In the various struggles against racist actions on the entry of Ugandan Asians the question of 'free speech for fascists always comes up. People often claim it is an infringement of 'democracy to break up even National Front meetings. This issue is so important that it is worth looking at in detail.
WHAT IS FREE SPEECH?
Under capitalism there is no free speech for the mass of the population. The various points of view of the capitalist class are put forward via mass circulation papers, radio and television. No such rights exist for the rest of the population. As someone once said, free speech is like the Ritz hotel -it is open to everybody.....provided you have the money.
However even if what is called "free speech" is a fraud for most people, it is still in the interests of the working class to defend even this bourgeois right. It is far casier to struggle under conditions of such free speech' than under conditions of military, fascist, or strong state rule, For this reason, revolutionaries are always to the fore in the struggle to defend bourgeois democratic rights against right-wing attacks.
Tendencies such as fascism, however, do not aim to defend "free speech". On the contrary. their racist campaigns are a means to destroy the organisations of the working class which defend such bourgeois democratic rights. The goal of their meetings and demonstrations is the building of a mass movement which can destroy bourgeois democracy and the power of the working class.
ONLY ONE WAY It is for this reason that the only way to deal with fascist type organisations like the National Front is to break up their activities before they grow to a size where they can begin to smash the activities of the working class. Trotsky made this clear thirty years ago: " Hitler explains his success in his book. The Social Democracy was extremely powerful. To a meeting of the Social Democracy he sent a band with the Fascist leader Rudolf Hess. He says that at the end of the meeting his thirty boys evicted all the workers and they were incapable of opposition. Then he knew he would be victorious."
We are nowhere near a threatened Fascist coup yet, but the methods necessary for preventing such a threat must be explained and demonstrated in practice now. Actions against the organisations of the right are not just part of the struggle against racism. They are the first shots in a war that will grow in importance in the coming years in Britain. We must begin to adopt the right tactics right from the start.
NO PLATFORM FOR RACISTS!