Brexit Britain: a clear and present danger

Neil Faulkner writes:

As the post-referendum debate continues, a number of articles make the case that the Leave vote was a class vote and a left-wing victory. One argues that ‘the tinder that was building at the base of society’ has now ‘caught fire’, and that ‘the political establishment has lost contact with the masses’. It goes on to argue that we are seeing ‘an intensification of the class struggle’, and that now is the moment for ‘socialist planning projects to meet this crisis’.

These arguments are based on false optimism, false hopes, and false perspective. And if we do not understand social reality, we cannot act effectively to change it. This is an appeal to comrades on the Left to accept that many of us misread the EU Referendum, and that we now need to take stock, revise our perspectives, and reconfigure our strategy.

To have got it wrong on Lexit was an understandable mistake: the EU is a nasty neoliberal setup. But in the event, the Left voice was almost entirely inaudible in the Referendum debate, the agenda was set by the Right – on both sides – and the Brexit campaign has unleashed a torrent of racism. That is the simple truth. But many socialists seem caught in a denial of this, that risks moving them ever further away from the harsh realities confronting us.

Let us consider the Lexit argument in detail.

1. The Brexit vote was primarily an ‘anti-elite’ revolt, and racism was only a secondary factor.

The mistake here is twofold. First, there is nothing new about ‘the tinder at the base of society’ and the widespread hostility to the political and business elite. The only question is which political forces will lead it. The Brexit vote is a victory for right-wing leadership of the discontent. It is therefore a victory for the racism with which the entire Brexit campaign was laced.

There is a fundamental difference between workers being led by right-wingers and racists, and workers acting for themselves in a mass movement based on class unity and class struggle.

2. The Brexit vote represents a deepening crisis for British capitalism and the British state. This crisis, reflecting an intensification of the class struggle, is an opportunity for the Left.

There is indeed a deepening crisis – not just of British capitalism and the British state, but of the entire neoliberal order and the system of global financialised monopoly-capitalism on which it rests. This is not new. Again, the question arises: who will lead? When the crisis poses that question forcefully enough, the centre crumbles and politics polarises to right and left.

But the two poles are alternatives, and socialists have to distinguish between them. The EU Referendum campaign was not an argument between right and left, between neoliberalism and socialism, but an argument between soft right and hard right, between less racist and more racist fractions of the British ruling class.

3. The Brexit vote means we can anticipate a sharp rise in working-class struggle and we should be putting forward the most radical demands.

The economic class struggle has been at rock-bottom for about 25 years. Nothing has come close in significance to either the miners’ strike of 1984/5 or the poll tax revolt of 1989/90 in the period since. We have seen great political upsurges, most notably against imperialism and war, but union power in the workplaces has been hollowed out by the neoliberal counter-revolution, and the strike rate has now been bumping along the bottom, at mid 19^th century levels, for a quarter of a century.

We are failing to defend the most basic gains of the post-war boom. Welfare is being cut and cut and cut. The NHS is being privatised. Graduates enter working life with massive debts because higher education has become a commodity, not a right. There is an unprecedented housing crisis because council estates have been sold off, new social housing has not been built, and rent controls disappeared long ago in a Thatcherite ‘bonfire of regulations’.

To argue that we need more ‘socialist planning’ seems surreal. Right now, even having a little more Keynesianism would be a good start. Socialist planning is pie-in-the-sky in Brexit Britain, and if we offer people something they cannot have, we will demoralise and demobilise them – and condemn ourselves to irrelevance. We need to be grounded in the contemporary class struggle.

The German Communists welcomed the terminal crisis of Weimar Germany in 1932 with the notion ‘after Hitler, our turn’. They failed to identify the main threat and the urgent need for a defensive battle by a united working class. The crisis is not yet of that kind, but we cannot afford to make that mistake again through an inability to understand that the rise of the Far Right across Europe is a clear and present danger, and that Brexit Britain is a project driven by the Right, not the Left.

4. The pro-Remain Left is patronising, pessimistic, and pandering to middle-class liberalism.

The EU is a bankers’ club, hard-wired for neoliberalism, that it is leeching the wealth out of European society to feed the grotesque greed of the rich. We all agree. No socialist voted Remain thinking that the EU is anything else. Socialists voted Remain despite this reality, without enthusiasm, for this simple reason: we sensed that most Remain voters would vote Remain for broadly progressive, multi-cultural, anti-racist reasons, and that most Leave voters would vote Leave under the influence of some form of ‘take back control’ nationalism and ‘send them back’ racism. We were more right than we guessed.

For me, the decision, some months ago, was difficult. I had always been anti-EU. I am still anti-EU. But I am not anti-European, any more than I am anti-internationalist, and I made the judgement that the real issue in people’s heads when they voted would not be the EU of the bankers, but the Europe of the common people. It was a close call, but it was the right call.

The figures seem to prove it: all the signs are that between two-thirds and three-quarters of young people, black people, British Muslims, Labour voters, Green voters, and trade union members voted Remain. That is, the more progressive section of the working class voted Remain, not Leave.

They abhorred the racism of the Leave campaign – and rightly so, for it is bigoted, ignorant, and divisive. But the misery and despair of many who voted Leave are real; it is this that feeds the growth of the Far Right, and we need united mass struggle around achievable radical demands to create an alternative pole of attraction.

This will take much time and effort. The campaign to defend the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party is a critical immediate task. The attempt to build a fighting campaign against NHS privatisation is another. The attempt to fan student rent strikes into a conflagration in the autumn is one more. But not least, we need an intelligent, honest, critical Left uniting against the clear and present danger represented by the advance of the Far Right and the threat of racism.

Neil Faulkner is a revolutionary socialist, a Corbynomics/Brick Lane Debates activist, and the author of A Marxist History of the World: from neanderthals to neoliberals.