate followers. Campaigns on rents, wages and unemployment won over many of the fascist sympathisers.
It is a clear vindication of the strategy adopted by the Militant' which has consistently explained that the 'love thy neighbour' brigade are ultimately useless against the rise of fascism. Fascism appeals to the most desperate sections of society offering them, unlike the leaders of the establishment, a way out of their problems. Socialists can destroy fascism by showing that the labour movement alone has the power to eradicate those problems.
However, this book must be read with care. It is a careful selection of anecdotes specially avoiding the disastrous guiding principles of the Communist Party. There is no mention of how the workers'
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movements were originally weakened by the CP policy of labelling social democratic workers as 'social fascists' between 1929 and 1934, of their call for alliances with the Tories and Liberals, of how Stalin's policies meant Hitler coming to power and the crime of the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
The dishonesty is summed up on the book's cover where we find the outrageous suggestion that the Communist Party were in some way responsible for 'the triumphant labour movement victory of the 1945 elections'. This when prior to and in the course of the election, they had been demanding that Labour enter a coalition with the Tories!
The book only describes the temporary coinciding of the interests of the CP leaders with the heroic
determination of the working class. Nevertheless, the reader is provided with what are valuable lessons for the struggle to free the East End and other areas of the country from the poison of racism and the fascist
gangs.
The current decline and disintegration of the fascist organisations indicates the ease with which the labour movement could crush fascism if these lessons are learnt. Following the anti-fascist movement of 1977/78, the fascists are demoralised. The break up of the NF is clearly apparent from the current tussle for power between Tyndall and Webster. But though the NF may cease to be a significant force, fascism will remain a menace to the workers.
Our Flag Stays Red, by Phil Piratin. Published by Lawrence and Wishart. Available from World Books for £1.50 + 20p postage.
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Already in the Tory Party there are elements whose politics are indistinguishable from many in the NF. With growing disappointment at the inability of the Tories to deal with the crisis or the workers' organisations, this right wing will become a new focus for extreme reaction. Cloaked by the respectability of the right wing of the Tory party, fascism in this form could prove an even bigger menace to the working class.
The very fact that we are discussing how to defeat fascism four decades after Cable Street is a confirmation of the fact that the threat from fascism will reappear time and time again until the working class is able to abolish capitalism removing for ever the inhumanity of class society.
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29 THE 35-HOUR WEEK The Fight Against Unemployment WEEK twentieth IS revolution.
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