Around the world, capitalist governments are taking new, sharp turns towards authoritarianism. This is a process taking different forms in different parts of the world. Many countries have seen the introduction of new laws restricting the right to protest or more aggressive policing of protests based on broader interpretations of existing laws.
By Jack Yarlett and Connor Rosoman
In Germany, pro-Palestine protests have been brutally attacked by the police on the grounds that any expression of support for Palestine, such as the wearing of a keffiyeh, constitutes ‘antisemitism’. In the UK, this has led to extreme cases of criminalisation of speech and organising, such as anti-monarchy activists being arrested for heckling the king or Just Stop Oil activists being jailed for merely attending Zoom meetings about protests.
In other places, this turn towards authoritarianism is seen in the rise of new ‘strongmen’ figures such as Donald Trump in the US, Erdogan in Turkey, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. In South Korea, President Yoon Suk Yeol attempted a similar turn by staging a coup, but was defeated by mass demonstrations.
Mainstream capitalist parties and media outlets have engaged in greater levels of right-wing, anti-migrant, and anti-trans rhetoric, fuelling right-wing parties like Reform UK and Germany’s AfD. These parties are also starting to receive financial and political backing from sections of the capitalist class.
What is behind this wave of authoritarianism?
The explanation lies in the state of global capitalism – a decaying system in deep crisis. Around most of the world, 15 years or more of austerity following the 2008 financial crash has left public services crumbling and living standards either falling or stagnating – even before the Covid pandemic and the cost of living crisis.
Support for traditional parties has collapsed as a result. The Tories were crushed at the last General Election, and just eight months in, the Labour government that replaced them is facing unprecedented unpopularity. In the US, support for the recently defeated Democrats continues to reach new, record lows. In the German elections this year, the Social Democrats received their worst share of the vote since 1887.
In addition to economic turmoil, capitalism is also in a period of increased wars, militarism, and climate collapse. These crises have been met by a response from workers and young people, including a huge, ongoing, global movement of protests against the genocidal war in Gaza, and an increasingly radicalised climate movement. In the face of falling real wages and renewed austerity, the trade union movement in many countries is at last beginning to flex its muscles once more after decades of decline.
Capitalists can feel the sands shifting under them. At the same time, this system has shifted into a new era of imperialist conflict and militarism. For the ruling class, maintaining ‘national security’ and the idea of a united national interest to justify their warmongering requires turning to authoritarian methods to clamp down.
Capitalism returns to the norm
While this authoritarian turn is alarming, it is anything but new or unprecedented. Liberal commentators in the mainstream press who bemoan the loss of ‘liberal democratic values’ are only showing their historical ignorance. Attacks on civil, political, and human rights and liberties have always been the response of the ruling class against threats to its rule.
Even in the liberal democracies of the advanced capitalist countries, huge restrictions applied historically to the political rights of large portions of the working class. In the UK, men who did not own property could not vote in elections until 1918, with women not having equal voting rights until 1928. The racist Jim Crow laws in the US are another example.
These countries have also been quick to jettison their populations’ rights whenever any crisis emerges. During the Vietnam War, the US government engaged in brutal violence towards the anti-war movement. The Kent State massacre, for example, saw soldiers of the National Guard fire into a protest at a university campus, killing four and wounding nine. In Britain, the government responded to the outbreak of The Troubles in Northern Ireland by imposing curfews, removing the right to a jury trial in favour of closed military courts, and torturing suspects in custody.
However for the vast majority of the history of capitalism, in most parts of the world, capitalist societies have not been free or democratic. Most capitalist nations have historically been ruled, at least for some part of their history, by dictatorships or military juntas, such as those of South Korea, Taiwan, or Chile, or absolutist monarchies, such as that of Saudi Arabia. This is in addition to the globe-spanning empires of nations like Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal, whose subjects possessed no democratic rights at all.
The right to vote, the right to organise trade unions and parties, the right to protest, and the right to freedom of speech are hard-won gains by the struggles of the working class which the ruling class, having at first opposed them, then found politically expedient to claim as their own.
The capitalists, in times of relative stability, prefer to use these limited democratic rights as a safety valve for workers’ anger against their governments, granting limited avenues for struggle while leaving the underlying system intact. For this reason, Lenin described the democratic republic as “the best possible political shell for capitalism”. But as soon as the ruling class feels threatened, they do not hesitate to fall back on the ‘traditional’ tools of repression and violence.
In reality, capitalism is, by nature, an authoritarian and undemocratic system. It is a system whereby a small minority of society accrues massive wealth at the expense of the work done by the majority. It is subject to constant cycles of recession and crashes, where the majority face either poverty or the threat of it, where states vie for control over resources and markets through endless wars. Such a blatantly unequal and exploitative system cannot survive in the long run without resorting to methods of strict repression against the resistance that it will inevitably face.
Is society turning fascist?
Among some parts of the left, it is common to describe the current state of politics as “fascist”, or to warn that society is becoming fascist. While this is understandable, and there are things reactionary right-wing politicians share in common with fascists, it is important to properly understand what fascism is – and isn’t.
Fascism is a distinct form of politics that completely and violently removes the working class’ ability to organise itself. In Spain and Germany under Franco and Hitler, all left organisations were not only outlawed but completely destroyed, and almost an entire generation of worker activists were wiped out and murdered. This is done through dictatorial methods, but crucially also in whipping up a frenzied mass movement to violently crush workers’ organisations and other groups in society.
In countries like the US, although Trump has engaged in an authoritarian power grab, a dictatorship of the fascist type is still not on the cards. Trump has taken moves to criminalise dissent, such as the attempted illegal deportation of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, and has verbally lashed out in his trademark rambling style against ‘illegal’ reporting by CNN and MSNBC on his ongoing court cases. But he is a long way yet from destroying the working class’ ability to fight back as Hitler did.
Last September, a teacher, Marieha Hussain, was acquitted in court after being arrested and charged with a racially aggravated public order offence for holding up a sign calling Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman “coconuts” while attending a Pro-Palestine march in London. This case is one of several others that highlight the increasing steps the British state is taking to criminalise protest, but no court in Hitler’s Germany would have acquitted her. Indeed, no protest march would have been possible in the first place.
While right-wing parties and figures like Trump, the AfD and Reform do rest knowingly on a support base that includes explicit and often violent fascists, they are not themselves fascist. This matters because, like a doctor diagnosing a patient, we must be precise in assessing and diagnosing the political situation if we are to react to it and organise to fight back effectively.
Doomsaying about how we are faced with an impending fascist dictatorship could do more to demoralise workers and young people than it will to rally them to action. Calling for counter-mobilisations against the far right after describing the current government as fascist sows confusion, and the ‘cry-wolf’ effect of using the term “fascist” where it does not yet apply can lower our guard against the real thing.
It also runs the danger of letting capitalism off the hook. The structural racism, misogyny, LGBTQ+phobia and violence we see today are not a sign of a fascist aberration – they are core features of capitalism itself.
Bonapartism
The term that more accurately describes and explains figures like Trump in capitalist countries is “Bonapartism”, although it isn’t regularly used or widely understood. It is named after Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, or Napoleon III (Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew), who was elected president of the second French Republic in 1848 following the defeat of the 1848 revolutions.
A conservative, he initially enjoyed the support of the right-wing parties. In 1851 he staged a coup d’etat when the National Assembly threatened to pass a constitutional amendment preventing him from seeking a second term as president and declared himself Emperor.
Bonaparte’s regime employed many familiar authoritarian tactics. He carried out strict censorship of speech and the media, and outspoken opponents of his rule faced prison or exile to the French empire’s colonies. While the National Assembly and bourgeois parties still existed on paper, in practice he acted as a dictator.
Like his modern counterparts, he also rested on violent far-right thugs such as the ‘December 10th Society’ which was used to crush opponents. These methods were to be taken to a new extremes as part of the organised mass terror against the working class by the forces of fascism.
At the same time, Bonaparte relied on populist appeals to the masses, and claimed to represent all classes in society. In contrast to most governments of capitalist countries, who depend upon the support of the capitalist class for power and represent their interests and politics directly, Bonaparte was the archetypal ‘strongman’ ruler who wielded state power independently and subordinated the bourgeoisie to his authority. Crucially however, he still maintained and protected the capitalist system through his dictatorship.
A modern form of Bonapartism, which maintains, to a varying degree, a parliamentary veneer, can be seen today in figures like Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Throughout history, such Bonapartist figures have come to power at times of a political impasse in society, with a crisis neither the working class or the ‘establishment’ wing of the capitalists can address.
In 1848 France, there was mass discontent with the ruling parties, but the working class and left leaders had suffered major defeats following the failure of the revolution. It was in this context that Bonaparte was able to establish his dictatorship.
The working class today has suffered blows, such as the ebbing of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the failure of Corbynism. It is in this context that figures like Trump have emerged. While his regime bears many of the hallmarks of Bonapartism, it currently does not need to entirely do away with the political forms of parliamentary democracy to maintain its rule.
What’s more, any attempt at doing so would still risk a mass backlash. While some of the key movements of the last decade have faced defeats, the working class has not suffered anything like the crushing defeats of the 1840s or the 1930s.
Our organisations are still intact and still able to operate openly, even in spite of rising repression. This is a crucial difference between the Bonapartism of Trump, Orbán and others, versus fascism, which is especially dangerous because it comes to power only after having completely smashed the working class’ ability to organise.
On the other hand, we can still harness the growing anger against Trump and the other ‘strongmen,’ against war, climate change, poverty, and oppression to build a movement to topple the undemocratic authoritarian capitalist system and to build a new, free socialist society.
