The rise of Reform and their recent electoral successes rightly cause concern. A class analysis and strategy is required to meet the threat.
The financial crisis of 2008-9 was a defeat for globalism and fantastical “end of history” delusions, signalling a reversion to national interest, tariffs and an intensification of competition for resources and hegemony. As in the inter-war period, right-wing populism has arisen in conditions of economic and political instability. Capitalism’s multiple crises, exacerbated by 40 years of neoliberal reaction, has produced a deepening crisis of liberal democracy itself. Whatever party you vote for, the policies never change, with more cuts, privatisation, austerity, war and repression.
Globalisation supercharged de-industrialisation in the west and nowhere more so than Britain. Thatcher and her successors tied the country’s economic fate ever closer to the colossal finance capital money-laundering operations of the City of London.
Political developments lag behind economic reality. Traditional British parties proved incapable of resolving the contradictions laid bare by neoliberalism. The two-party system is dead and in the process, many are attracted to the right-wing populism of Farage’s Reform. Instability creates disorientation and only by analysing the causes of these processes can a strategy be constructed to defeat the right-wing and the crisis-ridden profit system that produces and enables them.
The failure of the labour and trade union movement to stem the tide of reaction remains the principal subjective factor explaining current conditions. Many workers have fought fierce and heroic struggles to defend conditions, but almost always in conditions of isolated struggles. The refusal to coordinate such struggles or, as with the pensions public sector general strike in 2011, when they have been openly betrayed, has allowed our class enemies a tremendous opportunity to divide us.
The main political task of building a mass workers’ party to replace a Labour Party has been massively set back by the truly shocking experience around Your Party, riven by the twin poisons of that narrow perspective incapable of looking beyond current conditions, to the potential of mass class resistance – dead-hand bureaucratism and infantile sectarianism.
There is also the near ubiquitous influence of left-liberalism in our movement with its divisive and destructive identity politics, the elevation of hyper-individualism over collective class solidarity with its moralistic virtue-signalling, rather than effective class organisation in the workplaces and communities.
Socialists and communists must entirely reject the self-defeating approach of many ‘lefts’ who contemptuously dismiss working class people currently attracted to Reform as “stupid, racist gammons” and even as “fascists”. Reform UK is not, at this stage certainly, a stable political formation. As class struggle intensifies many workers voting for or even joining Reform today will leave as it fractures along class lines. It is a serious error to dismiss such people, some who will be union members.
Reform is not a fascist party. Left liberals throw around the term ‘fascist’ as a preacher denounces sin – a moral condemnation, an insult, not a serious political designation. Farage and Trump do employ some of the rhetoric of fascism, but they are establishment to the core. The social composition of society is now heavily weighted in the working class’s favour. The ruling class is unlikely to repeat the historic error of handing over state control to fascists as in the inter-war period – liberal authoritarianism is their weapon of choice.
We should engage workers who have an initial attraction to Reform in debate in workplaces and communities, not alienate them from the only force that can represent their interests – socialism.
In conditions of growing instability, such workers can most effectively be won to socialist ideas by a return to class politics, a trade union movement prepared to fight not just isolated but coordinated battles and the formation of a new workers’ party which, despite recent failures, remains not merely a desirable option but an historic and political imperative.
If you have thoughts and comments or have personal political experiences organising against Reform, do write us, including your contact details, at [email protected]
