As happened the previous year, August, traditionally the ‘silly season’, was anything but frivolous this year also. It was the opportunity for a wave of far-right terrorism. Last year it was triggered off by a terrible stabbing of young girls at the end of July in Southport, Lancashire, by a disturbed young man of Rwandan descent who was born in in Wales to parents who were evangelical Christians. It was a terrible incident; the perpetrator was clearly in some sense deranged. But the false story was spread through social media by the far right, that he was a Muslim immigrant or asylum seeker, and that caused an eruption of white lumpen rage in many parts of the country – that developed into attempted pogroms against non-white people and particularly those of Asian/Muslim origin.
The cops had great difficult in dealing with them- they were thwarted by popular anti-fascist mobilisations by the left. The British left outside Labour did creditably last year in bringing out tens of thousands of demonstrators to swamp and marginalise virtually every demonstration the far right was able to mobilise. However, there were still brutal acts of attempted murder and pogroms against refugees – particularly attempts to burn down refugee accommodation. In some economically depressed cities, roadblocks were set up by racist vigilantes specifically to attack non-white motorists. People were attacked in the street for having dark skin. This petered out with the popular counter-mobilisations but then took electoral form with the growth in support for Farage’s Reform Party this year as the government exposed itself as viciously anti-working class and having nothing to offer except more austerity and imperialist wars.
Starmer – Patsy for the Fascists
At the time this happened last year, Starmer’s Labour government had just been elected, and though there was already rhetoric against the government in some far-right agitation, it was not the major issue that it is now, after a year of Starmer being in office. This year the situation is far worse – the issue triggering it off is not some anomalous crime, but simply a far-right offensive against refugees which the government is tacitly encouraging. The fascist mobilisations have mostly taken the form of aggressive, violent demonstrations outside hotels that are being used for accommodation for so called ‘boat people’ – that is, refugees who, refused asylum by EU countries, come to Britain from the French coast in rubber dinghies. These events were often organised by Homeland, which is a neo-Nazi splinter group from Patriotic Alternative, which has outgrown its parent organisation and is now supposedly organising ‘local’ people in several areas around the country, while attempting to hide their Neo-Nazi politics.
In many ways the phenomenon of refugees coming to Britain in rubber dinghies is a result of Brexit, as the EU had agreements for sharing out the refugees, and in the EU Britain could legally demand refugees above a certain quota be returned to France on the way to other places in the EU. Now there is no agreement and very little cooperation. The xenophobes’ own xenophobia has undercut their own power and given rise to another wave of hysterical racism and xenophobia. But this is far from a disaster for the likes of Farage, it is a means of exploiting the disaster caused by Brexit to try to propel a far-right populist party into power.
Some of this new wave of horrors have been beaten back: particularly in Liverpool and Bristol, large, powerful anti-fascist movements massively outnumbered the fascist mobilisation and basically ran them out of town. It is notable that the fascist mobilisation in Liverpool was led by Ukip, the remnant of Farage’s original party that he junked to form the Brexit Party, now known as Reform. UKIP’s new leader Nick Tenconi is a comic opera composite of Trump, Musk and Mussolini, who was seen in public doing a composite of Trump’s fist-bobbing jig and Musk’s version of the Nazi-fascist salute. Whether this he was celebrating Hitler or Mussolini is not clear given his Italian origin – likely both. This maniac is calling for the hanging of ‘communists’ and ‘traitorous’ politicians like … Labour ministers. Seeing his people driven out of town was excellent. But in other places, including Epping and Cheshunt on the fringes of London, and in the East End/Docklands, the resistance has not been so successful, and fascists have made the running.
White Lumpen Rage
We have seen the ‘Raise the Colours’ movement – a mass movement of racist and nationalist semi-working class semi-lumpens which, beginning in Birmingham with the raising of the St George’s England flag on numerous lampposts, has spread around the country. Along with flag hysteria, we see a wave of vandalism, daubing the St George’s Cross in red paint on anything white in terms of road markings, from painted mini roundabouts at road junctions to Zebra crossings. This wave of ‘popular’ nationalism is not comical at all, though some have mocked it and tried to satirise it. It is aimed to threaten and intimidate oppressed groups within the working class. According to the Zionist-influenced supposedly anti-racist campaign ‘Hope not Hate’, it was co-initiated by a collaborator of Stephen Yaxley Lennon, one Andrew Currien, formerly EDL, now in Britain First, who served time in prison because of involvement in a racist killing. It has been accompanied by racist vandalism of such places as Chinese takeaways, racist daubing on bus shelters, and a wave of arson attacks. As well as creating the climate for overt racist attacks such as the attack on a Filipina nurse and her family in a park in Halifax, Yorkshire, recently.
Starmer is clearly a placeman put in place by the billionaire corporate ruling class in Britain, to pave the way for some kind far right regime. Founded on the political assassination of the left-wing social-democracy led by Jeremy Corbyn, which earlier aroused fervent hopes of a fightback of the working class against 40 years of neoliberalism and austerity, Starmer, heading up the hardened neoliberal bureaucratic layer that came to dominate Labour since the days of Kinnock and Blair, executed a series of brutal political manoeuvres to suppress that and drive both Corbyn and his mass base out of the party. Starmer and his people, in that sense, as a bourgeois-repressive force, reached parts that other bourgeois-reactionary forces couldn’t reach.
But now he is office he is carrying out a far-right enabling agenda. It is perfectly obvious what the purpose of Starmer’s regime is for the ruling class. He is a patsy, a transitional figure put in power to smooth the way to a regime of the extreme right, centred on Farage, because that is what the billionaire class in Britain want right now. Far from denouncing the attacks on refugee accommodation, Starmer and his government are helping the racists by pretending that they have legitimate ‘concerns’. Far from combatting the threatening use of English nationalist symbols by the lumpen fascist elements vandalising public infrastructure, he and his pathetic cohort Yvette Cooper, made statements to the media claiming that they had Union Jack tablecloths, flags all over the place, and red-white-and-blue bunting festooning their homes. Which is such a pathetic piece of grovelling servility to a concocted political hate campaign as to be simply comical. It’s just obvious that they are lying, as no politician with an ounce of culture and learning could possibly be that crass. No one believes a word of it.
The servility of the government to the far-right contrasts with their hatred of any anti-racist movement, not to mention the repression they have undertaken against the Palestinian Solidarity movement. Numerous activists and anti-racist, anti-Zionist journalists have been harassed by the state, arrested, had their homes raided, and much more. And then there is the fraudulent ban on Palestine Action as supposed ‘terrorists’, engineered by changing the definition of ‘terrorism’ to include non-violent direct action that causes damage to property, something that was done by the previous New Labour regime of Tony Blair.
Fascism, Populism and the Class Struggle
Clearly Starmer’s regime is feeding the growth of fascism, and this is a conscious policy of the capitalist class at this point. This is not new, capitalism in deep crisis always does things like this, it always tries to create a despair among the working class and to set them at each other’s throats through scapegoating. As Leon Trotsky noted many years ago in the context of the 1930s:
“The gigantic growth of National Socialism is an expression of two factors: a deep social crisis, throwing the petty bourgeois masses off balance, and the lack of a revolutionary party that would be regarded by the masses of the people as an acknowledged revolutionary leader. If the communist Party is the party of revolutionary hope, then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counter-revolutionary despair. When revolutionary hope embraces the whole proletarian mass, it inevitably pulls behind it on the road of revolution considerable and growing sections of the petty bourgeoisie. Precisely in this sphere the election revealed the opposite picture: counter-revolutionary despair embraced the petty bourgeois mass with such a force that it drew behind it many sections of the proletariat …”
(The Fascist Danger Looms in Germany, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm#p3)
This is not exactly the same as the situation now. The main driving force of this today is the despair of considerable sections of what was the working class in many places, who deindustrialisation and prolonged unemployment has left in a state of semi-lumpenisation. This is the legacy of the jobs massacre of neoliberalism, which began in Britain in the 1980s under Thatcher and continued in the 1990s and 2000s under Blair. The emasculation of the trade unions after major betrayals such as that of the 1984-5 miners’ strike went in parallel with similar deindustrialisation in the US, which produced what in the US is known as the Rust Belt.
These jobs did not simply disappear; rather the bourgeoisie exported them, particularly as the advance of computer technology made it possible to make capital itself much more mobile internationally. The decay of capitalism means over decades a gradual, almost imperceptible fall in the rate of profit – the rate of return on capital. This export of jobs meant simply moving production to places where the price of labour was cheaper, places like India, China, and other parts of Asia particularly. The rise of neoliberalism, with the privatisation of everything that could possibly yield a short-term profit even at the overall cost to the efficiency of the capitalist society they exist in, is also a sign of extreme social decay.
The petit bourgeoisie under neoliberalism in Britain, the United States, followed later by other imperialist countries that adopted this model later, has prospered much of the time, but an important part of the former proletariat has been driven into lumpen despair. This creates a different situation, not of an overtly fascist movement driven by massive hatred for the working-class movement by an enraged petit bourgeoisie seeking to crush the labour movement in a bloodbath, as Trotsky described in Germany. Instead, a somewhat less cohesive, right-wing populist movement where demoralised sections of the working class lose their real sense of acting independently as a class, but instead follow maverick wealthy demagogues like Trump and Farage. Who may even posture as championing the semi-lumpenised sections of the working class over the ‘elite’, meaning the petit bourgeoisie, not the ruling bourgeoisie who they are an integral part, and who they act for with their populist divide and rule campaigns. Such leaders as Farage and Trump may well have dictatorial ambitions, but their social base is somewhat different to those of Hitler and Mussolini before WWII, whose target was strong labour movements, often communist-led, in imperialist countries, which do not exist today.
There is still a substantial working class in imperialist countries like Britain and the US, capable of mobilising against capitalism but it is based in the major cities, not the many small and medium sized towns and villages in the deindustrialised rust belts that are often hellholes of despair. In fact, the working class in major cities is usually multi-ethnic due to previous waves of migration initially in the post-WWII Keynesian boom period when labour shortages were common. This continued in the later neoliberal boom of the 1990s and 2000s when the internationalisation of capital was accompanied by migration of both skilled and unskilled labour. The former was also a response to labour shortages; the latter was often about undercutting the declining rustbelt working class and increasing the rate of profit.
These events have changed the social and class composition of the leading imperialist countries quite considerably. A relatively large white lumpen layer has grown up outside the major cities, with a multi-ethnic working class in the cities, often with a large component of workers of Muslim origin who face considerable oppression from the far right, who are influenced and funded by Zionists as their contribution to political reaction in the current situation.
Labour movements have been significantly weakened, but up to now, the petit bourgeoisie, the middle classes, have not been impoverished in the way they were in the 1930s Depression. The main reason for this is that those middle classes have changed. Recall Napoleon’s famous remark that the English were “a nation of shopkeepers”. At that time, Britain was an advanced early capitalist power, and its petty bourgeoisie was large and mainly consisted of petty traders. That prefigured a phase of capitalism that became the norm but ultimately came to disaster in the Great Depression of the 1930s, when huge numbers of such petty bourgeois traders were driven to the wall. Today’s petit bourgeoisie is different; it is largely a managerial and technical layer that in some ways overlaps with the working class.
Managerial and technical staff are formally employed for a wage or salary, even if many of those higher up supplement their incomes through ownership of shares and the like. They are not in the same precarious position as the pre-war small trader petit bourgeoisie, and to a considerable extent, they still support liberal politics. However, technological developments such as the rise of Artificial Intelligence may well put many of these salaried workers, for this is what many of them are, in a similar position as the semi-lumpenised working class of the rust belts. This situation has not arrived yet, but that is what capitalist development offers for the future. The redundancy of major sections of the working class in imperialist countries occasioned by the system’s voracious attempts to shore up the rate of profit, is likely to be extended to major sections of salaried workers through a mechanism driven by the same source – the profit hunger of the bourgeoisie in a system in severe decline through obsolescence. This points to an accelerating social crisis and even the collapse of the system itself.
Break with Social Democracy!
These changes underline the bankruptcy of social democratic/Labourite politics today. The 30-year boom after the end of WWII is enormously distant from the changes that neoliberalism has made to imperialist countries like Britain. Many even now see it a class-collaborationist utopia – but many of its features were forced on the bourgeoisie by the massive failure of Hitlerite fascism, mainly at the hands of the USSR. Even though the leadership of the USSR was conservative and did not seek world revolution, in the context of its conventional, non-revolutionary victory, a series of social revolutions, often in the form of peasant guerilla movements seeking to create states like the USSR, shook he colonial world. The ruling classes feared that ‘communism’, in some form or another, would spread to the imperialist heartlands, so they made major social concessions, while fighting back with McCarthy style witchhunting of communists, or those who they considered so. In Britain, the anti-union repressive laws passed after the General Strike of 1926, were abolished, unions became much stronger, and the National Health Service, and a ‘welfare state’ with a significant degree of social protection was created in this period.
It was fear of revolution, and not the political potency and leadership of social democracy, that led to these concessions. Labourism was just the party that was most suited to implement concessions that the ruling class considered to be required to save the situation. Today’s huge split in the Labour Party, with the emergence of ‘Your Party’ as the crystallisation of a split away from the Labour Party’s neoliberal political bureaucracy, is based on the idea that a revived Labour-like left party can rollback 40 years of attacks. But the bourgeoisie only conceded such gains due to the threat of revolution. It will be necessary to once again raise the credible threat of working-class revolution to even extract concessions from the bosses. If the project fails to break with social democracy and embrace a revolutionary programme and outlook, it will ultimately fail.
A crucial issue in making clear the intent of the new party will be its stance on the violence of the lumpen fascist elements currently attacking oppressed layers of the working class. We must offer a positive alternative to those impoverished by neoliberalism – a major reorganisation of work and the social wage is essential to provide useful, sustainable work and income to those who capitalism has thrown on the scrap heap. But the new party must use its mass base to organise defence formations, including military ones, to protect those under attack from fascist lumpens, and indeed to defend the inviolability of working-class organisations from state persecution. Such a programme of collective working-class defence, independent of the bosses’ state, must be at the top of the agenda of Your Party.
