Blackshirts, Capitalism and the British Ruling Class

Something has always felt comforting about the conventional British treatment of Oswald Mosley. According to the mythology, fascism was fundamentally foreign to Britain, an unpleasant continental import that could never take root in a country supposedly distinguished by pragmatism, parliamentary traditions and ingrained national moderation. Mosley consequently appears as an eccentric, a political adventurer who temporarily wandered outside the respectable boundaries of British politics before history consigned him to irrelevance.

Stephen Dorril’s Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism provides ample material to demolish this complacent interpretation. Dorril traces Mosley from conventional parliamentary politics into the New Party, the creation of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932, his relationships with European fascism, his antisemitism and his later attempts at political rehabilitation. The book’s documentary strength rests above all on Dorril’s reconstruction of the extensive network surrounding Mosley, including political and aristocratic figures, secret agents, Nazi contacts, adventurers and outright crooks. This evidence matters beyond the biography of a particularly repellent politician. Properly understood, Mosley’s career illuminates the social and political forces that could produce fascism within British capitalism itself.

Mosley did not emerge from the political margins. Born into privilege, he entered Parliament as a Conservative, moved toward Labour, served in Ramsay MacDonald’s government, then broke with the party and established the New Party. His journey towards fascism therefore proceeded through the institutions of respectable bourgeois politics. His authoritarian turn was not an inexplicable psychological conversion but developed amid the enormous contradictions of the interwar period: the decline of British economic supremacy, mass unemployment, the Depression, the crisis of parliamentary government and, above all, the spectre haunting the European ruling classes since the Russian Revolution, the possibility of socialist revolution.

Fascism has consequently to be understood as a class phenomenon rather than simply an ideology of nationalism, racism and dictatorship. Leon Trotsky developed the essential Marxist analysis during Hitler’s rise to power. Fascism mobilised the desperation of the petty bourgeoisie, ruined small proprietors, disillusioned veterans and other socially dislocated layers and directed their anger away from capitalism and towards the organised working class.

But the social layers mobilised by fascism must not be confused with the class interests that fascism ultimately served. The petty bourgeoisie supplied the mass movement and its street fighters; fascist dictatorship defended capitalist property and destroyed the independent political and industrial organisations of the proletariat. The petty bourgeoisie was the battering ram, but it ultimately protected capital's interests.

Dorril shows how readily Mosley’s supposedly marginal movement intersected with elements of respectable British society. Around the BUF appeared wealthy sympathisers, aristocrats, businesspeople, military men, and political figures alongside thugs, adventurers, and political eccentrics. This mixture of drawing room and street corner was not incidental to fascism but central to its social function.

None of this means that the British ruling class collectively supported Mosley. It plainly did not, and it had little immediate need to. British capitalism retained an empire, established parliamentary institutions and, crucially, the services of Labour and the trade-union bureaucracy in containing working-class opposition within the framework of parliamentary reform.

That explains Mosley’s failure far better than appeals to a supposedly tolerant British national character. Fascism remained comparatively weak not because British capitalism was organically democratic, but because the ruling class had not exhausted the traditional mechanisms through which it maintained political authority.

This is what makes Blackshirt more than a biography. Behind Mosley stands a larger historical warning. Fascism was no foreign contamination of an otherwise healthy British political tradition. Mosley emerged from the contradictions of British capitalism itself. The decisive question his history poses, therefore, is not whether Britain was somehow immune to fascism, but under what conditions parts of its ruling class might have concluded that parliamentary methods were no longer sufficient to defend the existing social order.

From parliamentary politician to fascist

Mosley's trajectory was no personal aberration. It expressed the crisis of British capitalism and, inseparably, the bankruptcy of Labour reformism. He passed through both Conservative and Labour politics before breaking with established parliamentarianism. Dorril's account makes clear that Mosley's fascism cannot be reduced to personal ambition or psychological instability. His movement towards authoritarianism occurred amid profound international convulsions: the aftermath of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the decline of British imperial predominance, mass unemployment and the international economic crisis.

Dorril's biography therefore inadvertently poses a larger historical question. What is fascism? Here, Leon Trotsky's Marxist analysis during Hitler's rise remains indispensable. Fascism cannot be understood primarily as extreme intolerance, political violence or the appearance of charismatic dictators. Such descriptions concern its symptoms rather than its class content. As David North stressed in a 2025 discussion of fascism's historical development, fascism emerged after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent wave of working-class radicalisation. It mobilised sections of the petty bourgeoisie, demoralised workers, and lumpen elements against the organised working class to defend bourgeois interests. In the North interview, the Italian experience is characterised as a movement aimed at suppressing a radicalising working class. [wsws.org]

This framework is necessary for understanding Dorril's extraordinary cast of characters. Around the respectable politicians and aristocrats appear adventurers, spies, fanatics and swindlers. The publisher's description of Dorril's research itself emphasises precisely this collection of political figures, secret agents, Nazi spies, crooks and other marginal characters surrounding Mosley. But this social composition should not obscure fascism's fundamental class function.

The ruined petty bourgeoisie can provide fascism with its mass constituency and street fighters. It can supply the resentment, desperation and nationalism that fascist leaders transform into political reaction. Once fascism becomes a serious contender for power, however, these forces become an instrument for defending capitalist property against the organised working class. The petty bourgeoisie is the battering ram. Capital is the social force whose interests are ultimately defended.

Fascism and the British establishment

Mosley’s failure did not prove British immunity to fascism; it only showed that authoritarian rule had not become necessary. Dorril’s evidence does not demonstrate that the entire British ruling class supported Mosley. It did not, and his connections within the establishment do not prove a unified conspiracy. The historically important question is why parts of British ruling circles were willing to tolerate, finance, or sympathise with authoritarian political alternatives at all.

Mosley left conventional parliamentary politics before embracing fascism. His trajectory therefore places fascism within British political history rather than outside it. Some argue that a supposedly innate British attachment to democracy cannot explain its comparative weakness. Britain developed under different conditions from Germany and Italy. The ruling class retained parliamentary and reformist mechanisms that could contain working-class opposition without resorting to a fascist dictatorship. The decisive question, therefore, was not whether the bourgeoisie had collectively converted to fascism, but whether it needed it. As long as parliament, Labour reformism and the trade-union bureaucracy could preserve capitalist stability, authoritarian alternatives remained unnecessary. But unnecessary did not mean impossible. Mosley’s failure showed not that British capitalism was immune to fascism, but that its ruling class had not exhausted the political mechanisms it could use to defend its power. 

This is precisely why Dorril’s portrait so damages the mythology of Britain’s supposedly instinctive democratic moderation. Mosley did not inhabit a sealed political underworld disconnected from respectable society. His career intersected repeatedly with Britain’s political and social establishment. Dorril devotes considerable attention to these connections, including Lord Rothermere, and to Mosley’s relations with German and Italian fascism and British intelligence. These are central themes in Blackshirt, not incidental details.

The point is not that the entire British ruling class became fascist or supported Mosley. It plainly did not. Nor does the existence of contacts between fascists and members of the establishment demonstrate some unified conspiracy. Such an interpretation would substitute intrigue for an analysis of class relationships.

The historically important point is different. Within British ruling circles, forces were prepared to investigate, finance, tolerate, or sympathise with authoritarian political alternatives when traditional parliamentary methods appeared increasingly inadequate to the capitalist crisis. Dorril’s reconstruction of the milieu surrounding Mosley, including political and aristocratic figures alongside secret agents, Nazi contacts and adventurers, makes it impossible to separate British fascism from the society that produced it.

This places Mosley squarely within British history rather than outside it. He had, after all, travelled through conventional parliamentary politics before establishing the British Union of Fascists in 1932. His evolution demonstrated that parliamentary politics and fascism were not two hermetically sealed universes. Amid profound social crisis, politicians who had operated within the traditional system increasingly looked to authoritarian methods.

The weakness of British fascism therefore requires a historical explanation rather than one based upon national psychology. No peculiar democratic instinct supposedly embedded in the British character made fascism impossible. Britain developed under objective conditions different from those prevailing in Germany and Italy.

This distinction is fundamental. The British ruling class still had powerful parliamentary and political mechanisms to contain social opposition. Mosley founded the BUF, but British capitalism did not face the same combination of circumstances that produced fascist rule elsewhere. That difference tells us nothing about an inherent British devotion to liberty. It shows that ruling classes use political forms appropriate to the circumstances they face.

Germany's experience demonstrates the opposite side of this process. David North has emphasised that fascism emerged historically as a movement directed against a radicalising working class and mobilised petty-bourgeois and other socially disoriented layers to smash workers’ organisations in the interests of the bourgeoisie. The decisive question was therefore never whether an entire capitalist class suddenly underwent an ideological conversion to fascism. The question was whether mounting social and political crisis made authoritarian methods necessary to defend the existing order.

From this standpoint, Mosley’s failure offers no vindication of British exceptionalism. Indeed, Dorril’s evidence points the other way. British fascism matters partly because it shows how quickly supposedly marginal authoritarian politics could find points of contact within respectable society. The appropriate conclusion is consequently more unsettling than the traditional celebration of British moderation. Parliamentary democracy persisted not because British capitalism was constitutionally incapable of fascism, but because circumstances had not compelled the ruling class to abandon its existing mechanisms of rule. Mosley was not foreign to British capitalism. He represented one of the political possibilities that its crisis generated.

Why Mosley failed

The weakness of British fascism, compared with Italian Fascism or German National Socialism, must itself be explained historically. Britain had emerged weakened from the First World War and suffered severely during the Depression. Yet British imperialism retained enormous global resources, while its parliamentary structures and traditional parties remained far more politically resilient. Most importantly, Labourism and the trade-union bureaucracy continued to exercise enormous authority over the working class.

The British bourgeoisie did not face circumstances identical to those confronting German capitalism. Germany had suffered military defeat, revolution, Versailles, hyperinflation, intense class conflict, and, subsequently, the catastrophic effects of the Depression. Above all, it possessed a working class with immensely powerful mass organisations. The question posed in Germany was therefore not whether resistance to Hitler existed. It was why that resistance was politically paralysed. Peter Schwarz's lecture on the rise of fascism in Germany approaches the catastrophe precisely as a problem of political leadership and the collapse of the Communist International, rather than deriving Hitler's victory from some alleged defect in the German population. [wsws.org]

This was Trotsky's central concern during Hitler's rise. Against the Stalinist policy that characterised Social Democracy as "social fascism", Trotsky demanded a workers' united front. Communist and Social Democratic workers should act together against the fascist threat while the revolutionary party preserved complete political independence and continued its struggle against reformist leadership. That strategy was the antithesis of the later Popular Front. A united front represented common working-class action against fascism without abandoning political independence. A Popular Front politically subordinated the workers' movement to alliances with bourgeois parties in the name of defending democracy. This distinction had immense historical consequences.

Cable Street and the working class

Here, the Battle of Cable Street in October 1936 assumes its broader significance. Cable Street has often been absorbed into another reassuring national mythology: ordinary Britons, united by traditional decency, supposedly proved fascism could not flourish on British soil. Such an interpretation removes the event from the class conflict that produced it. Mosley's attempt to march through London's East End encountered mass opposition from workers, Jewish residents and anti-fascists. The central historical lesson is not that British institutions automatically protected democracy but that large numbers of people mobilised to prevent a fascist provocation.

Nor should we obscure the role of Communist workers. Whatever the politically disastrous consequences of the Stalinist Popular Front orientation, Communist Party members became important participants in anti-fascist mobilisation at Cable Street. This distinction matters enormously. The militancy and courage of Communist workers cannot be identified uncritically with the policies dictated by the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Indeed, the tragedy of the Communist movement during these years lay in the repeated contradiction between its working-class members' revolutionary aspirations and the increasingly counter-revolutionary demands of Soviet foreign policy. Cable Street therefore cannot be reduced to either a liberal celebration of British tolerance or the accomplishments of any particular bureaucracy. Its greatest significance lay in independent mass mobilisation.

Fascism and the crisis of leadership

Here, the British and German experiences illuminate one another, despite profound differences in their historical circumstances. Hitler’s victory did not demonstrate fascism's irresistible strength, let alone the political backwardness of the German working class. Germany had one of the world's most powerful and highly organised workers’ movements. The catastrophe of 1933 resulted not from an absence of working-class opposition to fascism, but from a crisis of political leadership that prevented this immense social force from being mobilised against Hitler.

Social Democracy and Stalinism had different but complementary historical responsibilities. The Social Democratic leadership subordinated the working class to the bourgeois state and presented defence of the Weimar constitutional order as the means of resisting Hitler. The Stalinist Communist Party, meanwhile, rejected the united-front policy advocated by Trotsky and divided Communist from Social Democratic workers through the disastrous theory of “social fascism”. The consequence was not an absence of working-class opposition to fascism, but the prevention of its unified political mobilisation.

The German catastrophe consequently sharpens one of the most important implications of Dorril’s history. Appeals to the existing capitalist state cannot finally eradicate the danger of fascism because fascism does not originate outside capitalist society. It emerges from its contradictions. Parliamentary democracy is a historically specific form of capitalist rule, not an institution that stands impartially above conflicting social classes. Under relatively stable conditions, elections, parliament, collective bargaining, reformist parties, and the trade-union apparatus can mediate class antagonisms. Concessions can be made and social opposition contained without challenging capitalist property. But these political forms are neither permanent nor inviolable. When economic and social crisis becomes sufficiently acute, especially when the working class appears to threaten capitalist property and political power, sections of the bourgeoisie can turn to increasingly authoritarian alternatives. Nothing about this process was peculiarly German. What was distinctive, however, were the historical conditions that gave it its catastrophic German form.

This is why Mosley’s connections within the British elite matter far more than historical gossip. Dorril’s extensive reconstruction of the political, aristocratic and intelligence milieu surrounding Mosley demonstrates that British fascism did not exist in complete isolation from respectable society. His study explores Mosley’s connections with Nazi Germany, British political figures and intelligence circles and the broader network surrounding the British Union of Fascists.

This does not establish that the British ruling class collectively embraced fascism. It did not. The more important conclusion is that elements within established society could contemplate, tolerate or sympathise with authoritarian political alternatives. That alone punctures the mythology that parliamentary democracy expressed some timeless quality of the British national character.

Dorril’s great strength lies in the accumulation of evidence. He reconstructs the world around Mosley in extraordinary detail, tracing connections among parliamentary politics, aristocratic society, fascist organisations, intelligence circles, and the political underworld. In doing so, he exposes how porous the boundary between supposedly respectable Britain and its fascist fringe actually was. Yet description alone cannot explain the phenomenon it uncovers. The decisive question is not simply who supported, financed, or associated with Mosley, but what contradictions within British capitalism created a political space where fascism could emerge at all.

That requires an analysis of class. It requires explaining fascism not fundamentally through Mosley’s personality, British eccentricity, antisemitic prejudice or political conspiracy, important as these elements are, but through the contradictions of capitalist society and the struggle between classes. Dorril provides extraordinarily valuable raw material for such an analysis. Marxism supplies the historical framework that allows its deeper significance to emerge. Mosley then stops appearing as an inexplicable British deviation. He becomes something considerably more disturbing: evidence that authoritarian reaction was one of the possibilities generated within British capitalism itself.

The contemporary warning

This is also where Dorril's book acquires renewed relevance. Historical analogies must be employed carefully. Contemporary politics cannot simply be mapped onto the 1930s, and the specific relations of class forces that produced Mussolini and Hitler cannot simply be reproduced eighty or ninety years later. Nevertheless, the social foundations upon which fascist movements can grow have not disappeared.

Capitalist crisis, extreme inequality, imperialist war, the destruction of living standards and the insecurity of the middle classes create conditions in which nationalism and authoritarianism can again be cultivated against immigrants, minorities and, ultimately, the working class. At the same time, fascism's victory is by no means predetermined.

This is an important element in David North's treatment of the question. His 2025 discussion stresses not merely the danger of fascism but also its link to the historical failures of revolutionary leadership and the need to attack the capitalist foundations on which fascism develops. [wsws.org]

The conclusion points in a fundamentally different direction from liberal anti-fascism. If fascism arises ultimately from capitalist crisis, it cannot be eradicated through an alliance with supposedly democratic representatives of the same capitalist order. Defending democratic rights cannot depend on subordinating the working class to bourgeois parties, state institutions, or trade-union bureaucracies. The working class's political independence therefore becomes decisive.

That is the lasting distinction between the united-front strategy Trotsky fought for and every variety of Popular Front politics. Workers belonging to different organisations may have to fight jointly against fascist attacks. But common action must strengthen, rather than dissolve, the working class's political independence.

Dorril's achievement

Blackshirt remains an enormously valuable work because its accumulation of evidence makes any sentimental rehabilitation of Mosley extraordinarily difficult. According to the book's published description, Dorril made extensive use of archival material and interviews, including one with Mosley's widow, Diana Mosley; the resulting study investigates Mosley's financing, Nazi connections, and the milieu that helped his movement.

Yet that material becomes far more significant when interpreted through the history of class struggle. Mosley was neither a freak nor an inexplicable deviation from an otherwise democratic British capitalism. He arose from its political institutions, responded to its crisis and found support among elements of its established society. Britain did not avoid a fascist government because the British ruling class possessed an inherent commitment to democracy. Nor did Mosley fail because fascism was somehow incompatible with the British temperament. Different objective circumstances prevailed. The ruling class retained alternative mechanisms of political rule. Labourism and the trade-union bureaucracy still had enough authority to keep the working class within parliamentarism. When Mosley tried to take his movement to the streets, he met determined opposition from below.

Dorril's book therefore teaches us that the deepest lesson concerns not Mosley's personality but the society that produced him. Fascism becomes possible when capitalist crisis drives threatened ruling elites towards authoritarian solutions and mobilises socially desperate layers against the working class. Its ultimate strength, however, depends on the working class's political condition and leadership.

That is what connects Germany in 1933 with Cable Street in 1936 while simultaneously explaining their profoundly different outcomes. The struggle against fascism is consequently inseparable from the struggle against the social order that continually reproduces the conditions of reaction. Mosley's blackshirts emerged from British capitalism, not from outside it. The enduring answer lies neither in faith in parliament nor in alliances with the supposedly progressive wing of the ruling class, but in the conscious, international, and politically independent mobilisation of the working class against capitalism itself.

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Bibliography

• Dorril, Stephen. Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism. London: Viking, 2006. The 2007 Penguin edition contains 717 pages and includes bibliographical references.
• Eatwell, Roger. Fascism: A History. London: Chatto & Windus, 1995.
• Linehan, Thomas. British Fascism, 1918–39: Parties, Ideology and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
• Mosley, Oswald. My Life. London: Nelson, 1968.
• North, David. “An Interview with David North on Fascism, Trump and the Lessons of History.” World Socialist Web Site, 16 April 2025. North discusses fascism historically as a movement that mobilises the petty bourgeoisie and other disoriented social layers against the workers' movement, in the bourgeoisie's interests. [wsws.org]
• Renton, Dave. Fascism, Anti-Fascism and Britain in the 1940s. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.
• Schwarz, Peter. “The Rise of Fascism in Germany and the Collapse of the Communist International.” World Socialist Web Site, 11 October 2005. [wsws.org]
• Thurlow, Richard. Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front. London: I.B. Tauris, 1998.
• Trotsky, Leon. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971.
• Trotsky, Leon. “What Is National Socialism?” 1933, in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany.