Video | How can we build a mass socialist politics of ‘freedom dreams’

Jonas Marvin spoke at an Edinburgh rs21 public meeting about the threat of Farage’s Reform Party and opened a discussion on how the left should respond.

Edited transcript

Thanks to Edinburgh rs21 for having me. I should say two things just to protect myself at the beginning of this meeting. One is I am knackered after a long day at work, and the second is I’m not particularly familiar with the dynamics of the far right and Reform in Scotland, so I look forward to hearing what you guys have to say about that.

The starting point is the terrifying figure at the minute of Reform leading the polls, which they have done in the recent YouGov poll at 24%. YouGov says that’s within the margin of error, but when Reform is leading the national polls that’s fairly scary regardless of whether it’s in the margin of error, and something we need to think about quite intensively. 

The moment we’re in is a scary one. We can look at the actions of someone like Donald Trump who’s now the US president and we can see all sorts of constraints imposed on Trumpism. Performance is striking out over real material reform, we can see where the holes are in the Trumpist project, but I don’t think we should be under any illusion about the moving of the dial that is happening at the minute politically, and we have to follow that carefully. At the last general election Reform may have only gained five seats but it finished second in 98 constituencies, the runner up in 60 northern seats, 13 Welsh constituencies and immediately trailed Labour in a grand total of 89 constituencies. One of those is my own.

The last MRP that came out, which is a big polling data sample, which looks at tens of thousands rather than just 1000 people, had Reform with a lot of seats, particularly my own in Stoke. The former Brexit party is now regularly trumping it in the polls, and we could see a situation with Reform legitimately competing for up to 100 seats at the next general election. When it comes to TikTok, something that I’m not especially au fait with myself, all the major parties trail Farage. This complements Reform’s relatively decent showing among 16- to 24-year-olds. It feels to me that the far right, in the form of Reform, is grabbing the moment by the horns in a way that we’re not, and in a way that the other political formations that dominate British society, the two-party duopoly of Labour and the Tories, certainly can’t. And   we could be seeing the first stages of Reform hegemonise the right as well. 

It was remarked upon on a chat thread that rs21 is part of the other day how small the recent London Nazi demo was comparatively to the one that just followed the pogroms last August. Similar trends which happen between movements and politics on the left also happen with movements and politics on the right. Sometimes left movements exhaust themselves and are absorbed into politics. We saw this with anti-austerity movements and Corbynism for example, and a similar thing can happen on the right when the energy of a movement and the energy of a political side of society is absorbed into one field over another. We’re seeing the absorption of the far right’s energies into the political sphere quite intensely. This doesn’t rule it out from giving smaller fringe far right groups energy and a boost to do stuff on the streets. A list has come out of demonstrations happening across Britain that we’re going to have to be aware of. 

We should be clear about how the rise of Reform is already moving the dial with how other political actors in society think and talk. Some of you will have seen that in the Labour Party there’s been a boost to the forces of Blue Labour. Blue Labour advocates a defeatist, racialised, communitarian workerism that’s quite hostile to migrants and talks in quite communitarian terms. Dan Carden, someone who used to be on the left of Labour has now converted to Blue Labour. 

Labour have now set up a focus group on the special problem that Reform pose. That’s organised by Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, someone who’s close to him. So,   even though none of us are under any illusion that Starmer isn’t already incredibly racist and incredibly committed to border regimes, imperialism and all sorts of horrible things that we oppose, we can always prepare for it to get a lot worse and we can prepare for the Labour Party to adopt some of Reform’s talking points.

There is a broader question here which is about the reorganisation of politics at a moment when the two main parties are hollowing out in terms of their broader electoral vote and support that they can usher in and mount. First Past the Post makes it incredibly difficult for an outsider party to do well. The left has understood this quite harshly over the last 100 years in Britain despite its recent breakthrough in the General Election [pro Gaza independents]. We have been in a moment of massive reorganisation in British politics for the last decade and a half and Reform are the current beneficiaries of that. That’s not to say that this is the equivalent of 1922.

In 1922, the Labour Party took over the Liberals and that was in no small part because of the expansion of the democratic franchise. We’re not in the moment of the expansion of the democratic franchise, we’re in a moment where more and more people participate less and less in politics, because they see there’s less and less impact and politics is a depoliticised field for most people. They are told and reinforced and made to know that they can have no real influence. Reform provides a right-wing route and a defiance of that.

The threat of Farage

The name Reform, the talk about getting rid of the House of Lords, outdoing Labour on the two-child benefit cap, the nationalisation of water. I don’t know if anybody saw the video that Farage did for PoliticsJoe. When someone asked him ‘don’t you and Jeremy Corbyn have a lot in common really?’ He spent two minutes going into how he and Jeremy Corbyn had a lot in common. This guy is not a guy to mess about with. We should recognise that this is the most successful British politician, at least in my lifetime – and I’m 32 years old – and constitutes a real severe threat. It is quite clear that he wants to be the beneficiary of the reorganisation and decline of the British political sphere. 

As for Farage’s politics, crucial to it is a notion that the British nation is in decline, and that the British nation and the British people are being ‘deliberately devalued’. Farage says the family is being deliberately devalued. Broken-down communities in the Rust Belt regions are being deliberately devalued. The concept of our national past and present is being thrown under the bus by a left liberal intelligentsia, setting up the duopoly of the two parties and woke millennials as a kind of agent. Lee Anderson talks about raising a people’s army. You start to get a clearer sense of who the political subjects are in Farage’s project. He speaks quite openly, and always has, to petty bourgeois reactionary politics. But increasingly, he also talks about Gen Z hard grafters against millennials. I imagine, given the amount of young people who are not in work, employment or education, he’s talking about Gen Z hard grafters against those elements of Gen Z who don’t graft hard. So, there’s a politics of work to Faragism as well. He talks about high energy bills caused by net zero policies; the cost-of-living crisis, caused by an immigration-fuelled population explosion of 10 million people over 20 years. Again, he uses the language of this population explosion that is devaluing British lives, British infrastructure and British culture. 

So that’s the politics. There’s also a separate thing about body sovereignty that Farage talks about. He wants to get rid of the WHO from the influence of British politics, just like Donald Trump has just done withdrawing from the WHO. There’s also an intervention about how people reproduce themselves. At the minute, they seem to be raising their most organised branches to rally and contest local and national elections, and to develop a cadre basically, who can evangelise within the areas that they live in. And this will be mixed. 

Part of the problem of politics is that politics is very chaotic at the minute, it’s very ungraspable, we don’t live in the 20th century of mass political civil society organisations on the same scale that we did then. We live in a fundamentally different era and there’s a fragility to all politics in this moment. But Farage is currently the political force that is doing well to take advantage of it.  And it sits within an ecology, it’s not clear to me that if the far right was as well organised and as militaristically disciplined as it was in the interwar years it would be as successful as it currently is, if it could hold together. It sees the benefit of the fragile nature of politics in general. 

Rebuilding laboratories of hope

Some of the stuff that these guys talk about, the left is really behind on this. The left doesn’t have a story to tell in many different ways, and if it does, it doesn’t have a story that it communicates at a popular level. 

Farage is insistent on politicising the terms of decline. All of that is geared towards a racialised resentment against refugees and migrants. The spectre of military-age men that’s always waged by the far right is incredibly racist and terrifying for the ways that it incites the sort of violence that we saw in August of last year. It’s an agenda which wages war on the ‘woke educational establishment’, vilifies trans children, and crucially, in this moment of demographic decline or aging population, they are very committed to talking about a pronatalist agenda. They say we should rewind back to the times of the family, people should have more children, we need more traditionalism, and we need to boost the manosphere that we all see on our Instagram, TikTok and Twitter reels. Their politics of masculine uplift is particularly targeted at younger Gen Z generations. And of course, it makes a claim against the politics of climate adaptation, about the state’s climate policy as authoritarian. It pitches itself as the only party ready to fight for popular democracy.

There’s of course a case to be made, and it’s a very true case, that the right benefits in a way that the left can’t from a very conducive and friendly media sphere that amplifies it. Not just things like GB News that gives a daily channel into far-right politics, but in general the main institutions of the media are much more open to the far right in their newsrooms than they are to the far left. 

I have a sense that the way we treat Reform – like a typical fascist party – is not going to work. Parts of the left think we can just do antifascism how we did it in the past against the BNP or against the EDL. With Reform, we can highlight his city background on the leaflets, we can get trade unions to email Stand Up to Racism bulletins to their members, we can protest at party conferences and meetings, and we can campaign against them at elections with no suggestion of something to vote for. I’m sympathetic to lots of the people that do this work, and for the reasons why, but I do think it’s inadequate for the moment. Because Farage emboldens fascists and street movements of the kind that we saw in August. There’s a synchronicity between the fact that Farage did so well in the general election and had that breakthrough and the fact that two months later there are fascist riots on our streets. Those two things are completely connected, and we have to be aware of that. But the politics of physical force confrontation which in some places did meet the far-right last year will not defeat this iteration of the far right in my opinion. If anything it will play into their hands, allowing them to pose as the defenders of free speech and political democracy against an authoritarian left. 

I’m not trying to rule out street based antifascism by any means. When there are far right Nazis marching through your area you get out on the streets and you march against them and you defend your communities, but the task is bigger, we need a political agenda, we need something that’s not simply reactive but something that rebuilds politics, we need to develop forms of counterculture. We can’t just think about the ANL, we have to think about Rock Against Racism. At the same time, we have to think about how we change the political landscape of the ways in which people think, the habits. The far right is doing this at the minute and we are not processing it on the left as much as we should. 

Gabriel Winant, in a breakdown of the American election, spoke eloquently about how the far right is remaking human beings in their own image. As a friend said to me, the right, whether it’s Trump or Farage, have a sense of a felt imagined community. The left does not have that, we don’t have a sense of a felt imagined community that we construct, and we certainly don’t have a sense of a real community that we’ve constructed, as there have been defeats over the last 40 or so years. Part of the problem for our side is you’ve had loads of debates amongst leftists in the past where we talked about a crisis of leadership; if only we had the right leadership, we’d make it through, and everything would be fine. But at the minute we have a crisis of subjectivity, which isn’t to say that there aren’t working class people who are organising and fighting. We’ve had a mini strike wave, we had the Black Lives Matter movement, we have had one of the biggest mass movements in British history in the last 18 months with the Palestine solidarity movement, which was an incredibly – at least where I live and elsewhere – an incredibly multiracial proletarian movement in lots of ways. But we are still faced with this question of a crisis of subjectivity where we don’t have the same political subjects and political agents that drove radical politics in the way that we did in the past. And that needs to be at the centre of the question of left strategy for thinking how we combat the right and how we rebuild our capacities and our sense of who we are and what we need to do as a class and as a movement.

It is very difficult at this point in the meeting because this is when I’m expected to come up with practical claims as to what we should do, and I think the main thing is that we have to treat politics a bit like a laboratory. Gramsci talked about laboratories of hope and we have to take that spirit and that perspective about what are the initiatives that we can do to rebuild our class capacity and to rebuild senses of community and subjectivity – that build a story, that rewire the way that people feel about this country and the world that they live in, and how we give people in our communities, in their workplaces, and wherever we may be the tools to remake themselves and to remake the environment around them. Because the right is doing a good job right now. It may be febrile and fragile but they’re doing a much better job of it at the minute than we are. 

It could include many things, like are there gigs and forms of counterculture that you can organise, that encourage young people and people who don’t have collective spaces, social spaces, to come together? Are we moving beyond our usual crowds on the left and are we building political spaces? I read an article the other day by Joe Todd in Prometheus, where he talks about relentlessly focusing on the hundreds of thousands of disorganised socialists that exist. That seems to me like an interesting starting point. What are the other venues and forums that we can build where we can get those people in the room, we can build and rebuild our sense of who we are and our agency and just our basic mass, the amount of people who can do stuff and organise and think together. 

And one of the big questions that underlies a lot of this, is a question of organisation. A lot of us are in rs21, some of us may be in different organisations, but we can’t escape the question that there isn’t a mass political project on the left in British society and we need to be thinking in those terms. We’re in limbo as the left. The general election happened, you saw those five independents get elected in a historic breakthrough in the history of the British state, something that’s not happened before. Most of the people that got elected, for example, as Communist Party MPs, affiliated to the Labour Party. This is a historic breakthrough, but we’re waiting to see what happens out of it, and to see if someone else will form a party. 

I’m not saying we can all go and form our own party but maybe in our communities, in our spaces we need to try to create the precursors to what a local party might look like. Where we can bring people together bigger than ourselves, we can talk about the problems that we face, we can work out how to organise, we can map the strategy for going forward and who is going to carry out that strategy and how we build a culture and a sense of community around them. Because Farage is a big concern. I don’t necessarily think that Farage is going to win the next general election, at least not in terms of seats, the first past the post electoral system negates that, but he could well win the popular vote, and the question then beckons of what we do when Farage is the kingmaker in British society.