by Tommy Johnson
Beginning last month, the streets of England have been embroiled in right-wing riots against immigrants. Armed with nationalist flags, fire bombs, sticks, and rocks, far-right gangs mobilized the most backward sections of the English masses to carry out combative attacks against religious and housing infrastructure associated with the immigrant masses. In this context, the police were also attacked. Right-wing populism, most often built on total lies or half truths, is never to be underestimated because it is capable of mobilizing a mass base: the far-right agitators copy tactics of the left, embed in the people’s just struggles, and corrupt them in the interests of imperialism.
Many of the participants have been deceived by a right-wing lie that claimed that an immigrant Muslim carried out a knife attack against children and teachers at a dance studio for young girls. The attack was carried out by a 17-year-old from Wales. Due to the age of the attacker, the authorities did not release his identity right away, and far-right leaders via their social media platforms took to inventing a false story, an old trick of fascism to rile the most backward ideas among the people into deadly and hate-filled actions. This follows years of the ruling class and monopoly media conditioning society to blame its problems on immigration, a trick that divides workers and helps the ruling class escape responsibility.
In no less than seven cities the lies of the right have manifested in massive attacks on immigrants and boiled over into indiscriminate riots. A refugee center in Rotherham was attacked and burned. In response to the mass-reactionary protests and riots, an even greater pro-people mass demonstration movement has formed, dwarfing the reactionaries in size and engulfing them in a sea of opposition. This is most pronounced and well-organized in the immigrant communities themselves, where Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and non-religious community groups of immigrants and native born peoples have come together in community self-defense. They have formed patrols and pickets, armed themselves with whatever they have available and taken to the streets in opposition to the police who in some cases stand by when their neighborhoods come under attack. More broadly, the masses have condemned the attempts of the right and promise to put a stop to them.
There are those who raise a false banner of “antifascism” that use the occasion to call for tailing one or another faction of the bourgeoisie and bringing the masses under the leadership of imperialism and its interests. This approach to antifascism, preferred by anarchists and revisionists alike, falls into the same logic of the right—use a phantom to provoke fear, shoring up votes or support for a ruling-class party.
The knife attack that served as the catalyst for the riots and counter-demonstrations had nothing at all to do with immigration; even if it did, it is correct to defend the masses and especially the immigrant masses who are forced by imperialism to immigrate, where they then face racial discrimination and on average lower wages and worse living conditions. In reality, the knife attack follows a trend in regards to the social isolation and maladjustment prevalent among the youth. The knife attacker was not unlike the school shooters in the United States who often carry out reactionary violence with a lack of clear political motive. Their short lives are developed in conditions of paranoia, violence, and the reactionary ideologies of the ruling class fed to them through the media and entertainment. Real treatment for their conditions is often out of reach due to the private and for-profit medical industries. What results is a decomposed form of anti-social nihilism and extreme individualism.
As the old-societies further rot, it is on the front-lines of struggle where new people are forged, who, through fighting the imperialist enemies of the people and confronting all of their lies, can create the organizational forms the masses require to take power and reshape the old world into a new one.
