The Drift to the Far Right
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Yet another sign of the steady drift to the Far Right with the Alternative for Germany winning big in the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt.
Here in Spain, too, it’s the same story. I came out of my local supermarket today to find VOX campaigning hard. The latest news is that the PP (Partido Popular) and VOX, Spain´s far-right party, now have an absolute majority in terms of electoral support. Come the next election, Pedro Sanchez and PSOE will very likely be routed.
Look elsewhere, and once again you see the same story. In South America, in places like Chile and Colombia, you see the same pattern. In Britain, too, with the Dover protest being just the latest incident pointing to what seems to be a trend.
In short, rampant nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment are on the rise in most places. Of course, as socialists, we can have no sympathy for the capitalism-supporting Left. To some extent, they have been hoisted by their own petard. They constantly appealed to the electorate based on what is supposedly “good for Britain” (or Spain, or Germany or whatever). Leftist nationalism has, in its own way, prepared the ground for Rightist nationalism.
The real question I guess I’m asking is: how do socialists respond to this seemingly seismic shift in the world of capitalist politics? How, for instance, do we respond to workers who are now more and more blatantly and enthusiastically embracing the delusional death cult of nationalism? It’s an utterly irrational and stupid idea, but you can’t really reason with the irrational, can you?
I think the first thing socialists have to avoid is responding to nationalism with another form of nationalism, even a supposedly progressive or left-wing one. Once politics is framed in terms of what is “good for Britain”, “good for Spain” or “good for Germany”, the basic nationalist premise has already been accepted.
The more important question is why nationalism becomes attractive to workers in the first place. People experience insecure employment, housing shortages, declining public services, falling living standards and a general sense that they have little control over their lives. Nationalism then offers a simple explanation: the problem is immigrants, foreigners, Brussels, another country, or some other group of workers.
But changing the nationality of those who administer capitalism does not change the fundamental economic relationships of capitalism. Workers remain dependent on wages, production remains organised around profit, and competition for jobs, housing and resources remains. Nationalism therefore redirects dissatisfaction with the system towards other workers rather than towards the social relationships that produce that insecurity.
That is why simply telling nationalist workers that they are irrational or stupid will achieve very little. Their explanation may be mistaken, but many of the problems to which they are reacting are perfectly real. The task is to separate the real problem from the false explanation.
The socialist response should therefore be patient but uncompromising: immigrants are not the cause of capitalism’s contradictions, and neither tighter borders nor a different government can abolish those contradictions. A worker born in Britain, Spain or Germany ultimately has more materially in common with a worker born elsewhere than with the owners of capital who happen to share the same passport.
Perhaps the most important thing is not to chase nationalist opinion by adapting socialist arguments to it. If socialism begins asking how capitalism can be run in the “national interest”, it has already abandoned the internationalist case.
Nationalism says: your problem is the worker on the other side of the border.
Socialism should answer: the border is obscuring the fact that workers on both sides share the same fundamental relationship to capital.
You can reason with people attracted to nationalism, but probably not by beginning with nationalism itself. Begin with their actual lives: their work, rent, wages, insecurity and lack of control. Then ask whether changing the nationality of another worker really changes the system producing those conditions.
It is interesting that in effect part of what the Trots had been arguing for years has come to pass.
Many Trotskyist groups argued, back in the day, that it was right to support the Labour Party and other leftist parties, despite knowing that their reforms will come to nothing, knowing fully well that they will not provide the milk and honey they promised as this would expose the uselessness of their reforms.
Once the shells had fallen from their eyes the Trotskyists will be able to whip on their ordinary labourist clothes and reveal their superhero costume and say to the workers, yes “but you can still have the milk and honey because we the political caped crusaders can lead you to that promised land.”
I even had one member of the Militant group “explain” to me that the “only way to deal with reformism was to support it.” he followed that on with the priceless “That, comrade is how the dialectic works! It’s the inter-penetration of the opposites”.
Sadly for these early Harry Potter wannabees, their magical spells didn’t quite work out. Some of the workers have grown tired of being promised the grassy uplands by leftist parties and being let down and have started to believe the spells chanted by wizards of the far right racist left.
Coming back to Robbo’s original post, I do think that the growth of the far right is rather over stated in some countries. I think what has happened in some cases is that there has been a split between the general coalition within the right wing parties of what in the UK was known as one nation conservatives and what Cameron once described as “the swivel eyed loon” faction of the conservative/right wing. I think certainly in the UK, the views of parties such as reform were similar to views espoused in large groups within the conservative support, if not their leadership. In the UK since 1945 roughly 52-55% of voters have voted for what would generally be described as progressive parties (LAB, Lib, Lib Dem, SNP, Plaid, etc.) and about 45-48% have voted for right wing parties, usually the conservatives. If you look at he UK polls the split is still about the same.
It is similar in other countries, the rise of Independent Ireland, a right wing party in the Republic of Ireland has been commensurate with a fall of the two traditional conservative parties Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. In France the same thing has more or less happened. You cannot really argue that the Gaulists did not have their share of right wing populists within their ranks. It seems that on the right the swivel eyed loon faction has become the dominant faction within the right across areas of Europe.
Robbo asks how do we reason with the irrational? I think that there is an assumption that rationality and irrationality are two different states of mind, however I would argue that at times we are all rational and at times we are irrational. We all have irrational thoughts, from lucky numbers to thinking everything in our lives has gone wrong, to believing in little green men. Most people with irrational thoughts have some degree of rationality that you can touch base with and build rationality into it. I know someone who was really into the whole QAnon crap, but talking with her calmly and gently putting forward factual explanations, counter arguments, etc. etc over several years has led to her being far ore rational in her political arguments, whilst I cannot say she is now about to join the party, she will accept at least some of our views and thoughts. Changing minds is a slow process , but we cannot afford to write off a section of the working class as unreachable.
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