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.
In Argentina, the Trotskyists ( who have worn several masks ) are becoming Peronists ( they are dancing to the tune of the same tango ) who are right-wingers too, pretending to be socialists; the Trotskyist Morenaist supported the dictator Fulgencio Batista; other Trotskyist sects supported Saddam Hussein and the stalinist supported Trujillo, who was willing to negotiate with the soviets to avoid assassination and a coup from the USA.
Argentina is the country that has the biggest population of Trotskyists in Latin America; but they can not compete with the Stalinists, Maoists, Hoxhaists and the Castroists. You can place all of them in a blender, and you will get the same juice; there is no ideological difference.
If the right-wing president Milei dares to challenge England, they will support him too, based on so-called Leninist anti-imperialism, national liberation and nationalisation; some Trotskyists in the USA ask for the nationalisation of the Budweiser company: beer for everybody.
They are already saying that the Falkland Islands belong to the Argentinian workers, as they said it during the first war against England,( ALB published their leaflet ) and this time might be defeated again, but the problem is that the USA also want the oil and gas reserves of the Malvinas; with their new puppet and clown elected in Colombia, they might also take control of the Colombian oil, they have not invaded cuba because they do not have oil but they can make business arrangements to control the tourism industry and the cuban government will share the profits with them.
Many Trotskyists have supported the Cuban government after they were kicked out by the Stalinists in Cuba along with the anarchists, but they are like the chameleon; they adapt themselves to the colour of the tree.
The Trotskyist theorist known as Celia Hart was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. As the old saying goes: If you want to get with dogs, you will get fleas; she applied the permanent revolution theory to the Cuban bourgeoisie revolution, which was also supported by a large sector of the Cuban oligarchy and the catholic church, who wanted to flip the wings to Fulgencio Batista, and the USA imposed an arms embargo on his government and he had to buy weapons from the Armeria San Cristobal owned by Trujillo and many of the weapons ended in the hands of the guerrillas fighters.
Probably I would not call it irrational for the workers who support right-wingers; they do not have class consciousness, as millions of workers in the whole world do not have either, support left wingers might be irrational too. If workers had class consciousness, this capitalist system would last less than a roach inside a chicken coop.
I am dealing with some right-wing workers at present, and their political ignorance is very profound, but some of them are doing their own research and reasoning on my world analysis, and some have accepted that they are mistaken. In the USA, some right-wing supporters are voting for the so-called democratic socialists; they do not trust either political tendency. As we said in one article, the left-wingers pave the way for the right-wingers; the right-wingers also pave the way for the left-wingers
https://elsobrante.substack.com/p/la-sombra-roja-del-peronismo-el-ascenso?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=7588705&post_id=197961355&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=6n5kdd&triedRedirect=true. The red shadow ( Trotskyism ) of Peronism, a three-part article. The Montoneros were Peronist guerrilla fighters rooted in Guevarism and the liberation theology of Camilo Torres ( Camilistas )
Who was Camilo Torres? He was a priest who called himself a Marxist, but his ideas influenced the Peronists guerrillas groups and the priests who worked in Villas Miserias (a working-class neighbourhood), and they influenced Pope Francis. The real founder of liberation theology was Gustavo Gutiérrez. All those movements were in some way supported by the Trotskyists
641684053_1445449170307096_7749400671806950604_n.jpg Bishop Belgoglio riding in a bus in Argentina,
The growing popularity of Trotskyists in Argentina.
Workers in Latin America are like a clock pendulum; they can oscillate from right to left and from left to right. Lula in Brazil is losing popularity, and Bolsonaro’s son is gaining it; in Peru, the daughter of Fujimori was elected president. Sometimes workers suffer from historical amnesia; Bolsonaro and Fujimori supported the criminal military generals, and Bolsonaro promoted a state coup d’etat
https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2018/no-1372-december-2018/material-world-brazil-people-
elect-a-populist/. Brazilian people elect a populistDuring the last Brazilian election, Lula had to make alliances with some right-wing groups, and lately he had to give some concessions to Donald Trump, too. This is an article from a Trotskyist newspaper. Mario Pedrosa helped with the formation of Lula’s left-wing party, and some underground groups helped him too, and then some groups broke away from him; left-wingers always have internal problems with their alliances. It is their natural Leninist foundations
I think your last point gets to the heart of the matter. Supporting the Right is not inherently more irrational, from a socialist standpoint, than supporting the Left when both ultimately accept the continuation of capitalism.
The crucial issue is not whether workers vote Left or Right, but whether they understand their position as a class.
Workers do not become class-conscious simply by moving from a right-wing party to a left-wing one. If they still believe that their interests can be secured through better leaders, nationalisation, protectionism, national liberation, stronger borders, or a more efficient administration of capitalism, the fundamental relationship remains unchanged: capitalism continues and workers remain wage workers.
This is also why I would be careful about describing workers attracted to nationalism simply as stupid or irrational. As you say, people can change their minds. What matters is giving them an explanation of society that enables them to examine their own experience.
A worker may begin with nationalist ideas and nevertheless ask perfectly reasonable questions: Why, despite working all my life, do I remain economically insecure? Why are housing, employment and public services permanently under pressure? Why does every government promise fundamental change while the same basic problems continually reappear?
Those questions provide an opening for socialist argument.
And this is where class consciousness matters. It does not mean persuading workers to support the “correct” capitalist political camp. It means reaching the point where workers recognise that their common interest is not British, Argentine, American, Cuban or any other national interest, but a class interest shared across national boundaries.
The pendulum between Left and Right can continue indefinitely. The failures of the Left can prepare the ground for the Right, and the failures of the Right can eventually restore the Left. Changing who administers capitalism is not the same thing as changing the social system.
So perhaps our response to the growth of the Right should not be: “How do we get these workers back to the Left?”
It should be: “How do we get workers to stop looking to either side of capitalist politics and begin thinking in terms of their own class interests?”
That seems to me the much more important question.
Just look at the case of Venezuela: after so many years of left-wing propaganda, the so-called socialism of the XXI was knocked down with one palace coup and the removal of the president of Venezuela; it has shown that it was not deeply rooted in Venezuelan society.
Chavistas are in a stampede, and chavismo is no longer a predominant ‘ideology ‘, and it has shown its cracks, and some workers are supporting the removal of Maduro; they are not ‘facho pobre’ ( poor people’s fascists), as they are called by the left-wingers.
The leftists did not fulfil their promises, and they became poorer, and it became an authoritarian and repressive system like the right-wingers, and the leaders and the ruling class accumulated capital from their labour; it was an economy based on mono-production, and now some foreign investors do not want to invest money because they might lose money, and the Chinese and Russians want their contracts to be fulfilled,
The USA is not going to take over Cuba; it is only a dog barking to get votes. They owe money to everybody, including the Sicilian mafia, and they are in default; the industry is destroyed; the only investment would be tourism to create Trump Island using Arab investors. The Cuban workers want to get rid of that government; if they have a democratic election, the winner would be the right-wingers; they do not know anything about state capitalism; if you say that Cuba is a state capitalist country, they will take you to jail.
That is not irrational; it is rational. They do not know what they want; they do not have class consciousness and political education. It was the same situation in Chile: the so-called socialist government of Boric and the communist alliance passed laws against the working class, sent troops to the Mapuche territories, and now they are collaborating with the right-wing. Both so-called communist leaders run a nationalist and xenophobic campaign like the right-wingers, like the old McDonald ads: Where is the beef? The same dogs wearing different collars
In Chile, some high-ranking members of the Communist Party became ministers of defence, the army, and the police (Carabineros). During the campaign, they were the champions of feminism, and there was a women’s protest, and they sent the troops and the police to the protests, and the Mapuches voted against them and rejected their new constitution. The Boric government acted like President Piñera, and he was part of the old right-wing coalition; they oscillate like a clock pendulum
The vice president of Venezuela is now supporting the right-wingers, and she has changed his past stance; she might be getting her benefits or part of the fruitcake like Chavez and his closer allies.
The Venezuela communist party was hijacked by the Chavistas, and they are silent, and people do not trust them anymore. Who are the workers going to elect? They might do as in Colombia and Chile, where people voted null and blank, and there was a high abstention, and right-wing candidates were elected by a small margin or with election fraud, and in the past Chile was one of the more politically educated countries in Latin America
The anti-imperialist case of Venezuela, it is also the same case as Iran; most left-wingers of all kinds are supporting the war of Iran against the USA, and they are labeling its as a revolutionary war, which is going to defeat Yankee imperialism, and whoever does not support it is also called a Facho pobre ( poor fascists). What revolution is taking place in Iran? It is a reactionary government, probably more reactionary than all the right-wing governments of Latin America; they have killed as many human beings as the government of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Some groups who do not support Iran are calling it a paper tiger, or junk capital, against real expansive capital, as this article says:
As well, we can not call fascist or fascism to all right wing political party or right wing political movement, leader, or to any workers that support right wings movement or populist leaders.
In the USA, the democrats and leftists call Trump a fascist and his followers as fascists, but they are members of the working class like any other workers, and they also live in poverty.
They always associate fascism with wars, but they never remember that the soviet union conducted several wars around the world and they supported those wars, and all of them support the concept of the vanguard party to lead .
Probably the concept of “Facho Pobre” applies to both sides or both tendencies
Bijou Drains wrote: “Changing minds is a slow process , but we cannot afford to write off a section of the working class as unreachable.:
Well observed
I think this reinforces the distinction between rejecting the Left and developing socialist consciousness. They are not the same thing.
Workers can have perfectly understandable reasons for becoming disillusioned with governments that called themselves socialist. If those governments promised fundamental change but workers continued to experience wage labour, inequality, insecurity, repression and the accumulation of wealth by a privileged minority, it is hardly surprising that many eventually rejected them.
The mistake would be to conclude that workers moving to the Right have therefore moved closer to understanding their class position. They may simply have moved from one proposed administration of capitalism to another.
That is why the pendulum you describe is important. The Left disappoints workers and creates an opportunity for the Right. The Right eventually confronts the same fundamental limitations of capitalism and disappoints them in turn, creating another opportunity for the Left. The names, rhetoric and policies can change considerably while the underlying social relationship between capital and wage labour remains.
Venezuela, Cuba, Chile or Argentina therefore raise a much more fundamental question than whether a Left or Right government has succeeded. What exactly do we mean by socialism?
If wage labour continues, production remains separated from the producers, goods and services are produced within monetary and market relations, and workers remain dependent upon selling their ability to work, calling the state or government “socialist” does not make the society socialist. Nationalisation itself does not abolish capitalism; it can simply make the state the organiser or owner of capital.
This also explains why calling disappointed workers “fascists”, “poor fascists” or politically ignorant is a dead end. A person can reject a government for entirely rational reasons while still lacking an understanding of the alternative.
That is where socialist education becomes important. The objective is not to persuade somebody who has abandoned the Left to return to it. Nor is it to persuade somebody on the Right to become a better nationalist. It is to demonstrate why both sides repeatedly encounter problems that cannot be solved merely by changing governments.
Abstention, blank ballots and electoral disillusionment do not by themselves constitute class consciousness either. They may simply express the recognition that the available political choices have failed.
Class consciousness begins to develop when workers go one step further and ask why this pattern continually reproduces itself regardless of who governs.
So I think the political pendulum is a useful image, but socialism represents something quite different from making the pendulum swing back towards the Left. The point is to understand why the pendulum exists in the first place — and ultimately to make it irrelevant.
Ernesto Che Guevara wrote that a renegade is the worst thing in the so called working class movement, what renegade was he referring to ? He was referring to the workers that do not support them, or the workers that do not support leftwing tendencies, guerrillas fighters or Castroism. The issues is that supporting them will not conduct a worker to obtain class consciousness or become a socialist, He or she will become a reformist and a supporter of salaried slavery. Right there, the concept of ‘Facho Pobre” or Fascist workers can be defined.
When Fidel Castro went to Chile and he met president Salvador Allende and the copper miners went on strikes, he said that they should be repressed because they were reactionary and counter revolutionary, a right wing leader would make the same statement, and that type of statements have been made by Donald Trump too, therefore, there is not difference between right wing and left wing tendencies as they pretend to be, both wings come from the same bird known as capitalism.
Joe Biden who is a right winger walked in a workers strike along with the workers, Allende did not do that
The so called leader of the so called cuban revolution and the commander of the revolution is also a reactionary and a repressive individual willing to kill the workers, even more, as a present or a gift he gave to Salvador Allende a Russian rifle, and he said give arms to peoples but never gave arms to cuban workers because he knew that they were going to be used his own government, like Trujillo who imposed mandatory millitary service but the guns used were made from lumbers, they were not real guns, nobody was allowed to carry guns, the same case is the so called USA second amendment, white men were allowed to have guns but Indians and blacks were not allowed to have guns, the Comancheros were killed and taken to jail when they were found selling guns to the Indians
Ironically Salvador Allende was overthrown by a group of military who he had called the popular army and he brought the head of them to the state apparatus because he was not longer able to control the workers protests and the claim for better salaries and better benefits, and chilean workers in that time had more political education than the present time, after he was overthrown by a brutal coup d’etat his popularity was not higher than the popularity that he had when he was president.
His supporters made a big deal about his medical service proposal ( and he was a medical doctor ) but those social democrats benefits were not his creation and they were not unique, they were implemented in Europe by local social democrats and by the capitalist class to keep workers alive while they were producing commodities and profits, it was not a gift
This illustrates precisely why socialists should judge political movements by their social content rather than by the labels they give themselves.
A government may describe itself as socialist, workers’ government, revolutionary or anti-imperialist, but the important question remains: what is the position of the working class under it?
If workers must continue selling their labour-power for wages, if production is still organised through capital and workers are expected to subordinate their interests to the needs of the national economy, then the fundamental relationship of capitalism remains.
The experience of the Chilean copper workers is particularly revealing. Workers were told that nationalised industries now belonged to “the people”, while at the same time they were told that they had a responsibility to increase production, moderate their demands and put the interests of Chile before their immediate interests as workers.
But this raises an obvious socialist question: if workers supposedly own an industry, why must they still be disciplined as wage workers within it?
This is where nationalism can unite Left and Right despite their very different rhetoric. The Right may tell workers to sacrifice for the nation, while the Left may tell them to sacrifice for the nationalised economy, the revolution or the “workers’ state”. In either case workers can be asked to subordinate their class interests to a supposed national interest.
That is also why terms such as “renegade”, “counter-revolutionary” or “reactionary” can obscure the real issue when they are applied simply because workers refuse to follow a particular political leadership. Workers do not acquire class consciousness by supporting a Left government, a guerrilla movement or nationalisation any more than they acquire it by supporting a Right government.
Nor does rejecting such movements automatically make somebody socialist.
Class consciousness means something more fundamental: workers understanding their common position within capitalism and recognising that their emancipation cannot be handed down to them by presidents, governments, parties, military leaders or national liberators.
Nationalisation changes the legal ownership of an enterprise. It does not by itself abolish wage labour, commodity production or the economic subordination of workers.
So the interesting historical lesson is not whether the Left behaved exactly like the Right. There can obviously be substantial political differences between governments. The deeper socialist criticism is that both can find themselves administering the same underlying social relationship: capital on one side and wage labour on the other.
For socialists, therefore, the question should never simply be: “Is this government Left or Right?”
The more important question is: “Have workers ceased to be wage workers?”
If the answer is no, then changing the political label attached to the state has not yet amounted to the emancipation of the working class.
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