Prediction 2 – Support for Reform Stalls
Analysing the rise of fascism in Germany, in the 1930's, Trotsky noted,
"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."
As Trotsky also notes, and as every sociological study shows, fascism is a movement of the petty-bourgeoisie. As Trotsky also notes,
“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.”
In Britain, the peasantry disappeared two centuries ago, with the closest, to it, now, being those small, inefficient private family farmers, that seek tax concessions and so on. Today, the new professional middle-class, itself organised in trades unions, particularly within the public sector, is more likely attracted to progressive social-democracy than to the fascists. In normal times, even these numbers of the petty-bourgeoisie are inadequate. They constitute around 25-30% of the electorate. They are forced to find expression in the petty-bourgeois wing of conservative parties, e.g.. the Tories in Britain. Many of them, and particularly their associated elements from the lowest social layers of society do not even bother to vote or engage in political activity. Mostly, their influence on even the conservative parties is limited, being used as simply voting fodder, whilst those parties in government, pursue the interests not of the petty-bourgeoisie, but of the ruling-class. Again, as Trotsky put it, in relation to the Chinese Revolution in 1927,
“Before these collisions develop to the point of becoming an open revolutionary struggle, they will pass, from all the available facts, through a “constitutional” stage. The conflicts between the bourgeoisie and its own military cliques will inevitably draw in the upper layer of the petty-bourgeois masses, through the medium of a “third party” or by other means. From the standpoint of economics and of culture, the former are extraordinarily feeble. Their political strength lies in their numbers. Therefore, the slogans of formal democracy win over, or are capable of winning over, not only the petty-bourgeois masses but also the broad working masses, precisely because they reveal to them the possibility, which is essentially illusory, of opposing their will to that of the generals, the country squires and the capitalists. The proletarian vanguard educates the masses by using this experience, and leads them forward.”
Only when the ruling-class is fearful of its own rule, as it is challenged by a revolutionary working-class, does it ally with the petty-bourgeoisie, and its fascist parties. But, no such situation exists, today, the ability of the petty-bourgeoisie to utilise its one strength – its numbers – in elections, to capture political regimes/governments, as witnessed in the form of Brexit/Reform, or, in the US, Trump, is not a consequence of the support given to it by a fearful ruling-class, but, the tiny size – in numbers – of the ruling class, and the disorganised, weak state of the working-class. The ruling class, in so far as it feels seriously threatened by these petty-bourgeois political regimes, rather than being able to adapt to them, has used its main strength which is not its power at the ballot box, but is its ownership of property – today its ownership of fictitious-capital – and so its economic and financial power, as well as its continued control of the state.
So long as the ruling-class does not feel threatened by the working-class, and no such threat looks likely in the foreseeable future, it has no need of fascism, and the existence of increasingly fascistic regimes such as those of Trump, Le Pen, Starmer and potentially Farage, geared to the needs of the petty-bourgeoisie, pose a threat to it. In the end, the capitalist state acts as the instrument of the ruling-class, and that state, if the interests of that ruling class are seriously challenged by these petty-bourgeois regimes will assert itself against them. In most cases, it is even sufficient for the state to simply abstain from the fray, when the fascists take to the field of battle, on the streets. The ruling class and its state asserts itself against the petty-bourgeoisie and its reactionary governments, via the financial markets, the courts and so on.
Trumpf's petty-bourgeois nationalist regime has far more scope given the size and power of the US economy to engage in its nationalist delusions than does Farage in Brexit Britain. Yet, the contradictions of Trumpf's petty-bourgeois nationalist regime have already exploded, within months of his returning to the White House. His support has plummeted within his petty-bourgeois MAGA base, for all of the reasons that Trotsky noted above in relation to the Nazis in the 1930's. The difference is that this is not the 1930's, the ruling-class is not fearful of a revolutionary proletariat, and its interests are more threatened by the pursuit of the interests of the petty-bourgeoisie, by the likes of Trumpf, Le Pen, Starmer, or Farage. Unlike the 1930's, the ruling-class has no desire to ally with fascists, when those fascists, having reached the limits of their popular support, are led to turn to a violent overturn. Fascism extracted a heavy toll on the ruling-class, in the 1930's, as its price for saving it from the revolutionary workers.
Already, the contradictions of the petty-bourgeois agenda of Reform have been exposed. As the likes of James O'Brien regularly describe, it is somewhat surreal that Farage, having been the architect of the disaster that is Brexit, continues to spout the same idiocies, and supported by the Tory media outlets that seek to bolster and retain their reader/viewer numbers by appealing to all of those same prejudices of that same petty-bourgeoisie, presents himself, and his Reform company as the answer to all of those problems that his own Brexit agenda created in the first place! Trumpf 2.0 showed that, in the absence of a credible alternative, i.e. an alternative not itself undermined by its own previous failures, whilst appealing to voters to vote for it, as purely a “lesser-evil”, the petty-bourgeois demagogues are given the best possible opportunity to win elections.
Trumpf's support has cratered even more quickly than during his first term of office, but a craven ruling-class has sat by whilst he undermines its state apparatus, creating his own paramilitary force of blackshirts, as he recruits assorted criminals, racists and fascists into the ranks of ICE, which he is using on the streets of US cities. Farage and his Reform company have attempted something similar as they encouraged gangs to riot across Britain on the basis of lies about refugee hostels. And, acting as a further outrider to the constitutional forces of Farage has been the mobilisation of outright fascist thugs by the likes of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, backed by Elon Musk.
Sections of the ruling-class and its state seem to be waking up. In the US several weeks ago, we had some former generals speaking out, and saying to troops they not only had a right, but a duty to disobey unlawful orders given to them by Trumpf and his regime. For that, Trumpf accused them of treason. But, as Trotsky pointed out, in the 1930's, what would be the worst possible thing for the working-class to do would be to simply rely on an electoral/constitutional response to Trumpf, allowing his criminal gangs of ICE thugs to be rampaging through the streets. By all means, as he noted, ally with the masses that continue to be deluded by the formalities of bourgeois-democracy, on the streets, to confront those fascistic forces, but do not confine yourself to passive electoral blocks with them.
The same is true with Farage and his Reform company. A look at even the polling numbers shows the point. Farage pushed through Brexit in 2016, by a demagogic appeal to that reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, many of whom turned out to vote for the first time in their lives, whilst the lacklustre offering of the likes of Cameron did nothing to stir the enthusiasm of progressive voters. Many of those that voted for Brexit did so as a proxy vote against Cameron, and as a proxy for voting against immigration. The Leave voters were overwhelmingly Tory, and overwhelmingly old. They were part of a pre-war generation that grew up when the British Empire held millions of colonial slaves in chains, and who looked back with nostalgia to those days. It was a total delusion that it could return, let alone that anyone should want it to return.
Even in the referendum, and despite all of those formerly apathetic voters turning out, it secured the support of only 37% of the electorate. Never has support for leaving obtained a majority in the polls, and today, the majority recognising that Brexit is a disaster and seeking to reverse it grows by the day. The reality is that the support for Farage and his Reform company has not grown, since the Referendum, it has just been relabelled as it split from the Conservative Party. The 2024 General Election, in which Starmer won a majority of seats only because of the fraudulent nature of the electoral system, and the division of the petty-bourgeois vote between Reform and Tories, showed to them why they had to ditch the Tories and consolidate under Reform. The fruits of that were seen in the 2025 local elections when the situation was reversed and the petty-bourgeois vote was united behind Reform, whilst the working-class vote split between Labour, Liberals, Greens, Plaid and SNP. Labour now faces the same fate as the Conservatives as, Caerphilly showed, because, even where it was the governing party, it loses to more progressive parties, seeking to consolidate that progressive vote.
Reform having consolidated its vote will not fall substantially, but the much heralded advances are likely not to materialise either. That is because Blue Labour's ability to claim to be the only choice to oppose it will have been shown to be false, and the progressive working-class vote will consolidate behind Greens, Plaid, SNP and Liberals. For Reform, the conditions that made the Brexit vote possible have gone forever. The large majority of that vote was from the elderly, but ten years on, most of them have now died. That is why Farage has to switch to the focus on overt racism, and the scapegoating of migrants. As net migration is also collapsing, and as the consequence is again not what he promised, but is instead a further stagnation of the economy, and collapsing public services and NHS, as it cannot recruit the required workers, the contradictions of its agenda will once again explode its base.
No comments:
Post a Comment