The socialist left has an opportunity—and a responsibility

Over the last year, the mask has come off: fascism is back as a global movement. The “right-wing populist” label, long used to obscure the rise of ultra-nationalist, anti-left bigotry, has increasingly been revealed for what it is.

In country after country, neo-Nazis, fascists and far-right nationalists have dragged mainstream politics to the right—by winning national elections, by becoming the dominant opposition or by infiltrating existing conservative parties.

As they have done so, feckless liberal and social democratic parties have capitulated down the line, often trying to prove that they, too, can practice the politics of inhumanity—bowing to the powerful, menacing the powerless and callously discarding workers and the poor like pieces of trash.

Predictably, the beneficiaries have been billionaires and capitalists.

In the United States since President Trump was elected, Oxfam, a charity, estimates that the wealth of the ten richest people has surged nearly US$700 billion. While this obscene trough gouging has proceeded, the federal government has announced some $1.2 trillion in cuts to working-class welfare and health programs.

In Australia, Foodbank, a charity, estimates that one in three households experienced food insecurity in the past year. At the same time, Gina Rinehart, the country’s richest person, increased her personal wealth by nearly $6 billion. She is now rumoured to be backing One Nation, which, according to a recent Redbridge poll, has grown its support to 18 percent—not far behind the Coalition on 24 percent. Meanwhile, thousands have marched in anti-immigration rallies led by open neo-Nazis, and polls show that greater numbers of people believe migrants are the cause of the country’s cost-of-living pressures.

The political mainstream is doing nothing to challenge any of this, or to fight for the working class. The Greens seem caught in an interminable contradiction between the aspirations of their wealthy middle-class membership and parliamentarians, and the wants of young voters squeezed by the economic system that has enriched the party’s old guard. In working-class suburbs, Labor’s vote has been declining for years. With the ALP’s rule-for-the-rich approach, and its fawning over big corporate interests, the danger is that the fascists will continue to grow here as they have elsewhere.

Yet in many Western countries, there is evidence that the capitalist status quo and its far-right outgrowths can be challenged. Where the left has gotten its act together, it has tapped the well of discontent. Again and again over the last decade, self-identified socialists have galvanised support for a program of wealth redistribution away from the billionaires to workers, and against bigotry and division: Bernie Sanders in the United States, Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France and, more recently, Zohran Mamdani in New York.

The limitations of these electoral projects have also been exposed, one of which is that they have been bound up with leaders not under the control of a socialist party—leaders who, once elected or in a position of authority, act more like the freewheeling politicians they claim to differ from. Mamdani’s recent friendly meeting with global fascism’s hero, Donald Trump, and his sucking up to the NYPD and New York’s billionaire class show the limitations of “getting left-wing faces into high places”. While it is shocking just how low Mamdani has stooped here, the direction was predictable. As we wrote after his June victory in New York’s Democratic primary election:

“Recognising these positives [that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers voted against the establishment and for Mamdani’s left-wing program] doesn’t mean drinking the Kool-Aid of municipal socialism ... Without the backing of a mass socialist party and an insurgent working-class movement, even the most principled of revolutionary Marxists would be incapable of withstanding the institutional and ruling-class pressures that are brought to bear on the chief executive of capitalism’s most important city. Given the current balance of class forces, a moderate like Mamdani has no chance.”

So while socialists have an opportunity to provide an alternative to the centre and the far right, they also have a responsibility not to bullshit people that politics can be changed if only the right person is elected. One clear lesson from the rest of the world is that getting people excited enough to vote is not enough.

A socialist movement encourages a shared understanding that the world can be fundamentally changed only by the mass, collective action of the working class fighting for its own interests. The role of a socialist party is not primarily to run in elections, but to build a self-confident movement—one capable of engaging in electoral politics in a principled way and, where relevant, using elected officials to build the movement, rather than simply mobilising workers’ sentiments at the ballot box to advance the politicians’ positions.

In Australia, the project of establishing a Socialist Party has attracted more than 4,000 new members in a matter of months. The party’s total financial membership, 5,400, is larger than the Greens’ national membership was in 2002 after nearly a decade of party building. Nothing like this new socialist party has existed in generations.

So there is an opportunity here, as in other parts of the world, to build a socialist movement that can challenge politics as usual. Longstanding socialists ought to join the project and help train a new generation of working-class fighters to understand that they themselves have the potential power to overthrow capitalism.