Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century
 
Revolutionary
Socialism in the
21st Century
Farage with Union Jack in the European parliament
European Parliament – shared under Creative Commons

Be concerned – Reform is coming

Jonas Marvin

We have some catching up to do… Jonas Marvin  argues that we need to work out how to facilitate the flourishing of forms of culture and identity conducive to new coalitions, new common-senses and a mass socialist politics of “freedom dreams”

This article was first published on Marx’s Dream Journal

We should be deeply worried. The momentum of British politics has swung firmly towards the Faragist right. Having won five seats in the general election, Reform has been rising in the polls (above Labour in one), increasing their paid membership to over 170,000, and dominating daily public discourse.

Creating an image of young white children subject to the peril of Muslim rape gangs rather than patriarchal structures of local power, the demand for a national inquiry into historical child abuse in the English North West was the centrepiece of Farage’s speech yesterday at one of Reform’s four regional conferences. This one, held in Kemi Badenoch’s North West Essex seat, was a warning shot in the direction of the Tory leader. Buoyed by the decisive reelection of Trump, the radical right in Britain have become a major player and the former UKIP leader’s speech offered some further insight into the framing of his party’s rising star.

Fundamental to the politics of the Faragist right is the notion that the British nation is in “societal decline”, reeling from a “deliberately devalued” family, broken down communities, and a concept of national past and present thrown under the bus by the liberal left intelligentsia. Against dossing woke millennials and the “uniparty” duopoly, Reform is to become, in the words of Lee Anderson, a “people’s army”. This swelling multitude of older petit bourgeois revanchists and Gen Z “hard grafters” are fed up with high energy bills supposedly caused by Net Zero policies, the cost-of-living crisis and crucially, an immigration-fuelled “population explosion” of ten million over twenty years, seemingly “devaluing” British lives, British infrastructure and British culture.

Raising a mass to organise branches and rallies, contest local and national elections and “evangelise” within their constituencies, Faragism acutely represents what Richard Seymour describes as “disaster nationalism”. As a far right project, it politicises national decline on terms conducive to violent racialised resentment against refugees, migrants and the warlike phantom of “military-aged men”. It’s an agenda which wages war on the so-called “woke” educational establishment, vilifying trans children and revitalising a pronatalist agenda centred upon traditionalism and “manosphere”-induced masculine uplift. It makes a claim over the politics of climate adaptation, repelling statist climate policy as authoritarian, pitching itself as the only party truly prepared to fight for popular democracy. And it celebrates Elon Musk’s enthusiasm for slashing state budgets whilst it simultaneously calls for specific nationalisations, scrapping the two-child benefit cap and reinstating the winter fuel payments for pensioners. Farage’s project, far more than any other political force in Britain, is proving itself the beneficiary of the country’s mounting array of crises.

It knows its enemies, it has a growing sense of who its agents of change may be, and whilst Reform chair Zia Yusuf’s claim that Farage will be in 10 Downing Street in a “few years’ time” may certainly seem premature, it is a project with a keen sense that its leader could well be a powerful kingmaker in the years to come.

Reform may have only gained five seats at the last election, but it finished second in 98 constituencies, runner-up in 60 Northern seats and 13 Welsh constituencies, immediately trailing Labour in a grand total of 89. The former Brexit party regularly polls within five points of Labour, and the recent More In Common multi-level regression and stratification polling (MRP) – based on data collected from over 11,000 adults – sees them gaining another 13 seats were an election to be held today. When it comes to TikTok engagement, all the major parties trail Farage and his outfit, complementing Reform’s relatively decent showing amongst 16-24 year olds in the general election. The far right, it seems, is grabbing the moment by the horns and leaving behind the radical left in the process.

For parts of the left and labour movement, transposing the strategies of antifascism against Reform will suffice. We can highlight Farage’s city banker background on a leaflet, we can get trade unions to email Stand Up To Racism bulletins to their members, we can protest the party’s conferences and meetings, and we can campaign against them at elections with no suggestion of something to vote for. I’m sympathetic to the people who do this work and the reasons why, but it is wholly inadequate and underestimates how little the old ways of doing politics work in such a volatile, open and politically transient world.

Faragism certainly emboldens fascist street movements of the kind we saw explode in August, but the politics of physical force confrontation which stymied last year’s pogroms will not defeat this latest iteration of the far right. If anything, it will play into their hands, allowing them to pose as defenders of free speech and political democracy against an authoritarian left. This does not rule out street-based antifascism, but the task is far bigger than organising counter-demonstrations.

We need an agenda that is not simply reactive but begins to rebuild politics, a sense of counterculture and organising habits in our communities. To stand on a stall at the next election, local or otherwise, giving out leaflets advising people not to vote Reform without any argument for who people should vote for, let alone a convincing case for a party that can genuinely transform people’s lives, is limp at best, at worst, a total disaster. We cannot rely on this Labourist logic which sees antiracists do baseline antiracist work whilst vacating the political space and leaving the unions to shrink and mobilise for the technocratic centrism of Starmer or whatever managerialist worm succeeds him. Our antiracism needs to insist upon its intimate connection to a strategy of popular transformation.

For this, as I have been saying for some time, we need a new political force of the left. However, it seems the initiative for such a vehicle is harder to come by than one would like. The question of the Greens, in urban seats with high graduate populations, makes the task difficult even if it is a dynamic that takes on less significance in rustbelt regions like where I live. The damning quietude of Labour’s suspended Socialist Campaign Group (SCG) MPs has hardly added to the momentum for a new left party. Nor has the powerlessness of the will-they-won’t-they anticipation of the five pro-Gaza, anti-austerity independent MPs forming a new party. Jeremy Corbyn proving the most reluctant. And fruitful conversations such as Party Time have barely taken off outside of London, despite the election of four non-London independents to Parliament, the emergence of Majority in the North East, and the resignation from Labour of the twenty Broxtowe Independent councillors.

A vehicle such as a political party, or an alliance of some sort, would by no means be a magic bullet. But it would provide us the pretext to organise politically in our communities in a way that simply being a trade union member, part of a single-issue campaign, or an isolated lone socialist would not. It would also allow us to accumulate resources, develop networks, build avenues for discussion, agitation, organising and community repair — all weapons that the left could do with utilising against both the government and far right formations like Reform. If, as Joe Todd has argued when discussing what the left can learn from Farage, we refused the half-house quiescence of NGOs and Labourist politicking, a new political vehicle should be willing to “impose costs on Labour in terms of votes, seats, and – yes – risking Tory majorities.” A strategy of hardnosed strategic confrontation could allow us to marginalise reactionary politics amongst our people, break down the lonely and oppressive habitus of capitalist realism, and open up a political space for the left to prove itself as the force in society that is truly committed to transgressive, radical change against the social and political norms of the rich and powerful.

Forging a new political vehicle may also offer us an opportunity to do something that the right, both here and in the US, has proven so scarily successful at: remaking humans, or providing working class people the structures, tools and ideas to remake themselves and their lifeworlds around them. To sustain this, we must take seriously what the right does so well. We must reckon with the reality that people’s understanding of the world and how they relate to one another is increasingly mediated by the raw materials of culture that are unevenly scraped together to cultivate one’s sense of self, one’s subjectivity. The lexicon of culture war has become something of a cliché in British politics, but it speaks to a fundamental reality that the Faragist right have proven themselves adept at, recasting identities, creating antagonisms and shaking up the status quo. Backed by offshore financial interests, climate deniers, sections of the oil and gas lobby, and Elon Musk, Reform profits from a rightwing ecology that stretches from legacy media outfits to a fascoid digital sphere, whilst making hay from a centrist establishment which legitimates and provokes far right impulses on a regular basis.

Without access to such monstrous resources, we must suss out practically how our interventions can chime with and facilitate the flourishing of forms of culture and identity conducive to new coalitions, new common-senses and a mass socialist politics of “freedom dreams”. Crucial to this will be the development of a strategy which intervenes in politics, organises on the ground, and takes culture – the physical and digital spaces where people define and recreate themselves – very seriously.

Are there forms of culture and art we can learn from in how they shape populations and their worldviews? What kinds of democratic and reparative collective spaces can we rebuild in our communities? And what experiences of transforming our environments and lives can we build upon and generalise? These are the questions we should be asking as we construct new vehicles to marginalise an insurgent far right and augur socialist transformation. To defeat the right, we need nothing less than to work out who ‘we’ is, what this ‘we’ fights for and how we fight for it.

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