Fascism, a plant that thrives in any climate. Australia’s “New Guard”

In 1931, at the height of the social crisis caused by the Great Depression, an armed, reactionary paramilitary group known as the “New Guard” was formed in Australia.

Founded by Lieutenant Colonel Eric Campbell, a First World War veteran, lawyer and petty-bourgeois ideologue, the New Guard emerged in Sydney as an open defender of capitalism against the growing wave of working-class unrest and the spectre of revolutionary change. Although often presented in bourgeois historiography as a “quaint” moment of political extremism, the New Guard, like other fascist movements of the period, must be understood not as an anomaly, but as a concentrated expression of the bourgeois class’s terror in the face of the collapse of the capitalist system.

The 1920s and early 1930s marked a historic turning point throughout the capitalist world. The collapse of post-World War I stabilisation efforts gave way to a new global crisis: overproduction, financial chaos, mass unemployment and political unrest.

In Australia, an appendage of the British imperialist system of capital, the limitations of its protected economic model and its dependence on raw materials were laid bare. When the international financial system crumbled and demand for wool, wheat and minerals collapsed, the fragile foundations of its economy imploded. Within two years, unemployment reached almost a third of the workforce. All illusions of liberal prosperity were shattered.

The New Guard claimed (and we emphasise “claimed”) to have over 50,000 members, mainly from the threatened strata of the petty bourgeoisie and the well-to-do strata of the working class. Its base was concentrated among former officers, civil servants, small landowners, shopkeepers, skilled craftsmen and clerks, i.e. those whose previous stability had been directly undermined by the crisis. These strata, suspended between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, have no independent historical trajectory. In periods of capitalist expansion, they can identify with liberal democracy. In periods of collapse, however, their fear of proletarian revolution transforms them into shock troops of reaction; Their hatred of ‘socialism’ is hatred of proletarian equality; their desire for ‘order’ is the desire to preserve their threatened privileges under the capitalist hierarchy.

The stated aims of this organisation were a “loyal, monarchical and constitutional government”, national unity and the eradication of “Bolshevism”, by which was meant any threat to property, hierarchy and the imperialist state. It developed a highly structured command hierarchy, conducted military-style drills, and carried out acts of violence against left-wing meetings and trade union demonstrations.

While claiming to defend constitutionalism, its practices revealed a counter-revolutionary will ready to overstep legality when the state hesitated. This is not a contradiction, but the very essence of bourgeois democracy, which maintains its legal mask only as long as the class balance allows it.

The New Guard’s programme – monarchist, nationalist, anti-parliamentary but virulently anti-communist – represented the classic fascist synthesis: an ideological league composed of the panic of the middle class and the need for discipline of capital in its various components. Like its Italian and German predecessors, the New Guard never offered an original world view, but merely regurgitated the historical debris of a bourgeois society in decline. Campbell himself explicitly looked to Mussolini as a model and praised the Duce’s “corporate state”, hoping to import its organisational model to Australia. His subsequent attempt to form the Centre Party in 1933, after a visit to Fascist Italy, demonstrates the conscious ideological importation of the Italian model to Australia, albeit adapted to local parliamentary conditions. His most spectacular action took place in March 1932, when Francis De Groot, a member of the New Guard, cut the ribbon on horseback at the inauguration of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, an act intended to prevent Labour Premier Jack Lang and symbolically “restore” the authority of the Crown. But the New Guard was not born as an isolated phenomenon. Its growth corresponded directly to the intensification of capitalist contradictions. The depression in Australia had thrown hundreds of thousands of people (mainly proletarians) into unemployment and poverty, while the state apparatus sought to impose brutal austerity through the ‘Premiers’ Plan’. Labour governments, long compromised by their role as administrators of capitalism, teetered on the brink of collapse. Mass strikes, unemployed workers’ councils and communist-led agitation spread through urban centres. It was against this backdrop that the fascist reaction found fertile ground, not in a strong workers’ movement, but in its momentary disorientation and the hesitations of its political leadership.

The CPA (Communist Party of Australia) had managed to establish a foothold in industrial unions and unemployed leagues. The party helped lead strikes in Broken Hill, Newcastle and the coalfields and organised anti-fascist demonstrations in urban centres. For the bourgeoisie, this represented not a minor nuisance but a structural threat. Although still numerically modest, the CPA had succeeded in framing the capitalist crisis in class terms and had begun to link the spontaneous discontent of the workers to a broader revolutionary vision.

In the absence of a decisive proletarian victory, the ruling class prepared its response, not only with laws and ballot boxes, but also with truncheons and paramilitary organisation. In contrast, the ALP (Australian Labor Party), tied to the state and the ruling class by its loyalty to parliament, had neither the will nor the means to lead a revolutionary struggle. Its passive opposition created the vacuum into which fascism stepped.

The Communist Left has always maintained, in accordance with the Marxist docrtine, that fascism is not the product of ideological ‘extremism’ or irrational hatred, but a method of class rule. As we stated in 1921 and reiterated in 1926, fascism emerges when the bourgeoisie can no longer rule through liberal mechanisms. It is a defensive adaptation to revolutionary crises, aimed at preserving the capitalist economy, disarming the proletariat and mobilising the middle classes in reactionary forms. The New Guard played all three roles:

1. It served to defend capitalist production at a time when strikes and social unrest threatened discipline in the workplace.

2. It violently repressed expressions of proletarian class struggle, targeting communist and trade union meetings, trade unionists and unemployed councils.

3. It was created and directed by big capital, framing sections of the petty bourgeoisie, a historically vacillating middle class always ready to side with the strongest.

Although the New Guard failed to seize state power or consolidate itself as a mass fascist party on the Italian or German model, this was not due to any lack of intention or class character. Rather, it reflected the limited depth of the Australian crisis and the ability of the ruling class to continue to conduct its affairs through parliamentary means and the Labour apparatus. Campbell himself, after flirting with open fascism, was discarded by the bourgeoisie once his usefulness had ended. The reaction had achieved its goal: the labour movement was fragmented, the trade unions were contained and the bourgeois order was preserved.

In this sense, the New Guard should not be seen as a failed curiosity of Australian political history, but as a real episode in the international history of bourgeois counter-revolution. Its lessons are enduring. As long as capitalism remains intact and as long as the proletariat does not have its own revolutionary party, fascist forms – whether marginal or dominant – will return wherever the ruling class faces a crisis and needs a stick to ensure its domination.

The only way against fascism, as against liberalism, is proletarian revolution: the destruction of the capitalist state, the abolition of wage labour and the dictatorship of the working class, led by its communist party.