Creeping Fascism – Public Reading Rooms

The United States enters its Weimar Era

Public Reading Rooms — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 19:23:57 +0000

Walden Bello writes: By mid-February 2021, American deaths from COVID-19 may well surpass the country’s 405,400 deaths during the Second World War. By around mid-May, more Americans will have died from COVID-19 than during the Civil War, which killed 655,000, and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, when 675,000 are estimated to have perished.

The unravelling of American politics

Yet America’s largely self-inflicted COVID-19 disaster may be eclipsed by the US’s political unravelling, which has proceeded with warp speed in the last few weeks, with the once celebrated American way of succession in power via the ballot box dealt a body blow by a large sector of the electorate that has marched in lock step with their leader in refusing to accept the results of the presidential elections.

Joe Biden will be seated this time around, but this may well be a Pyrrhic victory purchased at the cost of being regarded as illegitimate in the eyes of the majority of the 71 million Americans under the spell of Donald Trump. Future electoral contests for power may well end up being decided by a strong dose of street warfare, as the US goes the way of Germany’s ill-fated Weimar Republic. The violent storming of the Capitol by a Trumpian mob underlined the face of things to come.

America’s crisis has been building up for decades, and COVID-19 has merely accelerated the march to its dramatic denouement. Central to explaining this crisis is the erosion of white supremacy, a condition that the Republican Party has exploited successfully since the late 60s, through the so-called “Southern Strategy” and racist dog whistle politics, to make the party the representative of a racial majority that is threatened subliminally by the demographic and cultural expansion of non-white America.

An added contribution to the Republican consolidation of its white political bastion has been the the desertion by the Democratic Party of its white working class base – the pillar of the once solid “New Deal Coalition” put together by Franklin Delano Roosevelt – as “Third Way” Democrats from Clinton to Obama legitimized and led in promoting neoliberal policies.

America displaced

Neoliberalism has been central to the concurrent and seemingly irreversible economic crisis of the US. By preaching that it would lead to the best of all possible worlds for America and everyone else if capital were free to search for the lowest priced labor around, neoliberal theory provided the justification for shipping manufacturing capacity and jobs to China and elsewhere in the global South, leading to rapid deindustrialization, with manufacturing jobs falling from some 18 million in 1979 to 12 million in 2009.

Long before the Wall Street Crisis of 2008, such key US industries as consumer electronics, appliances, machine tools, auto parts, furniture, telecommunications equipment, and many others that had been the giants of the capitalist global production system had been relegated to history, that is, transferred to China.

With highly paid manufacturing and white collar jobs sent elsewhere, the US became one of the world’s most unequal countries, prompting economist Thomas Piketty to exclaim, “I want to stress that the word ‘collapse’…is no exaggeration. The bottom 50 percent of the income distribution claimed around 20 percent of national income from 1960 to 1980; but that share has been divided almost in half, falling to just 12 percent in 2010-2015. The top centile’s share has moved in the opposite direction, from barely 11 percent to more than 20 per cent.”

Trump smelled opportunity here that a Democratic leadership tied to Wall Street ignored, and he made anti-globalization a centerpiece of his 2016 electoral platform. And, by tying anti-globalization to anti-migrant rhetoric and dog whistle anti-black appeals, he was able to break through to the white working class that had already given signals it was ready to be racially swayed as early as the Reagan era in the 1980s.

Ironically, the combination of neoliberalism’s ideological conviction and corporate America’s hunger for super-profits made China’s state-managed economy the so-called “workshop of the world,” contributing centrally to the creation in just 25 years of a massive industrial base that has resulted in China’s becoming the new center of global capital accumulation, displacing the United States and Europe.

Xi Jin Ping has his pulse on the New China, infusing confidence to millions of Chinese with an ideology that combines the vision of ever rising living standards with nationalist pride that China has forever left behind the “century of shame” from the mid-1850’s to the mid-1950’s.

America’s ideological malaise

Even as an ideologically motivated Chinese population emerges from the Coronavirus crisis, convinced that China’s ability to contain COVID-19 proves the superiority of China’s authoritarian methods of governance, the current spirit of American society is perhaps best captured by William Butler Yeats’ immortal lines: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” American ideology – and there is an American ideology – is suffering from a profound loss of credibility, and not only among non-Americans but among Americans themselves.

Two primordial beliefs undergird this ideology, and both have been irretrievably eroded: the so-called “American Dream” and “American Exceptionalism.

The American Dream has long lost its sheen, except perhaps to immigrants. To people on the left, the American Dream is now mentioned only in cynical terms, as a lost Golden Age of relative social mobility that was destroyed by neoliberal, anti-worker policies. To those on the far right, the American Dream is one that liberals have taken from whites through all sorts of affirmative action programs and given to racial and ethnic minorities. The subtext of the Trumpian counterrevolution has been, in fact, restoring the American dream, the bright prospects of social ascent, to its rightful owners, that is, to white Americans, and to them only.

As for American Exceptionalism, the idea that America is God’s own country, this has had two versions, and both have long lost credibility among large numbers of Americans. There is the liberal version of America as the “indispensable country,” as former US secretary of State Madeline Albright put it, where the US serves as a model for the rest of the world.

This is supposed to be America’s “soft power,” of which Frances Fitzgerald wrote: “The idea that…the mission of the United States was to build democracy around the world had become a convention of American politics in the 1950’s,” so that “it was more or less assumed that democracy, that is, electoral democracy combined with private ownership and civil liberties, was what the United States had to offer the Third World. Democracy provided not only the basis for opposition to Communism but the practical method to make sure that opposition worked.”

Cold War liberals believed that it was America’s responsibility to spread democracy through force of arms, if necessary, and it was this ambitious project’s tremendous cost in lives lost and sovereignty of nations violated that led to the historic emergence of the New Left in the US beginning with the Vietnam War. The effort to resurrect this missionary democracy to justify the US invasion of Iraq in the early 2000’s received widespread repudiation both domestically and globally.

The conservative version of American Exceptionalism was first forcibly expressed in the early 1980s by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, who said that the United States was indeed exceptional and unique and that its democracy was not for export as other countries lacked the cultural requisites to water it, thus providing the justification of American support for dictators like the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet.

When Donald Trump appropriated the right’s ideological legacy, democracy itself was taken out of what was supposed to be unique to the United States. In his rabidly anti-immigrant and pro-police speech at the Republican National convention in August 2020, not once was the word “democracy” mentioned. What was unique to America, in Trump’s view, was the spirit of conquest of the land and the West by white “ranchers and miners, cowboys and sheriffs, farmers and settlers,” a white world made possible by the likes of “Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill.” Those names of television characters that Trump apparently loved as a child did not exactly resonate with non-whites nor with the rest of the world.

Another hallowed institution threatened

With Trump inciting resistance to democracy and his Republican base marching to his tune, as the storming of the Capitol so vividly illustrated, the next 4 years promise to be an era of unrestrained political strife. And with civilian politicians increasingly unable to break the political stalemate, another hallowed American institution might well become extinct: the subordination of the country’s military leadership to civilian authorities.

To those for whom military intervention in the name of “political stability” is unthinkable, they have only to see how many unthinkable things Trump has done to American political traditions in just the last few months, with undying support from his large mass base. They have only to look at Chile, where that country’s proud tradition of military non-intervention in politics ended in a military coup in 1973, after rightwing resistance to the lawfully elected President Salvador Allende had stalemated the democratic process and led to violent street warfare instigated by right-wing para-military gangs like Patria y Libertad that resemble today’s Proud Boys, American Nazis, and the Klan.

More like the rest of us

In recent days, many American and foreign commentators on US politics have evinced shock that the country that invented modern logistics could get only 4 million of the projected 20 million people vaccinated for COVID-19 by the end of 2020. But there are even more previously “unthinkables” that are likely to occur as an America plunged into the depths of political and economic crises becomes more like the rest of the world, as Americans become more like the rest of us ordinary mortals.

Walden Bello is senior analyst at the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South and the International Adjunct Professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton. The author or co-author of 25 books, he served as a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines from 2009 to 2015.

this article first appeared in Rappler.com

Boris Johnson Enables Creeping Fascism: the Labour Left must fight back

Seema Syeda — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 17:07:18 +0000

If it wasn’t obvious before, it’s crystal clear now: Boris Johnson is a far-right authoritarian leader. He unlawfully suspended parliament to avoid MP’s scrutiny and force the UK to crash out of the European Union without a deal. He’s purged the Conservative Party of ‘moderates’. He has delivered political speeches with uniformed policemen lined up behind him, breaking any facade of police neutrality. He’s even used police to escort sacked Conservative advisors out of Whitehall: for which he must pay damages. And he’s made openly racist, sexist, and homophobic comments.

Fascists on the streets are no longer chanting ‘Tommy Robinson’ but ‘Boris, Boris, Boris!’. And while he may have lost his parliamentary majority, his spectacular antics have a greater prize in mind: winning the next election so that he can gut the state; trample on workers’ rights and environmental regulations; enable the hedge funds who’ve invested heavily in a no deal Brexit to make a killing; and open up the British market to his billionaire backers. And if Britain becomes an authoritarian regime in the process, so what?

Boris’ elevation to the premiership has not happened in a vacuum. In Britain, decades of right-wing media messaging from outlets like the Daily Mail and the Express have launched attacks on the institutional foundations of liberal democracy: parliament, the judiciary, the civil service. They have whipped up xenophobia and reaction amongst a significant constituency of the British electorate.

Supposedly ‘liberal’ outlets like the BBC, with their anti-labour and anti-Corbyn editorial policy, have stoked this further, consistently platforming spokespeople of the far-right, from Steve Bannon to Generation Identity. Big data and targeted advertising on social media played a critical role, with the Cambridge Analytica scandal highlighting the rife abuse of data for political ends.

Public services devastated by decades of austerity, and a capitalist system that has left many workers exploited with high living costs and low wages has created rage amongst the British people, some of whom who have been persuaded by the media and the racist Tory regime to scapegoat migrants rather than politicians and bosses. The Brexit vote encapsulated this sentiment.

As this study from LSE shows, it was not a monolithic ‘working class’ that drove the Brexit vote. Instead, the ‘squeezed middle’ played an instrumental role. Many Tory voters in the shires — white, older — swung the vote. Neoliberalism has created atomised individuals and broken down any sense of community solidarity.

The squeezed middle, struggling to cope, turns to patriotism, nationalism, and strongmen leaders to fulfill their need for belonging. This trend is repeated across the globe: from Trump’s America to Orban’s Hungary, from Modi’s India to Bolsonaro’s Brazil. In my recent book, co-authored with Neil Faulkner, Samir Dathi, and Phil Hearse, we call this process Creeping Fascism.

It is now crunch time for Brexit and the liberal parliamentary order as we know it. For the Labour Left, the crisis is existential. Labour’s Brexit fudge isn’t working. The party has wasted years promising to deliver a ‘jobs first’ Brexit, failing to expose it for the racist, far-right, billionaire-backed venture that it is.

In doing so, it’s hemorrhaged progressive remain voters across the country. It’s not just the polls – long discredited on the Labour Left for their failure to predict the 2017 election – that prove this. The EU election results were a hammer blow to Labour, and the Peterborough by-election evidenced a huge drop in vote share.

The progressive vote is now split between Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens. With the Tory Party and the Brexit Party now headed for an electoral alliance, the far-right vote is soon to be unified. If things remain as they are now, we will have a Tory-Brexit Party majority government in power by the end of the next election.

Labour MPs and the shadow cabinet know it. That, of course, is why legislation for a general election has not yet passed. The only way for Labour to stand a chance, and we must repeat this over and over again, is for Labour to unequivocally back a radical remain position.

It must not be the remain campaign of Cambell and Blair. We must go, all guns blazing, on an offensive against the Brexiters and their fundamentally capitalist, racist agenda. We must defend migrants and free movement. As Sabrina Huck recently argued in LabourList, capitalism as a system must be explicitly criticised and a real socialist transformation offered. And our manifesto as a whole: domestic and foreign, must be far more radical than 2017.

A four-day week, universal basic income, rent controls, housing as a guaranteed right for all, complete nationalisation of railways and the energy industry are just some of the ideas that have been floated. Of course we can and should dare to go even further. A positive, inspiring, visionary manifesto from the Labour Party can break us free from the current constitutional quagmire and threat of fascism.

But a radical policy agenda is not enough. Labour most mobilise its mass movement onto the streets. The fascists are emboldened. On Saturday, they brazenly attacked two demonstrations and started altercations with the police. They openly stated their intentions to attack Diane Abbott and Owen Jones (who has already been ambushed and beaten on his birthday), both of whom were speaking at the rallies. This is an escalation of their previous mobilisations. The Left must be ready to take control of the streets to defeat the fascists and create a new generation of activists to fight for socialism in Britain, Europe, and the world.

This is the only way to tear apart the Tory and Brexit party’s base of Leave voters. The appetite for a clean break with the existing order exists: the task for Labour is to ensure this radicalism is channeled to the Left, not to fascism and the far right.

Seema is co-author of Creeping Fascism: what it is and how to fight it with Neil Faulkner, Phil Hearse and Samir Dathi. Follow her on Twitter @seema_syeda.

The New Fascism: borders, ‘illegal’ people, and concentration camps

Neil Faulkner — Tue, 03 Sep 2019 19:15:45 +0000

‘Illegal’ is a fast-growing category of non-person. Or, as US Customs and Border Protection call them, ‘inadmissables’. These are now the most visible among what Franz Fanon called ‘the Wretched of the Earth’.

The UN estimates that the world now contains 71 million displaced people, 29 million of whom are refugees displaced from their home country, including 3.5 million registered asylum seekers.[1]

These are the most high-profile – and also the most vilified – of the victims of the global crisis. Their displacement is the result of some combination of four factors: war, genocide, poverty, and climate change. People leave their homes either because they are in fear of their lives or because they face destitution if they stay put. They leave their homes because they have no hope if they do not.

The world is like this because capitalism is geared to private profit, not human need or ecological balance; because it is a system of competing corporations and rival states whose purpose is to enrich the 1%. Greed and power are all that matter.

The ‘inadmissables’ are the system’s collateral damage. Not only that: they are also its ideological shock-absorbers.

As the system wrecks people’s lives, it leaves behind great pools of social despair. This might crystallise into anger against the system – against the asset-strippers, the privatisers, the landlords, and the corporate debt-collectors. So the system allocates a special role to its ‘inadmissables’. Let them, the poorest of the poor, the most powerless of the powerless, take the blame.

So important is this role that demand quickly outruns supply. So valuable are ‘inadmissables’ that more are created. Take the case of the Indian province of Assam.

Indian state fascism

The Hindu chauvinist regime of Narendra Modi has just deemed 1.9 million residents of the north-eastern province of Assam to be ‘illegal’. Hindu chauvinism – as my colleague Seema Syeda has explained in the second edition of our book Creeping Fascism – is the Indian form of fascism. ‘A new revolution, to defeat the alien enemy, is beckoning,’ proclaims a promotional song of India’s National Register of Citizens (NRC). ‘Bravely let us shield our motherland.’

The NRC leaves no-one in doubt as to the identity of the ‘alien enemy’. The official NRC Facebook page displays a message from an Israeli woman that reads: ‘This Israeli sends her love to India: I stand with India in their fight against Pakistani terror.’

Modi has just put mainly-Muslim Kashmir – a territory in dispute between India and Pakistan since Partition, and contested in three subsequent wars between the two countries – under martial law.

The NRC is turning Assam Muslims who fled Bangladesh in 1971 into ‘illegals’. At the same time, Modi’s BJP party is considering a bill to enshrine the rights of Hindu migrants in law. Pakistan is the external enemy. Muslims are the internal enemy. The long-term aim is an exclusive Hindu state.

What will happen to the newly created Assam ‘illegals’? They have been given a right of appeal – a grotesque travesty given India’s expensive, clogged-up, and increasingly chauvinist courts. ‘Everyone will be given a right to prove their citizenship,’ Assam’s BJP law minister told the BBC. ‘But if they fail to do so, well, the legal system will take its own course.’ Pressed further, he explained this meant deportation.

To where? Bangladesh has said it will not take them. So they will be locked up. The BJP regime is building new camps for the mass incarceration of Muslims deemed ‘illegal’.[2]

The regime is also giving the green light to Hindu-fascist pogroms.

An estimated 24,000 Rohingya Muslims were murdered, 18,000 raped, and 116,000 beaten in state-backed pogroms in Myanmar in 2017. Around 700,000 Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh.

A wave of Islamophobic violence by state police and communal mobs in Hindu-chauvinist India, a country of 1.4 billion people, where Muslims account for 14% of the population, could turn the Rohingya Genocide into a historical footnote.[3]

American state fascism

Take another example: Trump’s America. The US operates the world’s largest migrant detention system. Around 20,000 people are held on the US-Mexican border by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), more than 50,000 elsewhere in the country by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and more than 11,000 children by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

As well as deporting around a third of a million people at the south-western border each year, the US state is currently targeting around one million ‘illegals’ inside the country in paramilitary-style raids, arresting and incarcerating hundreds of workers at a time, many of them with children at home, who are then left abandoned. Conditions inside US concentration camps can include: families separated and children either incarcerated apart from their parents or left to fend for themselves; hundreds of sweating men held in wire pens in the heat; lack of access to showers, washing facilities, and toothbrushes; lack of access to private toilets; lack of access to clean clothes; lack of hot meals or even enough food.

At a camp in El Paso, Texas, 900 migrants were ‘being held at a facility designed for 125. In some cases, cells designed for 35 people were holding 155 people.’ One observer described the facility as a ‘human dog pound’.

Children at a facility in Clint, Texas, were reported sleeping on concrete floors. Observers described ‘children as young as 7 and 8 … wearing clothes caked with snot and tears’. A doctor described camps he had visited as ‘torture facilities’.[4]

European state fascism

Now let’s take a look closer to home.

The EU currently has around 900,000 asylum seekers in limbo, their applications for entry pending, most of them incarcerated in detention centres. The rejection rate has risen from 37% in 2016 to 64% in 2019. So a majority of the people held will, in due course, be deemed ‘illegal’ and deported back to the violence and poverty from which they have fled.

Around 9,000 of these people are living in a concentration camp at Moria on the Greek island of Lesbos. Here, people live in metal containers or tents surrounded by rubbish. More than 70 people share a toilet. Raw sewage seeps into children’s mattresses. Suicide attempts are at epidemic level. Traumatised children held in the camp draw pictures that show stormy seas dotted with terrified faces, lifeless bodies floating in the waves, planes dropping bombs, and eyes that weep blood.

Around 140,000 people reached Europe across the Mediterranean last year. But many who tried failed to make it. Some were drowned: an average of six a day. But many were herded back by EU-funded Libyan coastguards, many recruited from warlord militias, and many of these ended up among the estimated 5,400 held in Libyan concentration camps. Crowded into huge breezeblock and corrugated iron warehouses, hundreds together, they sleep on bits cardboard. Most are considered by refugee agencies to be ‘at risk’, and there are reports of murders, rapes, suicides, and deaths from disease and starvation.[5]

In another part of the Med, the EU has paid the authoritarian regime of President Erdogan £4.6 billion in aid to prevent Syrian refugees reaching Europe. Around 3.5 million are living in the country. Some have been shot dead by Turkish police and army. Thousands have been driven back across the border into the war zone. Only 200,000 are accommodated in camps, though some of these are little more than giant warehouses for surplus people. The rest are rooting for themselves on the margins of society and dodging police raids against the ‘unregistered’ (another of the terms favoured by state racism). A measure of the extreme marginalisation of the refugees is that an estimated 80% of Syrian children in Turkey do not attend school.[6]

Britain holds about 25,000 people in detention centres. The Guardian described conditions thus: ‘In some senses, they look, sound, smell, and taste just like prisons: bland food, bleak corridors, standard-issue tracksuits and blue flip-flops, and the mechanical clunk at 9pm when everyone is locked in for the night. But Britain’s network of immigration removal centres are a case apart for the 25,000-plus people who pass through one each year: there is no rehabilitation, no criminal sentence, very often no time limit on the loss of liberty. Many of those incarcerated say the conditions are far worse than actual prison.’[7]

The British state – under the Brexit regime of Boris Johnson – is promising further repression. The Tories are talking about raising the income threshold for immigrants from £30,000 to £36,700 per year – this being the amount they must earn to secure residence rights. This, one assumes, will now be applied to a new category of ‘illegals’. Around 40% of the 3.6 million EU citizens resident in Britain are being denied permanent residency in the run-up to Brexit on 31 October. Their plight was encapsulated by the televised plea on 29 August of a Portuguese woman who has lived and worked in Britain for 20 years. ‘I have no voice… The resettlement scheme is not working… I can’t just be kicked out… I am very angry,’ she told a Sky News reporter.[8]

This is the true meaning of Brexit for the working class: the division of the population into ‘nationals’ and ‘illegals’. This is the face of state fascism.

This is what fascism looks like

The ‘illegal’ Muslims of Assam and the ‘illegal’ Europeans in Britain have not actually done anything to earn their new status: it has been imposed upon them by the state. They have not murdered a black man in a cell like some police do. They have not stolen public money by fiddling their expenses like some MPs do. They have not sexually abused children like some celebrities do. They have not dodged their taxes like some corporations do. The Muslims of Assam and the Europeans in Britain have not done any of these things. Instead, simply by virtue of who they happen to be, they have been designated ‘illegal’, reclassified as ‘unregistered’, turned into ‘inadmissables’, by a nationalist-racist state.

How many people were held in Nazi concentration camps in 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War, more than six years after Hitler first came to power? Compared with what was to come, not many. One estimate puts the number at 21,000.

When the war ended, of course, there were three-quarters of a million in the camps, and some 12 million had been murdered. It was the war, and in particular the Nazi conquest of Poland and western Russia, that created the context for interwar fascism’s hideous culmination in the Holocaust.

Fascism is a process. It has begun again.

The people of the world must organise, mobilise, and fight – by any means necessary – to stop the wave of nationalism, racism, ande fascism that is now threatening to engulf us. And we must face the hard and simple fact that the main enemy is the state itself.

The upsurge of mass resistance to the Brexit Coup has to be seen as part of a global struggle to smash second-wave fascism.

Never again! Onto the streets!

Stop the Coup! Stop Brexit!

All Migrants are Welcome Here! No-one is Illegal!

Neil Faulkner is the author, with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse, and Seema Syeda, of Creeping Fascism: what it is and how to fight it.

[1] https://www.unhcr.org/uk/figures-at-a-glance.html

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-45002549

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-49520593

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/world/asia/india-muslims-narendra-modi.html

3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-49460386

[4] https://www.globaldetentionproject.org/countries/americas/united-states

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/14/politics/ice-raids-undocumented-immigrants/index.html

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/12/politics/mike-pence-border-immigration/index.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-facilities/593239/

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/25/asylum-seekers-limbo-eu-countries

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/03/trauma-runs-deep-for-children-at-dire-lesbos-camp-moria

https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/press/2019/1/5c500c504/six-people-died-day-attempting-cross-mediterranean-2018-unhcr-report.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/31/un-calls-for-evacuation-of-libyan-refugees-amid-dire-conditions

[6] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pictures-of-life-for-turkeys-25-million-syrian-refugees-crisis-migrant-a6969551.html

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/turkey-6000-refugees-arrested-istanbul-crackdown-190724113011835.html

[7] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/11/life-in-a-uk-immigration-removal-centre-worse-than-prison-as-criminal-sentence

[8] https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/priti-patel-migrant-minimum-salary-threshold-home-office-a9056846.html

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/30/eu-citizens-uk-settled-status-alarm

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2019/aug/29/i-need-a-voice-portuguese-womans-brexit-plea-video

Mass Action Can Stop the Brexit Coup

Public Reading Rooms — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 12:54:26 +0000

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets last Saturday to defend democracy – to stop Boris Johnson closing down Parliament and imposing a no-deal Brexit.

There were angry protests everywhere – from Bodmin to Orkney, from Swansea to St Albans. People in cities, towns, and villages – many of whom had never been on a demonstration before – came out against an illegitimate government. Across the country, the chant ‘Stop the Coup’ rang out.

In London, tens of thousands filled Whitehall, and thousands of young people went from there to take direct action – closing roads and bridges and marching on Buckingham Palace. They were outraged by Johnson’s attack on democracy, overwhelmingly against Brexit, solidly anti-racist and committed to free movement.

A new mass movement is being born.

Many of these protests were spontaneous. Many others were organised by campaign groups such as Another Europe is Possible. All credit to them!

The Labour leadership called on people to join the protests. Jeremy Corbyn spoke in Glasgow and Diane Abbott and John McDonnell in London. Many grassroots activists spoke alongside them, as well as Laura Parker from Momentum and the new general secretary of the UCU lecturers’ union, Jo Grady.

What is at stake? We are entering a struggle for the future: not just of this country but across the world. It is a struggle against the politics of the far right – the politics of the 1930s.

The suspension of Parliament is the latest stage in the right-wing takeover of the Tory Party and the Government that began with the Brexit referendum in 2016. The Leave campaign was pumped full of money by billionaire Aaron Banks. It used unlawful data targeting methods. It was fed by the lies of the Tory press. It was the opposite of democracy.

Anti-migrant xenophobia was the key to the victory of the Leave camp. And in the frenzy whipped up by the far right, MP Jo Cox was tragically murdered.

If we don’t defeat it, the suspension of Parliament will mean a calamitous hard Brexit, followed by a general election. In this, Johnson will posture as the politician who carried out the will of the people. He will advance an utterly reactionary programme based on being ‘tough’ on crime and fake spending promises.

The chickens of the 2016 referendum are coming home to roost. This was never simply about crashing out of the EU. It was always about the extreme right seizing control of the Tory Party and then the Government. They have done so.

Now they want to impose their ultra-right programme. They want to turn Britain into a deregulated, cheap labour, low-tax, outpost, with minimal workplace and environmental regulations. With no EU deal, Johnson will be forced to accept a trade deal imposed by the United States – with grave implications for the NHS. This will make Britain a vassal state. A cornucopia for ruthless billionaires, exporting cheap labour, operating as an off-shore tax haven.

There would be huge tax cuts for the rich, paid for by the working class. There would be soaring prices, stagnant or reduced wages, a collapsing health service and social care sector. Zero-hours contracts would be hugely expanded, with a reduction or abolition of the national minimum wage further down the line. Cue rampant racism and attacks on immigrants. Cue new attacks on trade unions and democratic rights. Cue British servility to American militarism world wide.

This is the hard Brexit that must be fought. It’s the only one on offer. So the Labour Party must fight for Remain.

On Saturday, Extinction Rebellion activists occupying Manchester’s Deansgate spontaneously joined their actions with the anti-Brexit coup mobilisation. This is the kind of unity that is needed. We need to come together to fight and win.

There seems little chance that parliamentary action alone can stop the coup. Even with opposition parties united – a moot point – it needs Tory rebels to stand up to their leadership. In the past, all such rebellions have faded away. Johnson is threatening all Tory MPs who oppose his plans with immediate deselection. Tory MPs have few principles, but keeping their seat in Parliament is one.

Stopping the coup in Parliament would require a complex operation that could be derailed in the Lords. And even if Parliament succeeds in voting it down, the Johnson regime threatens to deepen its attack on democracy by ignoring it.

The present spontaneous mass action is showing the way. Now we need Labour and the trade union leaders to step up and play their part. They must call a national demonstration – a million-person (or more) march. Trade union leaders such as Dave Prentis from Unison, Len McCluskey from Unite, and TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady all recognise how calamitous Johnson’s plans are for workers and their families. The threats to union rights, to the NHS, and the threat of mass casualisation and large-scale unemployment are staring them in the face. They cannot step back from this fight.

Trade unionists must call for our unions to join together with Labour in preparing this national mobilisation, linking with the new movement that’s forming. The Labour and trade union movement has the strength to overturn the drive to dictatorship that the Johnson government represents.

Tory strategists will be reckoning that however this plays out, they can win a general election with a hard Brexit message, topped up with promises to build more prisons, lengthen sentences, exclude more unruly pupils, and spend more on the NHS.

The best way for Labour to prepare to win the election is to join with the mass mobilisation against the Brexit coup. The politics played out in the next few weeks will determine the future of Britain for years.

MPs can’t win the fight in Parliament without the mass action and civil disobedience we’re seeing across the country. We have to step it up on both fronts. This is a continuing struggle and we must link up with others across Europe and beyond who are facing the same attacks on democracy.

We must act, but we must also debate. We must decide strategy and tactics as we go forwards. This is the reason for this bulletin. It is an initiative of anti-Brexit internationalists on the Left. Please contact us with reports of actions in your area and ideas about the way forward. Contact us for further copies. Let’s work together to stop the coup, stop Brexit, and launch the fight for a better world.

Now is the time to act.

Hundreds of thousands mobilise nationwide against the Brexit coup

Public Reading Rooms — Sat, 31 Aug 2019 17:21:22 +0000

Where were today’s demonstrations against the suspension of Parliament? Everywhere!

A mass movement has been born. The 100,000+ in Whitehall is what you might have expected at a major national demo, but today it was just part of the action. Demonstrators turned out in big cities like Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Bristol, Newcastle and Leeds, but also in smaller towns including York, Brighton, Litchfield, St Albans, Oxford and Clitheroe. Great receptions for Jeremy Corbyn in Glasgow and John McDonnell and Diane Abbott in London. Here are just some of the photos from #StoptheCoup and #StoptheBrexitcoup. Some of these twitter photos are not great quality, but they give a feel for the scale of the mobilisation.

Whitehall

Sheffield

Bangor

Whitehall

London

Brighton

Clitheroe

Leeds

Exeter

Manchester

York

Glasgow

Trafalgar Square

Satanists against the coup

Malaga, Spain

The Brexit Coup: an analysis

Neil Faulkner — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 15:02:14 +0000

Practice is the test of theory. Three years ago, a small group of us advanced the theory of creeping fascism. We were either ignored or ridiculed by most of the Far Left. On the basis of the theory, we advanced a number of predictions. These have been, to a large degree, confirmed by events.

Let me summarise our argument and its relationship to events:

The election of Donald Trump in the US and the Leave victory in Britain’s EU Referendum formed part of a rising global tide of nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and authoritarianism.

In the absence of a strong labour movement with its own armed militias (as in the interwar period), we should not expect paramilitary organisation to feature heavily in modern forms of fascism.

Fascism is a political process, not a done deal. Anyone who takes a tick-box approach to defining it belongs in a sociology seminar. Activists engaged in the class struggle have to grasp that everything is motion: it is the dynamic and trajectory of mass political phenomena that matter.

The principal agent of fascist repression has always been the existing state apparatus. There are no historical examples of fascism overthrowing the liberal-bourgeois state and creating a new fascist-totalitarian state. Without exception, fascism takes over the existing state and, by a process of purge, coercion, and indoctrination, turns it into the main instrument of its dictatorship. Therefore, if fascists can take control of the state by electoral means, they will do so.

Nor does fascism necessarily require its own party form. Just as the state can be transformed and made fascist, so might existing right-wing parties be taken over and made fascist. There are many historical examples, but in this regard we do not need to delve far into the past. The Far Right has now taken over both the Republican Party in the US and the Tory Party in Britain.

The EU Referendum and the Leave Campaign represented the first stage in a slow-motion coup by the Tory Right. The second stage was the election of Boris Johnson as Tory leader and prime minister. Long before his election, we argued that Johnson was the British Trump in waiting.

For anyone on the Left to back Brexit is a catastrophic mistake. It means, at a time when the labour movement and the Left are very weak, supporting the flagship project of the Far Right instead of challenging head-on the nationalism and racism at its core. It means, in practice, abandoning internationalism, anti-racism, and solidarity with the oppressed.

By peddling Lexit, the degenerated sects of the Far Left have cut themselves off from the progressive vanguard of the working class. Far worse, by attempting to ‘triangulate’ between reactionary Leave voters and progressive Remain voters – a policy engineered by backroom Lexiters – the Labour leadership has a) failed to challenge the nationalism and racism of the Far Right, b) split the progressive vote (facilitating, in particular, a massive Liberal-Democrat surge), and c) laid the basis for possible electoral collapse

As soon as Johnson was elected, we made a further prediction: that he would be forced to go for a general election to secure a stable working majority, and that he would fight this on a ‘People versus Elites’ platform. The proroguing of Parliament is preparation for that: for stage three of the slow-motion coup that began in 2016.

Some sort of lash-up with Farage and the Brexit Party remains highly probable, and if this is done, Labour, on current showing, is liable to be smashed. At the moment, we have an unstable Far Right regime. If the Johnson regime crashes out of the EU on 31 October and then wins a general election, we could have a stable regime able to govern for a full term. The implications of that are spelt out in the Public Reading Rooms editorial ‘Defend Democracy: Stop the Coup’ (https://prruk.org/johnsons-coup-fight-for-mass-action-to-re-open-parliament/).

The prospect would be fast tracking towards a low-wage sweatshop and tax-haven in the edge of Europe; becoming a colony of American-based corporate asset-strippers and privatisers; turning into a country where wages stagnate, public services are sold off, the poor are left to rot, and minorities are hounded by the police in a context of moral panics around crime, migration, and terrorism; evolving into a nationalist-racist silo filled with hate, repression, and misery.

Is this what fascism looks like?

Despite the creeping fascism thesis, and the accumulating evidence of its accuracy, I have generally avoided applying the term ‘fascist’ to politicians like Trump, Johnson, Farage, Le Pen, and Salvini. I have tended to assume that they represent stages on a road towards fascism, and that other, harder, nastier, more fully-fledged fascists would in due course emerge. I no longer think this.

Modi, the Hindu chauvinist leader of India, has put mainly-Muslim Kashmir under military occupation. Erdogan, the nationalist-Islamist leader of Turkey, has shut down the independent media and sacked tens of thousands of academics, teachers, and lawyers. Bolsonaro, the racist-misogynist leader of Brazil, is destroying the Amazon rainforest.

Tens of thousands are held in concentration camps on the US-Mexican border. Thousands more are held in detention centres elsewhere. Seven US states have made abortion effectively illegal, and the Far Right is poised to try and extend this to the rest of the country.

Tens of thousands more are held in concentration camps in Libya, Turkey, and Europe. These include detention centres in Britain, where people deemed by the state to be ‘illegal’ are incarcerated by private security firms in deference to a nationalist-racist definition of who is and who is not entitled to their liberty.

These things are happening now. They are being normalised, and then augmented in further attacks, by a global Far Right that is surging, confident, empowered. Creeping fascism is not a matter of moving slowly towards a still-distant destination; it is a matter of gradually implementing the fascist programme in the here and now.

So when Ilhan Omar, the Democratic congresswomen for Minnesota, says that Trump is a fascist, she is right to do so. This is not casual abuse: it is an accurate description of Trump’s politics, in theory and practice.

To describe the new generation of Far Right politicians as ‘fascist’ is not to describe their power, but a) their intent, b) their base, and c) their trajectory. Their power is not yet absolute. It is not the power of Hitler in 1934, let alone in 1944.

By advancing directly on state power by electoral means, the new fascists find themselves confronting the deeply-embedded liberal parliamentary systems of the post-war era without having the assistance of an activist mass party of hundreds of thousands like the Nazis and the Brownshirts of 1932.

Though they have gathered the ‘human dust’ of capitalist crisis into a electoral base motivated by ‘the shit of ages’ – nationalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, authoritarianism, militarism – they lack the means to batter their liberal opponents into immediate submission. Events unfold more slowly.

But they are playing a carefully calculated game. It is a new game, with new rules, and they are playing in deadly earnest for the highest stakes. Everything is discussed, planned, thought through. Nothing is left to chance. And in this regard, in relation to their opponents, the new fascists are way ahead of the curve.

What is to be done?

In this sense – in the only sense in which the term becomes meaningful in the early 21^st century – Johnson is a fascist. He is now leading an acceleration in the slow-motion coup that began in 2016. To repeat, it is the process, the dynamic, the trajectory that define the project. To repeat, it is the state that is the main enemy, the main instrument of repression, the main mechanism for increasing authoritarianism, nationalism, and persecution.

The label matters, because if Johnson is, to all intents and purposes, a fascist, then building active mass resistance by any means necessary becomes an immediate and overriding political priority. Before it is too late. Before we are in Putin’s Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey, or Sisi’s Egypt, where resistance is effectively illegal.

The liberal centre will collapse. This is what happened in Germany and everywhere else in the 1930s. The liberals never fight. In Germany, in March 1933, in the Reichstag, they voted for the Enabling Act that made Hitler a dictator.

The Left must lead the resistance. The workers, the renters, the women, the minorities, the whole mass of the exploited and the oppressed, must be organised and mobilised in all-out struggle.

But that requires leadership, and that is so woefully lacking. The leaders of the Labour Party and the TUC should be calling for and organising for mass resistance. But they are not. Corbyn has appealed to the Queen. A modern socialist leader, confronting a Far Right coup, turns to a feudal relic. Others place their faith in legal challenges and constitutional manoeuvres.

What is perhaps most pitiful is the craven submission of the liberal political elite in the face of the prorogation order. It is the act of an unelected prime minister who is a rank political chancer, a serial liar, and a man who owes his position to the votes of 90,000 members of an ageing party of Islamophobic bigots. It has been underwritten by the ludicrous anachronism of the British monarchy, a racket currently run by a family of reactionary toffs with a long record of racism, snobbery, and sleaze. Why does the liberal political elite not do the obvious thing: ignore the prorogation order and continue sitting as the leadership of the popular resistance?

More specifically, why does Labour not propose this, setting itself up as the leadership of a popular, progressive, pro-democracy, anti-Brexit mass movement? The fascists have a plan and a goal. The Left is in desperate need of leadership that is equally serious and determined.

Neil Faulkner is the author, with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse, and Seema Syeda, of Creeping Fascism: what it is and h

Preparing for a Hard Brexit – Mr Bolton Comes to Town

Phil Hearse — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 15:10:56 +0000

As was widely publicised, Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, was in London last week, having meetings with senior government ministers. According to the UK government, this was all about negotiating a trade deal after Britain leaves the EU on October 31. Simon Tisdall in the Guardian says that it was not really about trade, it was about aligning a post-hard Brexit Britain with US foreign policy imperatives, such as withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal and refusing to allow Chinese electronics giant Huawei access to the UK’s 5G infrastructure.

Of course the Bolton visit was about both. There is no divide between economics and politics in the US government; and ever since the Project for a New American Century report in 1997 – the panel that produced it was chaired by John Bolton – the United States has leaned on its military dominance and hence dominant political role, to leverage its economic position.

Hard Brexit is a Godsend for the Trump administration. Boris Johnson, if he wins the upcoming election, will be desperate for a trade deal with the US. Unless that happens, Britain outside the EU will operate with calamitous Word Trade Organisation rules, and giant tariff walls worldwide. And the United States is perfectly well disposed to a trade deal with the UK – on their terms, economically and politically. Britain will have to get into line with US trade demands and also political/military demands. This will involve subordinating the world’s fifth largest economy and its political weight to the needs of Washington; it will amount to a substantial shift to the right in the world relationship of economic and political forces.

Economically the US had made its position crystal clear by publishing in February this year a summary of its trade deal negotiating objectives. This involves detailed demands for full access to the UK for American investment capital, including all state operated or controlled enterprises, with only commercial criteria being used. It contains strictures against ‘unfair’ subsidies for domestic companies, and demands a harmonisation of standards for goods and services, including food and agriculture. In return the UK would be required to accept the US government’s own ‘Buy American’ policy. The document also contains proposals for banning any attempt to discriminate against Israeli goods in trade.

Ironically there is one area where the US position seems more ‘progressive’ than the present practices of the UK government – labour law, which the US says it wants harmonised with ILO conditions on the right to organise unions and decent working conditions. In practice it is unlikely, to say the least, that the US would object to the UK’s anti-unions laws, which would probably be further tightened in the event of a Boris Johnson electoral victory.

There are also numerous proposals for joint oversight and dispute resolution. It amounts to forcing the UK into close alignment with American political and economic needs. It would force a unique subordination to the United States at a level that has not been seen between two major capitalist countries since the Nazi invasion of France, and the American occupation of Japan after the second world war. Any attempt by the UK to pretend to independent foreign policy or trade positions, especially in relation to Iran, the Middle East and China, could be met by immediate trade retaliation. Chlorinated chicken and US firms further enforcing their penetration of the NHS is the least of it; Britain as a 51st state is on the agenda.

This attempt to shore up a Trump-Johnson international hard right axis comes at exactly the same time as Matteo Salvini’s Lega party in Italy has forced a general election, in an attempt to eject his Five Star party coalition allies, leaving the fascists in complete control.

Steve Bannon at Brothers of Italy Rally 2017

The Lega party is likely to win the upcoming election in alliance the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), led by Giorgia Meloni. The Brothers are the re-branded fascist MSI (Italian Social Movement), the historic continuers of the Mussolini tradition. The same people who cheer in bars when the deaths of immigrants in the Mediterranean are reported on TV News, will also cheer the election of an all-fascist government.

The Lega-Five Star government has already resulted in a spike in racist attacks against immigrants and Roma people, as well as the death of hundreds of would-be immigrants who have drowned as a result of their flimsy boats being refused permission to land and driven out to sea.

As Roberto Saviano reported:

“The list of reported racist incidents in Italy from the beginning of this year is shocking. In Lecce province, a young boy from Sierra Leone was battered on the back with a chair as his assailants racially abused him and told him to ‘go home’. In Rome, a 12-year-old Egyptian was verbally abused and beaten up so badly by a group of older boys that he ended up in hospital. A black brother and sister were pilloried by a schoolmaster in Foligno, in central Italy. Women of colour are more and more treated as if they were sex workers – and not only in the street but even in public offices. Many incidents go unreported, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that what is happening in Italy is a sign of a descent into barbarism.”

The election of a Salvini-led fascist government will lead to a new crisis for the EU, with a strong temptation by the Lega-led government to repeat Britain’s exit from the EU and more closely align with the United States. This corresponds of course with the Trump administration’s plan to force European politics to the right and widen its alliance against China.

The news that the German economy is sliding into recession is a confirmation of the warnings of many economists, that there is a danger of a new world slump. A time of new economic turmoil, at a level as big or bigger than 2008, with the far right on the march and the left retreating in many places, highlights major dangers for the world working class.

In these circumstances, the announcement of a new left-wing pro-Brexit campaign is, as Lenin once put it, like wishing people many happy returns of the day at a funeral.

Trumpism Goes Global

Public Reading Rooms — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 12:11:04 +0000

NICK DEARDEN writes on how Trump’s right-wing authoritarianism is spreading internationally.

“I’ve travelled 24 hours, from Manila to Rio, to be here, yet politically I feel I haven’t left home.” Walden Bello, leading light of the ‘anti-globalisation movement’ and former Filipino congressman reflected on the rise of authoritarian right-wing ‘strong men’ from the Philippines to Brazil. I joined him in Brazil to assess what has changed in the 20 years since mass protests in Seattle brought the World Trade Organisation to a standstill, and announced the birth of a new, international movement to the world. “But 20 years ago, Seattle was an exclusively left-wing affair” Bello continued. “We need to understand how the far right managed to eat our lunch.”

How indeed, when capitalism is facing one of its deepest crises in history, has a rogues’ gallery of financiers, billionaire businessman, and the most establishment politicians imaginable been able to capture sufficient popular imagination to take over some of the biggest countries in the world? And where is the international left, which 20 years ago fermented one of the most international and diverse movements the world has ever seen, but today seems defensive and insular in the face of a crisis which we predicted and warned about?

We were in Brazil to compare experiences, to learn from each other, to work out how to rebuild an internationalism strong enough to combat this ‘Trumpist’ trend. As Walden Bello’s opening quote makes clear, the similarities faced by very different societies across the world is startling. Capitalism is facing its deepest crisis since the Second World War, a crisis which threatens the very existence of this economic model. But while the political left is in retreat in many places and focussed heavily on a defensive, domestic agenda, the far right have used this moment to build a terrifying global network, backed by big money and able to feed off popular discontent.

In countries including Brazil, India, the Philippines and Turkey, authoritarian strong men have been elected to office, fuelling movements of fear and hatred, further demonising marginalised groups, rolling back the limited gains made on climate change, on racial and sexual equality, and even challenging the relatively democratic spaces in which we organise. The kingpin is Donald Trump, normalising and legitimising these politics, giving confidence to far-right networks, encouraging international funding. And the narratives are spreading well beyond the countries where the strongmen rule, seeping into politics everywhere.

Trumpism around the world

20 years ago, Brazil was one of the launch pads for what became known as the anti-globalisation movement. It was here, under a radical regional government that the first World Social Forum was held, an attempt to counter the elite gathering in Davos, Switzerland known as the World Economic Forum. The World Social Forum was a space for meeting, learning and strategising with activists from around the globe. Two years later, Lula was elected president, part of the ‘Pink Tide’ which swept Latin America and provided a thorn in the the side of free market capitalism.

Today, Lula is in prison, and Brazil is ruled by Jair Bolsanaro, an extreme-right member of the elite, an apologist for the human-rights-abusing military dictatorship, who somehow has managed to cultivate a popular image and win a majority. He came to power denouncing left-wing activists and social movements as terrorists. A racist, a misogynist and a homophobe, Bolsanaro makes Trump look moderate.

Of course, when you arrive in Brazil, you don’t see stormtroopers or swastikas. And many tourists will not even notice anything has changed. But for the left, and for the marginalised, things have changed a great deal. The police and military have been let off the lease. During our 5 days in the country, soldiers shot 80 bullets into a car carrying a family, without warning, killing a black musician. They claimed it was a case of mistaken identity. 12 months ago, Marielle Franco, a Black, lesbian city councillor who spoke out for the poor of the favellas, and against police violence, was assassinated along with her driver. Two men have just been arrested for this crime, after much public outcry, but we know that the real people who ordered the murder are associated with a shadowy criminal group with links to the elite, including the new president. More generally, civil society groups are increasingly harassed and anyone who harbours hatred in society, feels empowered to spread their bigoted views online and in the streets.

Brazil is not alone. The current president of the Philippines, mentioned by Walden Bello at the opening of the conference, is Rodrigo Duterte. Duterte is responsible for the killing of 20,000 drug users, victims of the vicious war on drugs which has been a central theme of his presidency. Duterte has compared his war on drugs to Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. He’s proud of that. He’s encouraged death squads to take part in the killings, which don’t only include drug users but also street kids and the marginalised poor in general. And he’s an aggressive opponent of human rights organisations which make any criticism of these policies.

Then there’s India, run by Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist, whose period in office has seen a massive upswing of hate crimes, murders, lynchings, public beatings, gang rapes, especially aimed at muslims and low caste groups, combined, in true Trump style, with an unprecedented amount of political interference in, and undermining of, democratic institutions from the parliament to the courts to the media.

Of course, this is just three countries. Trumpist ideas are spreading much wider, including Europe where fascists are an important part of the Italian government and where Hungary is essentially run by a fascist. Even here in Britain, during my time in Brazil, an opinion poll suggested that 54% of the public agreed with the statement that “Britain needs a strong ruler willing to break the rules.” Only 23% disagreed. In Uruguay, a stable, progressive sociIn Uruguay, a stable, progressive society with no recent history of far-right activity, the head of the armed forces recently took the unconstitutional step of criticising the judiciary for investigations into human rights abuses. After his dismissal by the president, he has become a rising populist star who activists fear will run in the elections for president in elections later this year.

The essence of Trumpism

All of these situations have important differences. By the nature of the ‘strongman’, there is a hefty dose of individual eccentricity, sometimes bordering on mental illness, in the ascendant leaders. But there is enough commonality to begin drawing lessons from this situation confronting us.

The Trumpist leaders and movements always rise up by demonising certain vulnerable groups in society: migrants, the underclass (labelled ‘criminals’ or ‘drug users’), muslims or low caste groups, women, trans and gay people. This has proved a vital way of building the popularity enjoyed by these leaders. The popular base for the Trumpists is very male, and feeds a feeling that white (or Hindu or Latino) men have lost space to more marginalised groups, that they can no longer say what they feel without being challenged. Even though these challenges come from groups who have traditionally been voiceless, and are finally able to express themselves to some degree, it has been successfully equated with a liberal elite project of ‘political correctness’. Fascism always appeals to those who have some power to lose – however small. And of course, there’s usually someone more screwed than you, and if someone tells you ‘watch them, they’re after a bit of what you’ve got’ – be it migrants, or women, or Muslims or whoever – it can be very effective.

In this way, deeply establishment figures (Trump the billionaire, Bolsanaro and Modi the elite politicians, [and in Britain -IV]Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage the upper class financiers) have been able to portray themselves as anti-establishment. After the defeat of the unions and the capitulation of the social democrats to the forces of the free market, these elite politicians have successfully portrayed themselves as the voice of the ordinary and forgotten majority, harnessing an often legitimate anger at an elite which has spent the last 40 years enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else.

It also explains the most frightening aspect of these strongmen – their popularity. None of these people came to power in a coup. They were democratically elected. They have very significant support from the middle classes, and from sections of the working classes who actually stand to economically lose out from their economic policies. The murderous Duterte has an approval rating hovering around 80%. Modi expected to win the upcoming Indian election. Trump and Bolsanaro, while not as popular, could easily win a second term as things currently stand.

That’s how they’ve got away with their unprecedented attacks on the institutions of liberal democracy across the board, the dismantling of those systems which, while highly imperfect, at least allow us space to organise for our rights and for change. Like traditional fascists, Trumpists are determined to upend any form of pluralism or democracy which can thwart their power or allow resistance to build and succeed. They are trying to reshape our politics as a whole, in a way that means their power, their programmes, will enjoy a longevity well beyond their own terms of office.

What is this programme? At its core it’s letting capitalism off the (very very long) lease it is on. Many of these leaders are climate change deniers. Trump has withdrawn from the main international climate treaty and Bolsanaro is expected to do so, regardless of the extremely weak terms of this treaty. Trump has begun to open up all offshore waters to oil and gas exploration, to massively expand fracking potential and to open the US market fully to Canadian tar sands. Bolsanaro promised to remove protections from the Amazon and throw it open to unlimited mining. Modi is on the verge of evicting over a million indigenous peoples from lands which mining corporations are desperate to exploit. The indigenous, globally, are a major target for the strongmen, because even though they are sitting on top of some of the worst land in the world –where they were pushed – capitalism is so desperate that it now needs that resource too. And the indigenous are ‘in the way’.

The view of capitalism is much more authoritarian and nationalist than we’ve seen over the last 4 years, but big business and big finance is still at the core of the model. Trump has passed one of the biggest tax giveaways to corporate America in history. He’s taking an axe to Obama’s mild financial regulation. Bolsanaro has appointed an ultra-free market economic minister, who bases his policies on that first and most brutal and authoritarian neoliberal leader, Chile’s General Pinochet, and declares “We are creating a Popperian open society” after free market ideologue Karl Popper. Both Modi and Duterte are involved in sweeping deregulation of financial investment and privatisations.

So the programme, at core, is about sweeping away those the limits that are being placed on capital by climate change and public opposition. But the pretence that the nation-state isn’t important to capitalism is swept away. Partly, that’s because the state will be necessary to deal with the increased anger that will result from these polices. It’s clear that the policies, for instance, will fuel migration across the world. No wonder that building taller walls, enforcing harsher rules on migration, is part of the programme. An increasing authoritarian approach to those who offer resistance will also be needed as the shit really starts to hit the fan, and explains the focus on undermining space for opposition and dismantling liberal democratic institutions.

Of course, the problem with these strongmen is that they’re difficult to control, difficult even to predict. There’s no blueprint. Duterte claims to care about the environment and even calls himself a socialist. Trump is said to enjoy a more productive relationship with some unions than his Democrat predecessors have for some time. Modi has backed off a number of economic reforms in the face of resistance. But it’s that very unpredictability – that ability to tear up the rule book of politics – that makes these leaders so necessary at this point in time.

Some of this will also be at odds with the values of individual corporate leaders. So Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon, doesn’t care for Trump’s incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric. I believe him. I’m sure that many heads of industry disliked aspects of Mussolini or Hitler’s rhetoric. But the point is not that these are the regimes which individual capitalists would ideally like to live under. It’s that there is a structural necessity to these politics, and Silicon Valley needs it more than most. After all, the revolution in technology and communications which is taking place threatens automation which could wipe out millions of ordinary jobs, decimate small business, allow the completion of the corporate takeover of agriculture and massively increase the surveillance all of us face every day.

There are democratic solutions to this – widespread socialisation of these technologies. But that means Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerburg losing control of their empires. They won’t be keen on that solution. And the alternative is that things will get very messy indeed. If they think they’re under scrutiny now, they’ve seen nothing yet. They will find that they need authoritarian capitalism more than anyone, whether they like it or not.

In the 1930s, big industrialists and finance found fascism more palatable than communism. Today, they find it more palatable than even moderate forms of social democracy – witness the horror with which they greater Lula in Brazil and now greet Corbyn in Britain. That’s the extent of the crisis which the elite today perceives.

Trump is coming… get busy

Trump is the kingpin of capitalism’s Plan B. His election has legitimised the new form of strongman politics. Even if others preceded him, he makes these politics safer through normalisation and through the dismantlement of international institutions which would have previously made life difficult for the strongmen. Trump also changes the discourse – centrists like Blair and Hillary Clinton have urged a doubling down on anti-migrant polices to ‘answer’ the Trumpists. Beat him by becoming him. The networks of think tanks and dark money, are emboldened. They will spread the hate right across the world. They will use new technologies to manipulate electorates in ways we couldn’t have imagined ten years ago.

How do we respond? First by not giving an inch. We must not sacrifice those most impacted and most opposed to the strongmen. In fact we need to empower them. The bit of American society least likely to have voted for Trump is the bottom 20%, measured by wealth in US society. The really marginalised don’t like any of this, and with good reason. Helping them organise, and take leadership positions in our movement, is essential. And visibly confronting Trump and his ilk in the streets – like when he comes to Britain on 4 June or later in the year for the NATO summit – is a vital part of this confrontation. It’s simply untrue to say Trump deserves a state visit because he’s the US President. This is an unusual honour which simply legitimises his programme and his hate speech.

That doesn’t mean we can write off those working class people who aren’t hardcore racists, but have been attracted by Trump-like rhetoric because the economic system has so clearly failed them. Without toning down our defence of migrants, our opposition to anti-abortionists and so on, we have to admit these messages alone will not cut through to everyone. They can only work as part of a radical platform of economic restructuring – putting power into the hands of ordinary people through socialisation of the things we need – housing, healthcare, education, energy, communications. We need to show clearly, we’re on the side of the have-nots, not the elite. Many are already engaged in local struggles to take back control of energy and housing, and to oppose developments that re about profit not people. It is through these concrete struggles that we can win arguments on migration.

Our Brexit woes are replicated in many others countries across the world, as the left struggles to respond to the authoritarian right. In the Philippines, some communists even went into Duterte’s administration, in Thailand, some leftists supported the military coup, and in the US there’s a feeling some on the traditional far left were far too soft on the dangers of Trump. This has created massive divisions and broken down trust at the very worst time. We must finds a way beyond this. It’s certain that a small minority (for example, anyone who stood for the Brexit Party in the European elections) is beyond the pale. Them aside, we have to try to find common ground, probably based on values rather than precise policies.

Reinventing internationalism is key to our project too. 20 years ago I was part of the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement, the biggest international movement the world has ever seen, which was also grassroots, and scored some incredible victories. Today, while the far-right has developed frighteningly impressive international networks, the left has never been more insular. Let’s learn from history. As the First World War approached, the socialist international broke down as different national groups fell in behind their own national war machines. The horrors unleashed were beyond precedent. Of course we shouldn’t dismiss the vital importance of domestic struggles. But we need to find ways to internationalise our struggles because we’ve never needed international solidarity more. It’s not a luxury. The power of the nation state can only take us so far. Facing climate change, transnational corporate power and a well networked far right, we cannot win in Britain alone. In fact, the experiments with local democracy – from Porto Alegre to Barcelona to Preston – might be the perfect way to make give people power without falling back on the imperial nation states for ‘answers’. A form of what we might call local internationalism.

We will not have an easy landing. Climate change and the sheer scale of environmental degradation alone means we need to rethink our linear view of history and ‘progress’. We don’t know what tomorrow will look like, but it will have to be very different, and we must embrace this. Even our ‘enemy’ is not as clear as it was in the past; the reason part of the right has been able to “eat our lunch” and appear more radical than the left. We need to convey hope and that can be a challenge at this point in history. But let’s try to be open-minded. Again, to a degree the new right has done this better than the left, ditching neoliberal ideology when it failed to serve their values (indeed the only neoliberals left are those in the political centre, who should never have swallowed the dogma in the first place).

We can find hope in the collapse of ‘market knows best’ dogma, in the progress now being made on public understanding of climate change, in the anger felt by so many at the power of Big Tech, in the inability of world leaders to complete major trade deals like TTIP. We need to have confidence in our cause, in our ideas, in our programme, and not be thrown off track by the strongmen. We can’t solve all the problems of the last 200 years. The attempt would overwhelm and paralyse us. But we can, and must, make a start. As I learnt in Brazil, what we’re feeling is also being felt by activists like us right around the world. Let’s learn, share, try to draw energy from one another.

Trumpism is still a growing global phenomenon. It can be halted, but only with a radial programme which is local and global. It won’t be easy. But it’s certainly possible. If not us, then who, if not now, then when?

5 June 2019 Red Pepper