How should the non-party political left respond to the rise of the far right?

[smokedout]

I think you are being slightly tongue in cheek, but not sure the people I know advocating this would be the educated elite tbh!

I was, but if not an educated elite then the fact they might have a choice about where to live/work means they are likely to have a degree of privilege not shared by many they left behind. I take on board a lot of the analysis about the proletarianisation of graduates and downward mobility but the fact is that not many graduates are still doing care work or labouring or on benefits in their 30s. They may be working class and increasingly precarious but their experience of being working class is very different to someone working in manual labour with no qualifications, or someone who is unable to work due to local unemployment, childcare commitments or sickness/disability and who is dependent on the state for housing.

Fair point about the cities, I was responding to points others have made as well, and really just don't think we can be complacent and assume the cities will look after themselves. I'm in zone 2, in what's still a pretty working class part of London (although gentrification is ongoing) and there's certainly growing support for Reform round here and conspiracy theories are everywhere, even graffitied on bus stops.

 

[hitmouse]

Found this linked on a post hitmouse made, it's an interesting take from Robert Evans on what needs to be done - and importantly, what doesn't. Not had time to properly digest and think on it yet.

We failed to stop the rise of fascism. What comes next?

How to navigate the future without a map.

shatterzone.substack.com

It's interesting how much what Evans proposes sort of resonates or rhymes with what Neel's saying.
Evans:

And yet many organizers, be they progressive social democrats, communists, anarchists, whatever, are still stuck in the same loops. Behind each march to nowhere and tired chant is an equally tired hope. The social democrats dream of a giant, continent-sized Denmark, with cyclists replacing Ford Trucks, universal healthcare, good schools and a bevy of other lovely things both political parties will fight tooth and nail to prevent. The authoritarian Communists dream of a new October Revolution, but this one will work rather than just creating a new dictatorship that ages and dies within the space of a single human lifetime.

Anarchists tend to be very good at seeing the flaws in the logic and futility of the hopes of the previous two groups, but they are just as bereft of ideas for how to stop what’s coming. Some tendencies dream of collapse, of an end to industrial society and either living in the woods eating berries or some sort of solarpunk daydream, wildflowers sprouting from rubble. The latter is a nice dream but try offering either future to a single mom who can’t afford her 5-year-old’s insulin and see how she reacts.

Most of the anarchists I know define themselves as “helpers” before anything else. They’ll cheerfully admit they don’t know how to solve the big problem but they do know how to provide free eye exams to homeless people once a month, or do water drops down at the border so migrants don’t die of dehydration, or crowdsource insulin from their friends to help that single mom through a bad week or two.

If you are where we all are right now, bereft of ideas, staring down the barrel of a nightmare, those are good folks to know. Like everyone else, they’re defaulting to what they’ve been doing, but at least what they’ve been doing helps people.

The larger solutions to our common woes, if they ever arrive, will be something new. Something we haven’t tried yet. I feel very confident they won’t take the form of another march or involve everyone finally agreeing to be the same kind of communist/anarchist/whatever. Shawn Fain, chief of the United Auto Workers Union, has called for a General Strike in 2028, and that so far is the only clear plan I’ve heard anyone make that feels like it has a ghost of a chance.

It’s an audacious plan, and I recommend reading what Shawn’s laid out about it. But half of why I support the idea is because it IS audacious. The religious right got to where they are right now in this country by being bold. As I laid out earlier, fascists win because they always try, and this is something we need to copy.

Shit can be different, but not unless we’re willing to try different shit.

Neel:

Ideas don’t enter the mind through the ears, they enter through open wounds, through joints burning after endless shifts of dead-end jobs, through feet blistered by long days on the picket line, through hands torn open by some machine, arms coated in grease scars, the lining of lungs filled with teargas. One consequence of this is that, insofar as we “communicate” our political ideas, we do so largely through action in the moment of the revolt.


So, if you want to advocate for one particular type of organization or strategic orientation, you have to take a tactical lead in the uprising, whatever it is: perform concrete acts that surpass the immediate limits constraining the extension and elaboration of the political sequence. In some cases, the organizational form that you are arguing for in the abstract may even serve this practical function. But, in many cases, it actually has little to do with whatever larger-scale theory of organization you have, since the action is maybe nothing more than hauling in food for people, breaking in to occupy the fulfillment center rather than picketing out front, smashing the first window of parliament, or of course setting the first police station ablaze. Whatever it is, though, it should be facing outward, rather than focused on critiquing or attacking or arguing with other participants. You’d think that the hyper-sectarianism of the New Left would be enough of a cautionary tale, reminding us that we have to be kind to one another, and ecumenical. But it’s difficult, because these actions are also a gamble. Leading acts are always dangerous ones and it’s never clear if they’ll have the intended effect or if they’ll turn out to be adventurist oversteps. Someone will always disagree with you, terrified that you are endangering everyone involved. If you succeed, though, other participants will be magnetized to the sigils of your politics and thereby opened to the ideas that attend these sigils. These practical arenas are the starting point of organization, from which we begin to aggregate a sort of collective consciousness of how to elaborate struggles beyond their initial limits. But to start, there is only one suggestion: take the lead, don’t just talk about it.

Think this sums why we are where we are 'nicely':

Oh yeah, I have to admit I struggled a bit with the middle of the article but when I got to that bit there was a moment of "oh yeah, that's Phil Neel doing what he's really good at".

 

[steeplejack]

I increasingly think any focus on individuals is the wrong one tbh and I think much of the left gets obsessed with figures of hate and it hasn't got us anywhere, infact I think it plays into strengthening their narrative more often than not.

I've been enjoying, if that's the right word, reading the considered responses on this thread.

I agree with the above- focusing on the far-right bogeyman (Le Pen / Griffin / Trump / Farage / Musk / whoever) has yielded zero results and achieved precisely nothing politically. It's an echo of the correct condemnation of ANL lollipop waving from twenty years ago as useless in opposing street violence. Arguably shrill condemnation in closed liberal circles has accelerated the rise of these figures. People don't need explaining who these people are or what they stand for, a frigtheningly large number know and don't care.

A couple of thoughts though. In the broader sense 'not focusing on the indivdual' in building campaigns is getting harder and harder; younger people are ever more socialised as individuals and are growing up in a time where the ideals many on this board adhere to are little more than a fairy story from before they were born, with little sense of how they might matter in the here and now. They certainly say nothing to the young folk I work with who are very aspirational, materialist, and have ambitions not to fundamentally change society but to own a house by the time they're 30. There is a desperate clinging to a fading middle class dream from forty years ago which increasingly isn't available to them.

I think working on ideas of collective action and its consequences is the way to begin to get through to individuals. This does require- for me- physical spaces and where I live there are one or two inspiring groups working really hard on major community issues, such as shaping and working with a working class community directly affected by the snake oil of an "Energy Transition Zone" who have been shat on comprehensively by local and national politicians. There is an anarchist owned and run pub and music bar in the city centre and that is influential in keeping these ideas alive, even if they don't really resonate beyond that subcultural milieu- nonetheless, it's better than nothing and a base to build from. People get a job there and direct experience of how to roganise along anarchist lines and how direct democracy / decision making works, as well as receiving some kind of political education. A lack of political education- how politics works, how people govern / are governed and in whose interests, how to think critically and if you have the luxury of tiem to get involved- have been flattened by forty years of cynicism produced by lies, theft, corruption, hyper-ventialting obsession with political scandal and innuendo, and generally poor outcomes.

Small groups of people can't resist half a century of denigrating and dismantling publically owned and accountable services nort can they fill the yawning gap left by the enforced ideological retreat of those services. Small groups of people can't resist the consequences of self-interested decision making by the professional middle classes and their paymasters. But they can keep ideas alive for a time more receptive to their enactment. Not an inspring answer, but I can't think of any better.

Many on the thread have been very active locally in single issue campaigns or campaigns with a trajectory across different issues down the years and that is the one terrain that ideas like this have some strength. It's vital experience that can be passed on and where small local wins could gradually grow into something bigger.

SNP activists used to hold to the mantra that people would listen to wider ideas about an independent Scotland once SNP councils had shown that they could empty the bins on time and clean the streets. But even that local government mantra seems quaint in 2025 with councils struggling to provide statutory minimum services in many areas. There is a broader argument for an aggressive localism alongside community organising- clawing back the powers lost by local authorities, and using them purposefully. But honestly such talk is mere farting out of brightly coloured smoke in a hurricane. It's not going to happen, other than cosmetically, in dimwitted central government initiatives such as "The Big Scoeity" and "Levelling Up" (lol).

In fact aggressive centralising, desperately flogging off whatever's left, and elected governments increasingly tugging their forelocks to unelected oligarchs is the direction of travel. The conditions for communitarian / left organising / growth are simultaneously there (in terms of levels of poverty / deprivation / ill-health/over-work) and not there (agressive anti-TU legislation, a generation socialised to think only in their own material self interest and to pay for help).

It's easy to give into despair. Nothing is getting better any time soon. But we all have to keep doing what we think best in spite of it. If we can.