The murder of Labour MP Jo Cox by a British fascist, the prominence of the far right in the campaign for Brexit, the dramatic rise of extreme nationalist forces across Europe and the increased prominence of organisations like the United Patriots Front in Australia all raise the question of how fascist movements can be challenged.

History never repeats exactly, and there are many differences between the situation today and that during the first big upsurge of fascist movements in the 1930s. Nonetheless, the left wing anti-fascist campaigns of the past provide important lessons for how these new far right movements can be pushed back.

One of the most important and successful anti-fascist campaigns of the 1930s was the struggle against the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in East End of London. Not only did the left militantly challenge the far right on the streets, they also undercut the fascist foray into working class areas by proving themselves the best fighters for workers’ rights.

Fascism with an English accent

By the mid-1930s, fascism was on the rise across Europe. Mussolini had come to power in Italy, Hitler had been given dictatorial powers in Germany in March 1933, and in Spain there was an increasing left-right polarisation that erupted into civil war in July 1936. In England, the depression had gutted many working class communities. On the right, the figure of Oswald Mosley loomed large. Mosley was a strong supporter of Hitler and his movement. Such was his enthusiasm that he travelled to Germany to be married by Goebbels.

Mosley had some early success in cohering a British fascist movement. The British Union of Fascists (BUF) had between 35,000 and 40,000 active members in 1934.

In the spirit of Italian fascism, much of Mosley’s early rhetoric had been predominantly anti-communist, but the BUF’s propaganda increasingly developed an anti-Semitic tone. This was reinforced by heavily Jewish areas often having high concentrations of leftists.

The East End neighbourhood of Stepney was populated by at least 60,000 working class Jews. Mosley regularly organised thugs to smash shop windows and attack left wing meetings. In his memoirs, local communist Joe Jacobs recalled, “In many places throughout the East End the slogan ‘Perish Juda’ was whitewashed on the walls. Eventually the letters ‘PJ’ were sufficient”.

By 1936, there were regular skirmishes between radical leftists and Blackshirts. Whenever the fascists tried to organise public meetings, they were besieged. In his autobiography, Communist Party member Phil Piratin described a communist shipman scaling the ceiling beams in one of the fascist meeting halls. The less nimble Mosleyites couldn’t get high enough to dislodge him, and so he spent the entire meeting yelling obscenities at the Blackshirt speakers. The meeting had to finish early.

While Mosley had built on the frustrations of the middle classes, the BUF also tried to rally working class support. They campaigned on living standards and job losses in depressed and disaffected working class communities. They directed hostility away from the capitalist system and towards Jews, migrants and the big banks. They had some success.

Piratin described watching a fascist march from Salmon Lane in late 1936: “I was curious to see who and what kind of people would march … About 1,500 men, women (some with babies in their arms), and youngsters marched behind Mosley’s banner. I knew some of these people, some of the men wore trade union badges”.

It would be imperative to challenge the fascist activist core as they mobilised, while simultaneously attempting to undercut their working class base.

Showdown

By the middle of 1936, the fascists were losing ground. Some of the better-off Mosleyites had returned to the safety of traditional conservatism, and some of their working class recruits were being won away. In a desperate move, the Blackshirts tried to regain momentum by organising a mass march through the East End, the centre of London’s Jewish and Irish working class.

Local leftists, unionists and others sprung into action. A petition calling for the Blackshirt march to be banned was ignored by the home secretary, who began to prepare the police to facilitate the march. In response, local Jewish and Irish workers, members of the Independent Labour Party and, after some prevarication, the Communist Party, called a counter-demonstration.

Thousands of homes were leafleted, posters were plastered and messengers on motorbikes drove through the East End calling locals to arms. Detailed preparations for the day began. Legal and medical aid was prepared. Marshals were designated to lead contingents to stop the fascists from marching along their proposed route. The slogan of the day was “They shall not pass”.

Concerned with respectability, the British Labour Party urged its members to stay home and trust the cops to deal with the fascists. The conservative Jewish Board of Deputies told its members: “If you go out on the streets you will be castigated as violent Jews”. Such an attitude was greeted with disdain by many working class Jews. Jacobs reflected: “The Jewish leaders always pleaded for dignified behaviour and support for religion and trust in the authorities to be fair and decent. Germany didn’t seem to show that this attitude was right”.

On the morning of 4 October, 7,000 fascists gathered in Whitechapel to prepare to march through Victoria Park to the centre of the East End. Ten thousand police were deployed, 4,000 of them on horseback. They were instructed to protect the fascists and clear their way. But the left had done their work. The streets of East London teemed with more than 100,000 anti-fascists, some of whom had travelled across the country to attend. Participant Bill Fishman told a Citizen TV documentary maker: “What was most inspiring for me was to see bearded Jews and Irish Dockers standing together behind police lines”.

Oxford historian Alan Hudson described the dynamics of the march: “It brought very diverse communities together. It brought them together as people who opposed fascist violence, not on the basis of ethnicity, but on the basis of politics. That is an important point to remember in the contemporary discussion”.

These working class anti-fascists managed to corral the fascists into Cable Street, where barricades were made using old cars, an abandoned tram and cobblestones. Jacobs described the scene vividly: “Young people were perched on the lampposts and any other vantage point … directing the crowd towards the weak spots in the front with the police”.

The police tried to charge through the massing crowds but, as Piratin said, “they could make no impression on this immense human barricade”. Kids threw marbles under the police horses’ hoofs. Local women emptied dirty water and slops over the heads of the constabulary. A number of police surrendered, which confused the locals. Piratin recalled, “This had never happened before, so the lads didn’t know what to do, but they took away their batons, and one took a helmet for his son as a souvenir”.

By the day’s end, the fascists had been decisively driven out of the East End.

Aftermath

Despite hostile responses from the Labour Party and other liberal voices in the press, who equated the violence of the anti-fascists to the violence of the fascists, the working class of the East End was united and powerful. Piratin expressed it best: “Those who were tongue tied the day before were full of expression that evening; they had a message to give; they were proud and they were confident. They no longer needed to be told, ‘have confidence’. The crowds were in charge. The police were absent”.

While a magnificent display of working class strength and solidarity, the battle of Cable Street did not immediately destroy the BUF. The Communist Party continued the campaign against the fascists’ bases in working class areas. This involved agitating for tenants’ rights in some of the most impoverished slums of London.

The CP had helped established a tenants’ rights group to fight the slumlords and stop evictions in the deceptively titled Paragon Mansions. In doing so, they discovered that a number of families had joined the BUF. As it transpired, two of these families had been threatened with eviction. The CP jumped into action, seeing this as an opportunity to prove in practice why the left was the natural ally of workers and the poor and the fascists were not.

The party proposed to the families that they call a mass tenants’ meeting and organise to resist the evictions. One of the BUF families was hostile and refused to participate at first, but as the organising began to gather momentum, it joined in. The differences between the fascists and communists were drawn out. Piratin described:

“[W]e asked this member of the BUF about to be evicted what the fascists had done for him. He said that he had raised the matter, but they had no intention of doing anything. This was a very valuable piece of information to be used by us in disillusioning many of the BUF supporters.”

The tenants and the CP barricaded the home, the women made bombs of mouldy old flour to pelt the bailiffs with, and all were ready for a battle. The police were called and rebuffed by barricades and taunts. In the end, the slumlords were forced to rescind the eviction notices. The families resigned from the BUF. Events such as this proved salutary in the broader battle against the fascists.

Both the battle of Cable Street and the Communist-led anti-eviction campaigns provide useful lessons for battling nascent fascist movements today. Militant movements on the streets are vital in undermining fascist hubris. Fascist marches are designed, as Hitler himself put it, to “burn into the little man’s soul the proud conviction that, though a little worm, he is nevertheless part of a great dragon”.

Anti-fascist movements must prove through numbers, bravery and determination that the fascists are not as powerful as they think. But this is not enough. The left must be the most ferocious and principled fighters for working class rights. In Britain and Europe today, economic crisis and austerity are ravaging working class communities, and the old parties of the labour movement and the left have proved ineffectual at best and complicit at worst.

This opens space for the right to gain a toehold. Rebuilding organisations and working class movements that have an unswerving commitment to fighting capitalism and its effects is a fundamental part of the battle against fascism today, just as it was in the 1930s.