Countering the far-right threat: a fight on all fronts
Far-right and outright fascist politics are on the rise across the West. Australia isn’t immune. The recent spate of far-right protests here is a wake-up call.
The numbers taking to the streets as part of the “March for Australia” and subsequent mobilisations have been relatively small. Nevertheless, the fact that tens of thousands of people were prepared to join open neo-Nazis in what, as Omar Hassan argued in a recent article for Red Flag, amounted to “a national day of racism and bigotry” is significant.
These kinds of racist rallies need to be countered, wherever possible, by mass, united marches of anti-racists. Our effort to resist the rise of the far right can’t stop there, though. Just as concerning as the far-right street marches has been the high vote for far-right parties in Australian elections in recent years. Mick Armstrong analysed the far-right vote in this year’s federal election for Red Flag in June, finding that far-right outfits polled almost 2 million votes in the Senate nationwide.
Voting for a more racist Australia isn’t as politically significant as demonstrating for it. However, these numbers indicate that the supply of potential recruits to movements and organisations on the far-right fringe is far from being exhausted.
But viewing things only in terms of protest politics—of far-right mobilisations on the streets and counter-mobilisations by the left—fails to grasp the issue at its root. Racism and fascism are the deadly fruits of the poisonous social and economic conditions imposed on humanity by capitalism. And the fight against them must also, at its core, be a fight against the system as a whole.
Alongside challenging the individual manifestations of far-right and fascist politics like the “March for Australia”, the left must also put forward a vision of a better and fairer society and of the means of fighting for and winning it. Not in the expectation that this will convince the kinds of hard-core racists who joined the marches on 31 August, but rather to give hope and purpose to the vastly bigger layer of working-class people who oppose racism and the far right (and any number of the other barbarisms of capitalism today, for example the genocide in Gaza), but who are in many cases so alienated from political life and from its mainstream representatives that they feel there’s no point in trying to do anything about it.
It’s because of this widespread disengagement and political passivity that racists can expect, in many contexts, to spread their poison with little or no resistance. Historically, in times when a broader layer of working-class people was politically conscious and organised, it was very different: racists could expect to be challenged whenever they raised their heads, and this provided a degree of immunity to their ideas among the mass of more apolitical workers.
How can today’s left get its message of anger, hope and resistance across to the currently sympathetic, but largely passive layer of workers required to recreate this scenario? How can we convince them that they have a part to play in heading off the threat from the far right and ensuring Australia doesn’t follow the same path as countries like the US, Britain and Germany, where fascists are, if not actually in power already, certainly knocking on the door?
A revival of socialist politics and organisation is key. We can see from examples overseas: we can’t depend on so-called centre-left political parties like the British Labour Party or the US Democrats to push the far right back. It’s the same with the Labor Party here. Albanese and Co.’s commitment to the status quo of capitalism and propensity to adopt elements of far-right political agendas as their own (for example, the ongoing brutality of their treatment of refugees) only adds fuel to the fire.
Some people who regard themselves as left wing complain about socialists supposedly “coopting” movements by selling newspapers and attempting to talk to and recruit people at rallies and other left-wing political events (never mind the fact that in many cases, the rallies and events have been organised in large part by the same socialists being accused of doing the coopting).
But it’s precisely by building the ranks of organised socialists in Australia that we can counter the growth of the far right. We need more distribution of socialist publications, more meetings and political education and more recruitment to socialist organisations. We need to train new layers of hundreds, and ultimately thousands and tens of thousands, to go out into society and fight the far right and fascism on all fronts. In addition to countering them on the streets, we need to combat their ideas in our workplaces, schools, universities and local communities. And we need to ensure they don’t go unchallenged when they run in elections.
The more effectively we can do this, the more it will encourage disengaged people to get involved, and the more powerful our movement will become.
Socialist Alternative members are involved in this struggle on every front. Our work as part of Victorian Socialists, and more recently the new socialist parties being formed in every Australian state and territory, is an example. In the federal election earlier this year, our members collectively spent thousands of hours knocking on doors and talking to voters in outer suburban areas like Thomastown in Melbourne’s northern suburbs—areas where the combination of the cost-of-living crisis and the failure to fund the new infrastructure and services required for a growing population were expected to play into the hands of the right.
The far right did, indeed, do well in these areas. In the electorate of Scullin (which incorporates suburbs like Thomastown, Lalor and Epping), the combined vote of parties to the right of the Liberals was 18.7 percent. At the same time, though, Victorian Socialists candidate Omar Hassan got 6.5 percent, a jump of 3.7 percent from the party’s 2022 Scullin result, despite the party only very recently establishing itself as a presence in the area.
It might not seem like much, but every conversation we had that convinced someone to vote for and identify with the socialists rather than the parties of the status quo or the far-right fringe was a small win. These kinds of conversations—through which we’re able to point out that it’s not migrants but the capitalist class and their political servants who are responsible for high rents, shitty wages and working conditions, or the chronic underfunding of local infrastructure and services—are among the fundamental building blocks of a new, healthier, political context.
Suburbs like Thomastown—the heartlands of Melbourne and Australia’s multi-ethnic working class—should be bastions of anti-fascist resistance. The more socialists can gain a foothold in these areas, not only in elections, but in the day-to-day life of the community, the more this latent potential could be realised.
Imagine if every time the fascists raised their heads, workers from areas like this joined counter-protests, and if at election time the racist filth from parties like One Nation were treated with the anger and contempt they deserve. That’s the kind of all-encompassing movement against the far right and fascism that we aim to build: one that can not only push back and defeat the racists, but which can lay the basis for a struggle to overturn the entire poisonous system of capitalism that’s rapidly destroying our humanity and our world.
