For revolutionaries, the period must be defined by the international fight against the far right

The defining characteristic of mass politics in the present period is the stunning and terrifying growth of the international far right. Since socialist strategy must adjust itself to the character of mass politics in the period in which it operates, it follows that during this period, socialists must build internationally around a struggle against the ascension of this monster.

In this article, I will substantiate the claim that the rise of the far right is the defining characteristic of the present period. I will then try to articulate an international strategy for combating this ascension and highlight its strategically indispensable role for socialists in the current period.

The new authoritarianism and the polycrisis

The second election of Donald Trump as president of the United States marked a moment of transition, when the new authoritarianism in ascendance took a clearer form. Yet, this storm had been slowly taking shape for close to three decades, in some ways appearing like a grotesque reflection of the rejuvenation the anti-capitalist Left has experienced in that same period, since the current round of post-Soviet politics began to take shape around the anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s. Indeed, as Miguel Urbán has illustrated, asserting national cultural sovereignty against Americanizing globalization was key to far-right ideology and activities in this period. Both the new Left of this period and the insurgent far right spring from the same source: the slow moving crisis of the capitalist system.

The new authoritarianism is an uneven tendency moving in the direction of a divorce between capitalism and liberal democracy. It is moving in this direction under the pressures of what Adam Tooze has referred to as the “polycrisis,” the co-existence of multiple and overlapping crises (environmental, economic, or biological) that converge to create a total crisis for the system. The new authoritarianism is not a coherent and uniform ideology across different countries; instead, it is a general tendency moving unevenly in the direction of the aforementioned divorce, with some loosely shared characteristics.

Included under the broad umbrella of this new authoritarianism would be the now-dominant Trumpist wing of the Republican party, Fratelli d’Italia in Italy, VOX in Spain, the National Rally in France, Fidesz in Hungary, Alternative for Germany (AfD), and Reform in Britain. It would also include street fighting movements such as the Proud Boys, the international movement of “Active Clubs,” and even the spontaneous right-wing violence that we saw during the summer of 2024 in the UK.

It’s useful to outline some of the key features of the new authoritarianism using a comparison to traditional fascism as a sounding board to draw out its distinctive character:

1. Both the new authoritarianism and traditional fascism are rooted in the middle classes, the petty bourgeoisie (small business owners, landlords, professionals, managers), who experience very real suffering as a consequence of the crisis of the system, but lack a material interest in developing the analytical tools to adequately problematize it. Capitalism has given them certain benefits that the crisis has put under threat. They simultaneously want to defend capitalism and find a resolution to the crisis, a contradiction which sends them toward conspiracy thinking to explain why capitalism is not working for them as it should be. The result is that they grow suspicious of those both above and below: the large capitalists who squeeze them in the crisis, and the migrants and oppressed peoples that are easily scapegoated. Being unable to conceive of a crisis that is internal to the system, this class seeks out causes that lie essentially outside of its normal functioning.
2. Both of these movements are attempts by the system to rechannel discontent it generates among this class as a means of defending or saving itself. In traditional fascism, the pain of World War I and subsequent economic crisis were rechanneled toward scapegoating Jewish people and socialists who had “stabbed the nation in the back” when the home front collapsed and working class gains threatened the smooth functioning of capitalism. Fascism was the tool to beat back the threat the working class posed to capitalism. In the context of the new authoritarianism, the pain felt due to the collapse of 2008, its aftermath, and weak recovery, has been redirected against migrants, racial, sexual and gender minorities, and the Left, spun into a story of weak wills, and the nefarious intentions of a demonic cabal of pedophile elites, all resulting in national decline. In both cases, the middle class is used to preserve the system by rechanneling discontent the system has generated.
3. While traditional fascism openly advocated for the outright abolition of democracy, the new authoritarianism at least pays lip service to respecting its forms. At bare minimum it has no choice but to operate within its structures for the present moment, even while doing its best to undermine these from within. Yet the overall tendency, as highlighted by the contrast between Trump’s first and second terms, is to carve out increasingly more space to dismantle democratic institutions.
4. The ideological non-uniformity within the new authoritarianism highlights another of its key features: while the movement as a whole cannot be correctly characterized as out-and-out fascistic, self-identified fascists play a central role among its cadre, many of whom have roots in the more traditional fascist organizations of the past. This means that in many of the parties and organizations of the new authoritarians, there exist forces committed to deepening the organization’s politics in a more radical and violent direction. The strangeness of the present period results in seemingly contradictory circumstances, where someone who almost certainly still holds overtly fascist sympathies, such as Giorgia Meloni in Italy, sits at the head of a bourgeois state in the name of the new authoritarian ideology.
5. The lack of ideological homogeneity across the new authoritarianism highlights another key feature: its historical open-endedness. It would be a mistake to see the contemporary far right as something static, with a definite character and moving toward a definite end. The process of development of the new authoritarianism will depend on a number of factors, such as the rate at which the economic and environmental crises deepen, the sharpness of the class struggle, and the ability of the revolutionary Left to pose an alternative.
6. The new authoritarianism also distinguishes itself from classical fascism in the institutional division between the parliamentary and street fighting movements. The notable exception is Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi’s BJP, which has an explicit street fighting wing, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Yet, this street fascism interacts with the heterogeneity and open-endedness of the new authoritarianism, since there is no hermetic seal between the activities of the parliamentary and street fighting organizations, or between the parliamentary groups and the “spontaneous” right-wing street violence. The activities of one impacts the other. 

An example that highlighted this well was the racist pogrom in the UK in the summer of 2024, where years of anti-immigrant rhetoric from both far-right and mainstream parties suddenly erupted into mass street violence. In the U.S., while Trumpism does not have explicit formal connections to a street fighting movement, the U.S. has a history of extra-state right wing vigilante violence for him to draw on that runs from the KKK to the militia movement and groups like the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers. The way that these forces can be called upon for violent anti-democratic purposes was highlighted by the “beer gut putsch” of January 6, 2021, and the mass pardoning of those who were involved in this half-baked coup attempt. While Trump is currently primarily depending on the power of the executive to dismantle as many of the democratic aspects of the bourgeois state as he can, this will likely create resistance at some point, and he is keeping these forces in reserve to move into action should extra-state violence become necessary. The international expansion of the right-wing “Active Clubs,” which combine physical fitness with white supremacy, is further evidence of the growing tendency toward street violence. The future of the relationship between right-wing street violence and the parliamentary institutions remains unclear, but what is clear is that we are seeing an uptick in this type of violence across the world, and that there is a clear connection between this violence and the rhetoric and activities of the electoral side of the movement. Given the contemporary far-right’s open-endedness, it could very well move toward formal unification of these two sides. We see evidence of this potential in Fratelli d’Italia and Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany quietly fostering street-fighting forces through their youth organizations.

The far right defines the period

World politics still exists in the shadow of the crisis of 2008. This crisis was the turning point in which the hegemony the capitalist class had constructed around neoliberalism definitively broke, creating a void in which new voices, both left and right, could get a hearing.

As is almost always the case, this discontent first expressed itself spontaneously in movements like the Arab Spring, Occupy in the U.S., and 15M in the Spanish state. These movements demanded fundamental changes in the way that the system operated, expressing a spontaneous anti-capitalism. These movements were also inheritors of the post-Cold War anarchist-inspired philosophies around organization. They prioritized horizontality at the expense of effectiveness, and their rejection of politics created a void that demanded to be filled.

This void was filled by a new and resurgent radical social democracy in the form of groups like Syriza in Greece, Podemos in the Spanish state, Die Linke in Germany, Momentum in the UK, and in the U.S., the social democratic insurgency in the Democratic Party embodied in the figure of Bernie Sanders. While socialists were obligated to work alongside, and even within, these organizations in order to engage with the radicalization, any clear-eyed revolutionary could predict the trajectory of these organizations in advance. By pursuing a strategy of “socialism from above,” they cut themselves off from the only source that could materially challenge the system, the self-conscious working class, and were disciplined by capital in a slow and pathetic march back toward breaking their liberatory commitments and becoming part of the bourgeois status quo.

This is not to say that the far right was stagnant during this time, but it was still not playing the central role in terms of determining the character of the period as far as it decided the strategy of revolutionaries. In 2010, the Sweden Democrats secured 20 seats in parliament and in Hungary, Viktor Orbán won the head of government. Golden Dawn entered the Greek parliament in 2012, and UKIP gained 27.5 percent of the vote during the European Parliament elections of 2014, while the National Front became the largest French section in the same body. Poland’s Law and Justice Party won both the presidency and parliament in 2015, and the English Defense League marched through the streets in the UK. Yet despite these far-right advancements, the period was defined by a rejuvenated and youthful social democracy making some gains against a bourgeois mainstream that was trying to maintain its own increasingly unsteady hegemony.

Orbán’s election in 2010 was an important moment in the ascendance of the new authoritarianism. Before his election, Orbán had hired private lawyers to draw up a plan for rapidly destroying Hungarian democracy by dismantling the system of checks and balances that prevented power from being permanently captured by a single faction. Orbán in effect was writing the playbook for what the new authoritarians should do when they take the reins of a bourgeois state. There is in fact a direct connection between Orbán and “Project 2025,” the 900 page document from the ultra-right Heritage Foundation that is informing the blitzkrieg policies of the current Trump White House. The document outlined a plan for an American far-right presidency to attack the “deep state,” dismantling the state apparatus and replacing it where necessary with far-right loyalists. Simultaneously, the plan called for the strengthening of state intervention on social issues such as abortion and the rights of trans people, dismantling democracy, and moving toward something that could roughly be called a national-Christian state.

This document was written with the consultation of the Danube Institute, Orbán’s English language think tank, which entered into a formal partnership with the Heritage Foundation in order to develop it.

The second half of the last decade was defined by the self-immolation of the new social democratic movements, either through taking power of the bourgeois state and going back on their word (as with Syriza) or entering bourgeois governmental coalitions (as with Podemos) and betraying their principles, or by depending on such a top-heavy conception of electoralism that they inevitably hollowed out their base (as with the DSA). The far right began to claim more of a leading role in this period, with the passing of Brexit, the first election of Trump in 2016, and AfD entering German federal parliament for the first time in 2017, securing 94 seats and becoming the third-largest party in the country. Central to this growth was the Syrian civil war and the following small rise in migration, which was leveraged by the right to create a useful scapegoat. This period also saw a growth in far-right street movements, from the 3 Percenters, Oath Keepers, and Proud Boys in the U.S., and Generation Identity, the Reichsbürgers, and Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West in Europe.

The end of the decade saw enormous social explosions around the world. 2019 was a year of revolts in Algeria, Bolivia, Chile, Lebanon, Sudan, France, Ecuador, Egypt, Hong Kong, and more. Without a revolutionary socialist perspective or the organization necessary to become a powerful social weapon, these movements either stopped at political revolution, or more often collapsed in upon themselves. Yet, these movements were evidence of the energy still in reserve for large sections of the popular classes impacted by the crisis.

The pandemic changed everything. The already-shaky hegemony of the ruling class took an enormous hit as a consequence of the pandemic and the consequent economic impact. The Left took the leading role first, with a global movement for Black lives triggered by the brutal police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May of 2020. Tens of millions of people of all backgrounds took to the streets in the U.S., first rioting, burning down police stations and cars in rage, and then morphing into a sustained protest movement that lasted for months. But with a lack of organization to channel this energy and the unwillingness of the largest left-wing organization at the time, the DSA, preferring a focus on the 2020 elections to meaningful engagement with the popular struggle, these movements slowly lost their leading role, ceding it back to the center. By attacking the movement, the center attempted to regain its stability by using arguments that enabled the right wing, saying that the movement brought chaos and crime in its wake. “Law and order” against crime and immigration became the rallying cry of center and far right alike, and the Left had no organizational means to launch a counter-attack. The movements following the October 7, 2023 Hamas uprising in Gaza only reinforced this tendency, with centrists and the far right rallying in defense of the Zionist state against the movements for justice in Palestine.

In the wake of the pandemic, and after more than a decade of economic crisis, conspiracy thinking exploded, running the gambit from QAnon theories filled with anti-semitic tropes of “globalists” plotting to destroy western civilization from within, to vaccine skepticism, and the theory of the “great replacement,” in which “elites” (often code for Jews), plotted to destroy the native white populations of the West through mass immigration. With the radical Left too weak to intervene and the center offering nothing outside of the failing neoliberal norm, the far right has been able to insert itself into the cracking structure of bourgeois hegemony and carve out a space for itself by appearing as an alternative to the system in crisis.

And thus, we find ourselves in a situation in which bourgeois hegemony is failing and the right is offering an alternative vision for a world order. In 2022, Le Pen’s rebranded National Rally obtained 41.5 percent of the vote in the second round, and the Sweden Democrats became the second largest party in the Riksdag, while fascist-rooted Fratelli d’Italia led a right-wing coalition to victory in October. In 2024, Austria’s Freedom Party won the general election, and far-right parties made enormous gains in the European Parliament elections, with seven EU states, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and Slovakia all having far-right parties in their governments. The success of NR in the European Parliament elections prompted French president Emmanuel Macron to dissolve the National Assembly and call for snap elections, which saw the left-wing New Popular Front fend off the National Rally, which obtained 142 seats. The snap elections have led to a situation of profound uncertainty in France, with no obvious landing point. In the UK, far-right anti-immigrant pogroms swept the country at the end of July and the beginning of August. Now in 2025, the German Federal elections of February 23 left the AfD in second place with 20 percent of the vote, and Reform in Britain has increased its paid membership to 170,000, with its polling numbers surging, in one poll even surpassing Labour in popularity.

The new Left that emerged after 2008 has declined significantly during the period following the pandemic. Podemos has become a shell of its former self, and Die Linke saw their representation shrink to only four seats after the 2024 European parliamentary elections. The NPA (New Anticapitalist Party) split in 2021, highlighting the historic mistake of dissolving the LCR (Revolutionary Communist League). After circling the wagons around the old “left-wing of the possible” politics of Michael Harrington, the DSA has entered a collapse in membership that it is unlikely to ever recover from.

Though Die Linke, based upon its principled stand in support of migrants, did increase its margin to almost 9 percent in the recent elections, it’s unclear to what extent this success and the influx of young members will be able to shake up the reformist structures that had ossified. Though it could be a strategically important place for socialists to engage while a window remains open, if the membership is not able to break with the reformist and institutionalist tendencies that have been guiding the organization, this success could very well prove to be ephemeral.

It is worth stating here that the dynamics of the period do not in any way rule out temporary restorations of bourgeois hegemony, nor brief moments of wind being blown back into the sails of reformist movements. It’s fully possible to imagine Trump’s overreach resulting in the restoration of the Democratic party in 2028, for example. Yet, as there is no solution to the polycrisis within the framework of capitalism, the overall dynamic will be for the far-right to grow in strength. Temporary restorations and reformist upsurges will not alter the fundamental character and trajectory of the period.

Most significant in 2024 was the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the U.S. for the second time, which represented something of a watershed moment in the ascendance of the new far right. Trump came to power on an anti-system platform, promising to put America first in order to resurrect the dying American dream. His actions since he took office bear out the fact that his second term is indeed motivated by “Project 2025,” with a rapid assault on democratic institutions and the most marginalized members of U.S. society.

Trump and his team are further developing the playbook for how new authoritarians should operate when they come to power at the head of a bourgeois democratic state. They are opening a new period in which the character of the new authoritarianism has become clearer, and in which the far right will play a central role, while the Left is not only on the back foot but often finds itself without legs to stand on at all.

The international fight against the far right must define the period for the Left

If engagement with the new left-wing forces defined the previous political cycle for revolutionary socialists, the fight against the new authoritarians must define it today.

Revolutionary socialists must look with sobriety on the reality that the period of work inside mass social democratic organizations has passed. We are operating in a period when class consciousness has grown significantly compared to the time before 2008, but when the collapse of faith in democratic institutions has far surpassed this growth. In this period, the far right is taking advantage of this collapse of faith to push an alternative vision for the world, and the center of left-wing activity has moved from the electoral arena to the disparate grassroots social movements.

What are revolutionaries to do faced with such a situation? While neither the analysis of the new authoritarianism nor the strategy we develop to fight it will be identical as during the period of classical fascism, the analysis and strategies revolutionaries have developed in the past to fight off the far right can also help to inform how we can organize ourselves today to beat back this new monster.

Although its exact form will certainly have to be altered for the present period, the strategy of the united front remains the key tool revolutionaries have at their disposal today to combat the rise of the far right.

The strategy of the united front was initially developed when the revolutionary wave that shook the world following World War I began to recede in an unstable capitalist restoration around 1921. In its third and fourth congresses of 1921 and 1922, the Communist International, at that time shaped by the thought of Lenin and Trotsky, articulated this strategy as a way of dealing with the reassertion of bourgeois hegemony, where revolutionaries were operating, as a matter of definition, from a place of relative weakness.

The strategy sought to break communist parties out of this situation by reaching out and forming alliances with the organized working class positioned to the right of the communists in order to win influence among these layers, winning concrete reforms together while remaining critical of their leadership. This also familiarized the class with the experience of working in unison in an organized and coordinated way, something that would be an absolutely essential feature of any successful revolutionary attempt. This strategy was summarized in the slogan “march separately, strike together.”

The strategy took on new significance when the shaky bourgeois restoration began to succumb to the rise of fascism. Already in 1923, Clara Zetkin was arguing for the application of the united front tactic against fascism. Unfortunately, with Lenin’s health causing him to slowly fall from leadership of the working-class movement, the Comintern led by Zinoviev took on an ultra-left line, refusing to unite in action with the social democrats, enabling the rise of fascism in Italy in 1924, and in Germany nine years later in 1933.

Realizing their mistake, but learning the wrong lessons, the Stalinist Comintern then pivoted to the strategy of the “Popular Front,” which sought to unite, not the working class, but all the parties, including the bourgeois parties, who were opposed to the rise of fascism. This meant in practice that the revolutionaries had to sacrifice their independence, and the program of the Popular Front became the program of moderate bourgeois reform. Offering nothing to the toiling workers and peasants, the Popular Front constructed in Spain collapsed under fascism. This failure should remind us of the limits of such an approach in a period when a “New Popular Front” has arisen as an electoral bloc in France attempting to curb the rise of the new authoritarianism of the National Rally.

The united front today

Much of what defined the united front strategy against fascism is applicable today in the struggle against the new authoritarians. If the Left’s weakness and rise of the far right are indeed the defining features of the current period, then united front work has once again become essential.

We saw an excellent example of what this looked like with the experience of Golden Dawn in Greece, where an anti-fascist organization, KEERFA (United Movement Against Racism and the Fascist Threat), operating on the principles of united front work, completely smashed the ascendent fascist party. KEERFA built a large coalition of working class organizations, from unions to revolutionary groups, that shared a basic common interest in keeping Golden Dawn from growing.

These must be mass organizations operating openly, that, while taking security seriously, do not prioritize a paranoid security culture above openness and effectiveness.

A new united front strategy answers questions about the specific role of revolutionary organization today. If we accept, as Tempest contends, that re-building the vanguard of the working class through movement work is an essential part of meaningful left strategy today, then it has often left a question about what role remains for the revolutionary organization. In this period of growing reaction, it is clear that outside of the propagandistic role of the revolutionary organization, its activist role must be in leveraging its embeddedness in specific struggles to build the anti-authoritarian fronts that unite those struggles, bring them closer in action to revolutionary politics, and work to smash the threat of the right.

The question is how to break out of the fractured enclaves of the Left and to do mass politics in an era when the new social democracy is in retreat and the far right is in ascendance. The process of building the united front is also the process of finding a way to continue to relate to the broader radicalizing layers of society, and to increase the standing and influence of revolutionary politics inside of the class. If elements of the class are indeed moving away from the new social democracy of the last decade, then it is essential to find a way to relate these elements and pull them toward our politics. The united front is the type of tool that can do this.

Revolutionaries must seek to build large coalitions of working class organizations, from grassroots social movements, to unions, to other socialist organizations. It must organize counter-protests against right-wing demonstrations and seek to undermine right-wing activity wherever it can, making it very unappealing to appear in public as a supporter of the far-right wing. The strategy must involve creating fissures within the far-right movement in order to isolate its most radical elements. By attacking and bringing into the light the realities of the most extreme wing of the new authoritarianism, we can try to force the more moderate wing to maintain its distance under the threat of social backlash.

This movement must be international because what happens in one city, or one country, does not just have an impact on the politics of that location. As ironic as it may be to internationally organize for general global disintegration, the international far right is doing just that. This was highlighted by a recent far-right rally in Madrid, where far-right leaders gathered under the banner “Make Europe Great Again.” The meeting was attended by Santiago Abascal of VOX, Marine le Pen, Viktor Orban, and Matteo Salvini, where they hailed Trump’s victory and spoke with excitement about the chances for AfD in the upcoming German elections.

Through the international application of the strategy of the united front, the working class can win concrete victories against the international far right, while simultaneously facilitating the process of large sections of class learning to work with one another in unity. From there, the Left can begin to play a larger role in shaping the form and content of international politics. But for the coming period, the united front must be at the core of all we do.