GRZEGORZ PIOTROWSKI DISCUSSES FAR RIGHT POWER AND ITS INTERNATIONAL NETWORKING AND FUNDING ~ Uri Gordon ~ The far right agenda has never been so powerful since the end of the second World War. After decades of the political centre shifting steadily to the right, ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist forces are now in open alliance with populist and conservative parties around the world, or setting the tone within them. In Israel they have taken over the country and launched a regional war following the genocide in Gaza. In the USA they remain poised to stage a coup whatever the election results, but in either case far right ascendance is far from over. Repelled for now in France, in Austria they recently became the largest parliamentary party. To talk about far right power and its international networking and funding, we spoke to Grzegorz Piotrowski, a sociologist at the university of Gdansk and the European Solidarity Centre. The answers have been edited for brevity and clarity. While the political and business elites, and especially the right wing press in Britain, are busy spreading xenophobia and calling for tighter borders, those same elites and their attack dogs have no problem working across borders. We talk about our internationalism, but what about theirs? I mean that’s nothing new, right? Even before World War II they were quite international. But if 15 years ago extreme right groups were deeply rooted in their local context, now they have gained very powerful allies, especially allies that have a lot of money. At the CPAC conference in Budapest you can actually see this ‘far right International’ — Tucker Carlson, Viktor Orban, Russians cannot travel that much anymore but you have people from all over the world, even European Parliament members. But then you can observe the flow of cash and there are a lot of far-right groups that are financed by Western millionaires or the Kremlin. In Poland there are a lot of Twitter accounts that everybody knows are financed by Russia, they were sponsoring the far right in in Austria and Italy, and with groups fighting against reproductive rights you can trace cash flows from Brazil. So are ‘gender ideology’ and ‘cultural Marxism’ coming instead of open racial hatred, or just ideological covers? I think the base layer is a kind of simulacrum of white male Christian identity, so Islamophobia or antisemitism is a big part of that but it doesn’t work out the same way in all countries. The same with homophobia, I mean in Poland and Hungary it’s quite effective but in the UK not really, but this then allows them to play the ‘crusades and conquerors’ card. In addition to the welfare chauvinism card. But this is all about how you create the ‘other’ that doesn’t match, ethnically, culturally, to your homeland, the ‘sacred homeland’ that is supposed to contain the formative values of the nation. Recently it was exposed that American neo-nazis had helped start a chain of ‘brown gyms’ far right training clubs in England called Active Club. Are there other cross-border connections, say with the European continent? I know there was the English Defence League — Polish Division and then there was the Polish Defence League — English Division, that created a lot of confusion. The Football Lads Alliance try to use their networks to see who is now in the UK, etc., but these are really really marginalised groups. But in general what is helping the far right internationalise is they all moved to social media, especially now that platforms like X are weaponising ‘freedom of speech’. This was very evident with the Capitol Hill uprising, this scare that was created online translated into real action. So I don’t know how conscious people from the Trump camp actually were of how it might end up, I think they underestimated the power of social media in this case, but you could see that vast array of groups like the QAnon, the identitarians, the Proud Boys \and so on, they all met at the Capitol Hill because of this scare that was created by Trump’s acolytes online. Let’s go back to the contrast between their ‘internationalism’ and their racism. Are leaders like Orban in Hungary or Meloni in Italy really motivated by hatred of this ‘other’ that they stoke up? This is actually a very convenient tool to seize power, because it plays on the really low instincts of this society, and in a globalising world there are more and more people coming in. But the interesting thing is that you don’t really need to have refugees or migrants coming in to stoke xenophobia, you just create the image. People read that there are big movements of people from areas of civil war or poverty etc., and you can easily make a scarecrow out of that in order to seize power. I think this is a very cynical play. I think many leaders or at least their close supporters are not actually ideological about it, they’re just using these tropes because they think they work. And what happens after a couple of years is that you see they’re trying to use this power not for some ideological purposes but that it’s basically a kleptocracy. You see that in Hungary, most of the businesses are now owned or run by friends of Viktor Orban, in Poland every day there is a new scandal around stealing money from the state budget, if Bolsonaro were in power longer that would be obviously the case, also in Argentina. I’m pretty sure that lot of people from the immediate surroundings of the leaders are there only for the money and power. As for the leaders themselves, I don’t know to be honest, some of them might really feel they have a mission, but it’s quite often just to to seize power and whatever comes with it, usually money. But that still causes the mainstreaming of ideas and attitudes that used to be associated only with the far right, and we’re seeing how dangerous that can be. That’s actually something that I’ve noticed recently when I was talking to parents at my children’s school, and it’s sometimes in form of a joke or something like that, but you can see the spread of this xenophobic agenda in very ‘moderate’ terms throughout the middle class. You know, they were making jokes about lots of engineers and doctors coming on boats from North Africa to Europe, and this always comes with a small wink and so on. This is actually a ‘light’ version of what the far right is saying, and this scare about migrants and refugees is being extrapolated throughout the societies. So far I haven’t seen any tool to combat this, to highlight things like the fact that the only rise in crime that happens after refugees come is in the crimes committed by the far right against the refugees, or against people who help the refugees. This is a challenge I actually think will need to be addressed in the next couple of years both by the movement but also I think by the policymakers to start pushing the anti-fascist agenda to middle class people. Do you think anti-fascist groups are maybe less internationally networked than the far right? Are people absorbed in local struggles? It’s a question, how actively interested people are in what’s happening in other countries, because in some cases there are so many things going on in your home country that you don’t even have time to look around at what is happening in the region or the continent, right? I mean we had that in Poland for eight years where the Polish government was quite annoying, especially to activists, and there were a lot of protest campaigns and a lot of people in the street. But there’s so many things happening locally that people didn’t have time to look at what’s happening in Germany or beyond our eastern border because people were so busy dealing with these things on their own. So what can you say about resisting the far-right internationally? When you look at attempts to combat those initiatives they’re very much locally based, it is about people protecting their own communities. For example in the US, for many years anti-fascist politics was really scarce after Anti-Racist Action kind of slowed down, there was no militant anti-fascism. Trump comes to power and you have people like Richard Spencer and others, and suddenly you have a revival of militant antifa. Nowadays, a lot of the American anti-fascist movement is community based, and it actually appeals to the communities saying that these people are a threat to our community which is diverse, migrant based, LGBT friendly or whatever other issue the far right is targeting. And I think that is actually a big power. The second thing is that the far right is picking up on economic and social agendas that the left abandoned, protecting working families, a safer job environment, or restoring dignity by raising the minimum wage. These are leftist claims but the social democratic and liberal parties have embraced neoliberalism. I think today the mainstream parties’ language is incomprehensible to the younger generation of activists, they want to push their own agenda which is a leftist agenda and they see threats to their agenda coming from the far right, so that’s why they are becoming anti-right or even anti-fascist. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article first appeared in the Winter 2024/25 issue of Freedom Anarchist Journal The post “You can actually see this ‘far right international’ taking shape” appeared first on Freedom News.

A FASCIST IN THE WHITE HOUSE, AND THE ‘TRAFFIC LIGHTS’ GO OUT IN GERMANY ~ Jonathan Eibisch, Paradox-A ~ The promised turning point is clearly coming much louder than many would have expected. Why do anarchists care who is in government, one might ask. In fact, the ruling order remains the same precisely because of the replacement of its political decision-makers. One thing is clear: the neoliberal-technocratic model of government is being replaced by the protectionist-nationalist model in this phase. And ironically, both are still sides of the same coin. Democrats need not be surprised why fascists are taking over the bastions of political power one after the other: social security has been systematically dismantled since the turn of the millennium, public infrastructure has been left to rot, corrupt super-rich people have not been kept in check, and political rights have been restricted. It is correct to say that the protectionist-nationalist model of government is not fascist in itself. However, as a counter-revolutionary avant-garde, fascism plays the role of an integrating element in the reactionary and aggressive project of securing power. Meanwhile in the Federal Republic of Germany, since it was switched on, the ‘traffic lights government’ has been attacked by conservatives. What initially made some people want change increasingly seemed like an imposition for other parts of the population. Despite different population compositions and narratives, the core issues of the formation of camps in North America and Europe are the same: the lines of conflict run along economic models, the handling of migration and cultural issues. Even if state and federal politics are two different things, this applies to both levels. This is creating new constellations, while the camp of supporters of a socially equal, liberal democracy is becoming increasingly smaller and moving closer together. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance would have liked to become a stepping stone for the future state government – but wanted to take on this role only on its own terms. As far as the federal government was concerned, the issue was ostensibly the insoluble controversy over economic policy, in which Christian Lindner stuck to the neoliberal dogma of not taking on any more national debt – as if the state were not sovereign over money itself. There were probably many other issues in the background. Above all, however, the FDP wanted to save its ass in order to distance itself from the red-green coalition before the regular election date next autumn. This strategy may also lead it to insignificance, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. A lot of it was used in the USA too: enormous sums of money, overreaching campaigners’ involvement, celebrity appearances and propaganda battles on social media – which experience shows are not unaffected by some foreign interests. None of this helped Kamala Harris. Although it seemed like a smart move to bring her into the field when Uncle Biden mentally abdicated, the Democratic Party failed to appeal to those large sections of the population that were now miles away from them: white men with a low level of education. Nevertheless, Trump was elected in a wide variety of countries, by a wide variety of groups. The reasons for this are complex, or at least multiple. But you can only understand Trump’s voters and his electoral success if you understand a collective rationality in voting decisions when they occur en masse. This consists in the fact that the fronts should be clarified, prosperity defended and things finally get back to “normal”. In all cases, a considerable number of citizens are clearly  demanding that politics be made again. They are looking for points of friction, want to identify the enemy, strive for power and ultimately question the system. Where there is sawing, there are chips. The political landscape continues to change rapidly – but what are the anarchists doing? First of all, they would do well not to allow themselves to be carried away by the political spectacle. It is precisely the superficiality of the bourgeois democrats that leads to their chronic misunderstanding of neo-fascism, as well as to the ignorance and suppression of social movements. But then it would be important to establish themselves as a conscious, active factor with a shared vision. Broken down, this means that you need a toolbox for flexible, low-hierarchy, autonomous and federated groups, a common value base and culture, and a shared set of basic theoretical assumptions. This does not mean forcing all anarchists into a unified organisation with a clear program and leadership structures. In my opinion, it means organising in the first place. Instead, in the broad left-wing scene you encounter an unconscious, comfortable bunch of scattered and insecure individuals who talk at the same time, do not think in the long term or in terms of goals that can be achieved. It is a pitiful game that I will address elsewhere. The political upheavals in particular should motivate reorganisation. Anyone who is still running around like a bunch of cackling chickens has not heard the shot. The post Politics at all levels, by all means appeared first on Freedom News.

Items discussed in this program: German antifascist arrests and deportations • Valencia square occupation for decent housing • Lisbon riots after police racist killing • Escalation in Chiapas • UK budget and Labour’s capitalist cult of growth • Tommy Robinson sentencing and the threat of fascist “victimhood” The post Freedom News Review 29.10.2024 appeared first on Freedom News.

BOUND TO CAPITALISM AND ELECTORALISM, THE STATIST LEFT HAS NOTHING TO OFFER DURING A PERIOD OF CRISIS AND RESTRUCTURING — LEAVING THE FIELD TO THE FASCISTS ~ Blade Runner ~ Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed the resurgence of a familiar historical pattern, with segments of the working class and poorer communities increasingly turning to far-right figures like Trump and Le Pen. Austria is the latest country to take a sharp rightward turn, with the anti-immigration, pro-Russia Freedom Party (FPÖ) securing the winning position in last Sunday’s election, which had an impressive 80% voter turnout. This confirms a growing trend seen recently in countries like Italy, Hungary, Poland, Brazil and France. Mainstream left-wing circles often interpret this shift as a result of their own perceived “failures” to address working-class concerns. A common argument is that a ‘class reversal’ has occurred, with leftist parties being co-opted by educated neoliberal elites. Others contend that the left has abandoned economic analysis in favour of identity politics. However, the root issue lies in the failures of the electoral democracy system itself. The feelings of betrayal and disillusionment stem from the statist left’s historical failure to challenge the spectacle of electoral politics, which serves to maintain the class system at all costs. Instead, leftist parties co-opted periods of insurrection and unrest, during the collapse of social democratic ideals in the economic crises at the dawn of the 21st century. By doing so, the left (focused today on the Green New Deal, identity, and human rights) has positioned itself as one of the two pillars of hegemonic politics, the other being the right (focused on climate change denial, nationalism, and religion). The modern statist left faces a fundamental tragedy. Bound to electoralism, it becomes entangled in the web of neoliberal governance, offering neither real alternative solutions nor effectively challenging the capitalist system during a period of crisis and restructuring — a time that should be a prime opportunity to steer forward on a new path. Meanwhile, the elite stays in control by diverting workers from direct action and steering them toward far-right electoral options or orchestrated xenophobic riots. These distractions buy time for the ruling class to restructure production and political systems to adapt to the grim realities of climate collapse and ecocide. Ironically, it is the far-right, not the left that thrives on false promises. Far-right leaders cloak themselves in anti-establishment rhetoric, positioning themselves as champions of the “forgotten” working class. By exploiting myths such as the ‘Great Replacement’ and the degeneration of Western civilisation, they channel working-class anger into nationalism and xenophobia. Their agenda once again fractures the working class, dividing it along racial, ethnic, and national lines. Once in power, the far-right capitalises on the economic desperation that initially propelled their rise, imposing austerity and anti-worker policies that further deepen inequalities. In this way, they reinforce both material and ideological barriers that protect the privileged within the citadel from the excluded ‘others,’ spreading fear and hatred on both sides. The excluded are denied entry into the zones of prosperity inside Fortress Europe, while the state exerts control over the ‘prospering’ population showing zero tolerance for anyone who falls outside the boundaries of depressive capitalist realism. The solution does not lie in reforming left-wing electoral parties to bring them in line with the ongoing collapse of the capitalist system. It lies in building a movement that rejects the entire framework of electoral politics. The answer is in direct action, mutual aid, and community-based organising that rejects both the xenophobia of the far-right and the hollow promises of the left. Only with radical class consciousness and anti-authoritarian organisation can the capitalist and state structures that continually betray us be dismantled. The post The far right, the left, and the trap of electoral politics appeared first on Freedom News.