WORLD WORLDWIDE AUSTRALIA - news journal UPDATE - (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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