The world is experiencing a polarization of unprecedented characteristics. One of its expressions, which raises the most concern, though it’s not the only one, is the rise of the far right. On the other side of the barricade, the mobilizations of the exploited and the oppressed is growing, but without a coherent leadership to guide them towards a revolutionary perspective. This new awakening of a phenomenon that is sufficiently reminiscent of fascism brings us dangerously close to barbarism and presents a challenge to all of us who believe that a socialist world is not only possible, but more urgent and necessary than ever. Understanding the causes of the emergence and rise of these reactionary political expressions is the first step to developing a strategy to confront them, to advance in the regroupment of revolutionaries and in the struggle for workers’ governments on a national and global scale.
By Alejandro Bodart
The growth of the far right began with the new century, but has been accelerating in recent years. According to some academics, this would be the fourth far-right wave since the end of World War II. What makes this one different from all the previous ones is that for the first time they have gained mass electoral weight, spread internationally and gained governmental power in some of the most important countries in the world.
With Trump and Bolsonaro, they governed in the US and Brazil until a few years ago and, although they lost the following elections, they maintained a huge influence and Trump is likely to return to power this year. Since the rise of Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi in 2014, they have held government in India, the most populous country on Earth. Recep Erdogan has governed Turkey since that same year. Recently, libertarian Javier Milei became president of Argentina. And the government led by Benjamin Netanyahu in the State of Israel is responsible for the mass murder of the Palestinian people.
In the recent elections to the European Parliament, the growth of the far right in the main imperialist powers shocked the old continent. In France, Marine Le Pen’s party came in first, provoking a political earthquake. Although it was later defeated in the second round of the legislative elections, its growth is undeniable. In Italy, the coalition led by Giorgia Meloni, heir of Mussolini’s party, consolidated itself in power. In Germany, the neo-fascists of Alternative for Germany came in second. The far right won in Austria and Belgium and performed well in almost all EU countries. In addition to Meloni in Italy, Viktor Orbán governs Hungary and similar forces are part of coalition governments in Croatia, Slovakia and Finland. Until a few months ago, they also governed in Poland. The Swedish government is sustained by the external support of the far right, and in the Netherlands, the far right won the last parliamentary elections. The European political landscape is looking bleak.
Despite the significant differences between this phenomenon and the fascism of World War II, if it were to consolidate and succeed in inflicting significant defeats on the workers’ movement, it could evolve into very similar forms. This does not seem to be the most probable perspective in the immediate future, since the current international situation also presents a widespread rise of struggle by workers, women and the youth, which continues to be dynamic and difficult to dismantle despite its uneven levels. The flip side of the rise of the far right is the revulsion it provokes in the rest of the population, which fuels social mobilization to confront it, as we have just seen in France and in almost every country where it rears its head. Even the genocidal State of Israel, which is the closest thing to a fascist State, is unable to stabilize itself because of the heroic resistance of the Palestinian people and the extraordinary displays of international solidarity, mainly in the center of the American and European empires. But we cannot minimize a phenomenon that is on the rise and that we must confront with unity in the streets and developing audacious initiatives to strengthen the construction of our parties and regroup revolutionaries at the international level.
Similarities, differences and disputes
Although the various far-right populist forces are very heterogeneous, they have a common basis that identifies them. They are xenophobic, racist and misogynist. They openly defend social inequality as a natural phenomenon and fiercely oppose any intervention by the bourgeois state to temper it. They are profoundly individualistic, elitist and meritocratic. They blame individuals for being poor or destitute and refuse to provide them any kind of help with public resources.
Their goal is to end the rights that have been won through decades of struggle, mainly labor rights, and to drastically reduce the social expenditures of states in order to reduce taxes on corporations and thus guarantee them super-profits. They know that they have to defeat the working class to achieve this, and that is why they are trying to impose increasingly authoritarian and repressive regimes, limiting or eliminating democratic freedoms.
They present themselves to society with a series of central ideas and simplistic but effective answers. They propose a ban on immigration, which they blame for the deterioration of the standard of living of “native” majorities, mainly in Europe and the U.S. They present themselves as standard-bearers of security and propose an iron fist and increased militarization to “bring back order,” denying any relationship between social marginalization and crime, and attempting to put an end to social protest. Another of their central ideas is corruption, which they associate exclusively with the “political class” and some groups that oppose them, avoiding its relation to big business, banks and the networks of regimes which are corrupt down to their foundations. They defend nationalist policies or supposedly sovereign ideas in imperialist countries, while in backward or semicolonial countries they present themselves as lackeys of imperialism.
Another issue that unites them is Islamophobia, which has been encouraged by sectors of power after the 9-11 attacks and is the basis of the argument that leads them to defend the State of Israel and its genocidal policy. In countries with ethnic minorities such as India, they are deeply racist towards them. They are linked to an array of churches and religions and attack what they call gender ideology and the gains of the women’s movement and LGBT+ movement, such as the right to abortion and same-sex marriage, which they accuse of “perverting” the minds of young people and destroying the family institution. They also reject environmental rights in favor of extractivist business.
However, despite these agreements, the various far right parties and movements have differences among themselves. Although they all declare themselves to be “anti-system” and critical of the bourgeois-democratic or liberal regimes, and, for the time being, vie for power through their mechanisms, there are differences between those who are more “reformist” in their efforts to bring about the changes they propose, and others who would like to impose everything faster. There are still, however, very few who propose or try to impose other types of regimes by force or openly dedicate themselves to organizing paramilitary groups.
There are also differences between those who align themselves with Ukraine and those who align themselves with Russia in the war that has lasted more than two years. In Europe, although they declare themselves Euroskeptics and sovereigntists, not all of them are considering breaking away from the European Union or NATO. And while most try to discursively separate themselves from the fascism of the 1930s in order to broaden their support base, others refuse to do so. These nuances have led to the emergence of different spaces permanently shifting in the European Parliament. One group gathers around Meloni, who has recently attempted to move closer to the traditional conservative right. Another group that is gaining strength is Patriots for Europe, referenced in the Hungarian Viktor Orbán, who is openly aligned with Putin and sympathizes with Trump. Santiago Abascal of Vox recently joined this group (abandoning Meloni). So has the Dutch far right, Marine Le Pen’s bloc and other forces, including Salvini of the Italian coalition government, making it the strongest block of this ideological spectrum. There are other spaces, with a more openly fascist discourse, such as Alternative for Germany, which is forming its own group.
Under Milei, the discourse of the libertarian tendency has gained momentum. In regions of Asia and the Middle East, religious extremism has been gaining strength for years, and where it governs, it imposes profoundly authoritarian and medieval practices against women and society as a whole.
The causes
The far right has existed for decades. The important thing to unravel is why they are managing to win the sympathy of broad layers of the masses and become a phenomenon of international scope. Although many factors have converged, the determining one has been the capitalist crisis that has unfolded in the first years of the new century. This crisis, in its magnitude, is comparable to the great crises of capitalism that provoked historical changes, led humanity to two world wars, to the birth of the first workers’ state in Russia or to the rise of fascism in Europe, among others.
Capitalism as a system and bourgeois democracy as a mechanism of domination, which had emerged “victorious” from the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and ruling class ideologues predicted would last forever, began to decline within a few years.
In 2008, the economic crisis that broke out was the most severe one since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. The hardships of the workers and the oppressed deepened to unbearable levels. The despair of mass sectors, in countless semi-colonial countries, caused an unprecedented migratory crisis. Unbridled extractivism produced socio-environmental catastrophes that continue to worsen. Cuts in social spending led to a health crisis, the most tragic outcome of which was a pandemic that forced the world’s population to lockdown for months.
All this made “democracy”, which in the decades of the cold war against the Stalinist bureaucracy was a significant weapon of capitalist propaganda, become an empty shell for the great majority of humanity. Years of applying neoliberal plans and deepening social suffering led the old parties that historically alternated in power into crisis. Thus, the hegemonic discourse that imperialism and the bourgeoisies had managed to impose collapsed. Even the imperialist hegemony of the U.S. began to be questioned.
A shift to the left squandered
At first, this new situation resulted in enormous social conflict and the rise of various left-wing populist expressions internationally. In Latin America, a new petit-bourgeois nationalism developed, not linked to traditional bourgeois sectors, with Chavez in Venezuela as its main referent, and center-left or populist variants came to power in a large part of the continent. The wave reached the US, where the figure of Bernie Sanders grew, and a small organization within the Democratic Party, the DSA, was flooded with young people who defined themselves as socialists joining its ranks. In Europe, Syriza would become an international reference of a new reformist left, with a radical discourse, which began to overcome the old social democracy and had similar expressions across most of the old continent. The programmatic and class limitations of all these leaderships, which had to put their proposal to the test in the midst of an acute capitalist crisis, meant that instead of taking anti-capitalist measures to counteract it, when they came to government they ended up turning against the mass movement, continuing to apply austerity measures and plans designed by the IMF and the World Bank, which increased the hardships of working people. This led to the failure of all these experiences and provoked a great demoralization. The marginality of the revolutionary left as a whole, plus the sectarianism of some and the opportunism of others, meant that it could not offer an alternative to this course in any country. Although it was at the head of some important initiatives in Brazil, France and Argentina, only the Argentine Left Front for Unity (FITU)managed to maintain a certain degree of representation and to remain faithful to its program.
The pendulum swings to the right
The debacle of the new reformism that gave birth to the 21st century and the weakness of the revolutionary left caused the opportunity to begin to overcome the confusions in consciousness inherited from the collapse of the Soviet Union to be missed. On the contrary, these were worsened. With the old and the new left reformists having failed, the far right began to find fertile ground.
Uncertainty, skepticism and distrust of everything that existed grew even more. The development of alternative media became the channel for the spread of all kinds of crazy ideas and lies, which began to enjoy greater credibility than those coming from the institutions of a degraded democracy, from the parties that governed or had governed, from scientific authorities and from the supposedly “reliable” media, which in turn were responsible for having transmitted the ideas emanating from a corrupt and decomposed state bureaucracy. The far right was capable of using the networks and alternative media to propagandize its facile discourse and penetrate the masses.
The fact that the majority of the Latin American and European population has not suffered the consequences of the dictatorships of the 1970s or of fascism for decades has made the terrain easier for them. They managed to influence a sector of the youth that has not been able to adapt to the improvements in women’s rights. And sectors of an impoverished middle class, informal workers without any rights and very backward sectors of the working class.
Seeing that they were gaining influence, sectors of the bourgeoisie and imperialism itself, hit by a crisis that seems to have no end, began to finance them, betting on them being able to achieve what other leaderships have not been able to: defeat the working class, put an end to its historic conquests and begin to recover the rates of profit of the past.
The shift to the right of layers of the population has not only strengthened the far right: it has also been accompanied by a greater shift to the right of the traditional political forces, which are thus trying to join the wave of this second moment in the new stage that began with the new century.
Workers resist
But the growth of these reactionary expressions is not the only phenomenon of this stage. The other one is the fierce struggle of workers against attacks on their standard of living and in defense of their economic, social and democratic rights; of rebellions of entire peoples against their oppressors, of great mobilizations of women and the youth. We have seen rebellions, uprisings, general strikes and millions in the streets in a great number of countries on all continents. The latest, in Kenya.
We are witnessing a radically polarized world, where one phenomenon feeds the other. Right-wing expressions generate radicalization and rejection in other sectors of society, which are prepared to fight them in all fields, with whatever means they have at hand to do so. We have seen this recently in the French elections, where the danger of a National Rally victory mobilized millions who managed to reverse the results of the first round. In Germany, millions have mobilized against the threat of the far right Alternative for Germany. In Portugal, the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution was the channel for an extraordinary mobilization in response to the growth of Chega’s fachos. In Argentina, two general strikes and millions in the streets put up a fight against the liberfacho Milei. Similar situations are seen in almost all the countries where the far right is advancing.
Where they govern, the workers’ resistance multiplies and, since they do not manage to defeat the working class or solve the problems that brought them to power. So they lose ground and elections, as has already happened in the U.S., Brazil or recently in Poland, although the far right is a phenomenon that is here to stay in all those countries.
The tasks of the revolutionaries
The different political variants of the bourgeoisie and mainly the far right, the extreme right or the radical right, which globally attacks our rights and democratic liberties, must be confronted and defeated in the streets, with the methods of the working class. It is false that we must subordinate mobilization to possible and future electoral victories, as the reformists claim. Even where forces of the classic right or center-left manage to defeat the far right electorally, as has happened in the U.S. with Biden, Brazil with Lula or France with the Popular Front, the far right will not disappear, and it will feed on the new betrayals of the reformists to continue acting and return to power.
In order to promote the most massive mobilization possible and, where conditions exist, the general strike, revolutionaries have to develop the broadest unity of action and the united front, without subordinating ourselves in the least to the reformist or bureaucratic leaderships which we call upon to mobilize, nor forgetting to criticize their contradictions. We have to work without any kind of sectarianism and to fraternally engage the rank and file of the rest of the organizations, without falling into the opportunism of adapting to the erroneous positions of their leaders. At the same time, it is fundamental to encourage coordination among the most militant sectors in order to work as a single bloc. Also, where the far right has organized groups that operate, it is fundamental to be at the vanguard of organizing self-defense. Keeping in mind that fascism or its disciples are not to be debated with, they are to be fought until they are defeated.
One of the great weaknesses of the stage, despite the disposition to fight of our class, is the absence of revolutionary leaderships with mass influence. The problem of leadership is not only in the trade unions: it is essentially political. The most important historical task ahead of us is to build strong revolutionary socialist parties and an international that can become a pole of regroupment. And it is possible to take steps in this direction if we take advantage of the small and big opportunities that the class struggle offers us. We have to patiently explain to the best activists that they should not allow themselves to be fooled again by the siren songs of the reformists that, faced with the rise of the far right, which they themselves facilitated, propose the same recipes as always: to unite behind fronts without principle, with a program of cosmetic reforms and the refusal to undertake an in-depth struggle against the system, which they never see conditions to undertake.
The capitalist system is in full decomposition and if we do not help to bury it, it will soon lead us to barbarism. The fact that the far right and fascism are once again gaining ground is a clear sign that this process has already begun. Preventing its further advance is crucial not only to guarantee a dignified life for all humanity, but also to avoid new fratricidal wars and the degradation of nature reaching a point of no return.
The only alternative system to capitalist barbarism is socialism. However, we are speaking of the socialism of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, not of the bureaucratic caricature into which the Soviet Union degenerated under the reign of Stalin. Nor of the farce of capitalist dictatorships that stain the name of socialism in Venezuela or Nicaragua. Much less of what sectors of the “campist” left try to sell as alternatives to Western imperialism: China or Russia, countries that have become imperialist and whose regimes have nothing to envy to the worst dictatorships.
The socialism worth fighting for is one where workers govern through councils, where everything is decided democratically. Where the wealth of our countries allows the enjoyment of life, the enjoyment of free time and where no one lives off of the labor of others or the oppression of others. A world where countries are free to determine themselves.
To fight for this type of society it is essential to organize nationally and internationally, to regroup the true revolutionaries, to fight until victory. This is the proposal of the International Socialist League, which we invite you to join.