“The great majority of you are fed up to the back teeth with them. The election gives you the chance to make it clear to these people how you feel.” 
Conservative British Prime Minister Edward Heath was muttering, weeks before the 1974 general election. “These people” were striking coal miners—the advance guard of the British working class in those days.
The last few years had shaken capitalism to its core. Massive strikes and unofficial actions were the norm. Conservative attempts to break the unions with new industrial laws and wage-freeze policies had only let loose a torrent of resistance.
In July 1972, the government imprisoned five docker shop stewards for defying a legal injunction. Forty-four thousand dock workers struck to demand their comrades’ release—all this without hesitation or recourse to “official” union authorisation. The call from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to stop work didn’t come until ten days into the national strike.
As rank-and-file stoppages landed blows against Heath’s industrial laws, solidarity action was breaking his policies on wages. Heath insisted that no worker should receive a wage increase above 7 percent. In January 1972, more than 25,000 coalminers struck for a 35 percent rise.
The government tried circumventing the action by hoarding coal at power stations and transport hubs. It wanted to prove to the miners that it could keep fuelling the industry even if every pit stopped digging.
A class-wide battle ensued, as the National Union of Miners (NUM) won solidarity to stop the movement of coal. Wherever the government had stockpiles, miners travelled to convince workers not to burn, refine or transport the material. Broad layers of unionists, students and other sympathisers were drawn into the fight against Heath.
“I was away from home, at college in Enfield”, Jean Spence told Tribune magazine 50 years later. “My dad was a striking miner at Dawdon pit. We hosted striking miners—flying pickets—from Kent in our student flat, and I had my first experience of picketing at Picketts Lock Power Station. An old trade unionist taught us how to deal respectfully with lorry drivers we were trying to turn away.” 
The best-remembered battleground of the 1972 strike was the Saltley fuel plant in Birmingham, where the Conservatives claimed to have 100,000 tonnes of processed coal ready to burn. There, 20,000 engineers struck to support thousands of miners who picketed the gates, pushing back police. This crucible of solidarity forced the government into submission—days later, the miners won their wage increase.
The following year, a global recession emerged. Once again, the NUM led the way by imposing an overtime ban to win higher wages. With energy and steel production impacted, Heath saw a political opportunity. He was determined to push back the militant edge of the labour movement, turn popular opinion against the miners and bury them under a landslide election victory for the Conservatives.
On 13 December 1973, Heath announced nationwide power rationing in response to the miners’ bans. Under a State of Emergency, households were subjected to a rotating schedule of energy stoppages. Electricity would be limited to three days per week for industry—workplaces were directed to shut down operations for the remaining four days. Heath maintained this “three-day week” for the whole northern winter. The government was in effect imposing a lockout against the entire British working class in punishment for the NUM’s action.
Back then, coal accounted for three-quarters of the UK energy supply, and steel remained a core part of Britain’s dwindling manufacturing base. By February 1974, miners had moved from overtime bans to all-out action, and the strikes had reduced steel production to 60 percent of its usual capacity. The miners held immense industrial power—and they were fighting on behalf of all workers facing real wage cuts. 
Barclay’s Bank profits had risen by 75 per cent since 1970, while food prices had increased by one-half. Much like our own “cost-of-living crisis”, the “recession” of the early 1970s was a recession for workers, while bosses prospered. If the miners could break through Heath’s wage policies, they could set a new standard for what other workers could win. 
For my parents and their siblings, images of 1974 still glimmer through murky childhood memories. Before I even knew what a strike was, I learned about the power cuts under Heath and those orangey, incandescent evenings in my Gran’s living room.
Winters in Glasgow are cold and dark. So during the three-day week, it was flickering candles and the buzz of a repurposed camping stove. John Peel’s prog-rock sessions had adolescents transfixed by the radio—television channels went dead by 10pm. My dad watched his older brother pore over Tolkien by candlelight, night after night. I can still find those volumes on my Uncle Jim’s shelf, lovingly dog-eared and worn. 
In the mornings, even by 9 o’clock, daylight would be hours away. The street lamps were knocked out by the power cuts. “We had to wear luminous vests going to school in the pitch black”, my Aunty Jackie explained. These were formative weeks, when the children of the British working class undertook with pride the task of outlasting Heath in his stand-off against the miners. 
The older kids at university found their own creative ways to support the NUM. Student unions were barred from sending direct financial donations. So, instead, striking miners were invited to mass meetings at Norwich, Warwick and Essex universities. Socialist student societies fundraised towards a £250 “speaker’s fee” for each miner—a cunning scheme to deliver solidarity funds to the pit communities.
The Tories employed dirty tactics to try to break the workers’ resolve. As a new ballot on industrial action approached, one Conservative MP growled, “Social security should not be made available to wives and children [of NUM members], because it allowed the enemies of the state to go on strike”.
The Thatcher administration would make good on this threat during the great battles of 1984-5. But for the time being, the Tories were driven back by the very union movement they’d hoped to extinguish.
Heath ran the 1974 election on the now infamous slogan, “Who governs?” Would voters prefer questions of economic policy to be decided by responsible Conservative ministers, or by the trade unions? The British working class at that time answered unswervingly: “Who governs? Not you!” 
Heath lost the election in a hammering defeat. Over the next decade, the Tories geared up for another showdown. These years of humiliation at the hands of the labour movement would not go unavenged. 
As early as 1977, with the party still in opposition, Conservative MP Nicholas Ridley outlined a program for hoarding coal, slashing strikers’ entitlements and training a new army of riot police to attack picketers. The “Ridley Plan” would become widely recognised as the Tories’ blueprint for defeating the NUM.
Four years of Labour rule had curbed the tide of workers’ struggle. With Heath gone, union leaders accepted a shameful compromise—they would forgo wage rises and refuse to authorise strikes in exchange for more government welfare spending. In the winter of 1978-79, a heroic bout of wildcat actions arose over the heads of the officials. But Labour had successfully dulled strike rates and cohered union leaders around a new industrial peace. 
When Margaret Thatcher won the prime ministership in 1979, she tried to enforce this “peace” through open class warfare. Ruling classes around the world were looking to slash social welfare and privatise public services to stabilise profit rates after the recession. The Conservatives wanted to win a final, set-piece confrontation to force unions into total submission and ensure minimum resistance. Thatcher announced the appointment of her new energy minister in 1983 with the menacing words: “We’re going to have a coal strike”. 
The Tories were so determined to break the miners that they were prepared to reorganise totally Britain’s energy infrastructure. A massive expansion of nuclear power and North Sea oil was to displace coal—the mines would be closed down to drive out the country’s most powerful union.
Don Keating, a South Yorkshire miner, remembers the night he learned his pit would close. “I was doing a 6 o’clock evening shift with a mate”, he told the BBC. “I’m walking down Pit Lane and a couple of lads who were coming up off shift said, ‘Don, do you know pit’s shutting?’ A bit of a joke, we thought—more rumours. We got down there and ... they were saying, ‘Yeah, it’s been announced that Cortonwood will be shutting’.”
On 5 March 1984, the government’s National Coal Board declared a wave of closures across England, Scotland and Wales—twenty mines were to be shut and 20,000 miners sacked. Cortonwood miners had recently been assured their jobs were safe for another five years; now, the pit was to close within five weeks. 
South Yorkshire had always been a militant area. They’d been among the first to blockade Saltley Gate in 1972. The Cortonwood NUM sent mobile pickets across the Yorkshire coalfields. Kent, Durham, South Wales and Scotland followed. Pit by pit, day by day, the immense network of mines across Britain was being pulled out on strike.
It was the confrontation Thatcher had been waiting for. Faithful to the Ridley Plan, the government had stockpiled 9 million tonnes of coal over the preceding three years. They now unleashed the hell hounds of the state against picketers. Thousands of police from different branches were drafted to patrol roads and pit villages for the duration of the strike. Mike McKay, a BBC journalist at the time, recalled:
“I remember particularly one very early morning, I was driving up the A1, and on the other side of the road was this endless convoy of police riot vans. It just went on and on ... It was like you were watching an occupying army travelling to the front.”
Many who remember 1984 speak of “civil war”. Dave Creamer from the Yorkshire Silverwood colliery described the atmosphere as flying pickets worked to spread the strike in spite of police: 
 “We were setting off at four o’clock picketing, trying to get through roadblocks ... We went through every back alley you could think of, up farmers’ fields, down through woods—everything—just to get to that picket line.”
“It was quite an adventure at first”, Creamer recalled in a BBC interview. “I was 20-odd-year-old, it was exciting. The adventure became a bit of a nightmare later on.”
The miners fought with everything they had, but the mood darkened towards the middle of the year. On 18 June, a mass picket assembled at Orgreave, where fuel was being supplied to a major steelworks. Miners hoped to recreate the victory of 1972 by hitting industries beyond coal. Despite some hesitation from union leaders, thousands of NUM members were ready to confront the police. 
But nothing could have prepared them for the 6,000 officers, dressed in riot gear, who thrashed, clubbed and beat their way through the picketers on that day. Watching footage of the bloodbath will still turn your stomach, even 40 years later. Yet the British media cruelly doctored the scenes, framing strikers as the instigators of violence. 
From that moment on, the civil war against miners was played out on ideological terrain. Thatcher arraigned them as “the enemy within”—with the full backing of the mainstream press. Miners and union leaders were increasingly described as “thugs” and even likened to fascists. Print workers at the Sun newspaper refused to publish the vicious anti-NUM headlines prepared by their bosses.
Pockets of secondary action opened across the union movement. Dock workers struck for three weeks in August 1984 to stop employers transporting coal to the steelworks in Scunthorpe. In Leicestershire, unionised rail workers did not handle coal for 35 consecutive weeks. 
These exceptional cases needed to be turned into a tide of solidarity to face down Thatcher, the police and the media’s combined forces. After all, the Tories wouldn’t stop at smashing the NUM. Every worker had a stake in this fight.
Mainstream accounts of the 1984-85 miners’ strike describe a tragic arc; a losing battle against Thatcher’s inevitable victory. It’s true that the NUM couldn’t have won the dispute alone. A class-wide mobilisation against Thatcher was necessary—and possible. But it never materialised. 
After Orgreave, Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock encouraged comparisons between the so-called violence of picketers and the tyranny of the state. Some union officials even helped employers circumvent the strike’s impact, hoping they’d be rewarded with better sectional agreements. The TUC itself dealt the death blow, announcing in December 1984 that it would not endorse promised solidarity action after the High Court ruled the NUM’s strike illegal.
It’s difficult to communicate the gravity of this betrayal and the consequences that the British workers’ movement faced for decades afterwards. Unions have only recently begun to recover strike rates and membership numbers after the devastation of the Thatcher years.
Strikers themselves resisted the trajectory—they maintained their action through the Christmas and winter of 1984. In March 1985, miners reluctantly accepted a recommendation from NUM leaders to end the longest mass strike in British history. Dave Creamer recalls: 
“The night they held that branch meeting, when the orders came through from national level to go back to work ... There was almost fighting inside the club with people that wanted to stay out, people who wanted to go back ... It was one of the angriest meetings I’ve ever seen in my life.”
At the beginning of 1984, 170,000 miners worked across 170 collieries in Britain. Twenty years later, those numbers had dwindled to 4,000 workers in only eight pits. Unemployment destroyed whole communities. The economic power of the NUM—a power that had once disrupted heavy industry and toppled a government—was broken. 
Miners alone couldn’t defeat the arrayed powers of the ruling class. But they’d given Thatcher a serious fight. Because of them, the 1970s and 1980s in Britain are remembered not only as decades when the capitalist state attacked trade unions and working-class people. They are also memorialised as an era of defiant, tenacious and bitter class struggle, full of lessons. 
This history is the miners’ gift to every new generation of working-class resistance. For that, we owe them our gratitude.
Let them exhale
in unity
in hope
in disgust
and let them
remember
that shimmering sad yesterday 
when
people screamed no
—Extract from the poem “The unification” by Patrick Jones.

Ruby Healer

Remembering the British miners’ strikes

Serbia’s students have brought to life a mass movement and grassroots democracy rarely seen in the country. In the morning, they block roads; throughout the day, they occupy their faculties, march across the city and the country and shut down highways and ministry buildings. 
The movement aims to win justice for fifteen people killed in a train station collapse in Novi Sad on 1 November, and hundreds of thousands identify that goal with the daily mass protests of the students. Pushed into action by the tragedy, the students have questioned Serbia’s whole system of greed and autocratic governance.
The current president, Aleksandar Vučić, has spent years curbing democracy and allegedly lining his and his colleagues’ pockets at the expense of the mass of the Serbian people.
Vučić, who has held positions of power since the Milošević era, has usually seen off opposition protests. But this student movement has been different. Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned in disgrace after a mass 24-hour highway blockade, and several ministers have faced the chopping block. Unable to convince the population that the students are foreign agents, Ustaše fascists or separatists, the Serbian government has never appeared as powerless as it is at this moment.
The student movement is a dazzling display of the power of activism and democracy rooted in the people. While change is usually said to come from the best ideas and the ballot box, the masses in Serbia are showing that real change, change that can undermine an entire system of authoritarianism, comes from mass struggle.
What started as daily vigils was transformed by right-wing violence into a militant challenge to the entire system. Defending themselves against a physical attack, students in the Dramatic Arts Faculty of Belgrade took over their campus building and declared it under their control.
Soon, nearly all of the 80 major faculties in Serbia were taken over by students demanding the publication of documents regarding the station collapse, the release of their arrested comrades, justice for the attacks on students and a 20 percent funding increase for education.
The blockades are places in which a form of radical democracy has begun to grow. As described in a letter addressed to students of the world, the dramatic arts student group Svi U Blokade (SUB) describe:
“We have suspended classes, dissolved all student representative groups, self-organised plenums ... and begun to apply pressure ... We have begun to set up kitchens, dormitories, pharmacies, workshops, cinemas and classrooms for self-education ... We organise blockades through work groups ... open to everyone who wants to participate ... [They] present their ideas to the plenum ... an open forum for all students of the faculty ... [and] direct democracy is put in practice.”
The blockades have shifted power away from the government, but also from the more moderate opposition forces that have led many of the recent protest movements in Serbia. Centring resistance on the active participants of the struggle in the blockades makes those who refuse to take part have no influence, like the student union president who, on television station TV PINK, called the protests “the greatest destruction of higher education”.
The blockades have also used pressure from below and grassroots democracy in the plenums to keep leadership away from opposition politicians and in the hands of the masses themselves. After calling only a couple of symbolic demonstrations and a fist fight in parliament, those politicians have gained no leadership as the mass of students have voted for militant actions and systemic change, not just the election of the other political team.
Rather than scaring people off, the student occupations have drawn wide layers of the population into street politics. Students called one of the largest protests in Serbian history, have inspired teachers and workers into strikes and protest action, have led hundreds in days-long marches from city to city. Three months later, they continue to hold the vast majority of university faculties under student control.
With the occupations as focal points for organisation and protest, workers, unionists, parents and pensioners have all made their way into the blockades. Students have keenly adopted the concerns of various groups, supporting farmer and media protests, and travelling to the energy ministry to join rallying power plant workers. As one postal worker said in an article in the socialist newspaper Kontranapad, “If the students could respond and come to our protest, let’s stop our work too!”
Farmers have played a key role in maintaining the blockades and protests, providing tractors for barricades, soup kitchens and spit roasts, and food for weary marchers halfway between Belgrade and Novi Sad. Teachers have also shown solidarity and drawn in workers across Serbia, first in the universities as faculty members rushed to the blockades to support their students, conduct classes on the streets and participate in plenums.
The teachers have been an icebreaker for workers in Serbia. Every time they have joined a blockade, defied government threats, gone on strike or rallied in the city, they have inspired other workers to join them. 
Lawyers and actors joined the teachers on strike, while bus drivers refused to run services transporting strikebreakers. In the main news stations of RTS, workers demanded that the chief editor allow students to join their program or resign. Power plant workers, who had promised to strike further after a one-day suspension of work, overcame an order not to protest and began hour-long stoppages.
This was not guaranteed. “One part of the trade union is in connection with the regime and participates in the local government”, according to a coal miner in Kolubara speaking to N1 News. Across the country, various repressive and demobilising tactics have been attempted, workers being threatened with the sack or hauled into ministry and management buildings for lengthy interviews about their political support for the students. 
Trade union leaders have played no better a role than student union leaders. They have signed wage rise deals in exchange for calling off strikes and have taken to the media and to parliament to denounce the idea that they might strike against the government. However, they have also been dismissed in individual workplaces—one union meeting of electricity distribution workers ended with the union officials being booed out of the room by their own members.
By reaching out to workers on strike, pensioners, lawyers, high schoolers and more, the students have given ordinary people a chance to feel their own power. By creating opportunities for mass struggle, students have accomplished what a thousand speeches and essays couldn’t: they have convinced hundreds of thousands of people they have the power to change society.
Whether or not their movement wins, the students have started a radical process in Serbia. Instead of elections and bills, politics is now plenum democracies and protests. The idea that university faculties could be run by mass meetings rather than board meetings has gripped Serbia. 
During the 20 January teachers’ strike, Dušan Kokot—a leader of the Nezavisnost (Independence) trade union faction, a more militant faction of the unions—declared the strike gathering a plenum and turned to the crowd for a decision on, “Who is in favour of a general strike?” 
Of course, this is not the same as a student plenum, which Kokot noted in an interview with Vreme, but it gives workers a taste of their power. If this level of democracy were exercised not just in a protest or on a campus, but in every workplace, town and city, Vučić’s corruption and greed wouldn’t stand a chance. This could also be pushed by organising all sympathetic workers into a network of activists who could transform Serbia from the ground up.
Regardless of what building is occupied next, who protests next, who resigns next, the university students at the centre of the movement aren’t letting up. On 15 February, tens of thousands from across the country converged on the city of Kragujevac to protest together, following other inter-city marches to try to join the various city-based protests into one. 
While the government insists it is meeting the protesters’ demands, one student who had marched from Belgrade to Novi Sad explained to Radio Free Europe, “The system needs to change; if the system hasn’t changed, our demands have not been met”.

Johnny Gerdes

Serbian students lead mass movement against autocracy

On 11 January, 15,000 people travelled from across Germany in at least 200 buses and more sold-out trains to protest the conference of the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is polling second in the run-up to national elections next month. 
After its conference in Essen last year was met with 70,000 anti-fascist demonstrators, the AfD this year moved its meeting to the regional town of Riesa, in Saxony, where the party received 38 percent of the vote in the 2024 state elections.
Fascists lead the AfD. Its unofficial “führer”, Björn Höcke, who has been convicted for using Nazi slogans at rallies, has long won the fight for control over the party. Research last year by Bavarian Broadcasting, a media company, <a href="https://www.br.de/presse/inhalt/pressemitteilungen/afd-recherche-bundestag-mitarbeitende-rechtsextrem-100.html">found</a>
that the AfD employs more than 100 hardcore Nazis in the German parliament, including activists and organisers of street fighting groups.
The AfD dreams of a German ethnostate, to be realised through mass deportations of non-ethnic Germans. This plan to “return millions of foreigners to their homeland is no secret”, admitted AfD Brandenburg chair René Springer last year. “It is a promise.” 
Indeed, Höcke boasts of projecting a “politics of well-tempered cruelty”.
Two anti-fascist campaigns organised the blockades in Riesa under the slogan “Prevent the AfD conference!” Stand Up to Racism is a historic campaign formally supported by the Social Democrats, Greens and trade unions; Resist was formed last year to organise the blockades of the AfD conference in Essen.
An important development this year was the formation of Students Against the Right, which recently called mass student general meetings to oppose the AfD and mobilise for Riesa. Waiting for one of the dozens of buses from Berlin organised by the students, Phil Butland, a member of Socialism from Below and a contributor to the Left Berlin, told Red Flag:
“There were meetings at three Berlin universities where there were 4,000 at them [in total]. They were just student union meetings, but they were the biggest student union meetings in years.” 
Similar meetings across the country attracted thousands more.
“Most, if not all, also passed a motion on Palestine at the same meeting”, Butland said. “I think people were mainly there for the AfD thing, but it shows how much things have shifted at German universities that people who weren’t there for Palestine voted for a pro-Palestine motion.”
Once its fleet of buses arrived, the Berlin “finger” was stopped by the police for over an hour. As dawn broke, it finally began its march toward Riesa. A young, first-time protester told Red Flag that he knew he had to go when he saw the blockades advertised: “[The AfD] stand against everything that I stand for ... I’m scared of fascists, and even more scared of fascists that are successful with what they do”.
Amid economic stagnation, politics in Germany—and across Europe—has shifted sharply to the right. Racism has been used to paint refugees and immigrants, rather than bosses and landlords, as responsible for rising unemployment and rents.
It is not just the far right that is fuelling this shift. In 2023, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz argued for Germany to “finally deport on a mass scale”, and since his ruling coalition collapsed, all major parties apart from the crisis-ridden left-wing Die Linke (The Left) have begun a racist election campaign of which the AfD could be the primary beneficiaries. Prioritising campaigning for February’s snap election, however, Die Linke had a notably small presence in Riesa.
On the other hand, the trade unions were very visible. Germany’s second-largest union, ver.di, refunded half the cost of its members’ bus tickets and publicly promoted the blockades. There was even a small group called Tesla Auto Workers Against Fascism. 
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been promoting the AfD, but while he shared a livestream from inside the conference hall to his X account, outside, the Tesla workers who generate his wealth staffed the barricades.
After a couple of hours, sub-zero temperatures began to wear down the blockaders, but photos of a near-completely empty conference hall generated a triumphant mood. Unfortunately, this did not last long. Blockaders were cleared by police, who attacked with truncheons, pepper spray and dogs, Berlin’s Daily Newspaper <a href="https://taz.de/Protest-gegen-AfD-Parteitag/!6058447/">reported</a>. Nam Duy Nguyen, a Die Linke parliamentary observer, was beaten unconscious.
Protesters then marched through the town, carrying signs that read, “Björn Höcke is a Nazi” and “Stop the AfD-Nazis!” Red Flag spoke to Ahmed Shah, a member of Socialism from Below and a longstanding anti-fascist campaigner. “If Nazis march, and you don’t do anything, they grow”, he said. “So you have to act.”
With the fascist Freedom Party forming a government in neighbouring Austria and Donald Trump stepping into the White House, the far right is on the march. Days after its conference, the emboldened AfD distributed election flyers in the form of deportation tickets. 
The blockades in Riesa were important, but more actions will be needed.

Leon Whitehead

Inside an anti-fascist blockade in Germany

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.

D. Taylor

On the fall of France’s government

Phil Butland

When a Zionist riot is reported as an antisemitic pogrom

King Felipe of Spain, along with the Spanish prime minister and the Valencian president, visited the flood-ravaged town of Paiporta on 3 November. They were greeted by crowds of angry residents chanting “Murderer!” and had mud thrown at them. 
The furious reception was in response to disastrous floods in the Valencia region in late October. The floods, caused by massive rainfall—in some locations a year’s worth of rain fell in eight hours—were the worst natural disaster in Spain in decades. More than 215 people have been killed and about 1,900 are missing. 
This part of Spain typically receives a lot of rain at this time of year, but as global temperatures rise, the air carries more moisture, leading to more extreme events. 
While the flooding is a result of climate change, the death toll is a product of neglect. The day before the downpour, the meteorological agency issued warnings, which the regional government of Valencia largely ignored. 
It was only at 8pm on the day of the floods that the government sent a warning to every mobile phone, instructing people to stay at home or move to higher ground. By this time, flood waters had already hit many towns, trapping people in their houses or in cars on their way home after work. 
<a href="https://youtu.be/XEqfDG8Xn00?feature=shared&amp;t=43">One young man berated the King</a>: “It was known, and nobody did anything to avoid it”.
In line with other disasters, such as <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/rescuers-find-body-worker-swept-tennessee-factory-hurricane-115409477">Hurricane Helen</a>e, there seem to have been several cases of bosses preventing their workers from leaving work early to seek safety. One widely shared video <a href="https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2024/10/30/criminal-companies-outrage-as-mercadona-sends-driver-out-into-deadly-floods-while-other-firms-are-slammed-for-endangering-employees/">shows a delivery driver for Mercadona</a>, one of Spain’s major supermarket chains, being saved by rescue workers. 
After the floods, Juan Roig, president of Mercadona, was <a href="https://x.com/NombreFalso1231/status/1852851619211223496?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1852851619211223496%7Ctwgr%5E50476688fdf2e8e70c2e6c13fc8a9205673e97ce%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmarxist.com%2Fspain-monarchs-pelted-with-mud-as-rage-over-avoidable-deaths-boils-over-in-valencia.htm">confronted by angry shoppers</a> at a supermarket. “You have no shame. You sent your workers out to die”, one said. Graffiti reading “Your profits, our dead” summarises the sentiment. 
The Valencia Emergency Unit, which had been created to coordinate emergency responses, had been disbanded as a part of budget cuts by the conservative regional government last year. The government also initially refused help from firefighting agencies from other parts of Spain and France in an effort to show that it had everything under control. This left some of the worst affected areas without heavy machinery for up to six days. 
One consequence is that residents have had to organise the cleaning effort themselves. One, Ana Isabel Zomeno, told ABC News: “The street here was full of piled cars. Nobody came here, but all the neighbours in this street have organised themselves very well to do the clean-up. It looks this clean now because of us”. 
People throughout Spain have donated supplies. Volunteers from the region have travelled around to help others clean up. On one day when the government put a call out, up to 15,000 people volunteered to help. 
Video shows mud everywhere. It carpets the ground and is caked onto walls. The people are covered in it—from the flood and from cleaning up afterwards. 
The visiting politicians, and even the king, ended up covered in it too, for different reasons. That was one piece of good news coming out of this disaster.

Ben Lourie

Spanish floods highlight the muck of capitalism

<a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/night-britain-uk-fight-back-riots-southport-immigration/">Reports of the anti-racist demonstrations</a> sweeping Britain on the evening of Wednesday, 7 August, were a sight for sore eyes. Quite literally—those of us watching the <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/7/mapping-far-right-riots-in-the-uk">racialised thuggery</a> unfold across the UK since July have genuinely had to hold back tears. If the threat posed by the far right in Britain is to be successfully pushed back, much more anti-racist protest will be needed.
Britain hasn’t seen this level of coordinated far-right terror since the late 1970s. It’s <a href="https://socialistworker.co.uk/features/beating-the-nazis-in-the-1970s-we-did-it-before-and-we-ll-do-it-again/">reminiscent of the dark days</a> of jackbooted skinheads and the rise of the far-right National Front: days many believed were long gone. But almost 50 years later, anti-racists have once again found themselves having to organise emergency counter-protests against an onslaught of targeted attacks on refugees and migrants. 
The turnouts for the 7 August rallies in major cities were large. In East London, 10,000 took to the streets; there were 7,000 in Bristol, 1,500 in Liverpool and the same number in Sheffield. In one west London neighbourhood, around 400 protesters faced down a pathetic showing of four or five far-right thugs, protected and spirited to safety by the Metropolitan Police. The crowd took up a <a href="https://x.com/deborahfinding/status/1821266059141455880">chant</a> both poignant and to the point: “There are many, many more of us than you!”.
Reports also suggest that Muslim youth have organised themselves to defend physically their mosques and community centres—an echo of the <a href="https://irr.org.uk/article/recollections-on-the-asian-youth-movements-that-emerged-in-the-1970s/">Asian Youth Movements</a> of the late 1970s. 
Back then, migrant communities could also rely on mass anti-fascist mobilisations of workers and young people cohered around the <a href="https://redflag.podbean.com/e/lessons-from-the-anti-nazi-league-with-moira-leahy/">Anti-Nazi League</a> (ANL). After a <a href="https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/08/remembering-the-battle-of-lewisham-2">victorious march</a> against police and fascists in south-east London in 1977, the ANL chased the National Front off the streets wherever it was active. The radical socialists who organised the ANL also galvanised support from the most militant sections of the trade union movement; in 1979 the National Union of Mineworkers hosted a “Miners Against the Nazis” conference in collaboration with ANL activists. 
Today, unions are the only official institutions endorsing anti-racist demonstrations, union flags and contingents being present at many rallies. While left-pitching <a href="https://www.hastings.gov.uk/news/latest/joint-statement/">Greens</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C-V3tffo79c/">Labour</a> representatives shamefully warned their constituents against attending protests, many local union branches are trying to mobilise. One activist from the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers—which spearheaded a <a href="https://cms.redflag.org.au/article/britains-historic-strike-wave">strike wave</a> in 2022—told <a href="https://socialistworker.co.uk/anti-racism/7-august-fear-changes-sides-as-massive-protests-defy-the-far-right/">Socialist Worker</a> that a union conference held on 7 August had voted to attend a nearby anti-fascist protest en bloc. 
What the anti-fascist movement faces is a broad revival of serious and organised neo-Nazi street politics. The mainstream media have adopted terms like “rioting” or “disturbances”, but what we’ve seen are orchestrated physical attacks on mosques, immigration centres and refugee housing. According to UK anti-fascist research group Hope Not Hate, <a href="https://hopenothate.org.uk/2024/07/31/the-far-right-and-the-southport-riot-what-we-know-so-far/">flyers and social media posts</a> have been used to coordinate attacks at specific times and places.
On 27 July a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce4qd4e4e1vo">huge nationalist and anti-Muslim rally</a> of around 40,000 people was held in Trafalgar Square, London. Headed by notorious hate-monger Tommy Robinson, this mass mobilisation took place before the Southport stabbing that ostensibly triggered the wave of far-right violence across the country. And Robinson already had a follow-on <a href="https://www.thenational.scot/news/24490711.glaswegians-urged-stand-firm-tommy-robinson-promoted/">demonstration planned</a> for Glasgow’s George Square in September. This will be a major test for anti-racist counter-protesters to face down.
Hitler once wrote that mass rallies and street-level confrontations helped build the hardened core of Nazism because they “burn into the little man’s soul the conviction that, though a little worm, he is part of a great dragon”. 
Sinister <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVq4c-Wiazw&amp;rco=1">speeches</a> at Robinson’s event echoed this sentiment and delivered clear incitements to racist violence. “There is no political solution to this problem [of Muslim immigration]”, one speaker proclaimed. “The mass of you, the sea of you ... you are the solution. Defend your home ... take back your country and unite the Kingdom—God bless the king!” Another, dressed in full military garb, <a href="https://twitter.com/TRobinsonNewEra/status/1818239415040221667">declared</a> to rapturous applause, “I will keep fighting until I’m lying on the streets, choking on my own blood”.
The establishment politicians, the police and media outlets now decrying “disorder” have done nothing to denounce the rhetoric spewing from Robinson’s brothers-in-arms. Indeed, they’ve pushed a hard-right racist agenda of their own in recent years. Former Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tried to establish <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/how-australia-taught-britain-torture-refugees">offshore refugee detention</a> camps in Rwanda. His successor, Labour’s Keir Starmer, promises instead new counter-terror powers and faster deportations of asylum seekers directly back to their home countries. 
Establishment parties have given fuel to the far right by whipping up anger against migrants. Almost 17 per cent of voters in the recent British general election <a href="https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10009/">voted for</a> openly far-right candidates running with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK or as ex-Conservative independents.
When mass industrial action <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/britains-summer-industrial-discontent">broke out</a> in 2022, the British labour movement had an opportunity to impose a different narrative about rising inflation and falling living standards. Instead of scapegoating migrants and refugees, striking workers laid the blame squarely on the capitalist class gorging itself on the profits of the crisis. 
Keir Starmer condemned those strikes, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/27/sam-tarry-sacked-labour-frontbench-rail-strike-picket-line-keir-starmer">sacked</a> a Labour shadow minister for visiting a picket line. The Labour Party has actively engaged in racist fearmongering and undermined serious class resistance and solidarity. The chickens are now coming home to roost.
The ruling class is cohering around a <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/riots-starmer-turning-point-police-b2593477.html">“law and order” response</a> to the so-called disturbances of the past few weeks. British anti-fascists are well aware of the role police played in <a href="https://socialistworker.co.uk/features/eyewitnesses-to-the-battle-of-cable-street-fascists-did-not-pass/">defending far-right marches</a> in the 1930s and ’70s. The police daily enact their <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/24/outrage-after-british-police-officer-filmed-kicking-man-in-the-head">own racist violence</a> against Muslims and enforce the “order” of a perpetually unjust system. 
That’s why any movement against the far right must be imbued with a radical and unforgiving critique of the system that breeds fascist thugs. They are the political spawn of equally criminal bosses, media moguls and establishment politicians. Against all of them—all these fascist worms and their capitalist enablers—our side must respond decisively: “There are many, many more of us than you”.

‘There are many, many more of us than you’: British anti-racists mobilise against far right onslaught

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

The British Labour Party has won the UK general election, securing a large majority of seats and routing the Conservative Party, which ruled the country for the last fourteen years. The Tories, as the conservatives are known, have been reduced to a rump, losing 250 seats, including some that have voted for the party since it was formed in the 1830s.
Labour’s victory was widely predicted. The Conservatives stumbled through years of explosive political controversies, from Boris Johnson’s flouting of pandemic restrictions to party with his rich friends to the meltdown of Liz Truss, who held the prime ministership for just 49 days. The chaos was fuelled by divisions within the party and among its base—between centrist conservatives and a radicalised far right. The results showed the latter’s influence: Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK party won more than 14 percent of the vote.
The last fourteen years have been a disaster for workers. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the Conservatives slashed government spending, leaving schools and the health system to crumble. Wages stagnated; working-class communities were devastated. Meanwhile, the Conservatives funnelled money to their wealthy mates and the bankers of the City of London. 
As the masses became alienated from the government, the Conservatives moved sharply to the right. They tried to divide the population and give themselves the appearance of popular support. They deported refugees, demonised trans people, condemned the left and riled up their conservative base. Yet while people were turned on each other, they also turned on the Tories, leading to the emergence of various far-right formations and a revolving door of prime ministers.
All of this fed the widespread desire for the Conservatives to suffer a humiliating defeat. Few will mourn the end of Conservative rule in Britain. 
Yet Labour’s victory is far less impressive than it first appears.
Keir Starmer’s Labour comes to power with the lowest primary vote of any party entering or retaining government since 1929. While it will hold 65 percent of the seats in the new parliament, this is almost double its share of the vote, which was less than 34 percent. That’s more than 6 percentage points lower than when Labour lost the 2017 election under the leadership of left-winger Jeremy Corbyn. It is barely higher than the Labour result in 2019—a result considered so terrible that it led to the removal of Corbyn as Labour leader. 
So while voters despised the Conservatives, not many were won to Labour. Some of those deserting the Tories were traditional right-wing voters who instead backed either the centrist Liberal Democrats or Reform UK. 
Substantial numbers of working-class people and young left-wing voters also refused to vote for Labour. In Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn won as an independent, defeating the official Labour candidate by more than 7,000 votes. Pro-Palestinian independent Shockat Adam defeated Labour shadow cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth in a surprise win. Ashworth’s vote plunged to 13,760, from 33,606 in 2019. 
Another pro-Palestine independent, Adnan Hussain, defeated Labour in Blackburn, an industrial city held by the party for the last 69 years. So too did Iqbal Mohamed in Dewsbury and Batley, and Ayoub Khan in Birmingham Perry Barr. In Ilford North, pro-Palestine independent Leanne Mohamad was just 500 votes behind the Labour candidate. As well, Labour shadow culture minister Thangam Debbonaire lost their seat to the Greens in Bristol Central by more than 10,000 votes. 
Even Labour leader Keir Starmer wasn’t immune to the backlash over his staunch support for Israel’s genocide. Starmer’s vote fell to 18,884, from 36,641 in 2019. Andrew Feinstein, a South African-born anti-Zionist Jewish activist, came second, winning more than 7,000 votes.
Then there were those who voted for no-one. Voter turnout was 60 percent, the second lowest in any general election since the franchise was established in 1928.
Even among those who voted for Labour, there was hardly great enthusiasm for Starmer’s project. The chief data reporter for the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch, noted on X that the “lack of enthusiasm for Labour at this election really is striking”, pointing to analysis of a British Election Study poll revealing that “among those who plan to vote Labour ... the party is much less well-liked than in 2019, 2017 or 2015 (no data before that)”. A YouGov poll found that 71 percent of voters felt that the election campaign didn’t address any issues they cared about. 
All of this is understandable when you look at what Starmer’s Labour Party is all about.
“Change begins now”, Starmer said in his victory speech, “and it feels good, I have to be honest, after four and a half years of work changing the party. This is what it is for!” Later, he repeatedly returned to the theme, telling the audience: “The party has changed”, “We will govern as a changed Labour Party”, “The values of this changed Labour Party are the guiding principles of a new government”, “This election could only have been won by a changed Labour Party”.
Starmer was referring to his four-year crusade to destroy the influence of Jeremy Corbyn and shift the party to the right. In this, he has been very successful. At the launch of the party manifesto in June, Starmer argued that Labour should be “pro-business” and “the party of wealth creation”. He rejected the idea that there should be higher taxes on big businesses and argued that significant increases to social services were ruled out because “you cannot play fast and loose with the public finances”.
The British bosses have lapped it up. In May, the Times
newspaper printed a statement by 120 business leaders supporting Starmer’s party. Starmer also received the backing of the majority of the corporate newspapers, including the Murdoch-owned Sun and the voices of the centre-right establishment, the Economist and the Financial Times. 
In response to Conservatives and the far right running a hysterical campaign demonising refugees and migrants, Starmer has made it very clear where his government will stand. “Read my lips—I will bring immigration numbers down”, he told the Sun. “I will control our borders and make sure British businesses are helped to hire Brits first.”
Israel’s war on Gaza only intensified Starmer’s campaign to shift Labour ever further to the right. Speaking to Jewish News shortly after winning the leadership, he said: “I support Zionism without qualification”. On this, he hasn’t disappointed. As Israel launched its horrific assault on Gaza, Starmer told radio host Nick Ferrari that “Israel has the right” to deny electricity to Palestinian civilians. Since then, he has driven out Labour members for supporting Palestine, sacked frontbench MPs for supporting a ceasefire motion and suspended Labour MP Kate Osamor for calling Gaza a genocide. 
No wonder that pro-Palestine candidates were able to bring down some Labour MPs.
Starmer’s Labour comes to power, then, in a fraught context. On the one hand, there is already a substantial minority of left-wingers angry with Labour over its centrist pro-corporate politics and support for Israel. This is bolstered by the fact that the UK has had the biggest rallies in solidarity with Palestine anywhere in the world. On the other hand, the rise of Reform UK shows that a sizeable radicalised right-wing section of society will try to push politics further to the right. 
“What is interesting is there is no enthusiasm for Labour, there is no enthusiasm for Starmer. Half the vote is simply an anti-Conservative vote. This Labour government will be in trouble very, very quickly. And we will now be targeting Labour votes”, Nigel Farage stated ominously after being elected for the first time as a UK MP. 
“Keir Starmer is going to be attacked on all sides; there is not going to be a honeymoon”, Channel 4 News political editor Gary Gibbon argued as the results rolled in. Referring to those seats lost to pro-Palestine independents, Gibbon noted: “It’s almost like mid-term anger but at the very start of a new government”.
Starmer’s huge majority in parliament may give the illusion that he is running an all-powerful government, at least for a period. However, the election results reveal that the social basis for such a government is weak. 
The disappointment of the UK general election is that, despite there being a significant space to the left of the Labour Party, no socialist groups were capable of taking advantage of the situation. Several pro-Palestine independents were elected, but none seem more generally connected to the organised far left, which has declined significantly in size and influence.
Rebuilding the socialist left will be vital if workers in the UK are to fight back against Starmer’s pro-corporate Labour government and the threat of an emboldened right wing.

Remembering the British miners’ strikes

Serbian students lead mass movement against autocracy

Inside an anti-fascist blockade in Germany

On the fall of France’s government

When a Zionist riot is reported as an antisemitic pogrom

Spanish floods highlight the muck of capitalism

‘There are many, many more of us than you’: British anti-racists mobilise against far right onslaught

What we learned from the French elections

Victory for the left in France

UK Labour’s victory rests on rocky foundations

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