The growing influence of nationalist and far-right forces across Europe is neither accidental nor a development occurring outside the capitalist system. It is closely connected with the needs of capitalist power itself, at a time when imperialist rivalries are intensifying, preparations for war are accelerating and the established bourgeois parties are finding it increasingly difficult to secure popular consent for their policies.
Capitalism does not merely create the social discontent exploited by the far right. It also provides the political conditions in which nationalist and reactionary forces can channel that discontent away from the struggle against capitalist power.
The sharpening competition between the United States and China, the confrontation between NATO and Russia, and the struggle over markets, energy resources and trade routes are aggravating contradictions within the Euro-Atlantic bloc itself.
Different sections of European capital have competing interests concerning relations with Washington, Moscow and Beijing, the future of the European Union, military expenditure and the consequences of sanctions and economic confrontation. These disagreements inevitably find expression in the political systems of the capitalist states.
It is particularly revealing that, contrary to simplistic historical analogies with the 1930s, certain contemporary far-right parties have gained influence by criticizing aspects of the NATO–EU confrontation with Russia. While social-democratic, liberal and conservative governments support military escalation, sanctions and the transition towards a war economy, nationalist forces exploit popular opposition to their consequences. They promise peace, national sovereignty, cheaper energy and protection for domestic industry, presenting themselves as an alternative to policies that have burdened millions of working people.
Yet behind these promises, there is not the slightest challenge to capitalist exploitation, much less any prospect of freeing the working class from imperialist competition. What is being proposed is another strategy for defending the interests of the national bourgeoisie. The experience of Meloni's government in Italy is characteristic. Once in office, its earlier Eurosceptic rhetoric was adapted to the fundamental commitments of the Italian capitalist state, including its position within NATO and the EU.
The far right can therefore serve different, sometimes overlapping purposes: expressing the interests of particular bourgeois sections in the ongoing international realignments and redirecting working-class discontent towards nationalism, hostility against immigrants and the illusion that workers and capitalists share common national interests.
There is, however, another side to this political development, no less important than the first. The very forces presenting themselves as defenders of democracy against the far right are frequently those whose policies have helped create the conditions for its growth.
Social-democratic governments and liberal-conservative parties have presided over attacks on wages and labour rights, the commercialization of public services, increasingly unaffordable housing and the systematic subordination of social needs to capitalist profitability. They have also supported the escalation of military expenditure and deeper involvement in imperialist confrontations.
Having implemented these policies, they now demand that workers rally behind them to prevent the far right from coming to power.
This is the familiar blackmail of the so-called lesser evil. The working class is told that, regardless of its grievances, it must once again place its trust in those who have governed against its interests, because the alternative would supposedly be even worse.
Appeals for a broad alliance of “progressive” and “democratic” forces thus become a means of restricting popular opposition to the boundaries of bourgeois politics. The question of capitalist power disappears, replaced by the question of which political personnel should administer it.
The contradiction is even more striking when the European Union officially condemns fascism while promoting the unhistorical equation of communism with Nazism, tolerating the destruction of anti-fascist monuments and incorporating anti-communism into its ideological arsenal. What sort of anti-fascism demands opposition to the far right while treating the capitalist relations that sustain it as untouchable?
The far right and its supposedly democratic opponents may have real differences over specific policies and international alignments. Yet these disagreements unfold within the same social system, whose fundamental relations of exploitation neither side intends to abolish.
What historical experience teaches the Communist Parties
It is precisely here that the historical experience of the communist movement acquires particular significance. The struggle against fascism has been inseparably connected with some of the most heroic chapters in the history of the international communist movement. But that history also raises a difficult strategic question: what happens when anti-fascist struggle becomes detached from the revolutionary struggle for workers' power?
The experience of the Popular Front strategy, adopted at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935, deserves critical examination in this regard.
In France, cooperation with social-democratic and bourgeois forces against fascism developed around a programme of governing within capitalist relations rather than preparing for socialist revolution. In Spain, the subsequent evolution of the Communist Party towards national reconciliation and eventually Eurocommunism demonstrated the long-term consequences of strategic concessions made in the name of anti-fascist unity.
None of this diminishes the heroic sacrifices of communists who fought fascism, often at the cost of their own lives. The question concerns the political strategy of the communist movement and the consequences of subordinating its revolutionary objectives to alliances aimed at defending bourgeois democracy.
For experience has demonstrated that even the most determined anti-fascist activity cannot, by itself, guarantee a Communist Party's revolutionary character if its strategy becomes tied to the preservation or management of capitalist power. The issue is not whether communists should confront fascist organizations. That is beyond dispute. The real question is under which class banner they wage this struggle, with which political forces and towards what ultimate objective.
There is a fundamental difference between developing the struggle against fascism as part of the independent revolutionary activity of the working class and reducing it to an alliance with bourgeois forces whose objective is to preserve the existing social order.
In the latter case, the danger is that communists cease to act as an independent revolutionary force and become defenders of a bourgeois political system that continually generates new forms of reaction.
The revolutionary experience of the Bolsheviks provides an important historical lesson. Their independent class policy during the First World War, and particularly between February and October 1917, demonstrated the significance of maintaining a revolutionary strategy amid profound political upheaval, without subordinating the working class to one or another section of the bourgeoisie.
These lessons are hardly of merely historical interest. At a time when inter-imperialist competition is sharpening and the danger of generalized war is growing, they concern the very direction of the contemporary communist movement.
Communist Parties face the task of strengthening their roots in the working class, rebuilding the class-oriented workers' movement and confronting nationalism, fascism and imperialist war without becoming appendages of social democracy or other bourgeois political forces. They cannot accept the demand that workers make sacrifices for the competitiveness, military strength or geopolitical ambitions of their own bourgeoisie. Nor can opposition to one imperialist power justify support for another.
The struggle against the far right cannot be reduced to saving bourgeois democracy from its reactionary offspring. It must be connected with the struggle against capitalist power itself, against the system that gives rise to fascism and reaction, accommodates them when necessary and uses them to defend the interests of capital.
The working class has no reason to choose between different defenders of the same exploitative system. The historical task of the communist movement is not to rescue capitalism from its contradictions, but to organize the struggle for its overthrow and for socialism.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.