‘People’s Brexit’: a modern myth

A discussion piece from Neil Faulkner

A mighty storm is gaining force. Some, having seen it coming, argue for furling the sails and battening the hatches. Others, in denial of the storm, hold up a picture of their destination: a sun-soaked haven beyond the horizon. Some stare reality in the face; others take refuge in fantasy. Let us call these two factions the Realists and the Delusional.

Hermann Remmele, a leading German Communist in the interwar period, belonged to the Delusional faction. This is what he said in the Reichstag in October 1931:

Herr Brüning [the German Chancellor] has expressed it very clearly: once they [the Nazis] are in power, the united front of the proletariat will emerge and make a clean sweep of everything … We are not afraid of the Fascists. They will shoot their bolt quicker than any other government.

He was not alone. The German Communist Party was a monolithic organisation that took its orders from Stalin. All members, high and low, were expected to peddle the same line. There was little room for independent thought, let alone open dissent. No-one survived for long as a party member in open defiance of the dominant theory of ‘Social Fascism’. Communist party members were at the forefront of the street battles against the fascists and paid a heavy price but this could not save them from a terrible political defeat which resulted from this political line.

According to the theory, the main enemy was not the Nazis (who won 6.4 million votes in 1930), but the Social Democrats (with 8.6 million votes). The Communists (4.6 million votes) spent most of their time attacking the Social Democrats, seeking to replace them as the main party of the German working-class.

‘The 14^th of September [the date of the 1930 general election] was the high-point of the Nazis’ advance,’ proclaimed the Communist Party’s Berlin daily, ‘… what comes after can be only decline and fall.’

But in the July 1932 general election, the Nazis got 13.7 million votes, 37% of the total, and became the largest party in the Reichstag. The combined vote of the workers’ parties, the Social Democrats and the Communists, was slightly less, at 13.2 million (36%).

Though the Nazis had failed to ‘decline and fall’, the main enemy for the Communists remained the ‘Social Fascists’. As Communist leader Ernst Thälmann explained in September 1932:

The Trotskyists put forward the slogan of unity of the SPD with the KPD to divert the desire for unity among the masses into fake political channels … precisely at the present stage in Germany the two [the SPD and the Nazis] appear in their true colours as ‘twin brothers’ …

 Now it was no longer a matter of the Nazis having passed their peak. On the contrary, the Communists expected them to take power. But they would not last, and their brief rule would be but the prelude to socialist revolution. ‘After Hitler, our turn,’ proclaimed Thälmann.

Hitler came to power in January 1933. The Nazi dictatorship destroyed the German labour movement and went on to launch a world war and to murder millions in the death-camps. It is possible – very possible – that had the Communists formed an alliance with the Social Democrats to fight Fascism in 1932, Hitler would have been stopped.

We are not yet – as the German Communists were in 1932 – confronted by half a million Brownshirts. We are not yet facing the imminent prospect of the wholesale destruction of labour organisation.

But what is true is that the labour movement today is at a very low ebb – far lower than that of Germany in 1932. And what is also true is that a tidal wave of racism, authoritarianism, and right-wing populism is sweeping across Europe and America.

These two harsh realities make ‘People’s Brexit’ a fantasy of the Delusional faction. Without naming names, let me refer to one example among many, taken more or less at random from among the websites of the sectarian left. In an article headed ‘Next stop … the People’s Brexit’ (as in, dare I say it, ‘After Hitler, our turn’?), we are told,

We need to fight for an outcome that ensures a solution to the NHS funding crisis, a solution to the housing crisis, a raising of workers’ wages and employment rights, as well as total opposition to scapegoating of migrants and racism in all its forms. In other words, for what Jeremy Corbyn has called a ‘People’s Brexit’, a chance to shape the future of British society along egalitarian lines.

So in response to the tidal wave of racism and reaction represented by the Brexit vote (and the Trump vote, and the Le Pen vote, and the Orban vote, and all the rest), and notwithstanding the perilous weakness of working-class organisation and consciousness, we are invited to content ourselves with holding up a picture of socialist transformation.

This is worse than delusional: it is deeply dangerous in a manner directly comparable with the politics of the world Communist movement in the early 1930s. It is to imply that the Brexit vote was a left-wing assault on a corrupt neoliberal elite. It is to imply that our side is strong, that it is advancing, that it is poised to make great gains. It is to deny a clear and present danger, and thereby to lull us into a false sense of security and optimism.

There is an urgent need to construct a defensive shield to protect the minorities, the migrants, and the labour movement; a defensive shield to block and begin to push back the racists. We need a united front of the workers and the oppressed to challenge the growing normalisation of racism, to counter the abuse being hurled at the victims of the system, and to resist an increasingly repressive and racist state machine.

The immediate task is defensive. Anything else is delusional.

Neil Faulkner is the author of A Marxist History of the World and the forthcoming A People’s History of the Russian Revolution.