Conferences about colonialism aren’t unusual today. Universities host them regularly. But the one that took place in September 1920 was different. When the delegates set off for that conference, they were taking their lives in their hands. 
As boats from the east made their way across the Caspian Sea towards Baku, they were strafed by British Army warplanes: two delegates were killed. Participants travelling from the west through Russia found that anti-Communist militias had ripped up the tracks, burned down the stations, and threatened to besiege their trains. Borders were closed, and delegates had to sneak through.
The British had good reason to worry about this conference. It was called not just to discuss colonialism, but to end it. The participants were representatives of the international Communist movement and the various national and anti-colonial movements, particularly through Asia and the Middle East. 
“The European working class sees now, at every step, that the course of history has united the working people of the East with the workers of the West”, said Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International. That organisation, which united the post-revolutionary Russian government with Communist parties around the world, had called the conference. Zinoviev spoke of two “streams”: the “workers’ proletarian Communist struggle” and the “movement of the oppressed nationalities” that was challenging British and French colonialism. Those two streams, Zinoviev said, must be united into “one single tumultuous, powerful stream that, like the sea, will sweep all obstacles from its path, clearing the land of all the evil from which we have suffered so long”.
European colonialism existed before capitalism, but the two would become inextricably linked, and the growth of each would drive the development of the other. Precious metals from the Americas and slaves from Africa fed the growth of early capitalism in Europe. By the late nineteenth century, industrial capitalism had driven European powers to acquire colonies around the world. 
The unending pressure to compete and accumulate profits meant there was no end to the need for raw materials, export markets and armed outposts to ward off rivals and terrorise “the natives”. Continents were carved up and “zones of influence” determined by treaties between Western powers: plans for the division of Africa were finally settled at the Berlin Conference of 1884, without reference to the opinions of any Africans themselves. 
In the same period, as capitalism transformed Europe and expanded throughout the globe, the modern anti-capitalist movement came into existence. When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, it was impossible to ignore capitalism’s global spread—and its opponents’ necessarily internationalist strategy. 
The capitalist class, Marx and Engels wrote, “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the capitalist mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst”. In the broad outlines of this foundational document—more a declaration of principles than a worked-out theory—Marx and Engels still emphasised that capitalism had become a world system, and the socialist movement would be a world movement: the workers had “a world to win”.
But it was over the next decade that Marx and Engels would come to fully understand the promise of anti-colonial movements. At the time of the Manifesto, Europe was entering a wave of revolutions, and colonial questions were not at the forefront of Marx’s mind. When those revolutions receded, leading activists like Marx and Engels became political refugees. Marx made a living writing on world affairs for English-language newspapers. Through this work, as Kevin Anderson traces in his work Marx on the Margins, the 1850s became a time of political discovery for Marx.
The European revolutionary movement was in retreat; many of its key leaders were drifting away from their principles. Marx famously spent this time doing the research that would become Capital. But his journalistic obligations led him to study movements in Asia. During this time, he came to see that not only the global spread of capitalism but also the native populations’ resistance to colonialism could be a powerful revolutionary force.
The Indian rebellion of 1857, in which army officers trained by the British mutinied to lead an uprising against colonial rule, made a powerful impression—especially in comparison to the then dormant European socialist movement. “India”, he wrote to Engels, “is now our best ally”. The uprising in India, Chinese resistance to the British and other anti-colonial movements showed the possibility that world capitalism could be simultaneously challenged on two fronts: a revolutionary socialist workers’ movement combined with rebellions in the colonies. 
Marxist anti-colonialism was not simply a matter of supporting the “native” ruling classes, who could try to maintain their own rule under the guise of protecting traditional ways of life. But nor was it a matter of waiting for capitalism to “civilise” the natives and bring them into the world socialist movement. Socialist workers in Europe would have to oppose the oppression wrought by the colonial powers. When, in the 1860s, Marx and Engels helped found the International Workingmen’s Association to bring together the socialist parties of the world, they fought stridently for it to take a position in solidarity with colonised peoples—struggling in particular to encourage English workers to act in solidarity with the Irish national liberation movement.
This strategic position was based on the idea of an international revolutionary movement of workers, which respected no borders and aimed to overthrow all capitalist states. Naturally, such a movement would be the enemy of any nation that tried to extend its state power to rule over colonies and steal their wealth. But over the coming decades, the socialist movement, organised in the Second International, split into two wings. 
On the one hand, figures such as Eduard Bernstein—often described as “moderates”—would argue that revolution was impossible and unnecessary, and that socialists should avoid conflict and work through existing institutions. They would also become supporters of colonial projects. Opposing them were figures like Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin, who put opposition to colonialism at the centre of their revolutionary politics. Both saw colonialism—and competition for overseas influence—as central to the logic of capitalism, its drive to war and its tendency to economic collapse.
When World War One broke out in 1914, these revolutionaries also saw anti-colonialism as central to the strategy for socialist revolution. Luxemburg, writing from jail, condemned capitalism not only for its contemporary war, but for its atrocities in the colonies: “This same imperialism doomed tens of thousands of Hereros to destruction”. 
Lenin—exiled from Russia—wrote to revolutionaries at home, advising them to put this question to the working class: “Are you willing to pay these gentry, the capitalists, hundreds of millions of roubles [the Russian currency] every year for a war waged for the division of the African colonies, Turkey, etc.?” He proposed “workers and peasants’ peace terms” to end the war: “liberation of all colonies; liberation of all dependent, oppressed and unequal nations”.
When the Russian workers seized power at the end of 1917, this program was put into action. Almost immediately, the new revolutionary government published its Decree on Peace, describing “this war over the issue of how to divide among the strong and rich nations the weak nationalities they have conquered” to be “the greatest of crimes against humanity”. To the German state, Russia’s negotiators, led by Leon Trotsky, proposed peace on the basis that “colonial questions” be resolved by removing all troops and organising referendums of the colonial populations to decide their future. 
Unsurprisingly, the terms were not accepted by the German imperialist powers, or any others. Instead, the Marxist movement—which was being reorganised into separate revolutionary Communist parties inspired by the Russian example—would have to reach out to the oppressed colonial populations themselves.
“We do not want to become like the ‘heroes’ of the Second International”, Zinoviev told the anti-colonial conference in Baku in 1920. “We are mindful that in this world live not only people with white skin ... We want to put an end to the rule of capital everywhere in the world. And this will become possible only when we have lit the fire of revolution not merely in Europe and America but throughout the world, and when all the working people of Asia and Africa march with us.”
Of course, this was easier said than done—and even saying it was difficult, when the world’s imperialist powers were trying to eliminate the new Russian revolutionary government using the same techniques of mass slaughter and starvation they had learned in their colonial territories. 
But there were serious political challenges, too. The anti-colonial movements were based in economically underdeveloped countries and could be strongly influenced by local landlords and capitalists. Outside Russia, the European revolutionary movement was still too small and weak to challenge its own ruling classes. The global alliance between socialists and anti-colonial movements was an important strategic goal; implementing it required a level of strength and organisation that had not yet been reached. 
“If the struggle in Persia, India, and Turkey were merely to bring to power the capitalists and landlords of those countries, with their national parliaments and senates, the masses of the people would have gained nothing”, argued a Russian delegate, Pavlovich. “Every newly formed state would be rapidly drawn, by the very course of events and the iron logic of the laws of capitalist economy, into the vicious circle of militarism and imperialist politics.”
This vision of communist anti-colonialism inspired generations of fighters—but it has not yet been realised. The imperialist blockade of Russia had the desired effect: the revolutionary movement was starved out and replaced with the bureaucracy of Joseph Stalin. Zinoviev himself ended up in Stalin’s prisons, as would “all the speakers from Asia at the Baku congress who were within Stalin’s reach and whose fate is known”, according to the historian John Riddell. 
Stalin’s “Communist” movement retained the language of anti-colonialism when it suited its interests. But the idea of a simultaneous global movement to wipe out capitalism and colonialism in “one single tumultuous, powerful stream” of resistance became an occasional rhetorical device, not a strategic reality.
Now, the “vicious circle of militarism and imperialist politics” has absorbed most of the post-colonial nations. Some, like India, are happily supplying arms to Israel. Others, like Iran, collaborate with Russia’s foreign military adventures. China even pursues its own internal settler-colonial project in Xinjiang. The world remains in need of the strategy shaped by Marx: a global anti-capitalist revolution to liberate the oppressed all over the world.

D. Taylor

Communists versus colonialism

Everyone used to know which capitalists were the bad guys and which ones were the good guys. Bad: oil, banks, military contractors. They don’t care about climate change, they profit from wars, and they crash the economy. They live in bad places like Florida and Texas and Wall Street. They promote weird right-wing Christian ideas to bamboozle people. They are Republicans. They deserve derision and hostility. 
Good: tech. They make clever websites where you can stay in touch with your friends and see pleasant images of beaches and fancy breakfasts. They solve climate change. They live in California. They run Barack Obama’s campaign. They deserve low taxes, deregulation and invitations to special White House parties.
Yet here we are. Many of those enlightened Silicon Valley capitalists now look like a propaganda cartoon from a Communist Party magazine of the 1930s. They embody all that is awful about contemporary life and use all their power to make it worse. They fund, promote, and grovel before the most reactionary and authoritarian US president in living memory. They run media platforms promoting the most twisted and dehumanising racist propaganda. They celebrate the power of “masculine energy” with Joe Rogan. What happened? What do these people actually want? What do they truly believe?
Democrats are searching for answers. There are probably some contingent explanations. The development of AI depends on energy-hungry data centres. That makes immediate access to electricity more important and climate change less of a concern. The economic stagnation of the “second tech boom”, as well as fuelling the crypto and AI crazes, may have made key tech players more interested in direct corruption and state patronage. 
Some right-wing Democrats, like commentator Matt Yglesias, have suggested that the Biden administration’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/18/joe-biden-has-just-dealt-a-big-defeat-to-big-tech">meek pushback</a> against tech industry power, or his largely meaningless pro-union rhetoric, are to blame for “systematically trying to alienate stakeholders in the technology industry”. But that all came pretty late in the piece, once it was obvious that the big tech players were shifting towards Trump.
Contingent, temporary factors play a role. But so do permanent ones. To quote <a href="https://lbo-news.com/2012/05/22/explaining-what-exists-in-memory-of-bob-fitch/">Robert Fitch</a>: “Vulgar Marxism explains 90% of what goes on in the world”. 
These people are tech capitalists. But what is a tech capitalist? In a way, nearly all capitalists are “tech” capitalists. Most of the important products in the modern economy require complex technology to produce. That privately owned technology is the capital that makes someone a capitalist. Whether they make steel or spaceships, they have the same basic interests. They want to hold back the progress of competitors, protect their position and win special grants and favours from the state. They need to keep costs down: adopt new production techniques, keep taxes low, remove or disregard irritating regulations and keep their employees cheap.
Moment by moment, they may favour different tactics, and accept different compromises. They might be Democrats one day, Republicans the next, and some unknown horror in the future. In the realm of politics, they follow the principle of Lord Palmerston: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow”.
Seen in that light, the Trumpist tech capitalists are rather traditional. They are defence contractors, car manufacturers, finance capitalists and media barons. Who would be surprised that this crew would swing towards a far-right, ultra-racist, highly corrupt political movement once it looked like it could win?
Thiel and Musk began their “tech” careers with an online finance platform. Now they’re both tightly linked to the US defence and espionage industries. Thiel’s main outfit, Palantir, sells a data analysis tool used throughout the US intelligence and military. It purports to be able to reveal important trends concealed in mountains of data, and it received billions of dollars of military and intelligence contracts to do so. 
As David Runciman writes: “[Palantir’s] business is dispelling the fog of war—define war any way you like, and personal privacy be damned”. Likewise, Musk’s SpaceX has received US$3.6 billion in Defense Department contracts in the last decade—along with $11.8 billion from NASA. So what’s good for business? Civil liberties and global disarmament? Or a militarised, paranoid world in which the population is tricked or forced to accept spying, violence, ultra-nationalism, and the economic prioritisation of war and its associated machinery?
Musk makes cars. It’s big manufacturing. Production schedules are tight. Wages and conditions need to be constrained. Regulations and unions are a danger for him—as they are for logistics titan Jeff Bezos. So, unsurprisingly, he follows in the tradition of the industry’s modern founder, Henry Ford. For Musk, as for Ford, unions, “communists” (like Kamala Harris), and other forms of subversion need to be undermined; extreme racist propaganda is part of the cure. Musk’s anti-migrant tirades and flirtations with fascism on X are exactly in the tradition of Ford, the Hitler supporter who published his antisemitic conspiracy theories in his own personal media outlet, the Dearborn Independent.
It seems likely that Musk’s manufacturing interest first set him on the path to his current interest in fascist politics. In 2020, his Tesla plants were affected by pandemic lockdown protocols. Musk’s profits were temporarily threatened by government regulations aiming to save lives. 
“It will cause great harm, not just to Tesla, but to many companies”, he complained on a Tesla earnings call. He began furiously promoting medical conspiracy theories, tweeting against “fascist” lockdowns, campaigning against “unelected and ignorant” public health officials, and tweeting the “FREE AMERICA NOW” slogans of the conspiracy-addled far right. He ultimately reopened his factory in defiance of a lockdown order. Trump offered him public support. 
Thatis seems to have been the year of Musk’s political awakening, as it was for so many pandemic-era capitalists frustrated by public obsession with health affecting their profits. Musk learned that he could undermine and destroy inconvenient regulations if he promoted demagogic conspiracy-theory politics in an alliance with Donald Trump. Now, unelected and ignorant, he is the president’s “first buddy” and a guest speaker at European far-right party conferences.
Among the capitalist class, the owners of media outlets act as a kind of political vanguard. They try to shape the ideas and set the terms of debate for their co-thinkers. They have their own party-like rivalries and disagreements. Trump’s first rise to power was dependent on an alliance with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which had spent decades promoting anti-migrant politics to its TV audience of millions in the US. 
Now, in a way, the torch has been passed. By purchasing Twitter, Musk became a media baron. He quickly converted X into a decisively important outlet for racist conspiracy theories: taking advantage of his rigged algorithm, Musk himself became the platform’s “biggest promoter of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories”, according to an <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-musk-x-election-influence-immigration/">analysis</a>
by Bloomberg Technology. Mark Zuckerberg, always trying to mimic his bolder rivals, would soon adjust Facebook and Instagram to resemble Musk’s outlet more closely.
Old-school “legacy media” could present right-wing propaganda with an air of spurious authority based on traditional signifiers: a suit and tie, hair and make-up, a trained voice with a posh accent or a folksy one, depending on the audience. 
The social media outlets controlled by Musk and Zuckerberg play a similar trick with different methods. They are full of some of the most extreme racist, misogynist and anti-democratic right-wing propaganda you could imagine. But it’s presented as an organic representation of mass opinion. You forget the enormous data centres shaping your feed under the oversight of utterly secret algorithms shaped and guided by Musk, Zuckerberg, and their co-thinkers. The gusher of propaganda is delivered to you as a direct and authentic act of self-expression from people just like yourself.
So a set of ultra-powerful, quasi-monopolistic military contractors and manufacturers are using their influence over media outlets to promote far-right politics. Should anyone be surprised?
Maybe the Democrats. They spent years incubating this group of monsters. Their decades-long alliance with the tech industry, just like their alliance with Wall Street, would make a joke of Biden’s later attempts at populist, pro-union posturing. It’s part of what made people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama vulnerable to the (basically accurate) attack from Trump that they represented an oligarchy of wealthy elites. But Trump has now made those elites a better offer. 
The offer has not been universally accepted. Subtracting the donations of Musk, who spent $246 million in the 2024 elections, the biggest donors still broadly favoured the Democrats in 2024. As a group, the major tech industry donors gave Harris $121 million compared to $31 for Trump; overall, the Democrats out-raised the Republicans by more than a billion dollars during the 2024 campaign. This may be some comfort to Democrats., Bbut it is no good to the rest of us. After Trump proved he could defeat Harris, many more capitalists switched sides. And the fact that so many remain willing to finance the Democrats simply proves that the Democrats continue to act as loyal and trusted servants of the US oligarchy—not some anti-corporate opposition that can confront the power of Musk and the rest.
The MAGA tech capitalists have evolved in tandem with Trump, as he has proven his ability over time to capture and defuse anti-corporate sentiment more effectively than the Democrats. In 2016, Trump and his supporters raged demagogically against entrenched corporate interests that controlled their rivals. “Across the country, wages are flat”, Peter Thiel said at the 2016 Republican convention. “But health care and college tuition cost more every year. Meanwhile, Wall Street bankers inflate bubbles in everything from government bonds to Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees.”
Little remains of this anti-corporate posturing. Through years of propaganda, Trump captured this energy and converted it into pure, miserable bigotry. But Trump was never more anti-corporate than the Democrats are pro-worker. And the tech industry was never interested in social progress—only profits and power. It would be foolish to expect any better of these forces: the Democrats, the Republicans or the big business interests whose support they crave.

The MAGA tech oligarchy

These French governments just fly past, don’t they? Under the presidency of Emmanuel Macron, the expected lifespan of a prime minister has gone from three years to three months. Michel Barnier, the latest PM to fall victim to the rolling political, social and constitutional crisis that is the Macron presidency, was appointed in September and kicked out in time to spend Christmas with his family. His predecessor, Gabriel Attal, lasted a comparatively Methuselean six months. Projecting this rate of decline forward, some online statisticians estimate that the duration of the next French government will be somewhere below zero weeks, potentially triggering a crisis in the space-time continuum on top of the political disorder.
Macron called a midyear snap election to disorganise the left-wing opposition. The move backfired. Support for Macron’s coalition collapsed. An increase in support for the far-right National Rally was outpaced by anti-fascist and anti-neoliberal sentiment, the election bringing a surprise victory for the left-wing Popular Front coalition.
In response, Macron carried out a typically high-handed anti-democratic stunt. Claiming that “nobody had won” the election, he spent weeks locking the various parties into “consultations”. Finally, he appointed as his new prime minister an aged operative of the right-wing Republican Party—a party that had just won 3.8 percent of the vote.
Michel Barnier’s new government was completely dependent on far-right support. He had previously distinguished himself in politics by endorsing some of the most extreme and unconstitutional anti-migrant politics of the far right, including a five-year moratorium on immigration. Marine Le Pen, leader of the quasi-fascist National Rally party, noted approvingly that the new PM was “respectful” of National Rally and its supporters. Her offsider, Jordan Bardella, noted with pleasure that the Barnier government would operate “under surveillance” from the far right, who could bring it down at any moment.
For the fascists, the Barnier government provided a means to implement aspects of their anti-immigrant, pro-cop agenda while remaining unsullied by formal collaboration with Macron. For Macron, Barnier’s main qualification seemed to be that, unlike most other candidates for the prime ministerial post, he would retain Macron’s hated neoliberal pension reforms. Barnier embodied the symbiotic relationship between Macron’s neoliberal authoritarians and the French far right, for all that those forces denounce each other demagogically.
France’s broad reformist left is unusual: its most influential and biggest part is also the most left wing. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s pugnacious electoral outfit, France Unbowed, is the main force on the French left. It drags behind it the Greens and France’s ancient, decrepit Socialist Party, whose leaders are constantly tormented by the desire to break with the coalition and return to “respectable” centre politics. When Barnier’s appointment proved Macron’s desire to completely ignore popular concerns, protests broke out throughout France. The left spoke in strong terms: France Unbowed, and others around its region of the left, called the move a “coup against democracy”.
But the reformist left did not rise to the level of its own rhetoric. The midyear elections proved there is strong social support, especially in the big cities, for a left-wing, anti-racist political program. The entire Macron presidency has proven the willingness of workers, students and the oppressed to mobilise in protests, occupations and serious, prolonged strike movements. France faces the real prospect of fascist governments and presidencies. The left-reformist coalition, and particularly France Unbowed, have articulated a pretty coherent anti-racist, left-reformist program, and backed it up with impressive speech making and disruptive parliamentary operations. They have helped cohere and shape a left-wing current in French society that is in better health than what is found in many other imperialist countries. They have scored important victories—including the electoral defeat of the far right this year. But speech making and parliamentary interventions are not sufficient to confront a growing fascist menace in a country experiencing what is effectively a permanent political crisis.
France Unbowed’s main response to the Barnier government was to move repeated no-confidence motions, exposing his dependence on the far right each time the National Rally voted to keep him in power. Now, after Barnier proposed an austerity budget, the far right have decided to bring him down. 
Time after time in France, as social struggles are converted into parliamentary crises, the initiative has passed to the far right. This was true even of the electoral mobilisations, where mass support for a left-wing government was in part defused by Macron’s long procrastination in nominating a new government. It is even more true of the strikes and protests that have been a recurring feature of Macron’s presidency. Both Macron and Le Pen tend to passively wait out the big eruptions of social struggle. It is much easier for right-wing forces—both of the neoliberal and far-right variety—to get away with their political tricks when the streets are empty of protesters, strikers have gone back to work, and the only path to resolve social problems seems to be the state.
The causes of the crisis are not hard to understand. Macron’s commitment to neoliberal austerity politics is confronting a population that consistently rejects his program. Macron’s refusal to back down requires him to engage in more daring experiments with the anti-democratic provisions of the French constitution, and with racist scapegoating. This has fuelled the rise of the far right along with the revival of a social-democratic left. None of these currents can claim a complete social majority. The best weapon of the left is its capacity to mobilise workers and the oppressed in joint struggle, regardless of the rhythm and schedule of elections, and in defiance of the law and constitution if necessary. A significant national strike against Barnier’s austerity budget—a strike that continued even after Barnier had resigned—shows the capacity for resistance to develop and grow remains.
The crisis is likely to deepen. France’s economy is under serious pressure, and not only from the familiar effects of neoliberalism. Last year, the fascist Eric Zemmour, interviewed on Le Grand Jury, analysed the French economy from a different perspective: “France has managed to bring its artillery production from 1,000 to 3,000 shells per month”, he explained. “You must know that Ukraine consumes 5,000 shells a day, and that the Russians produce a million shells a year. Voilà: the balance of forces.” 
Macron, the military-industrial hawk of Europe, sees things in similar terms. Late last year, he spoke of the need for a “long-term war economy” in France. France aims to triple its annual manufacturing of 155mm shells; Russia produces more of its equivalent than all the EU combined. Macron’s project of bringing down the debt and deficit while ramping up military production will require economic sacrifices.
“We have rediscovered what great nations can do: realise the impossible”, Macron said at the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral. The ceremony did not necessarily provide the symbolic moment of optimism and hopefulness that was intended. Barnier’s government had fallen, and no replacement had been appointed. Macron’s audience included firefighters and priests. It also included President-elect Donald Trump, whose concept of a “great nation” is largely shared by France’s far right and may define future French governments. With him was Volodymyr Zelenskyy; his besieged nation’s need for artillery shells and air defence systems foreshadows how imperialist war is likely to reshape world politics in the coming years.

On the fall of France’s government

Is the Democratic administration of Joe Biden pro-worker or anti-worker? Opinions differ. Take Bernie Sanders. The day after the 2024 election, the Vermont senator issued a statement denouncing Biden, Vice President Harris and the Democratic Party for having “abandoned the working class”. The language was punchy, direct, withering and accurate. The Democratic leadership, Sanders wrote, has nothing to offer workers. The party, controlled by “big money interests”, does not understand workers’ “pain and political alienation”. As an inevitable consequence of this, workers of all races are abandoning it. 
But there are other currents of opinion about the Harris-Biden Democrats. For example, that Joe Biden is “the most pro-working-class president in modern American history”, with an agenda that speaks “to the needs of the working class”. He is “the most effective president in modern history”, “a good and decent Democratic president with a record of real accomplishment”, who “wants to tax the rich so that we can fund the needs of working families”. These were the words of, um, Bernie Sanders, a few months ago. 
It was easy to lose track of Sanders over the last few years. He has not been worth paying much attention to. But over the last decade, Sanders has gone from being the scourge of the Democratic establishment to one of its most reliable surrogates.
In 2016 and 2020, he stood against establishment Democratic candidates, achieved widespread support, was buried by the Democratic apparatus and then rolled over to campaign for the people who crushed him. Each time he ran, the process embedded him more deeply into the party machine. In 2024, he didn’t even challenge Biden or Harris. His email list has become a Democratic Party fundraising tool—reliant on worn-out catchphrases and in-jokes from his past presidential runs that are only marginally less groan-worthy than the coconut-pilled bratmongering of the official Harris campaign.
Sanders once used hard-hitting, pro-worker language to attack the record of the mainstream Democrats. But throughout 2024, he used the same rhetoric to demand loyalty and obedience to the leader —whoever that leader might be.
When even the corporate liberal press could see that Joe Biden had to step aside, Sanders and his protégés in Congress became the president’s most aggressive and reliable bodyguards. It was a head-spinning role reversal. Establishment mouthpieces like the Washington Post and the New York Times were stating an obvious truth: Biden was past it and would have to drop plans to run for a second term. 
Sanders devoted himself to a transparently dishonest campaign to defend and promote Biden as a champion of the workers. In a major Times op-ed, he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/opinion/joe-biden-president.html">extolled</a>
Biden’s allegedly pro-worker record and demanded that Democrats “stop the bickering and nit-picking”. A couple of weeks later, Biden threw in the towel. Sanders, the loyal mouthpiece of the Biden leadership, was left holding the bag.
I don’t care who leads the Democrats. But the incident proved that Sanders was now officially part of the dishonest, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/07/13/biden-sanders-aoc-liberal-lifeline/">deal-making Democratic machine</a>. Even most right-wing Democrats weren’t as willing as Sanders to burn their reputation in defence of a collapsing Biden candidacy. 
It didn’t stop there—and it wasn’t only Sanders. When Kamala Harris took over the reins, Sanders carried on his role as a key public advocate for a genocide-enabling neoliberal (and former prosecutor). His extra-special <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf5MThSniiY">Palestine-themed video manifesto</a>, in which he demanded that Palestine supporters swallow their pride and fall in behind the vice president, was a low point. “<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/4868310-bernie-sanders-liz-dick-cheney-kamala-harris/">I applaud the Cheneys</a> for their courage in defending democracy”: that was another.
His surrogates and allies, now an entrenched Democratic faction, joined in—and went further. Congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke at the Democratic National Convention to praise “leaders like Kamala and Tim [Walz]”. Her speech could have come from the mouth of any careerist Democrat of the Bill Clinton generation. 
Sanders at least acknowledged he disagreed with Harris on Gaza. Nothing like that from AOC. She assured the audience of party officials and donors: “[Harris] is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home”. (No Palestinians were permitted to speak at the event.) The rest of the campaign brought further embarrassments. American politics moves quickly. AOC is now irrevocably cringe. To paraphrase George Orwell: If you want a picture of the future of the Democratic Party, imagine <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAnKayYSStM">AOC livestreaming Madden with Tim Walz—forever</a>.
As Donald Trump’s election proves, dishonesty is not a decisive disadvantage in capitalist politics. Leftists with functioning memories might roll their eyes to see Sanders suddenly remember that the Democrats are actually quite bad. But many will be grateful to hear someone stating obvious truths and calling for pro-worker politics. Still, there are some lessons to be drawn from Sanders’ brat summer.
First: how quickly, and comprehensively, political “harm minimisation” turns into loyal advocacy. Maybe Sanders thought he’d extracted some concessions from Harris and Biden. Maybe he really believes that Trump is a fascist danger who must be stopped at all costs—fair enough. Either way, Sanders seems to think that a Democrat in power is a necessary condition for social progress. So any doubters must be convinced—even if they’re doubting for good reasons. By this mechanism, “pragmatic” leftists become delusional Biden loyalists. People like Sanders, with authority on the left, devote themselves to justifying—and lying about—the allegedly pro-worker and anti-genocide outlooks of people like Biden and Harris.
But a Democrat in office isn’t necessary for social progress. Yes, America needs a form of politics that is pro-worker, anti-racist and not beholden to the oligarchy. But just as much, it needs a form of politics that operates outside elections—and that can function no matter who’s in the White House, the Supreme Court and the Congress. It needs a pro-worker politics that draws its power from strikes and social movements, not fundraisers and TV advertising. That form of politics isn’t going to come from the Democrats.
If an alternative isn’t constructed, most of the people issuing these broad-left denunciations of the Democrats—no matter how strident and accurate—are going to end up back as captives of a future Harris or Biden equivalent.

Bernie’s brat summer

John Monash was the founding president of the Zionist Federation of Australia. There’s a three-metre-tall bronze statue of him, looking perplexed and unhappy, towering over the lawns of the Clayton campus of the university in Melbourne that bears his name. Monash University’s existence reflects, in part, the fact that Zionism did ultimately become the official policy of Australia’s ruling class. For those who view the success of the Jewish community as synonymous with the unassailable dominance of Zionist politics, Monash University is one of the ultimate symbols of this success.
That history is reflected in the student life of the campus. Monash University is the home of one of the biggest and most aggressive student Zionist outfits: the local branch of the Zionist campaign group, the Australasian Union of Jewish Students. The Monash AUJS section has spent decades mobilising its members to influence student politics and undermine campus-based Palestine solidarity. It has shaped the politics of the student union elections, organised dozens of stooges to disrupt pro-Palestine events, filed false disciplinary complaints and used its media contacts to circulate fraudulent stories about antisemitism.
Throughout these endeavours, it has received the support of the university administration and the dominant factions in student politics. And why not? Over most of that period, it was the campus socialists who led the Palestine solidarity work, and whether you are a university manager trying to give your campus the atmosphere of a shopping centre, or a Labor student trying to win a student union election, it can be very helpful to have a credible “community group” to tell the world that your socialist opponents are antisemitic lunatics. 
This convergence of interests was on display in 2014, when, after the bombing of Gaza in which 2,000 Palestinians were killed over a few weeks, the Monash Zionists were able to get the Socialist Alternative club dissolved and banned—for the antisemitic crime of organising a campus meeting titled “Why you should support the Palestinians”.
So, if there was one place you might reasonably expect a pro-Palestine student general meeting to go a little off the rails, it would be Monash.
Monash’s meeting for Palestine came late in the piece. It was scheduled for 3 September, by which time there had already been meetings of hundreds of students at universities around the country, all of which had voted overwhelmingly—often without dissent—to endorse some combination of solidarity with Palestine and a call for the university to divest from Israel.
Monash’s Students for Palestine group—mostly led by, but not solely consisting of Socialist Alternative members—had been frenetically campaigning to build on that momentum. Most students have never been to a mass meeting to pass a motion on a political question. What did they need to understand? 
First, that they had a chance to vote and be part of making a decision, not just make a moral stand. Second, that their attendance would nonetheless have the moral power of a protest, in part because the size and politics of these meetings was revealing something about the sentiment of young people towards Israel and Australia’s complicity in Israel’s crimes. 
Third, that meetings like this had been successful elsewhere, so Palestine supporters could have confidence and feel they are part of a broader movement. And finally, that the decision of each individual to attend would matter, in particular so the meeting could meet the threshold of 510 votes that would make the vote binding under the Monash Student Association’s constitution.
In a public debate, right-wingers have an inherent advantage over the left. Left-wing politics is about involving and encouraging the participation of the oppressed. You really have to explain things. There’s no point winning a vote from people who don’t understand what’s going on, or who have been bribed or tricked. For the left, a vote is meaningful only if it represents some genuine understanding on the part of those who cast it. 
Right-wingers have it a little easier. Their politics is about the power of official institutions. It doesn’t matter if ordinary people understand what’s going on; in fact, it’s rather better if they don’t. The assumption that because official institutions are backing a position, it is legitimate, and therefore no further inquiry is needed, works to their advantage. You could see this dynamic in the Zionist publicity campaign. Here there was no patient explanation.
On the morning of 3 September, the Zionists’ posters were still up all over campus. One, stamped with the logo of “Students Supporting Israel”—no official AUJS branding, but a big Israeli flag—read: “What are you voting for, MSA? Death to all Jews. Death to democracy. Supporting terrorists”. It is a familiar debating position for Zionists to adopt: don’t talk about what we’re actually talking about, just pretend we’re talking about the Holocaust. Anyone who has any qualms about killing Palestinians is a genocidal Nazi. Keep it in mind when you hear about the rising tide of campus “antisemitism”. 
Another strategy, on another poster: “No genocide in Gaza: Vote No”. Cross your fingers and hope that a few lost souls see your poster and vote the wrong way by mistake. When it is not backed by US military hardware, Zionist political strategy looks a lot less impressive.
The meeting was upstairs, indoors. Around 500 students were packed in, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Speakers were at the front. Stage left was the entrance queue, where for about half an hour after the meeting officially opened, the student union’s bureaucracy was still slowly accrediting registered attendees. Stage right was a giant glass wall looking out onto a student lounge, through which a growing crowd of spectators watched. 
A few dozen Zionists came, some in Israeli flag capes, nervous but excited about a big assignment: they hugged and high-fived each other, then sat in a wedge directly in front of the speakers’ stage. But by the day of the meeting, they’d given up on winning. An official statement denounced the motions as one-sided and biased, and announced that only a small contingent would be sent to argue their point.
The 500 students then sat through—cheering, heckling and chanting—an hour-long formal debate about Zionism, Palestine and Australia’s complicity in the genocide of Palestinians.
It was a debate more serious than almost anything in the Australian media because the Palestine advocates were granted equal time, and were able systematically to respond to, and demolish, each argument presented by the Zionists. What about the hostages? This war isn’t about rescuing hostages: the Israeli government has killed a number of them—not to mention the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners. Why does this motion denounce Israel, but not Hamas? Because the genocide of the Palestinians began decades before Hamas was founded. Why are you antisemitic? Zionism is not Judaism or Jewishness: it is a distinct racist political current.
It is unlikely that any crowd of this size at Monash has ever heard, let alone participated in, such a thorough real-time public dismantling of Zionist propaganda. The debate wound up on a speech about the need for solidarity with all the struggles of the oppressed—brought together in a socialist world view and strategy. It brought the house down.
The vote, of course, carried: 470 in favour, 50 against, with no abstentions. It was ten years, nearly to the day, since the Socialist Alternative club was deregistered for holding a Palestine solidarity meeting.
Much has changed in ten years. A decade ago, Zionist activists could count on the passivity and disengagement of the student population. Palestine solidarity was a fringe issue. A small number of socialists and Muslims would take a stand. Most of the time, others would look the other way. Not so any more.
Much has changed, but not everything. The Labor students who control the student union, politically unable to oppose the meeting openly just before a student union election, nonetheless cut off registrations just in time to stop the meeting from hitting the constitutionally binding threshold of 510 votes. 
Dozens of keffiyeh-wearing students were disenfranchised, forced to cheer through the glass windows. The student union will consequently not be compelled to act on the motion that was passed. 
The Zionists made no attempt to win the room over—one argued strongly for the war continuing until Hamas is eradicated—but they were not without purpose; they filmed their own speeches, and no doubt will use the record of this event to help recruit next year’s load of pro-apartheid activists. 
Despite the moral victory for Palestine the meeting represented, there exist national networks of dedicated advocates and propagandists for genocide, and they retain their institutional connections.
Still. Ten years ago, you’d put on a meeting about Palestine, ten people would come, your club would be banned, and you’d say, “Okay, well, that could have gone worse”. Now, those arguments that once were so hard to make have broken through: that Zionism is racism, and that the West is complicit in genocide of the Palestinians. 
The arguments that Palestine solidarity activists have spent decades publicising and perfecting have become the common sense of the left, and—in some contexts at least and on this particular day—the Zionist propaganda is being rightly drowned out with jeers, heckling and laughter.

Monash University: a yardstick for how far Palestine solidarity has come

When French President Emmanuel Macron solemnly addressed his fellow citizens in early June, he promised that a snap election would provide a “necessary clarification”. Moreover, it would express his deep commitment to the democratic process as a solution to political deadlock: “To let the sovereign people have their say: nothing is more republican”.
By late July, little has been clarified, and the power of the “sovereign people” does not seem to be in evidence. An enormous surge in far-right support—10 million votes for the post-fascist National Rally (RN)—was matched and exceeded by an anti-fascist electoral mobilisation. Terror of an impending fascist government was converted into uncontrolled joy and relief for French leftists. Yet France’s parliament remains split into three blocs, with no clear majority. Since that moment of joy, France’s anti-democratic constitution has worked its dark magic to convert this social crisis into behind-closed-doors manoeuvring, to the advantage of the ultra-powerful presidency.
Gabriel Attal, Macron’s prime minister, resigned yet remained in power in a legally mysterious caretaker arrangement. After three rounds of parliamentary voting, Macron’s former speaker of the parliament, Yaël Braun-Pivet, was re-elected to her post. The pre-election status quo has reasserted itself and demanded a leading role in forming a new government. After the election results were confirmed, the daily news was converted into rolling updates on the latest backdoor deals that had been made and broken, the moves and countermoves between the various parties to try to form a new government. The “sovereign people” were pushed out of the picture.
The partisans of the New Popular Front (NFP) coalition, and in particular its biggest and most left-wing section, France Unbowed of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, have a claim to power. The left is now the biggest parliamentary bloc. Within that bloc, France Unbowed is the biggest section. By tradition and convention, it should lead the formation of a new government. 
But even the tweediest conservatives seem to lose interest in tradition and convention when they might result in taxes on the rich and support for Palestine. Both RN and Macron’s supporters seem to agree that they will do anything to prevent a government formed by France Unbowed. During the electoral campaign, Macron’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, made his principles clear in a television interview: 
“If it came down to a two-way race between RN and France Unbowed where I live, I wouldn’t vote for France Unbowed. I love the police too much. I love the gendarmes too much. I love the state too much.”
Despite presenting the NFP as a threat as bad as, or worse than, the fascists, Macron’s machine relied on left-wing anti-fascist votes to keep its remaining parliamentary representation. Afterwards, it tried to undo the election results by breaking up the left-wing bloc and absorbing parts of it into the discredited ruling regime. The more “mainstream” (read: right-wing) members of the NFP coalition want to lead it towards political compromise and deradicalisation. So much for a necessary clarification; so much for the sovereign people.
This depressing spectacle should not be the end of the story. France’s elections occurred in a country shaped by regular, frequent, deeply rooted oppositional social movements. “Universal suffrage”, Vladimir Lenin wrote, “is an index of the level reached by the various classes in their understanding of their problems. It shows how the various classes are inclined to solve their problems. The actual solution of those problems is not provided by voting, but by the class struggle in all its forms”. 
What can we learn from these elections about how the classes in France are inclined to solve their problems?
For insight into the French capitalist class, we can begin by considering Macron and his political machine. There is a good reason to start here. French economists Thomas Piketty and Julia Cagé recently published a systematic study of French voting patterns going back to 1789. They found that Macron’s base is “the most bourgeois in all history”. Like most conservative parties, Macron’s group finds its highest support among the wealthiest people, whether measured by income or property ownership. Unlike traditional conservatives, he and his party have almost no support among the poor, whether in the cities or the countryside. Macron truly is the “president of the bosses”, as the chants of striking workers put it. 
Hence his authoritarianism. With no genuine mass support, Macron has forced through his program with raw state power. This runs the gamut from the physical violence of riot cops to the repeated use of article 49.3 of France’s constitution to implement laws without a parliamentary vote—most notably the hated pension changes. He has consistently tried to draw out the most authoritarian aspects of the French constitutional and legal framework, and normalise their application in political life.
However, Macron’s group does not rely solely on mechanical authoritarianism. It has a bigger plan for its project’s long-term survival, which is both more political and more insidiously undemocratic. Macron aims to transcend the old left-right split in politics and replace it with a new two-way division between liberals and nationalists. He has constantly attempted to disintegrate, split and anathematise the institutions of the left, while absorbing their most demoralised elements into the base of his own party.
Unions have been confronted and defeated. Left-wing anti-racist activists have been smeared as antisemitic terror-lovers. Almost any institution that might mobilise the oppressed against the rich has been targeted in one way or another. Meanwhile, Macron has anointed the far right as a legitimate opposition while demanding left-wing voters’ support in the face of the fascist threat. This is how the political representatives of France’s liberal capitalists have attempted to eradicate the left and pave the way for the growth of the far right.
What about the workers? It is well-known that fascist politics have penetrated the consciousness of French workers. But the picture is complex. More than half of French ouvriers voted for the far right in the European elections. But an ouvrier is not simply a worker. It is a blue-collar worker, of a kind that is shrinking as an overall proportion of the French working class. The ouvriers
now make up only 20 percent of France’s population; bosses outnumber them. They are ageing as France deindustrialises. The research of Piketty and Cagé shows that ouvriers now mostly live and work outside the big cities: factories and warehouses were pushed into the countryside, drawn there by cheap land and access to motorways, but also by the bosses’ desire to isolate blue-collar workers from the leftist influence of city politics.
France’s ouvriers are now its older workers, its more isolated, the ones who live in areas more dominated by small- and medium-sized businesses, and who are more likely themselves to own some property. As France’s mainstream parties adopted neoliberalism, the fascists took their “social turn”, proposing to re-industrialise and revive France’s welfare state on a racial basis. Following this, their electoral base expanded and shifted from the urban middle class towards rural workers. 
All this is no cause for complacency. Every working class will have its backward, even reactionary, currents. But the backward current in France’s working class is really big and really backward. It is no foregone conclusion that isolated workers should be reactionary, let alone fascist. And although those rural ouvriers
provide the largest concentration of fascist support, fascist voters and activists are found at every level of French society and within every section of its working class. The question becomes whether the organised parts of the French working class can resist and reverse this tendency.
Among French trade unionists, it’s a different story. Polling by Harris/AEF Info shows that only 19 percent of union-supporting workers support the fascists, compared to 37 percent of non-unionists. Among the powerful and influential General Confederation of Labour (CGT), there is real cause for concern: 27 percent of its supporters vote for RN, a very dangerous development indicating a major problem. Still, a large 61 percent majority voted for New Popular Front candidates in the last election. The CGT represents many blue-collar workers in regional industrial hubs and could mount a counterattack on the development of right-wing politics in the working class.
Among supporters of the FSU, a union representing mostly teachers, 74 percent support the NFP, and only 4 percent support RN. This confirms the argument by Piketty and Cagé that the left finds its strongest support among the professions intermédiaires—highly educated but badly paid and precarious workers like teachers and nurses, who mostly rent, live in big cities and tend to work for public institutions. They are generally younger, live among bigger concentrations of other workers and are more politically aware.
These figures do not simply represent voting blocs that can be expanded and consolidated to the advantage of left-wing politicians. They represent organised and class-conscious workers, many of whom have recently been on strike against Macron’s neoliberalism and have mobilised politically against fascism. That energy must be translated into action.
The recent electoral victory against the fascists was only a temporary reprieve. The growth of far-right sentiment in the working class makes a fascist government more likely, but it also risks making the working-class movement more disorganised and powerless in the face of attack. The electoral results show a huge desire to resist and reject the growth of fascism. The recent history of France’s strike movements shows that the anti-fascist trade unionists can lead the entire working class, and indeed much of the nation, against the country’s political elites. If they took up the fight against both racism and the French bosses, they could halt and reverse the advance of far-right politics in society as a whole.
In this, probably their biggest obstacle is the trade union bureaucracy. Despite much tough talk, France’s union bureaucrats have shown no desire to rise to the level of the current crisis. They allowed recent general strike movements to dissipate despite the rank and file’s willingness to go further. This contributed to the sense that France’s social problems will be resolved only through parliament, terrain that fundamentally favours right-wing politics. The left reformists of France Unbowed have refused to challenge the failings of the bureaucracy, instead hoping to curry favour with historically hostile union leaders and consolidate their voter base. In this, they have been successful: the CGT’s new leadership under Sophie Binet broke with long tradition to endorse the NFP in the elections. For reformist leaders, whether in the political parties or the trade unions, class struggle is valuable only insofar as it translates into a good result at the ballot box.
Yet for all their limitations, and for all the efforts of France’s establishment to lock the crisis within France’s constitutional puzzle box, the struggle may develop nonetheless. On the night of the election, after the left was shocked by its own success, Jean-Luc Mélenchon spoke to the crowds of France Unbowed supporters in Place Stalingrad. He demanded the right to form a minority left-wing government. 
“Those loudmouths who’ve blathered all week about an ‘ungovernable country’: they will have the responsibility to bring down the government”, he said. “And I bet they’ll be wise enough not to do it. Because it would be a grave error to think this electoral victory is like all the others. The politics from before will not continue. The people have come out: the working-class neighbourhoods, the youth.”
It was a threat: if you bring down our government, there might be social chaos. It was also a promise: let us form government, and there’ll be no problem.
The threat is a legitimate and powerful claim. The French ruling class has persisted in winding back democracy to force neoliberalism onto an unwilling population. Its refusal to accept the electoral results is just the latest example, and the growth of the far right is one of the results.
The promise indicates the limitations of France Unbowed’s project. It has cohered and inspired a left-wing current in French politics but remains content to use this as a bargaining chip to negotiate more aggressively with its parliamentary rivals.
Friedrich Engels wrote that elections “informed us of our own strength and that of all opposing parties, and thereby provided us with a measure of proportion second to none for our actions, safeguarding us from untimely timidity as much as from untimely foolhardiness”. Now, the “untimely timidity” would be to wait for a parliamentary resolution to the threat of French fascism. Left-wing, anti-fascist sentiment dominates the most powerful and influential currents of France’s youth and working class. It should be put into action before it is too late.

What we learned from the French elections

Who’s it going to be: me or the fascists? That’s the question Emmanuel Macron asked the French electorate a few weeks ago when he dissolved the parliament and called a snap election. On 7 July, he got his answer: neither. 
It was the most important electoral defeat for the French far right in decades. The National Rally (RN) has lost national elections before—indeed, every single one. But, since 2002, the party has steadily advanced in what began to look like an inevitable progression towards power. It has come to be seen as the government in waiting, prepared for office by the fiascos of the Macron presidency. 
Vincent Bolloré, France’s Rupert Murdoch, cultivated the RN, promoted it and finally helped negotiate a breakthrough electoral deal with a faction of the centre-right Republicans. The party even rented an apartment in Paris to conduct negotiations with bosses and prepare for government. The RN seemed to have it all: the blessing of important parts of the French ruling class and the aura of an authentic outsider party representing a clean break with rotten traditions. 
“We’ve never tried them” became a cliché supposedly expressing the national mood of openness to an RN government. This was meant to be the far right’s turn. 
The disappointment has inflicted a psychological blow on the fascists, who think power is their birthright. You could see it in the face of Jordan Bardella, the party’s prime ministerial hopeful, who spoke to supporters using the same tone and expressions with which he might explain his internet browser history to his mother. 
It was even more apparent in the <a href="https://x.com/ianbremmer/status/1810044783693287894">reaction from the RN election night party</a>, which was undoubtedly the worst social event of the season. Watch the young woman who, knowing the cameras are rolling, uses every ounce of her Will to Power to maintain a smile and not down her glass of white wine in one gulp. The activists were crying. “What a joke”, <a href="https://www.francetvinfo.fr/elections/reportage-legislatives-2024-au-qg-du-rassemblement-natioanal-les-militants-sont-passes-de-la-joie-a-la-desillusion-en-dix-secondes_6651807.html">one of them told France Info</a>, suddenly contemptuous of French voters. “They’ve behaved like sheep. A historic choice was offered to them, and they’ve done this nonsense.” 
The people let down the party. What will happen now?
The apparently inexorable rise of RN developed its own momentum. It was like a steam train smashing through its right-wing rivals—from the ultra-right Reconquete to the “respectable” Republicans—and causing splits everywhere as more and more ambitious conservative politicians jumped on board the RN express. Let us hope that this setback creates demoralisation, confusion, internal blame and paralysis.
The supporters of France Unbowed—the most left-wing and dominant force in the broad left coalition that claimed victory in the elections—gathered, appropriately, in Place Stalingrad in northern Paris. They cried too—in relief, and also with justifiable pride. They had been bracing for an electoral result that would express a triumphant wave of reactionary hatred, especially against migrants, and most especially against Arabs and Muslims, but generally directed at anyone who believed in social equality and progress. Instead of having to console each other and prepare to fight a fascist government, they celebrated a victory over both the fascists and Macron’s authoritarian liberals.
They campaigned against racism, for solidarity with Palestine, for taxing the rich and for increasing wages. They forced the cringing establishment left—the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the Greens—into the position of resentful junior partners in their coalition. They were relentlessly slandered as antisemites and terrorist sympathisers, in practically every media interview, by the fascists and even by some of their own coalition partners. But, as party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon crowed in his election-night speech, their program had mobilised the youth and the quartiers populaires, the poor and working-class neighbourhoods, to beat back the right wing and provide a victory to the left on a historically high turnout.
American voters might be wishing they lived in France right now. Every institution in US politics is designed to prevent such a thing from happening. “Progressive” politics is trapped inside the capitalist Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party itself is structured to make its capitalist leadership unassailable—even more tightly so since the two failed candidacies of Bernie Sanders. The top minds in the US political establishment are currently trying to push out a candidate who has all of Macron’s flaws and none of his virtues: a babbling, genocide-enabling pillar of the neoliberal establishment. How desperately the United States needs an independent, socialist political alternative that renounces the moral blackmail of the Democrats and fights the far right on a working-class, socialist program.
Important lessons should be drawn from the French victory. When far-right politics becomes a mass phenomenon, it can be blocked without capitulating to its racism. Sticking to leftist principles—whether on economics, immigration or Palestine—will attract scorn and slander from powerful institutions. But this can be challenged and overcome. A powerful political coalition of the oppressed—young progressives, migrants and workers—can be constructed.
But the victory is not total, and it is not permanent. It is a reprieve.
France Unbowed is a reformist party, which means it is pro-state and pro-capitalist, with all the limits that entails. Mélenchon has demanded the right to form a left government and insisted that they will not trade away their coalition's program: they will take power only to implement “the program, the whole program, and nothing but the program”. 
We have heard that before. It sounds great compared to the prevailing standards of the centre-left, in which compromises are upheld as virtuous. The history of social democracy is full of such stirring declarations. They often come on the eve of a catastrophic sell-out. Manuel Bompard, a senior official in France Unbowed, called for the activists to continue protesting and organising, to defend and pressure a left-wing government. 
Both pressure and defence may be necessary, but Bompard’s call still operates within a framework that reduces the masses to supporting and cheering on a set of politicians rather than reshaping society themselves. The fundamental rules of capitalist politics remain unchallenged: power remains in the hands of big business; the people exist to support politicians. 
While that is the case, even the most radical left government will find its program circumscribed in practice. The Socialist Party and the Communist Party have been discredited over the course of a century, not only because they sold people out, but because they did so despite having such lovely programs. Even if France Unbowed could form government independently, it would still be beholden to the system that produced the present political crisis.
But, of course, it cannot form government independently. Its electoral coalition with the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the Greens has been a lifeline for those parties, particularly the shrivelled Socialists, who have more than doubled their parliamentary representation. France Unbowed makes up less than half of the overall left bloc, and that bloc makes up less than half of the new parliament. 
The right-wing socialists and Greens have rebelled against the notion that the combative followers of Mélenchon could lead an emerging left-wing government. Many view France Unbowed as their biggest threat, and will repeat the red-baiting slurs that fuel the growth of the far right if they think they can improve their bargaining position by doing so. They are being tempted by the prospect of a “rainbow coalition” with Macron’s group. To form a bloc with the followers of Macron would be a propaganda gift to the fascists. They would declare that the whole project was ultimately nothing but a trick to keep the old order in power. They would claim that the fascists are, as they have repeated over and over, the “real opposition”.
The RN is already rehearsing this argument. In the 1980s, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen denounced the domination of the “gang of four”: the Socialist Party, Communist Party, and the two-right wing parties of the day. Now, the RN talks about Macron constructing a parti unique, a one-party state made up of fraudulent front parties ranging from left to right, to which only the fascists represent an authentic alternative. 
The National Rally is the smallest bloc in the new parliament, but it got the most votes of any party. Its people may be demoralised, but they have not disappeared. They will await betrayals and failures by any emerging coalition. “The tide is coming in”, Marine Le Pen said. “It didn’t swell enough this time, but it keeps growing, and thus our victory has only been delayed.”
The left’s victory shows that France’s most important political actors—urban workers and young people—want to fight against both fascism and neoliberalism, and for a left-wing program based on the principles of solidarity and equality. But it is plain to see that more battles are ahead. To use their energy solely as a basis for parliamentary manoeuvres will be to disperse it and aid future fascist breakthroughs. The enormous latent power of this left-wing resistance must be converted into class struggles outside the parliament—into a force that can drive the fascist influence out of politics and change the world for the better regardless of who forms government.

Victory for the left in France

If a fascist government comes to power in France, it should build statues in honour of President Emmanuel Macron. Victory wouldn’t have been possible without him. In fact, there is probably no individual in postwar French politics who has done more to rehabilitate the image and to legitimise the program of the extreme right.
It has been a long and winding road of reinvention and dédiabolisation for French fascism, or post-fascism or quasi-fascism—whatever we might call the National Rally of Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen. The first steps were taken in the 1950s. In those days, Pierre Poujade pioneered a much-needed rebrand of far-right politics. Fascism didn’t seem so civilised and patriotic in the immediate aftermath of Nazi collaboration and the Holocaust. In the early Cold War, Poujade’s Defence Union of Shopkeepers and Craftsmen found a new focus for middle-class reactionaries: anti-tax, anti-Communist and committed to the retention of France’s colonies by any means necessary.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, aged just 27, was first elected to the National Assembly as a Poujadist deputy in 1956. He carried out the next phase of the movement’s renewal. French ultra-colonialism had no political future after the victory of national liberation movements in Algeria and Indochina. So, in the 1970s, Le Pen was a pioneer of the European far right’s turn to anti-immigration politics.
His organisation, the National Front, went nowhere for some years. But it broke through in the 1980s after the Socialist Party’s transformation into a neoliberal austerity government, its tournant de la rigueur, under François Mitterrand. Mainstream centre-left “socialism” no longer even pretended to offer an alternative to the free market. Anti-immigrant racism offered an alternative that built on the prejudices of capitalist society. It worked for almost anything. Unemployment: expel immigrant workers. A housing shortage: evict immigrant residents. Social breakdown: deport immigrant criminals.
The neoliberal stranglehold on mainstream French politics allowed breakthrough after breakthrough for the National Front, later to be rebranded the National Rally. After the Socialist government of François Hollande and Manuel Valls forced through a law attacking the rights of workers, the Socialist Party’s vote collapsed to 6 percent in 2017. Emmanuel Macron, representing a pure embrace of neoliberalism, became president. Le Pen’s daughter Marine became leader of the fascist opposition.
And opposition to what? Macron’s neoliberalism increasingly blended with a right-wing authoritarian politics that makes fascism seem like the logical next step. At the highest level of politics, he has forced through unpopular policies using constitutional tricks to bypass parliamentary votes. In civil society, he has ordered the legal dissolution of anti-racist and environmentalist NGOs. On the street, he has banned protests and unleashed head-cracking riot cops on opposition movement after opposition movement.
On immigration and the persecution of Muslims, Macron’s thuggish interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, accused the fascists of being “un peu molle” (a bit soft), not “assez dure” (tough enough). Macron’s government passed an immigration law inspired by the National Rally, which Le Pen called an “ideological victory” for her tradition. After parts of it were ruled unconstitutional, Macron mused about amending the constitution to allow for the longstanding flagship policy of Le Pen’s party: a referendum on the immigration question. “It cannot be avoided”, he said.
And in election after election, Macron has begged leftists to faire barrage, to build a blockade against the far right. Faire barrage is French for lesser-evilism, the moral blackmail demanding that leftists support right-wing candidates or else be blamed if the public votes for even more right-wing candidates. At the same time, Macron and his allies have constantly characterised the broad left as an enemy within. The left are, the Macronie constantly repeat, outside the arc republicain. Unlike the fascist opposition, the leftist opposition of France Unbowed are said to have no legitimate place in French politics. This refrain intensified after anti-police riots in 2023, which France Unbowed would not condemn, and became deafening after it opposed Israel’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza.
Macron’s government has done so much to legitimise the far right, and to diabolise the left, that the fascist leader Jordan Bardella can now wield his own version of lesser evilism. On BFM TV, one of the large media networks, he called on the conservative electorate to faire barrage
(block) the left—the left who, in words that could have been written by Macron himself, “pass their time insulting our police, who want to disarm the police, who refuse to call Hamas ... a terrorist organisation, who trample on our businesses, who trample on our farmers’ fields, who trample on secularism”. He concluded: “I am the only one who can faire barrage against Jean-Luc Mélenchon [leader of France Unbowed], who can faire barrage against the far left”.
Is struggle the solution to the situation? France has had no shortage of it. Since the end of the Cold War, France has probably seen more and deeper social movements than any other major European country. Since 2016, there has been a once-in-a-generation social movement roughly every eighteen months. There have been student occupations, urban riots, environmentalist blockades, unclassifiable popular uprisings like the Yellow Vests and nation-wide political strikes of such breadth and intensity that they put most of the world’s workers’ movements to shame.
Some have been politically contradictory, like the Yellow Vests. Some, like the recent farmers’ blockades of the cities, have probably benefited the far right: when Jordan Bardella popped in to the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EskOABYuvmc">Salon de l’Agriculture</a> in February to campaign for “economic patriotism”, he was received like Taylor Swift showing up at a fan’s birthday party. But most have been unambiguously left wing: led by left-wing activists, informed by left-wing politics, opposing deregulation, privatisation, neoliberalism, racism and environmental destruction. Chief among these movements were the national strikes against Macron’s attacks on France’s pension system.
These strikes deserve close study. They persisted for years, beginning in 2019 and reviving almost as soon as the COVID lockdowns were over. Their size and resilience shattered expectations and defied the downward trends of the last few decades that had led to some suspicion that the French trade unions were past it. They combined local reconductible strikes—ongoing strikes, re-ratified daily by mass meetings of workers, in key sectors like rail and oil refineries—with enormous one-day national mobilisations. They were supported by sympathising movements: student occupations in the cities and cross-class protests in the little villages throughout France. Most importantly, they were overwhelmingly popular, with enormous super-majorities supporting the strikes in poll after poll.
In many ways, they were exemplary: political general strikes, in which the working class appears as the leading force in society, confronting a hated enemy and defending the people as a whole. Socialism will be impossible without many, many more movements of this nature. And the far right was nowhere to be seen. Indeed, its activists could not even attend the demonstrations, and were roundly mocked for their invisibility as a purported “opposition” during the biggest and most important oppositional movement of Macron’s presidency. The reason is obvious: fascists are known enemies of the workers’ movement, and if they had shown up, they would have been beaten up and driven out. 
It is sometimes said that the fascists are the leading party of France’s working class. This is highly misleading. Among workers and the poor in big cities, the vote is overwhelmingly for the left. The big population centres, in which the most organised, militant and class-conscious workers live, have so far rejected the fascists and embraced the left in overwhelming numbers.
And the story is not even as simple as an urban-rural split. Yes, the far right has its electoral base in rural and semi-rural electorates. But throughout France, it seems to appeal to a particular kind of voter, as the researcher Gala Kabbaj <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuLj1f3W7to">explained</a>
at a France Unbowed conference in 2023. The fascists do well among workers in areas where small businesses predominate, where there is little open class conflict and where workers can be strongly influenced socially, personally and politically by bosses who may be their neighbours, relatives and aspirational role models. 
When the biggest, best-organised, anti-fascist sections of the working class become active and assert themselves, they can provide an alternative leadership and undermine the influence of right-wing politics everywhere. So by April 2023, 60 percent of small business owners opposed Macron’s pension attacks, according to an Ifop poll. Right-wing political support began to crack up; conservatives said they would not vote for the policy, making a parliamentary majority impossible.
Yet the strikes failed. They wound themselves up. The apparently mighty Intersyndicale, the united campaign group of the chief national union bureaucrats, ran out of puff. Self-sacrifice and determination of the rank-and-file notwithstanding, the bureaucrats who summoned the movement into existence always wanted to limit it. Both the right-wing French Democratic Confederation of Labour (CFDT), which repeatedly offered deals to wind the movement up, and the more “militant”, Communist Party-aligned General Confederation of Labour (CGT) were much more comfortable with a series of national one-day rallies than with generalising the reconductible strikes and following through on their verbal threats to “blockade the country”.
In March 2023, Macron abandoned any pretence at democracy: he sidestepped parliament to force through his attacks using the notorious Article 49.3 of the French constitution. Attempts by the opposition to compel a referendum were rejected by France’s Constitutional Council, which consists mostly of ex-politicians. Serious riots, led by youth in the cities, exploded throughout the country. Spontaneous strikes proliferated. In late March, <a href="https://www.ifop.com/publication/le-regard-des-francais-sur-la-mobilisation-contre-la-reforme-des-retraites/">polls</a> showed an overwhelming majority of the population wanted the strike movement to “harden” and go further: 62 percent of the whole population, 68 percent of those under 35 years old, and 74 percent of the poor.
It didn’t happen. There was no generalisation, no hardening of the movement, no real general strike. The Intersyndicale didn’t want it, only another one-day mobilisation to take place on May Day and then another a few weeks later in June. It was an admission of defeat; an official recognition that the union bureaucracy would rather be beaten than destabilise the political order. The centre of gravity shifted back to elections—a much more comfortable one for the fascist opposition. And in that field, what has the French left offered?
The key figure, of course, is Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He had a long career in the Socialist Party, first as a young MP in the time of Mitterrand’s neoliberal turn, then as a participant in left-wing internal party oppositions. Then he left the party to launch a series of projects aimed, in various ways, at reviving old-school, pre-neoliberal social democracy, with an anti-imperialist flavour and a tendency to propose electoral alliances with the Communist Party. In program and rhetoric, he is not far from Jeremy Corbyn. Unlike Corbyn, he made the wise decision to launch his own parties, of which the latest is France Unbowed—so he is in no danger of being controlled or deposed by a hostile right-wing internal opposition. He has stuck to his principles.
As France’s political crisis has deepened, Mélenchon and his comrades in France Unbowed have achieved remarkable success. In current polls, they are neck-and-neck with the National Rally. They have won high support among demographics socialists crave: young people, urban workers, the oppressed. Firmly rejecting Islamophobia, even under the traditional French guise of “secularism”, France Unbowed is the party of choice for French Muslims, 69 percent of whom voted for Mélenchon in the 2022 presidential election. Its MPs are creative and disruptive in parliament. The party supports all the right causes and tends not to back down, even under the most intense media pressure: support Palestine, support the strikes, attend banned protests against police brutality.
This is all to its credit, and it is to the credit of France’s workers and youth that they reward France Unbowed with their support in such large numbers, despite the constant and predictable streams of slander from the mainstream media. It is better than most reformist parties ever get these days. It recalls Greece’s Syriza at the peak of its oppositional momentum. 
But is it enough?
During the pension strikes, the bureaucratic union leaders, who were leading that movement to a shameful defeat, attacked France Unbowed time and again—for being too radical. Philippe Martinez, the Stalinist secretary of the CGT, complained that France Unbowed wanted to “appropriate the movement and push the unions into the background” when it tried to disrupt the passage of the pension law; Laurent Berger of the right-wing CFDT called the party’s parliamentary protest a “shameful spectacle”. France Unbowed did nothing to counter these attacks. When the union leaders wound up the movement with a couple of hopeless one-day protests, Mélenchon simply announced: “We must all be ready to line up again behind the Intersyndicale”.
The right-wing press often accuse the “Islamo-leftist” Mélenchon of engaging in cynical electoral opportunism: betraying the principles of the republic to seek Muslim votes, adopting “antisemitic” support of Palestine. This is a typical racist slander. But there is a real problem of electoral opportunism. Mélenchon is happy to leave class struggle to the union bureaucracy—his party supports strikes but does not organise them, and certainly does not challenge their bureaucratic leadership. In exchange, it is hoped that the French union bureaucracies will maintain a neutral or friendly disposition to France Unbowed.
So far, so good. The political momentum of France Unbowed has forced its rivals in the reformist left to once more collapse into a Mélenchon-led electoral coalition, the New Popular Front. Everyone can get on board: the Communist Party on one side and the old, hated Socialist Party on the other. Even François Hollande, the political father of Emmanuel Macron, has reemerged as a candidate in Mélenchon’s coalition. None of the constituent parties will stand against each other: there will be no criticism of the Socialist Party, the Communist Party or the union officials. All together to faire barrage against Le Pen. “Throw rancour in the river” is Mélenchon’s slogan of the day.
Who knows? They might even win. If they do, they will presumably find themselves constrained by the realities of capitalism to jettison much of their program—like Mitterrand with his social democratic programme commun of 1981, abandoned for austerity in 1983. Nonetheless, just as Le Pen and Bardella became the opposition to Macron, now the left—with an anti-neoliberal, anti-racist, pro-Palestinian leadership—is the main opposition to Le Pen and Bardella. This is a real achievement, and something to build on.
But France does not need one more “socialist” government to draw up policies and abandon them under pressure. It has had plenty of them since 1848. 
The oppressed people in France, the youth, and especially the workers have shown their willingness to throw themselves into struggle to defend themselves collectively against the ravages of neoliberalism. They need a politics that can build on this determination, not by converting it into votes, but by helping it to break free of the bureaucratic leadership that keeps it within the bounds of the system. That alternative—a revolutionary socialist one—will be necessary whoever wins these elections, or the ones to come after.

The left leads the fight against fascism in France

The pro-Israel bias of the media is so extreme that even the journalists are sick of it. Australia’s reporters were some of the first to rebel against the anti-Palestinian straitjacket in which their reporting is confined. 
A <a href="https://archive.is/K6B0c">mass meeting of ABC journalists</a> in November revealed that management was trying to prevent them even from using the words “invasion”, “occupation” or “Palestine” to describe Israel’s actions, let alone the words “apartheid” or “genocide”. 
That same month, hundreds of journalists from around the world signed an <a href="https://www.protect-journalists.com/">open letter</a> accusing their employers of promoting “dehumanizing rhetoric that has served to justify ethnic cleansing of Palestinians” and of running “misinformation spread by Israeli officials”. Because of the deep and widespread pro-Israeli bias, the journalists wrote, “We risk becoming accessories to genocide”.
Of course, some journalists are perfectly happy to play this role. It’s unsurprising that right-wing media, such as Murdoch’s Australian and Daily Telegraph, have paid little to no attention to the suffering of the Palestinians. These are campaigning outlets for the right wing of the global ruling classes, and they can always be counted on to glorify oppression and slander the oppressed.
But what’s notable is the pro-genocide slant of supposedly “liberal” or even “left-wing” outlets, such as Australia’s state-owned ABC or the generally Democrat-sympathising CNN network in the US. 
Revealing their frustrations to the Guardian, CNN journalists have described their network’s anti-Palestinian bias as “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/feb/04/cnn-staff-pro-israel-bias">journalistic malpractice</a>”, “skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel” and driven from the very top. 
The ABC’s conduct has been so heavy-handed that 200 staff members passed a nearly unanimous <a href="https://www.meaa.org/mediaroom/abc-staff-have-lost-confidence-in-managing-director/">motion of no confidence</a> in the network’s managing director. Some ABC journalists, such as federal politics reporter Nour Haydar, have <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/abc-federal-politics-reporter-resigns-over-gaza-coverage-20240112-p5ewrm.html">resigned in disgust</a> over the network’s complicity in the killing and displacement of Palestinians. 
“Death and destruction on the scale we have seen over recent months has made me reassess my priorities”, she told the Sydney Morning Herald. Another ABC employee, Antoinette Latouf, was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/jan/16/antoinette-lattouf-abc-dismissal-social-media-posts-israel-palestine-gaza-war">sacked</a> after retweeting a simple, publicly acknowledged fact: that Israel is using starvation as a <a href="https://theconversation.com/israeli-siege-has-placed-gazans-at-risk-of-starvation-prewar-policies-made-them-vulnerable-in-the-first-place-222657#:~:text=Human%20Rights%20Watch%20has%20already,loss%20of%20life%20in%20Gaza.">weapon of war</a>.
What are the outcomes of these institutional biases? Senior Israeli politicians are invited onto respectable broadcasts to put the most extreme propaganda without questioning or push-back. CNN’s Anderson Cooper allowed an Israel intelligence officer to tell the world, “The non-combatant population in the Gaza Strip is really a nonexistent term”. 
Similarly, ABC’s Sarah Ferguson allowed former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert to tell her audience, after an Israeli massacre at a refugee camp: “Everyone present there was part of Hamas and the fighting group of Hamas. They were killed, but they were not innocent civilians”. 
This is genuine pro-genocide conspiracy theory, promoted while war crimes are ongoing, and should be seen in the same light as any historical genocide denial. Yet it is broadcast and promoted as if it’s insightful analysis, on well-respected, mainstream outlets.
Meanwhile, Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices have been silenced, excluded or slandered. They can be sacked, like Antoinette Latouf, have their reporting and commentary limited or sidelined by restrictive editorial policies, or face direct accusations of anti-Semitism and pro-Hamas sympathies, as happened to Nasser Mashni of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network during his appearance on ABC’s Q+A.
It could be worse. Israel is the first enforcer of anti-Palestinian censorship. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, throughout all of 2023, 99 journalists were killed around the world. Of them, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/15/nearly-75-of-journalists-killed-in-2023-died-in-israels-war-on-gaza-cpj">77 were killed in Gaza</a> by the Israeli military in the first two months of the invasion. 
Foreign journalists generally can’t get into Gaza to report on Israel’s attack. And the Israeli military won’t let them get close enough to view the conditions in the territory. 
The distortion of reality begins with the killing of witnesses and reporters within Gaza, continues through Israel’s military-controlled censorship regime and finishes with the slick Western journalistic productions that present pro-Israeli propaganda as news and analysis.
Instead of campaigning for the right of journalists to report freely in Gaza, or raising the alarm about the pro-genocide propaganda emanating from both the Israeli state and its political allies in the West, outlets like ABC and CNN are presenting the “enlightened” face of this same campaign. 
Little has changed since a 2010 study by researcher Jonas Xavier Caballero found that the liberal New York Times was <a href="https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/7515/">25 times more likely to report an Israeli death than a Palestinian one</a>.
Big journalism is a big business. To produce news around the clock requires enormous infrastructure. Like any other industry, that means they are run by and for the ruling class, with their own class interests always in mind. And it’s not just about making money. Some of these media outlets are loss-making: Rupert Murdoch is thought to have lost more than US$1 billion keeping his right-wing tabloid, the New York Post, afloat for decades, while in 2014 Paul Barry claimed on Media Watch that the Australian may lose A$40-50 million every year. Others are publicly owned.
The directors of these outlets are political activists overseeing the production of ideas. Australia’s most notorious right-wing media barons like Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Stokes are well known for their reactionary world views and militant dispositions: John Menadue, manager of Murdoch’s operation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, calls Murdoch a “frustrated politician”. 
But liberal competitors like the ABC and Nine (at which Peter Costello, a former Liberal Party treasurer, is now the board’s chair) also have managerial staff drawn from the political elites.
For those elites, Israel’s war criminals are “people like us”: the ruling classes of an important Western ally, whose violence can always be excused and whose enemies always deserve the worst.

‘Accessories to genocide’: the media’s pro-Israel bias

Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution, died a century ago, at the age of 53. He made few general statements of theory and left behind almost no self-regarding autobiographical statements. Yet almost immediately after his death, Lenin was made the central figure of a personality cult, as Russian government bureaucrats codified and promoted throughout the world socialist movement an increasingly deranged and tyrannical set of precepts. We got just 53 years of Lenin, but we’ve had a century of “Leninist” ideas that bear little relation to his actual thought and practice. 
Yet the Bolshevik leader’s life and work, once recovered from these distortions, are the keys to understanding many of the crises we face today.
Even before his death, in the period when he was badly sickened from strokes but still capable of political work, Lenin fought against the conversion of his life’s revolutionary work into what would become “Leninism”. Though sick, he remained the leading figure of Russia’s revolutionary government. Years of civil war and international economic blockade disintegrated the workers’ movement, which had made the revolution. Russia’s cities were depopulated, socialist activists were dispersed throughout the country, democratic life was made almost an impossibility. But the war had been won, leaving intact a bureaucratic system that now substituted itself for the dead or dispersed workers.
Heroic attempts had been made to spread the revolution internationally—not by conspiracies or coups, but by educating working-class militants in socialist strategy. In this, Lenin and his government followed Marx and Engels’ conclusions about whether an economically primitive Russia could contribute to international socialist revolution. 
“If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a working-class revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development”, they had written in 1882. But by late 1923, the Western revolutions were in retreat. Capitalists inside and outside Russia, ferociously anti-communist foreign governments and even the post-revolutionary Russian bureaucracy itself wiped out the remaining revolutionary impulse, converting Russia into just one more capitalist state.
In Lenin’s last months, he watched the nightmare eventuate. As documented by Moshe Lewin in Lenin’s Last Struggle, sections of the state bureaucracy began subordinating the Russian economy to the world capitalist system as soon as Lenin became ill. They relaxed state controls on foreign trade while reinstating the old tsarist Russian high-handedness towards national minorities. 
In light of later Stalinist crimes, the level of bureaucratic conspiracy, nationalism and deal-making with foreign capitalists seems almost benign. But Lenin recognised the danger. Russia’s government was undergoing a profound and disturbing transformation and was departing from the ideals that had inspired the revolution. Despite his intense fear that a split in the government would lead to a new civil war, Lenin declared his intention to wage a factional battle against the bureaucracy. This was practically the last political decision he was able to make before he died.
The speed with which the bureaucracy converted Russia’s government into a dictatorship might seem shocking. But it confirms the core of Lenin’s politics, and of Marxist theory: socialism is impossible without international working-class revolution. No national bureaucracy, regardless of its history and personnel, can organise society on socialist principles. 
By late 1938, almost all of Lenin’s closest collaborators had been exterminated by the Stalinist machine—even those, like Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had collaborated with it. Trotsky, the revolution’s second most prominent leader, was assassinated in 1940. The victims of Stalin’s onslaught were slandered as Nazi agents—or, during the period of his peace treaty with Hitler, as agents of US imperialism. In 1944, Hitler commented that the procedures in Stalin’s show-trials were a model for Nazi courtrooms.
The Russian economy was redirected towards military production, with a heavy dose of slave labour. The terror was enforced at every level of society: Russian workers who resisted political and economic repression were sacked, blacklisted and imprisoned as “Trotskyists”. As David King has documented, workers in this period, terrified of being caught in the purges, went through their history books and ripped out or burned photos of once-prominent revolutionary leaders, as if they were living under a fascist dictatorship. 
In the cultural sphere, “Leninism” in the 1930s and 1940s meant hero-worship of Stalin, who was literally repainted (in official murals and artworks) as Lenin’s anointed successor—the inheritor of a political dynasty rather than part of a revolutionary movement. Economically, it meant the forced industrialisation of Russia’s economy. In the field of international politics, it meant treaties and alliances with imperialist powers—including Hitler’s Germany, for a period—and the destruction of revolutionary workers’ movements that challenged the Russian bureaucracy’s grip on power: Stalin’s agents “liquidated” the leaders of the workers’ revolution in Spain, easing the path for Franco’s fascists to take power.
In this period, Communists everywhere read state-sanctioned texts from the Russian government on the “Foundations of Leninism”. Yet Lenin’s own practice of international politics was the opposite of the nationalist wheeling and dealing that Stalin’s henchmen carried out. 
From 1918 until his illness in 1923, the focus for Lenin’s international policy was the Communist International: a gathering and alliance of revolutionary socialist parties, in which tactics and strategy could be discussed. “Destruction of state power is the aim set by all Socialists”, read the theses on democracy adopted by the first gathering in 1919. It further specified: “By enlisting the mass organisations of the working people in constant and unfailing participation in the administration of the state, it immediately begins to prepare the complete withering away of any state”. 
But, as Lenin wrote to European and American workers in 1918, there was a problem: “We are in a besieged fortress so long as the other armies of the world socialist revolution do not come to our aid”. Socialism in Russia depended on workers’ revolution outside Russia, and both of these required open, democratic debate and argument throughout the workers’ movement. 
Lenin’s internationalism was based on working-class cooperation, across state borders, to overthrow the capitalist system. The congresses of the Communist International remain invaluable records of the high point of worldwide socialist strategic debate. Stalin’s “Leninist” regime wound the institution up in 1943—a signal to Western powers that international revolution was not of interest to his government.
In the 1950s, official “Leninism” appeared to have stabilised. Stalin’s Russia had spread its system through Eastern Europe, not by workers’ revolution, but by military conquest. The Soviet bureaucracy was joined by China’s new government, which admired Russia’s rapid industrialisation under Stalin. “Leninist” parties outside Russia argued that the duty of socialists was to support Russian foreign policy, embrace nationalist alliances and renounce workers’ revolution, the promotion of which was labelled “Trotskyism”.
But the history of Lenin’s revolutionary career provided reasons for hope. In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, the socialist movement had similarly collapsed into nationalist chauvinism, statism and a distortion of Marxism. Socialist parties across Europe supported the imperialist aims of their local capitalist states in the First World War. Yet a minority of activists held true to the internationalist vision of socialism, facing exile, jail or worse. Lenin was one of them.
More than passively maintaining old principles, Lenin argued that the crisis of world imperialism could create conditions for an international workers’ revolution, as the exploited in every country experienced repression and violence from their own governments. The rivalry between great powers had, in 1914, broken into open war. At that point, Lenin argued, socialists had the duty to “promote every effort at revolutionary mass struggle against imperialism, for socialism, and to work to transform the imperialist war into a civil war for socialism”. 
What was needed was a clear organisational and political split: revolutionary socialists had to break from those who supported imperialism and nationalism. This approach ultimately led to the workers’ successful seizure of power in Russia in 1917.
Imperialist rivalries and the distortions of socialism led to international revolt once again from the 1950s. The Stalinist regimes in China and Russia turned, denouncing each other as fascists. Socialist workers rose against Stalinism in Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, while revolutionary movements in the West challenged their own imperialist governments: US soldiers mutinied in solidarity with their “enemies” in Vietnam, the Black struggle against racism developed a revolutionary socialist current, student protests and workers’ strikes proliferated, and a new generation of activists sought to sidestep the sclerotic, conservative “Leninism” promoted by pro-Russian Communist parties and rediscover and authentic revolutionary internationalist tradition.
But this time, something was missing. Lenin had combined a commitment to political organisation with a crystal-clear vision of socialism based on workers’ power and participation. Many revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s, not wanting to reconstruct Stalin-style parties, rejected political organisation altogether. Others, unable to completely eradicate the influence of Stalinist bureaucratic politics, embraced political organisation, but rejected the focus on democratic worker’s power that was central to Lenin’s strategy for revolution. 
The revolts of the 1960s and 1970s exposed and, in many cases, mortally wound Stalinist “Leninism”. But the absence of a force that upheld Lenin’s strategy meant that the movements themselves largely disintegrated into confusion and disappointment.
It’s no surprise, then, that the 1980s and 1990s were an apparently triumphant period for pro-capitalist politics. The Stalinist parties had been discredited and weakened by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. But no significant socialist alternative had emerged to replace them. The great Stalinist powers, Russia and China, began to implement market “reforms”. Faddish theories proliferated: the working class was allegedly dead, and so was the class struggle and socialism. The peaceful triumph of the free market was apparently assured for the foreseeable future. Lenin’s project was, in the eyes of many, dead.
In the period of “peace” from 1907 to 1913, when Russia’s revolutionaries were hunted, jailed, exiled and hanged by a rampaging tsarist bureaucracy, many were tempted to abandon Marxism and the struggle for socialism. The revolution of 1905 had been defeated: “The Tsarist autocracy has been restored, the feudal lords are reigning and ruling again, the workers and peasants are everywhere being crushed down again”, wrote Lenin in 1908. 
It was, he wrote in the same year, a time of “rampant reaction, of betrayals and despondency in the camp of the democrats, of crisis and partial break-down in the [Marxist] organisations”. Rather than abandoning Marxist principles and embracing the mystical or conservative fads that swept the socialist movement at the time, Lenin and his allies in this period continued the difficult and dangerous task of underground organising. 
Just as the stability of the 1980s and 1990s collapsed into the current period of war and economic crisis, the “peaceful” period before World War One transitioned suddenly and sharply into worldwide upheaval—and the organisation built by Lenin was able to turn this into a workers’ revolution.
His experience in 1905, when workers’ strikes developed into revolutionary councils—the world’s first “soviets”, identified by Lenin as the “the embryo of a provisional revolutionary government” because of their ability to gather together the oppressed under the leadership of urban workers—provided the basic vision for the organisation he continued to build. 
“To lead the political struggle, both the Soviet ... and the Party are, to an equal degree, absolutely necessary”, he wrote in 1905. This strategic vision was the basis for his continued organising in the hard periods, when immediate revolution was off the agenda.
Since the 2010s, wars, revolutions, and the obvious failings of the capitalist system have returned to the centre of global politics. To turn the disasters of our time into a socialist future, Lenin’s politics–internationalism, workers’ power, and the building of revolutionary socialist politics–remain the only solution.

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