We could point to the numerous examples of where Greens have also allied with Tories in local councils, or on their own, when in control, have acted as dutiful managers of the local capitalist state, and attacked workers interests, but a more stark example is of where the petty-bourgeois, ideology of Green politics leads, as seen in other countries. Those of us whose earliest political activity goes back to the days of May '68, remember the name of the leader of the French students - “Danny The Red”, aka Daniel Cohn-Bendit.
Despite the “red” label, and media popularisation of him, at the time, as a socialist revolutionary, Cohn-Bendit was not a “red”, but a petty-bourgeois anarchist. There were two main factors for the failure of 1968. One was the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism, which was powerful in the workers movement, and acted to restrict the actions of workers, engaged in rolling general strikes, in favour of parliamentarism, and the second was the role of anarchists and syndicalists, who opposed the Stalinists' betrayal, but who promoted the ideas of spontaneism, and failed to build the required organisational structures to confront the bourgeois state, and create an alternative to it. Groups like the SWP have continued to make that same mistake ever since.
For an Anarchist like Cohn-Bendit, his individualist, petty-bourgeois mindset, also consistent with the collapse of large sections of the left into a reactionary, petty-bourgeois, moralism and “anti-capitalism”, led him inexorably into the Greens, the epitome of that kind of reactionary “anti-capitalism”, as a synonym for opposition to large-scale industrial capitalism, in favour of utopian notions of the small business myth, alternative paths of development and so on. In Germany, the Greens, now ally with the conservative bourgeois parties, and support NATO, etc.
Those who limit their horizons purely to an opportunist, “lesser-evilism”, focused on parliamentarism, can always find excuses for voting for anti-working class parties, on the basis that they are the least dirty shirt in the laundry basket. Doing so does nothing to change the conditions that lie behind such a restricted choice, other than to make it worse, by tarring those that do so with the brush of those parties, and further alienating the workers. It is that approach that has opened the door to Le Pen, to Farage, to Trump, to the AfD, and so on.
The same can be seen in the US, now. The liberal bourgeois politicians and media, in recent days, have seized on the fact that voters have turned increasingly away from Trump, and the Republicans, with some Republican politicians, also, peeling away, at the margins. The liberal bourgeois see this as decisive, but they fail to understand the nature of fascism as a movement of the petty-bourgeoisie. They assume that seeing this electoral support slipping away from him, Trump's days are numbered. But, for Trump, who has laid his cards openly on the table, in setting out his desire to utilise his “magic powers”, as he calls them, granted by The Insurrection Act, they fail to understand that, such fascist regimes, always, reach a point where they can no longer rest upon constitutionalism, and the vote, and so, simply resort to the use of force.
"It is stupid to believe that the Nazis would grow uninterruptedly, as they do now, for an unlimited period of time. Sooner or later they will drain their social reservoir. Fascism has introduced into its own ranks such dreadful contradictions, that the moment must come in which the flow will cease to replace the ebb. The moment can arrive long before the Fascists will have united about them even half of the votes. They will not be able to halt, for they will have nothing more to expect here. They will be forced to resort to an overthrow."
Trump is already doing that in Minnesota, and with clear plans to do the same elsewhere. It is sensible for the workers in Minnesota and, elsewhere, to be restrained, and minimise the ability of Trump to do that, just as, Lenin and the Bolsheviks argued against workers, in Russia, engaging in premature actions, in July 1917, which ended up with Kerensky utilising those actions to lock up the Bolshevik leaders. But, Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not make that argument because they wanted the workers to content themselves with constitutionalism. They did so because, as with Marx's advice to Parisian workers in 1870, they believed it was premature, that the workers needed to build their own organs of power, their own tested leaders and so on.
The ordinary citizens of Minnesota have shown tremendous courage and principle. But, it is largely unorganised and leaderless. They have engaged in a “General Strike”, but it was largely a passive, petty-bourgeois affair, with small businesses, shops, and schools closing their doors - they would have had few customers anyway. It is not like the political General Strike of masses of industrial workers, in the large enterprises seen in 1917, or in France in 1968. As Trotsky went on to note,
“the main strength of the fascists is their strength in numbers. Yes, they have received many votes. But in the social struggle, votes are not decisive. The main army of fascism still consists of the petty bourgeoisie and the new middle class: the small artisans and shopkeepers of the cities, the petty officials, the employees, the technical personnel, the intelligentsia, the impoverished peasantry. On the scales of election statistics, a thousand fascist votes weigh as much as a thousand Communist votes. But on the scales of the revolutionary struggle, a thousand workers in one big factory represent a force a hundred times greater than a thousand petty officials, clerks, their wives, and their mothers-in-law. The great bulk of the fascists consists of human dust.”
Large corporations in Minnesota are, now, coming out to oppose Trump's actions, and to demand that the confrontations be tempered. Trump does not represent the interests of large-scale industrial capital. At some point the permanent state is likely to move more decisively against Trump for that reason, but, in the meantime, it and the ruling-class will rely on their usual levers of power in the financial markets, use of the courts etc., as well as relying on the masses of workers doing the fighting for them, so long as they do not begin to assert their own class interests.
Having won the Presidency, and control of Congress with the votes of the petty-bourgeoisie, including some of them now opposing Trump and his fascist goons in Minnesota, Trump will increasingly have to rest, not upon their votes, but on his ability to mobilise violence via a hardcore of fascist thugs. Even the bourgeois liberals continue to present the recruitment into ICE of such thugs as being purely a matter of managerial incompetence, and failure to check their credentials, to train them and so on. No, Trump and the hard core fascist ideologues, like Miller, pulling his strings, have deliberately recruited those thugs, as their personal paramilitary force, separated from the hierarchy of the permanent state' bodies of armed men, and the discipline from above of the generals, who serve the interests of the ruling class. Many of those recruited are the very thugs convicted of actual insurrection on January 6th that Trump has, since, pardoned.
Workers in the US certainly should not gift Trump the justification for introducing the Insurrection Act, by engaging in violent acts, but they should not think that refraining from confronting the fascist thugs of ICE will prevent that from happening anyway. The workers in the US need to confront the ICE Gestapo in an organised and disciplined manner, the right granted to them under the Constitution, as the right to bear arms as part of a well regulated militia. The mistake of Alex Pretti, murdered by Trump's Gestapo, was not to be armed, but was to be armed, and to act as an individual in confronting them. The working-class of Minnesota is far larger than the forces that ICE can mobilise. A Workers Militia, armed, disciplined and organised that defends its own communities, and confronts the ICE thugs, in large numbers, would not suffer that same fate. But, it takes time to organise such militia, and to organise the democratic structures required to control it, to arm it, and so on. It is only that fact that causes us to advise caution at the present time.
But, the advice of the bourgeois liberals to rely on passive resistance and on the constitution will lead to disaster. There is no reason that Trump cannot cancel elections, or that, like De Gaulle in 1968, or Khameini, today, in Iran, where the protests have disappeared from the headlines, as a result of the mobilisation of mass violence against them, the elections may be held in such conditions as to ensure his success. Starmer and Blue Labour can only look on in admiration.
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