The BNP and Trotskyists chasing their own tails

Comrade John McKee of Permanent Revolution has written a stupidly illogical ‘critique’ of the CPGB’s view on the BNP and EDL, taking James Turley and myself to task for our recent articles (see ‘CPGB defends Nick Griffin’s “democratic rights”’: www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/2859).
In a flagrant disregard for evidence and facts, the comrade writes that the EDL is the BNP’s “boot-boy front”. He accuses the CPGB and myself of “deliberate naivety” because we have looked at the evidence and facts, and concluded that the mutual antipathy between the BNP and EDL is genuine. Of course, we accept that individual BNP members have been involved with the EDL - why else would the BNP threaten disciplinary action against them and declare the EDL a “proscribed organisation”?
Comrade McKee fantasises about the BNP “wanting to maintain some distance between its respectable profile and its street fighting wing”, but this “entirely bogus separation is strictly for public consumption”. Think about it. How can the BNP say one thing in public, including to its own members and supporters, and precisely the opposite covertly? Don’t you think it might cause some confusion amongst its own rank and file if the BNP were secretly running the EDL and urging its members to support it, while publicly threatening them with expulsion if they did? We also accept that the BNP is perfectly capable of lying about all sorts of things, but it is the duty of communists to identify when it is doing so and when it might just be telling the truth.
McKee displays the usual inability to actually deal with what comrade James Turley and I have been saying: “Right on queue [sic], the CPGB’s Weekly Worker launches a campaign to explain why socialists and anti-fascists should abandon ‘no platform for fascists’ and support Griffin’s right to a place in the mass media.”
We have not launched any “campaign” for Nick Griffin’s “democratic rights”. We are for defending the hard won rights of the working class and oppose all state bans and censorship, which inevitably will be wielded against us. We therefore also oppose demands by the left for the state to enforce such bans or for media outlets like the BBC to decide what views are or are not acceptable. As for ‘no platform’, we want to restate the classical Marxist case for utilising various tactics in the struggle in the fight against the far right - tactics which obviously include denying them a platform when appropriate. In the early 1920s the Communist Party of Germany tore apart the ideas of the Nazis not only in pamphlets, but on shared platforms. Under different circumstances they were prepared to tear them apart physically.
Comrade McKee states: “Like Ben Lewis, Turley does not rule out action against the fascists, but not now of course.” Amazingly, he then goes on to quote comrade Turley precisely referring to “now”: “If our working class organisations, meetings and demonstrations are being directly threatened in a given locality, then socialists, trade unionists and others should take whatever steps are necessary to defend them. But this is not true of the situation in British politics at large.”
It is the final sentence quoted above that McKee particularly dislikes: “This is utter complacency. If [the CPGB] had any influence, which fortunately it doesn’t, it would completely disarm the struggle against fascism and the BNP. This precisely needs to take place before it has built roots and can mobilise its passive voting base onto the streets.” Note that comrade McKee does not dispute the contention that working class events are usually not physically attacked by far-right thugs at this time, but he wants us to behave (or pretend to behave) as though they were anyway.
What the comrade is unwilling, or unable, to countenance is that the main threat to the workers’ movement does not come from the far right. It is the bourgeois state that is preparing a full-scale assault on the postal workers, planning to impose vicious cuts on all of us, waging a murderous war in Afghanistan and - as Nick Griffin points out whenever he is interviewed - is actually deporting refugees and asylum-seekers in the here and now. As Trotsky lucidly points out in his writings on fascism (have any of the so-called Trotskyists even read this stuff?), confusing the nature of threat of the far right can have disastrous tactical and strategic implications.
The icing on the cake comes when McKee scoffs at me for highlighting the core of the problem: the inability of the purportedly Marxist left to articulate its own political alternative in elections in the struggle to become a recognised force in society. He writes: “So, while the BNP are busy spreading their fascist politics across the media, the Marxists need to win elections in order to force ‘the establishment to start taking us seriously’. As if the establishment have ever been forced to do anything by the election of MPs.”
This is pathetic. The BNP is becoming recognised in society because it is standing candidates, getting elected and on some sort of level winning the political argument amongst a working class left high and dry by the idiocy of the confessional sects. Instead of constructing a response which focuses on the main enemy - the capitalist state - and on the need for a working class party and programme capable of challenging it, too many on the left want to chase around after the BNP like a dog chasing its tail.
As it cannot beat the BNP where it counts - in the battle of ideas - it views the ill-organised and disparate forces of the EDL as a godsend, pretending it is seeing off the “fascist” BNP’s “street fighting wing”.
If my insistence on party, programme and winning the battle of ideas makes me a “liberal wearing a communist mask” and a “democrat, not a communist”, then that says everything about McKee. We in the CPGB are the ones who have consistently fought for the unity of Marxists as Marxists in a political party now, whereas the PR comrades go along with the left ‘common sense’ of setting up organisations ‘not programmatically delimited between reform and revolution’ to swim in, as a means of building their own narrow sect.
Small wonder then that leading PR member Bill Jefferies was so keen on blocking attempts to mobilise against the EDL in Manchester around openly socialist politics. Much better to tail the bourgeois multiculturalist consensus and throw in a bit of 1980s rhetoric for good measure.