As the year 1936 dawned, black revolutionary CLR James warned in the paper of the Independent Labour Party (still at that time a sizeable organisation) that: 'The ruling classes, broadly speaking, are pro-fascist ... rule they must, by fraud or through Parliament and the Press, or when that fails by force through fascism ... and at the first signs of them we must apply the only remedy—organised bands of workers who will drive the fascists off the streets.'⁸
Events in Europe highlighted the danger. Nazi terror held sway in Austria and Germany. The Italian workers' organisations had long been smashed. In Paris, riots erupted as Fascists marched on the National Assembly. But the greatest blow was yet to come. The new line of the Communist International placed its hopes on 'Popular Front' alliances between workers and bourgeois parties to 'defend democracy.' Such a government now ruled in Spain. In July, sections of the army under Franco's command rose in arms with German and Italian aid and there too brought fascism to power.
The shock of these events reverberated through the British working class. It was in this atmosphere that Mosley launched his forces into the working class districts of London's East End, where a quarter of the population was Jewish. Claiming Keir-Hardie as the forerunner of the British Union of Fascists, fascist slogans declared: 'If you love your country, you are a National. If you love her people you are a Socialist. Be a National-Socialist!' Intensive recruitment drives rendered the East End the BUF's main base, with walls carrying the message, 'Perish Judah.' Street battles occurred almost daily.
As winter approached, Mosley announced a march across East London, from the City via Aldgate to Limehouse and Bethnal Green. Despite constant liberal protests, the Home Secretary declined to intervene. The date was set for 4 October 1936, a Sunday.
CABLE STREET
Resistance on a massive scale to Mosley was anticipated, but needed organisation. The Labour Party and trade union leaders, however, told workers to stay away.⁹ The Communist Party also held back. It had projected a major youth rally for the same Sunday in Trafalgar Square, and refused to cancel this until 1 October. The Daily Worker played down the issue until only days before the march, when the pressure had become irresistible. The 'official' CP record, written by Phil Piratin, virtually concedes this: 'What should be the character of the action against Mosley? It was felt that the workers would rally in huge numbers, and plans were made accordingly.' He continues, however: 'On that occasion, the leadership of the CP was undisputed.'¹⁰
In fact, the Independent Labour Party, which Piratin fails even to mention, played a leading role in calling for action. The ILP at that time stood to the left of the CP, opposing the inevitable concessions to bourgeois forces which accompanied the 'Popular Front' tactic. It was influenced by revolutionary agitation, and the Trotskyist movement, though small, was not without impact.
Following a split in 1933, a minority had entered the ILP, and published a paper The Fight as its marxist wing. The majority worked inside the Labour Party and Labour League of Youth through the paper Youth Militant.
These militants pressed for mass action to halt Mosley. Hundreds of Labour Party members and trade unionists responded to the call, and splits appeared in the East End CPs and YCLs. Jewish workers ignored the appeals of their bourgeois Board of Deputies to avoid conflicts. Dockworkers voted to participate. By mid-morning on the Sunday, 250,000 workers were on the streets.¹¹
Some 7,000 police materialised to protect the fascists, whose coach windows were smashed by flying stones from the crowd. The police repeatedly charged to clear a way through, and shop fronts caved in as the workers clung to their positions, blocking Gardners Corner. Trams abandoned by anti-fascist drivers reinforced the mass resistance.¹² As the battle spread beyond control, the police invaded Cable Street, only to encounter prepared barricades. Milk bottles and stones showered on them, forcing several to actually surrender. The Spanish workers' slogan 'They Shall Not Pass' carried the day. With the fighting still raging, the police at last ordered the fascists to withdraw. The blackshirts retreated across the city, leaving the anti-fascists to celebrate for hours.
... AND AFTER
The Government, said Blackshirt, had 'surrendered to Jewry.'¹³ Now the working class movement faced the crucial task of developing this victory to smash the fascists outright. But the Stalinists reverted to calls for a Popular Front, as opposed to organising the mobilised masses. A CP statement summarising the workers' triumph on the night of the battle ended 'Forward now to the united front and the People's Front all over Britain,' pointing to the forthcoming Labour Party conference.
Predictably, such hopes were dashed. Within ten days the Daily Worker was reflecting how the Labour Conference 'rose again and again in applause at every reference to the victory of the London workers,' but 'the resolution carried only found the incident "deplorable"'.¹⁵
In the face of social democratic inaction, the ILP drew a different moral: 'Unity of action must be maintained, and out of it must be built not only a movement of resistance to fascism, but a united militant working class which will go forward to win Workers' Power ... In East and North London today, the workers are compelled seriously to consider the question of establishing an organisation to defend themselves.'¹⁶ The ILP proposed an 'all-in conference' of workers' organisations to commence this task.
EAST END CONFERENCE
The need for organised and sustained mass action was apparent. Vengeance-seeking Mosleyites terrori[se]d Jewish passers-by in Mile End Road, throwing a seven-year old girl through a shop window. Fifteen thousand workers marched the next Sunday under the slogan 'Fascism must be smashed!' The ILP opened an anti-fascist HQ, held nightly meetings, and established a fund to combat Mosley, constantly urging the creation of a workers' defence force.
Eventually, an East End anti-fascist conference was held, organised by the Socialist League at Whitechapel. The official Labour Party leadership discouraged attendance, but 125 delegates came from union branches, local Labour Parties, Labour League of Youth branches, the ILP, and some CP and Jewish community organisations. A committee was elected, and an agreement reached on unified stewarding for working class meetings and on 'organised resistance' to the BUF, despite CP attempts to 'water down' these efforts.¹⁷
But obviously these moves by themselves carried insufficient strength to take the working class on to a general offensive. This permitted the State to intervene.
FASCISM ABANDONED
The arousal of the masses had seriously worried the ruling class. The government therefore rushed in the Public Order Act, banning political uniforms and limiting the right to organise demonstrations, to the delight of the Labour Party opposition in parliament. This 'anti-fascist' legislation has since been generously applied to the socialist left on various occasions.
The ILP, for its part, warned that: 'Any such proposals must be resisted to the utmost ... workers must not think that this will end the menace of fascism.'¹⁸ This proved correct. The failure to build on the Cable Street victory allowed Mosley to fight on for months. Despite a financial crisis and splits inside the BUF, the fascists provoked another violent clash in Jamaica Road, South London in 1937; took 20% of the votes in some local elections; and as late as 1939 could gather 15,000 at major rallies.
The approach of war, however, with its consequent armaments drive, destroyed Mosley's dreams of a new depression that would instigate fascist rule; and the alignment of British imperialism against Hitler finally installed the BUF's leadership in Brixton prison under Defence Regulation 186 [sic] in May 1940. Capital had no further need of this 'instrument of steel.'
It is beyond doubt that the successes at Cable Street and elsewhere had dented and damaged the fascist movement. In clear contrast to the timidity of reformism, and the zig-zagging policies of Stalinism, revolutionaries and militants in the working class movement had fashioned unity in action by the masses on the streets. Their call for a standing workers' defence force, independent of the State, remains valid in our time whenever fascism threatens—and links the duty to smash fascism to its logical corollary in eliminating the root problem—capitalism itself.
1. The Corporate State, by A. Raven Thomson, published by the BUF.
2. Blackshirt, BUF paper, 1 June 1934.
3. Who Backs Mosley? Labour Research Department, 1934.
4. Democracy and Fascism, Communist Party pamphlet, 1933.
5. Printers and the Fascist Menace, published by the Printing and Allied Trades Anti-Fascist Movement 1934.
6. The Fascist Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1, January 1935.
7. The Fascists in Britain, by Colin Cross, Barrie & Rockliff, 1961, page 123.
8. New Leader, ILP weekly, 3 January 1936.
9. Daily Herald, 3 October 1936.
10. Our Flag Stays Red, by Phil Piratin, Thames Publications, 1948.
11. New Leader, 9 October 1936.
12. Piratin, op.cit.
13. Blackshirt, 10 October 1936.
14. Daily Worker, 5 October 1936.
15. Daily Worker, 15 October 1936.
16. They Did NOT Pass, ILP pamphlet, 1936.
17. New Leader, 6 November 1936.
18. New Leader, 23 October 1936.