Saturday’s Together Alliance march in London “to stop the far right” takes place under the shadow of a war on Iran led by the fascistic leaders of the United States and Israel, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. This is another illegal war in the Middle East supported by a Labour government, coming on top of its criminal role in the Gaza genocide.
Millions of lives are threatened by ultimatums demanding total surrender on pain of the destruction of critical energy infrastructure. Millions more worldwide have already been endangered by the disruption of critical fuel and fertiliser supplies. An ethnic civil war tearing apart a nation of 90 million people is being actively encouraged.
European governments are shoring up the walls of Fortress Europe against an anticipated new wave of refugees. The Islamophobia whipped up to facilitate the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq is being whipped up again, coupled with the noxious lie equating opposition to Zionism with antisemitism. Anti-war movements are threatened with the same police-state offensive deployed against the supporters of the Palestinians.
This context makes clear the stakes in the fight against the far right. As the World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board wrote Saturday: “Trump’s ultimatum is not merely a threat against Iran. It is a warning to the whole world of what the ruling class is prepared to do to maintain its power.”
These events show that the far right cannot be combatted outside of a struggle against imperialist war and for the defence of the democratic and social rights of the working class. At the heart of this movement must be a fight to demolish the capitalist system, which sets nation against nation in competition for profits and resources and worker against worker in competition for crumbs from the table of the oligarchy.
In Britain, this means a fight against the Labour Party. The rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is inseparable from Labour’s systematic impoverishment of the working class, the scapegoating of migrants for its social consequences, its alliance with Trump on the international stage, and jingoistic, racist, law-and-order rhetoric to justify war abroad and repression at home. In all these policies, the Starmer government finds its most essential ally in the leadership of the trade unions.
The Together Alliance deliberately blocks the necessary political reckoning with the Labour and trade union bureaucracy by inviting dozens of its MPs into the fold. Required only to oppose Farage and support meaningless slogans such as “For love. For unity. For hope”, they are being given in exchange a platform from which to denounce the results of their own party’s policies. Nothing could be more disorienting to the fight against fascism.
Behind the cheap platitudes, the actual programme and function of the Together Alliance is to prepare a campaign of tactical voting and electoral alliances between capitalist parties in May’s local elections and beyond, on the principle of “stopping Farage”.
Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, will play a major role in these manoeuvres. Jeremy Corbyn, whose political stature has been reduced after years of opposing any fight against the Blairite right and the Starmer government, will serve as an understudy to Polanski with his Your Party. They will contribute to a political atmosphere aimed at choking principled socialist arguments in a miasma of “peace” and “love”, pragmatic agreements, and diplomatic silences, aimed at shielding Labour and blocking any effective struggle by the working class against a capitalist system hurtling to World War III.
To the same end, almost nothing has been said by Together in its promotion of the march about the concrete threats posed by the far right in the UK and internationally, let alone about the role Labour has played in its rise. The politics of Saturday’s march will be the line of least resistance: a perspective of defeating the far right with an empty agreement to oppose racism on the part of pro-capitalist politicians, trade union bureaucrats and well-meaning liberals.
We have already seen the results of this perspective. A moving force in the Together Alliance is the Socialist Workers Party. It is the latest iteration of other SWP-led anti-racism fronts, forged in alliance with the trade union and Labour bureaucracy, such as Unite Against Fascism (UAF) and Stand Up To Racism (SUTR), now welcoming the rising Green Party that supports NATO.
All these alliances were run on the same basis of championing “opposition” to the far right within parliament—above all from the Labour “left” at that time, but even secured the endorsement of the future Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, who was a founding signatory of Unite Against Fascism in 2003.
To distract from any serious discussion of this anti-socialist agenda, the UAF/SUTR coupled their appeals with an activist approach of beating the far right by outnumbering them “on the streets” in various protest marches. The end result was graphically displayed last September, when a Unite the Kingdom march organised by fascist Tommy Robinson mobilised over 100,000 people, dwarfing a Stand Up To Racism protest of a few thousand.
Together is an attempt to reassemble the pieces of the same shattered perspective, with the glue of more political, more celebrity and more middle-class community group endorsements. These have been secured by downgrading the previous de facto political connection with Labour, which would alienate everyone, including most of the artists and cultural figures that have given their backing, and diluting anti–fascist politics to the lowest possible common denominator: “unity against division”.
This makes particularly cynical the SWP’s attempt to give a Marxist gloss to their alliance, claiming Together is an example of a “united front”. This is a fraud. The united front was a tactic developed by the Marxist movement to overcome a situation in which the working class was split in its allegiance between two mass tendencies—reformist social democratic parties and revolutionary communist parties—and confronted with urgent tasks like combatting fascist gangs.
Together is nothing of the kind. It is a particularly bankrupt form of the united front’s polar opposite, the popular front, used by the Stalinist bureaucracy to subordinate the working class to the left flank of the bourgeoisie, with devastating consequences in the revolutionary crises of the 1930s in France, Spain and beyond.
Summing up the difference on the basis of these historic experiences, the co-leader of the Russian Revolution and pre-eminent Marxist thinker of the 20th century, Leon Trotsky, explained: “the political alliance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, whose interests on basic questions in the present epoch diverge at an angle of 180 degrees, as a general rule is capable only of paralysing the revolutionary force of the proletariat.”
Together puts forward not only an alliance with the bourgeoisie, but with members of a governing party actively participating in an illegal war, planning vast hikes in military spending, and carrying out a crackdown on migrants and the rights to free speech and protest. This must be rejected by all socialist-minded workers and students.
A movement must be built in the working class, in total opposition to the Labour Party, based not on abstract statements of anti-racism and opposition to the far right, but concrete struggles against their sources: war, inequality, authoritarianism and the capitalist system underlying them all.
As the WSWS argued recently of planned anti-Trump protests in the US, “Any movement that treats war as secondary, or avoids naming it directly, leaves intact the principal mechanism through which the ruling class is driving toward dictatorship and catastrophe.” The statement continued, “It must be built by bringing the fight against war into the workplaces and industries that make society run: the ports, logistics hubs, refineries, rail networks, schools, and hospitals.”
The Socialist Equality Party fights in the working class for this socialist internationalist position. We encourage those who want to stop the descent into war and fascism to join us today.