By Sara Guardiola
We are witnessing a global rise of the far right. On social media, toxic figures like Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate have developed huge followings as they particularly appeal to alienated young men.
In electoral politics, we have seen right-wing and far-right parties across the globe winning elections. These include but are by no means limited to Trump’s victory in the US, Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia in Italy, and the Rassemblement National party of Marine Le Pen, which came alarmingly close to winning the French legislative election last year. Other mainstream parties, like the Christian Democrats in Germany have shifted to the right in order to compete with the far right.
Britain has not gone untouched by these developments. We have not only seen the rise of Farage and Reform UK, but also the horrific far-right racist riots across the UK last summer. This included some of the most overt terror seen in years with violence directed at minority communities, attacks on mosques, asylum centres and hotels housing asylum seekers.
Tory politicians condemned these racist attacks, yet their leading figures – Patel, Johnson, Braveman and now Badenoch – have all contributed to the demonisation of immigrants in their speeches, giving credibility to the far-right populists. Labour too, in their own way, have fed the hysteria about ‘small boats’.
Why is this happening now?
These alarming trends pose the question: why is this happening now? Have people just become more racist out of nowhere? Has the world just gone completely crazy?
As much as it can feel like that is what is happening, we really need to dig deeper beneath the surface. Marxists understand that, ultimately, ideas reflect the material situation in society. Namely, capitalism has brought society into a deepening crisis and decline for a whole period of time. Everybody knows that things have become much worse in the last decade, which has been routinely exploited by racist forces.
Rather than blaming the true culprits for this – the billionaires and their rule of profit – the far right scapegoats marginalised groups such as immigrants and trans people for the already-existing crises: cost of living, education, housing, health services, precarious jobs created by capitalist crisis, and austerity.
It’s no coincidence that in the UK these far-right groups have managed to gain an inroad into some of the poorest, low-wage towns, some suffering from de-industrialisation, others in isolated rural or coastal areas. The far right feeds off the conditions which exist. But those conditions – joblessness, general capitalist crisis and deprivation – come from capitalism, and the capitalist politicians.
This is why our movement has to centre on confronting them and the system they serve if it is going to be truly effective. If the left offers no political challenge to the hated capitalist establishment, and union leaders fail to reverse the decline in our living standards, this will only create space for the likes of Trump and Farage. They seek to exploit genuine political discontent, felt by working class people towards mainstream capitalist parties across the globe, and scapegoat minorities for all of capitalism’s ills.
While posing as ‘anti-establishment’ figures, the economic policies of these rising far-right parties and ‘influencers’ are thoroughly anti-working class, idolising the free market and the exploitative billionaires, many of whom themselves pack Trump’s cabinet. In Britain, Farage’s true colours were on display when he voted against even the weak pro-worker measures in Labour’s workers’ rights bill. But what kind of alternative should anti-racists put forward? If not the right, then who?
Lesser-evilism vs. mass struggle
Some anti-racists would place an emphasis on uniting around a ‘lesser evil’ candidate to block these reactionary parties, such as Harris in the last Presidential election. Here, groups like Stand Up To Racism have campaigned in areas where Reform UK are on the rise calling on voters to simply “vote to stop Reform UK” – a tacit call to vote Labour, Lib Dem or even Tory.
This is understandable in many ways, but if all we have to offer in the fight against the right is a ‘lesser evil’ vote for the discredited mainstream political establishment, this can in fact be a gift to the right who paint themselves as representing ‘the people’. In some areas Labour councillors imposing cuts while hoovering up expenses are seen as the problem. If anti-racism is associated with these hated parties and politicians who make workers’ lives worse, this can lay the basis for them to spread their lies much more effectively.
It certainly hasn’t been enough to stop Trump in the US. After four disastrous years under Biden and Harris, people didn’t trust the Democrats to fight for their interests, especially when they clung to their establishment reputation more than ever, and Harris presented herself as a reliable administrator of US capitalism, which is failing millions of people.
Socialists would instead point to the need for mass struggle against the far right. This includes mass demonstrations to say no to the racist agenda of Reform, Trump, or whoever it is, as well as mass action to defend the rights of refugees, queer people and all the oppressed, and resist all attacks from the bosses.
But, crucially, we also need a clear political alternative. The best tool against the far right would be a new left party, by and for the working class, with a socialist programme to point a way out of the capitalist crisis, alongside a fighting trade union movement.
All too often, trade unions will fail to provide the resources and support directly to struggles against racism and deportations, instead choosing to funnel money to external campaigns such as Stand Up to Racism. While there’s nothing wrong with this in itself, there can be no substitute for unions directly taking up the struggle in their own name, and that of the multiracial working class as a whole.
Alongside fighting racism in society and the workplace, unions must build up a united struggle for jobs, homes and services for all if the lies of the racists are to be effectively rebutted. This means fighting for good quality, unionised jobs, mass council house building and for a living wage. They must also actively fight for the right of asylum seekers to settle, work and have decent housing. This can show who our real enemies are – the bosses and profiteers, not refugees and migrants.
All our movements need to be linked together by building a new left party, based on struggle and socialist policies. One which can group together anti- racists, trade unionists and all those seeking to build a real alternative to Starmer’s big business politics.
Socialism
To eliminate the conditions that allow far-right ideas to spread, the capitalist system itself must be challenged. Capitalism cannot be reformed to remove inequality and oppression. As long as the system prioritises profit over people, there will always be those who seek to exploit divisions and scapegoat the most vulnerable in society.
We need a fundamental change in the way in which society is run – we need socialism, where wealth and resources are publicly owned and democratically planned collectively in the interests of the majority. Socialist Alternative stands for a fundamentally different kind of society to capitalism, a socialist one, in which racism and all forms of oppression, violence, exploitation, poverty and war have no room to exist.
