Only a bold and popular left radicalism can stop the rise of fascism

Horkheimer is front left, Adorno front right, and Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair, Heidelberg, 1964. Wikicommons/Jeremy J. Shapiro at the Max Weber-Soziologentag.. Some right reserved.Two new
worlds are now struggling to be born amidst the crumbling ruins of
neoliberalism and market globalisation. The first is the waking nightmare now
unfolding in the United States in the glare of the international media. A
reality show with a cast of horrors, its politically successful mix of faux
right-wing populism and neo-fascism has inspired and emboldened autocrats
everywhere and threatens in the absence of an effective counter-power to become
our new global reality.

The
second, a just, compassionate, ecologically sound and democratically
self-managed post-capitalist world, may be detected in what Colin Ward once
described as scattered ‘seeds beneath the snow’. Deeply rooted in a rich soil
of ideas and grounded utopian imagination nourished by countless
counter-cultural critics of capitalism, industrialism and grow-or-die economics
from William Morris, Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus to Gandhi, Ivan Illich,
Murray Bookchin and Ursula Le Guin – as well as a long history of popular
movements from below working together to resist regimes of domination and
develop progressive and sustainable alternatives to them – the tender shoots of
another world are emerging all around us.

They are
visible in a wide range of grassroots practices, movements, and practical
utopias, from Buen Vivir in the Andes, Ubuntu in South Africa, Ecoswaraj in
India, Zapatismo in Mexico, and the budding degrowth movement in Europe to
solidarity economies, commoning activities, permaculture projects,
re-localisation movements, community currencies, transition towns,
co-operatives, eco-communities, worker occupied factories, indigenous people’s
assemblies, alternative media and arts, human-scale technologies, basic and
maximum income experiments, debt audit movements, radical democratic movements
such as Occupy and democratic confederalism in Rojava, and emerging
anti-fascist fronts and coalitions uniting immigrant solidarity groups,
anti-racists, feminists, queers, anarchists, libertarian socialists and many
others.

The great
danger we now face is that newly empowered forces of reaction will use that
power to repress progressive alternatives before they are able to coalesce as
an effective counter-power, sowing seeds of hatred and intolerance instead.

Many
commentators of a liberal democratic or centre-left political persuasion have
dismissed such warnings as scare-mongering, and suggested that the most
effective antidote to ‘populist politics’ is a renewed commitment to social
democracy and market globalisation with a ‘human face’. Rather than seek to
understand the complex mix of reasons why American citizens voted for a
demagogue like Trump, they blame an undifferentiated ‘populism’ and advocate
more elite democracy instead.

The breathtaking
naivety of this commentary is perhaps matched in recent memory only by Francis
Fukuyama’s equally naïve and now risible prediction in 1989 of an ‘end of
history’, i.e. an end to mankind’s ideological evolution with the
‘universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government’.

Walter Benjamin, Paris, 1939.Now more
than ever, it is vital that we recognise and articulate careful ideological
distinctions between competing right and left wing varieties of populism, and
that those of us committed to values like equality, democracy and solidarity
take urgent action to oppose Trumpism and the rise of fascism not with more of
the same failed elite-led liberal democracy, but with a bold left egalitarian
and inclusive radicalism.

The Trump
campaign gave voice to the ugly authoritarian and reactionary face of popular
opposition to the political establishment. It castigated the elitism and
corruption of the system, emphasised its ineffectuality in the face of sinister
threats to national well-being posed by Muslims and illegal immigrants and
other easily scapegoated ‘outsider’ groups, and maintained that Trump and Trump
alone could ‘make America great again’. It succeeded by peddling false
solutions and scapegoats for real social problems generated by the governance
of interconnected political and economic elites. 

By
contrast, a bold and inclusive left populist radicalism would expose the real
roots of festering social problems by speaking plainly and directly to ordinary
people’s needs, without pandering to their worst prejudices and fears. It would
offer a generous vision of a better world, and a sweeping programme for
revolutionary social change that can be translated into everyday practice.

This will
require a reconnection with revolutionary roots. Historically, revolutionary
ideas and social movements have tended to emerge out of, and give ideological
coherence to, popular democratic social forms. However, in our time once
revolutionary ideologies and movements like socialism and anarchism have grown
increasingly detached from their radical democratic roots, leaving a political
vacuum that right-wing populists and demagogues have been quick to fill.

Walter
Benjamin’s observation that every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed
revolution speaks poignantly to our current condition. It may be interpreted
not only as warning, but as a grimly realistic utopian hope that we still have
a fleeting historical opportunity to act before it is too late.