Hope and Resistance in a Time of Disaster

The forces of death running rampant through- out Gaza have normalized violence against oppressed people, emboldening the far right across the world. In August, organized bigots in Britain, extending Nazi salutes, attacked mosques and set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers. In India, two anti-Muslim hate incidents occur every day, fomented by far right Hindu fundamentalists. And in the United States, Trumpism has roused a violent white supremacist network embracing the likes of the Proud Boys and Patriot militias. This time around, Trump explicitly appealed to voters of color, attempting to put them against immigrants, who, he insists, are at the root of their problems.

Advance of the Far Right

Dismissing such groups as marginal ignores the ways they have been nurtured by the governing parties of neoliberalism—and the ways in which their bigotry has entered the daily currents of political life. As the late Mark Fisher put it, the neoliberals’ systematic assault on trade unions and social support services was a “deliberate destruction of solidarity and security.”²Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014). In destroying cultures of solidarity, they have cultivated, especially among the petty bourgeois, a politics of division based on scapegoating immigrants, people of color, women, Muslims, queers, and trans people. From the US to the European Union, our rulers have tightened borders, spurned asylum seekers, and demonized immigrants. And this has catalyzed the rise of the far right.

For a generation, the idea of “Never Again” was ingrained in political life. Yet today, Giorgia Meloni, who rose through the ranks of fascist movements, is now prime minister of Italy. The hard right Party for Freedom—which has called for shutting down all mosques and banning the Koran—is now the largest parliamentary party in the Netherlands. Narendra Modi, who cheered on anti-Muslim pogroms, has been prime minister of India for a decade. And, only months ago, a party with deep roots in neofascist politics nearly won the parliamentary elections in France.

The eruption of far right forces into the political mainstream can no longer be treated as exceptional. It is now a generalized phenomenon. As a result, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and heteronormative bigotry are now normalized features of mainstream political culture. This is the reality of capitalism in the twenty-first century. The racism underpinning Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza has only accelerated this pervasive violence against the oppressed.

When W. E. B. Du Bois pronounced that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” he could not have known how true that would be of the twenty-first century too.³W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.C McClurg & Co, 1903).

We could add that, in addition to the color line imposed on racialized peoples across the world, twenty-first century capitalism has reinforced all the lines maintaining the “traditional” social hierarchies of the heteronormative, cisgender, racial, and Western capitalist order. The two major political projects aiming to handle the consequences of capitalism in crisis—neoliberalism and right-wing populism—both maintain and then thicken these lines, either implicitly or explicitly. In Du Bois’s spirit, we need to reassert that antiracist, anti-oppression, and solidarity-based organizing remain central, indispensable elements of class struggle in our times.

Elections and the Left

It is understandable that many look to elections for solutions to the mounting problems of late capitalism: climate catastrophe, genocidal wars, racism, bigotry, precarious employment, crushing poverty, and unimaginable inequality. For instance, as we go to press, millions of eyes are focused on the presidential elections in the United States.

Yet, the outcome of this election will not fundamentally resolve these systemic problems. They are structural realities of both a stagnant, low-profitability capitalism that transfers wealth to the top and of a hollowed-out “democracy” that concentrates real power in the hands of CEOs, generals, and state bureaucracies. No mainstream party in the United States will champion the rights of Palestine, attack racism, launch a war on poverty, or challenge the ultra-rich. Instead, both the Democrats and the Republicans have furthered the repression of Palestine solidarity organizing and committed to brutal control and violence at the border. Despite the purported “mystery” of Kamala Harris’s policy agenda, her statements have made clear her commitment to Bidenomics, militarism, imperial hegemony, high-tech industry, border repression, law-and-order policing, and the repression of dissent, especially on Palestine. Such a program offers no hope or joy to those committed to social transformation and radical emancipation.

That is why, as Spectre has repeatedly argued, the priority for a meaningful socialist left must be rebuilding powerful and independent grassroots movements in communities, workplaces, schools, and beyond.⁴For example, see David McNally and Charles Post, “Beyond Electoralism: Mass Action and the Remaking of the Working Class,” Spectre 3 (2021): 74–87. In certain circumstances, this approach may involve some engagement in electoral campaigns. But any such engagement must always be a subordinate element of mass movement organizing focused on building power from below. And any electoral intervention must be grounded in basic socialist principles: no concessions to capitalism and its established parties and no selling out the interests of the oppressed. Otherwise, the Left will find itself adapting to bourgeois forces antithetical to a politics of liberation and providing cover for empire and oppression. The great socialist Rosa Luxemburg spelled out the stakes more than 125 years ago:

If we begin to chase after what is “possible” according to the principles of oppor- tunism, unconcerned with our own principles, and by means of statesman-like barter, then we will soon find ourselves in the same situation as the hunter who has not only failed to stay the deer but has also lost his gun in the process.⁵Rosa Luxemburg, “Opportunism and the Art of the Possible,” (1898; repr., Rosa Luxumburg Internet Archive, 2000), marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1898/09/30.htm.

We must not disarm the movements we participate in for the paltry gains or lesser evils on offer from political elites.

Sites of Struggle

At a bleak moment like this, it is vital to celebrate the important achievements of left forces that have mobilized grassroots power against the Right. The resistance to the reactionary capitalist onslaught will gather its forces from these actually existing sites of struggle, rather than from abstract formulations, dogmatic slogans, or electoral vibes. Elected politicians, liberal or otherwise, have simply refused to lift a finger in the face of far right threats.

Across the United Kingdom, including in Belfast, thousands of antiracist demonstrators blocked the streets as neo-Nazis and their allies fomented mass violence in response to racist rumors. After a Welsh-born teenager stabbed three girls, WhatsApp messages alleging the killer’s Muslim immigrant background proliferated rapidly. Within twenty-four hours, rightists had begun to attack mosques in multiple cities, and at least two hotels housing asylum seekers were burned to the ground. Keir Starmer’s new Labour government took ages to even condemn the attacks for what they were: racist pogroms. But before the vile attacks could pick up steam, thousands upon thousands of antifascists took to the streets, defending their fellow residents and chanting, “Refugees are welcome here!” In early August, more than fifty explicitly antifascist rallies took place across the United Kingdom, with “Stop the far right” the most ubiquitous slogan on display.

Just across the Channel, Palestine solidarity rallies played a major role in the campaign against the National Rally (RN), the far right party that—like such parties in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere—had its best showing in June’s elections to the European Parliament. In response to the extreme right surge in the EU’s only directly elected body, French president Emmanuel Macron called snap elections, and the RN dominated the first round of voting. In the face of a run-off, left-wing parties, led by La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), built a New Popular Front (NFP), eventually crushing both the RN and Macron’s own Ensemble coalition. This was achieved in significant part through community rallies for Palestine that La France Insoumise built to take to the streets and rally voters for the Left against the far right, as they did with much success in the banlieues of northern Paris. Unlike the US Democratic Party, left forces in the NFP encouraged the mobilization of its constituency, rather than trying to demobilize it. The run-off saw France’s highest voter turnout in over a quarter century and a breakthrough for the Left. The result was an organization and a politics that persisted beyond the electoral season—the organized left has since mobilized in the streets against Macron and to prevent further far right inroads.

This confrontational bottom-up approach has also made gains against the neoliberal wing of the procapitalist right. In Kenya, a mass movement arose under the banner #RejectFinanceBill2024, a reference to President William Ruto’s ham-fisted attempt to raise taxes on working people in order to appease creditors abroad. Peaceful marches were met with a cosmetic revision of the bill, and younger Kenyans doubled down by storming Parliament. While Ruto pulled the bill the next day, it was too late; the movement had gained steam, and protesters continue to demand the president’s resignation, hence a new hashtag: #RutoMustGo. In a context in which real wages have yet to return to 2008 levels and the unemployment rate has doubled since 2016, young Kenyans have had it with a government more interested in conforming to International Monetary Fund dictates than guaranteeing its people a viable future. The protests are now reverberating across the continent.

In Bangladesh, protesters mobilized in June to oppose the reinstatement of the government’s quota system for public sector employment, which was perceived as a patronage arrangement orchestrated by then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. These specific demands ignited Bangladeshi students, who were operating against a backdrop of economic stagnation and government authoritarianism. On the latter count, Hasina’s government had long been accused of corruption and dictatorial rule over the two decades she spent as the country’s longest serving prime minister. As the movement swelled, Hasina ordered a crackdown, massacring two hundred and injuring thousands. Helicopters blasted crowds with tear gas as soldiers unleashed machine guns on civilians. This repression only fed the movement, which stormed the prime minister’s official residence and forced her to resign. In early August, Hasina fled the country to an undisclosed location in India. The protests continued, with Hasina facing mass murder charges, albeit in absentia.

All four of these examples are obviously quite disparate: in the United Kingdom, mass mobilization against xenophobic mobs; in France, the utilization of rallies to unite a political coalition aimed at keeping the far right out of power; in Kenya, an anti-austerity mobilization directly targeting the state; in Bangladesh, the culmination of long-simmering disgust with authoritarian violence and corruption. But in every single case, mass mobilizations achieved what reigning politicians either could or would not. In short, collective action gets the goods.

Back in the United States, at the time of our writing this editorial, the return of the far right to power appeared entirely possible. Trumpism has shown itself to be a force with staying power. Yet Trump offers no hope to the working class. His overtures to workers ring hollow; as he told Elon Musk in August, “You’re the greatest cutter,” a reference to the erratic billionaire firing striking workers. They both laughed. “‘You want to quit?’ I won’t mention the name of the company,” Trump continued, “but they go on strike and you say, ‘that’s OK. You’re all gone.’”

So let us say it unequivocally: Trump is even more dangerous than Harris. However, this does not mean Kamala Harris is a friend to the working class. Like Biden, Harris is a conservative Democrat who refuses to be transparent about her policy program. Despite the lip service she pays to rent control, she has proposed $40 billion in subsidies to developers, as well as a massive new tax credit for—you guessed it—developers. And when it comes to Gaza, she presided as vice president over the genocide, has not uttered a word condemning Biden’s repugnant approach, and against her own electoral interests, refused to allow those representing the Uncommitted Movement to speak at her nominating convention.

Yes, Harris isn’t Trump; that’s honestly the best thing that can be said about her. Let us learn from the United Kingdom, from Kenya, from Bangladesh, and from France. These politicians aren’t here to save us; they’re here to guarantee continued capitalist accumulation. Regardless of who has won the election by the time this issue is in your hands, the Left will be faced with growing repression and pressure to abandon its liberatory commitments. Starmer’s response in the United Kingdom has been repression; in the United States, only the gullible would believe that the Democrats, who repressed large waves of the Black Lives Matter movement and doubled down on the Palestinian solidarity movement, would change course.

So, what’s the road forward? As always, comrades, keep organizing. Take to the streets. Did Biden lead the way last spring, or did the Palestine encampments? Did Democrats in Congress do a damn thing in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, or was it mass movements that shifted the tide? Of course, these things are always an ongoing and uneven process. But organizing is essential.

Here at Spectre, we’re ever more convinced that mass organizing with the oppressed is the way forward. That’s one key reason why Palestine is the key fault line today. And that is why we will only be free when Palestine is. ×