Creeping fascism was named by Neil Faulkner, Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda, in a book Public Reading Rooms published in 2017 and reissued in 2019, and restated by Faulkner alone in 2021, a year before his death. Faulkner and Hearse were founders of what became Anticapitalist Resistance, so this is an argument with our own. Their claim was that fascism is not a condition a country arrives at but a process it undergoes, and that the process was already running in Britain and the United States. Waiting for uniforms and militias before naming it would mean noticing too late. The primary instrument, they argued, was not the party or the paramilitary but the existing state, which the far right sets out to capture and repurpose rather than to overthrow. The argument was right, and the period it described has ended. These theses are about what follows.
1. The thesis was right about the thing hardest to concede. Fascism is a process, and the argument over whether a given organisation is technically fascist is futile. Neil Faulkner wrote that in 2021 and it has held through everything since. He was right too that the primary instrument of repression is the existing bourgeois state, and that the party and the paramilitary are means to the takeover of it. Whoever spent the years after 2017 waiting for a British Mosley before sounding the alarm missed two protest statutes drafted loosely enough that the police write them in practice, and the arrests that followed at a vigil and at a coronation.
2. It was right about the ground. German union density is about half what it was in 1980, and in Saxony-Anhalt 45 per cent of employees now work somewhere with neither a collective agreement nor a works council, against 33 per cent in 2000. Interwar fascism needed a mass movement because it faced a fortress. What four decades of defeat have altered is the price. A thinned class is broken more cheaply, and cheapness is what has changed, not the nature of the operation.
3. It did not anticipate that the absences would fill. The phrase was coined in 2017 to name a period defined by two things missing, a far-right party of governmental weight and a street force worth the name, with the danger carried in the meantime by an authoritarian state. On 7 May 2026 Reform UK took thirty-four seats in the Senedd and the official opposition in Wales, and seventeen at Holyrood from none. On Saturday 5 September more than three hundred uniformed men closed Dover’s passenger and freight port for a morning and went home unarrested. The day after, the AfD took 44.6 per cent in Saxony-Anhalt and 39 seats of 83, three short of governing alone.
4. The second failure of anticipation is internal to the argument, and the evidence for it is in thesis 1. What vindicated the thesis in 2021 is what convicts it in 2026. Its British application lists two protest statutes, a vigil, a coronation and a column of arrests, and contains no far-right movement at all, because in 2021 there was none to leave out. The front that follows from such a list is a coalition in defence of civil liberties, which is the popular frontism Faulkner rejects by name in the same articles where he defends the thesis. Dover collapsed the contradiction in the useful direction. The discipline of the march and the asymmetry of the policing were one event, and a front built against either half alone would have been standing in the wrong street.
5. This is a periodisation and not a repudiation, and the distinction is worth stating plainly, because Faulkner wrote the revisited version in 2021 and died in February 2022, in the organisation these theses are addressed to. The analysis did not fail. It described a transition and the transition has happened. Creeping says gradual, a slide down a gradient, which is what Mandel refused in 1969. No police state, he wrote, has the means to atomise and demoralise a conscious class of millions over years; only a mobilised mass can hold a class down that long, and there is therefore no peaceful growing-over from bourgeois democracy into fascism. What the phrase was reaching for was a convergence running from both sides at once, authoritarian statism taking on the ideological equipment of fascism, the far right giving up the permanent uniform for respectability. That gap has closed. What is left is a break, and nobody creeps across a break.
6. The better term is already to hand. Fascisation, in Ugo Palheta’s use, names the process and not the actor: what precedes and materially prepares the construction of a fascist state, with no requirement that a movement take the citadel first. The process has not changed, only its phase. Call what is now opening the governmental phase of fascisation, in which the far right contests or holds administration and fields a street force in the same season. Each makes the other cheap. A state that polices asymmetrically makes the street force cheap to put out, and a street force in the street makes the administrative measure look like public demand rather than government preference.
7. They are not fascist, and saying so is part of this argument rather than an objection to it. Reform UK has no militia, it accepts election results, and it has not set out to break the unions. To call it fascist would be to say the destruction is under way when it is not, and that is Mandel’s criterion, which these theses use. What the criterion describes is a process with several hands in it, and not a party. The state supplies the legal instruments and the governing parties supply the terrain, and the men in the street come from a formation that is nobody’s electoral property. None of the three is a fascist party, and the combination is what the criterion exists to measure. The trap is in the last step. If the word may be used only once the organisations are being destroyed, then it can be applied only afterwards, and a forecast has been turned into a post-mortem. Allan Harris had Britain exactly right in September 1969 when he wrote that the National Front and Powell posed no fascist danger at that time. He was wrong three paragraphs later, in the same three columns, when he concluded that the tasks were therefore very different from those of fighting fascism. Blair Peach was killed ten years after that.
8. The far-right vote is falling, and that is worth having. Reform UK is at an eighteen-month low, some ten points off its peak of last autumn, third behind Labour and the Conservatives, with Restore Britain on about 4 per cent and taking roughly a tenth of Reform’s voters, and a new Prime Minister in office since 20 July. None of it touches the periodisation, because the periodisation was never a claim about a poll. Thesis 3 named two things that had come into existence, and seats already won are not handed back when polling falls: Reform holds thirty-four in the Senedd and the official opposition in Wales for a five-year term. A split to the right of a party that already stands to the right of the Conservatives is not a de-escalation either. And one mechanism runs the wrong way for the optimistic reading, since respectability is a means to office and a vehicle that has stopped rising has less reason to keep paying for it. The Dover column formed in the eighteenth month of the decline, not during the ascent. What would refute these theses is not a poll. It is street formations that stop recruiting and shrink, and emergency powers repealed by a new government rather than inherited from the last. Above all it is coverage turning where the far-right vote is deepest: collective agreements and works councils in the east German Länder, union recognition and density in the English and Welsh towns where Reform polls highest. Hold us to that and not to Reform’s Tuesday number.
9. Creeping was always a metropolitan word. It describes a slide because a slide is what a country with intact unions and legal parties gets to watch happening to it. In Tehran the shoras were broken between 1980 and 1982 and the Tudeh banned in February 1983. In Moscow the market did the atomising and the state ratified it. Nothing crept in either place, and comrades there have no use for a vocabulary of gradual erosion, because their question is not prevention but reconstruction. Retiring the word costs us nothing and removes an obstacle to a conversation we need to be having.
10. Self-organisation carries the weight, because it is the thing being fought over. Mandel’s criterion is that fascism exists to destroy the organisations of the exploited. Their condition is therefore the only honest measure of the tense, and thickening them is the only work that changes it. Forty-nine per cent of employees in Saxony-Anhalt still hold a collective agreement and thirty-seven per cent have a works council, so the AfD vote was not won in a desert. It was won deepest where there is neither, and a grievance with no organisation around it goes to whoever supplies an author for it. The author supplied was the arriving foreigner, in place of the liquidation agency and the wage gap.
11. Electoral work ranks below that in importance and above it in urgency. The prize is the interior ministry. Wilhelm Frick held it in Thuringia for fourteen months from January 1930 and used them to purge the police and the schools. The civil service followed, and the purges required no Brownshirts. A Minister-President at Magdeburg would hold the police and the funding line of every migrant advice centre and antifascist project in the Land. Denying them administration is defensive work of a material kind. It buys time and it buys nothing else. A French section decided in June to field no presidential candidate and to back a unifying radical-left one, on that reasoning and no other.
12. The united front is the form the other two take. It was formulated for mass struggle and action, and the Communist International put it forward for offensive situations as much as for defensive ones, which is the opposite of the way it is now invoked. It is a criterion for choosing allies before it is a coalition of anyone: assembled from the organisations of the exploited, with the constitutional parties admitted on terms rather than consulted about them. Cable Street was won by people who lived in the streets that were barricaded, and the party that should have called it spent the preceding week directing its members to Trafalgar Square, reversing only days before under pressure from a local petition and from its own branches.
13. The obvious reading of theses 10 to 12 is that they are a sequence: self-organisation while there is time, elections to buy the time, the front to hold the two together. That is not quite right. They move at different speeds and the fastest belongs to the other side, since an interior ministry changes hands in an afternoon and a works council takes ten years. At a conference in July, in a debate on the far-right, a delegate said from the floor that creeping had stopped being the word and galloping was, two months before Dover and Magdeburg made his case for him. The room went with him. Nobody in the discussion that followed said what the change of adverb obliged us to do differently on the Monday. Which leaves the ranking above resting on an inventory nobody is taking, and a ranking of that kind is only as good as the count underneath it.
14. The specifically British form of the problem is that the three tasks have been divided among different people. The electoral alternative is real and it is moving: a new left party assembled out of the Palestine mobilisations, up to three hundred proto-branch meetings, a Green party with more members than the Conservatives, and at Caerphilly a Reform vote that went from 2 to 36 per cent. The workplace and the neighbourhood are not moving alongside it. Read the left press of the last year and the largest fascist-led demonstration in British history is answered, in the same article that reports it, by a proposal about electoral cooperation. Nothing is wrong with the proposal. It is being made by people who will not be at the port on a Saturday morning and who have no standing relationship with a stewards’ committee.
15. The next Dover will be answered by whoever can be in the street at four hours’ notice. The bodies that managed that in 1936, and again at Dover in 1998, had been built for other purposes and were turned to this one. Nothing currently recruiting in Britain was built for either. Whether a party of a hundred thousand members can throw off a stewards’ committee, or whether it discovers in its second year that what it has is a mailing list with a conference, is not something these theses can settle. Nobody has tried it at that scale here since the closed shop went, and most of the people who would know how it was done last time are no longer in the room.
Sources
Three arguments are used here as arguments and not as authorities: Neil Faulkner on fascism as a process, in Creeping Fascism Revisited (2021); Ernest Mandel on why there is no growing-over, in Trotsky’s Theory of Fascism (1969); Ugo Palheta on fascisation, in La nouvelle internationale fasciste (Textuel, 2025) and in “Fascisation and strategy” (International Viewpoint 615, April 2026). Two events are used as evidence and not as emblems: the united front as the Communist International put it in 1921 and 1922, and Cable Street. Allan Harris, “Racism and Fascism”, is in The International of September 1969.
The German workplace figures are from the IAB-Betriebspanel as presented in the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung’s Analysen zur Tarifpolitik. The Saxony-Anhalt, Senedd and Holyrood results are the official returns of 6 September and 7 May 2026. Frick’s ministry ran from 23 January 1930 to 1 April 1931. Dover on 5 September is Dave Kellaway’s account of the following day. The Reform and Restore Britain figures in thesis 8 are the published trackers of August and September 2026. The Iranian chronology follows the standard histories and the Fourth International’s own report of March and April 1983. The fuller case, with the documents, is Red Mole Guide No. 22, What Is Still Standing.