4. Neo-fascist capitalism, democracy, marxism and resistance

Abstract

Writing as a Marxist academic and lifelong political and trade union activist in the area of direct democratic action and the electoral arenas, I ask three questions. Firstly, where are we now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, in terms of the economy, society and policy/politics? I identify increased (‘racialized’ and gendered) social class inequalities, repression, conservative authoritarian brutalism, and increased resistance. Secondly, where do we want to get to, asking should we conform, reform, or transform the economy, society and policy/politics focusing on democratic Marxist egalitarian transformation in contrast to neoliberal capitalism and regulation/reformist capitalism. Thirdly, how do we get there? As public pedagogues, through political parties, social movements, and combinations of direct action and electoral politics. I discuss traditional social democratic parties, Broad Parties of the Left, and United Fronts. I conclude by asking what we can do, in different arenas, calling for courage, solidarity, kindness and activism.

Keywords: marxism, neoliberalism, capitalism, resistance, solidarity, transformation, pedagogy, activism.

Résumé

En tant qu’universitaire marxiste et militant politique et syndical de toujours dans le domaine de l’action démocratique directe et des arènes électorales, je pose trois questions. Premièrement, où en sommes-nous aujourd’hui, au quart du 21^e siècle, en termes d’économie, de société et de politique? J’identifie des inégalités de classe sociale accrues (« racialisées » et genrées), la répression, le brutalisme autoritaire conservateur et une résistance accrue. Deuxièmement, où voulons-nous aller, en nous demandant si nous devons nous conformer, réformer ou transformer l’économie, la société et/ou la politique, en nous concentrant sur la transformation égalitaire marxiste démocratique par opposition au capitalisme néolibéral et au capitalisme régulateur/réformiste. Troisièmement, comment y parvenir? En tant que pédagogues publics, par le biais des partis politiques, des mouvements sociaux et des combinaisons d’action directe et de politique électorale. Je discute des partis sociaux-démocrates traditionnels, des grands partis de gauche et des Fronts unis. Je conclus en demandant ce que nous pouvons faire, dans différentes arènes, en appelant au courage, à la solidarité, à la gentillesse et à l’activisme.

Mots-clés : marxisme, néolibéralisme, capitalisme, résistance, solidarité, transformation, pédagogie, activisme.

Resumen

Escribiendo desde mi posición de académico marxista y activista político y sindicalista de toda la vida en el ámbito de la acción democrática directa y las luchas electorales, planteo tres preguntas. En primer lugar, ¿dónde nos encontramos ahora, en el primer cuarto del siglo XXI, en términos de la situación económica, social y política? Identifico un aumento de las desigualdades sociales (racializadas y de género), represión, brutalismo autoritario conservador y una mayor resistencia. En segundo lugar, ¿a dónde queremos llegar? Preguntando si debemos conformarnos, reformar o transformar la economía, la sociedad y/o la política, centrándonos en la transformación democrática marxista y igualitaria en contraste con el capitalismo neoliberal y el capitalismo regulador/reformista. En tercer lugar, ¿cómo llegamos a donde estamos? Como pedagogos públicos, a través de partidos políticos, movimientos sociales y combinaciones de acción directa y política electoral, discuto los partidos socialdemócratas tradicionales, los Partidos Amplios de la Izquierda y los Frentes Unidos. Concluyo planteando qué podemos hacer, en diferentes arenas, llamando al coraje, la solidaridad, la amabilidad y el activismo.

Palabras clave: marxismo, neoliberalismo, capitalismo, resistencia, solidaridad, transformación, pedagogía, activismo.

Introduction

In this chapter, I want to: 1) examine Marxist analysis of social class and intersectionality; 2) analyse capitalism and its current neoliberal and neo fascist/pre-emptive fascist form; and 3) set out a revolutionary anti-capitalist, Marxist analysis, program and strategy regarding capitalism and resistance. Here, I stress that revolutionary Marxists go beyond reformism and reforms, beyond radical democratic, social democratic (and, certainly, liberal-progressive and conservative) analysis, programs and strategies. Then, I focus on the fourth component, the Marxist emphasis on revolutionary activism, on political leadership and on the organisation of the working class. Here, I focus on the question of the United Front and its alternatives. I conclude with a fifth component of the analysis by briefly signposting socialist democracy as opposed to liberal democracy in terms of two characteristics: economic democracy, and direct democracy.

Marxist critique of ‘liberal’ / bourgeois / parliamentary democracy and of ‘Pygmalion democracy’

Marxists see parliamentary (and presidential) elections as a sham, as giving an illusory choice between ‘Tweedledee and Tweedledum,’ between political parties and programs that operate within the strict limits set out by national and global capitalism. Actual or symbolic death and defenestration await those leaders and parties that challenge the discourse and the practice of social class-based oligarchic capitalist rule legitimised by bourgeois democracy. Examples of capitalist limitations on democracy are the actual deaths of the elected Marxist President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, of Patrice Lumumba in 1960, and the symbolic death and political defenestration of Jeremy Corbyn, the left social democrat leader of the UK Labour Party in the years 2015 to 2019.

The ‘Pygmalion Effect’ refers to a chimera, regarding bourgeois democracy, the supposed freedom and choice to choose a new government and/or leader. Bourgeois parliamentary democracy is enforced variously by the full panoply of state apparatuses, by both ideological state apparatuses, such as the media, schools, universities, and often the established religious organisations, and by the repressive state apparatuses, such as laws, the police, police batons on the skulls of protesters, and the attempt to limit by law what is acceptable to local and national capitals. Bourgeois, parliamentary democracy is, thus, a chimera of freedom and choice. This is the Pygmalion Effect, whereby the claims in this case, that such democracy can affect radical change and implement the will and the policy wishes of the electorate, the people, is a chimera, a fraud, a fake.

Having said that, elections and electoral politics can assist in some mobilization of ideas that are not generally disseminated by the media to the broader population as well as the mobilisation of activists and their wider supporters. I refer here to my own experience in fighting thirteen election campaigns as a candidate between 1972 and 2023, and also to my experience in direct action (strikes, demonstrations, occupations, marches) in non-electoral political action.

Marxist analysis of social class, class conflict and Capital-Labour relations

The relationship between Capital and Labour is not just based on discrimination, oppression and cultural oppression, and what Bourdieu termed “symbolic violence” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). Unlike discrimination and oppression based on race, religion, gender, sexuality, age, language, and disability, the relation between Capital and Labour is also, importantly, a relationship of economic exploitation. This is the exploitation and appropriation of the surplus value created by the labour power of workers. Surplus value is the value produced by workers in addition to their necessary labour time, the time they need to be paid for to keep them alive and fit for work. Surplus value in Marxist analysis is where a worker’s wage is only a proportion of the value they create in productive labour. Profit is different. The rest of the value workers create, after taking account of factors such as rent and capital investment, is taken by the capitalist class as a profit.

Institutions and apparatuses, such as health, education or social welfare systems, help keep a labour-force educated and fit enough to work. They serve to supply and reproduce workers’ labour power calibrated for capital and profit. Of course, such “maintenance” and reproduction of the existing economic and social relationships of production is often contested, and is not automatic.

 Politically, emphasis on ‘identitarian’ politics, social and political movements and specific demands–Black Lives Matter, Gay Rights, and Women’s Equality, for example–can be coped with and addressed to a certain degree, within the confines of capitalism. It is very useful for capitalists in their ongoing attempts to prevent working class unity, to emphasise and prioritise these aspects of subjectivity, of self, in contradistinction to that of the social class. And there are jobs for embourgeoisified layers of these groups in the education industry, in the media, in politics.

It is common for capitalists and for the ruling class to ‘incorporate’ leaders of such groups into the ranks of the handsomely paid (as it is to incorporate with flattery, status or preferment many trade union leaders, suborned by the rich). Léger (2023), in his hugely useful book and analysis in Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism notes that “much of today’s study of culture happily deals with race, sexuality and gender but not with the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society”. Léger quotes, from an earlier critique of postmodernism by Terry Eagleton, that “Neoliberal capitalism … has no difficulty with terms like `diversity` or inclusiveness` as it does with the language of class struggle: In today’s universities, museums and corporations, racists are cancelled but not class exploiters” (Léger, 2023, p. 12; see also Léger, 2021).

Léger (2023, p. 12) asserts with great clarity that “identity and class are not equivalent”. Class is transformed from an economic and, indeed, social category to an exclusively cultural or discursive one or one in which class merely signifies a “subject posiThe terms `neo-fascism` and `pre-emptive fascism’ (Hill, 2025) are now appropriatetrumption” (Kelsh & Hill, 2006). Intersectionalists, gender and race separatists often derogate from social class materiality (the materiality of economic exploitation) to one ‘cultural’ aspect of ‘self’ among many (Kelsh & Hill, 2006). Kelsh and Hill warn against class, the transformation from an economic and, indeed, social category to an exclusively cultural or discursive one.

Race, gender and other forms of oppression are particular oppressions. Class indicates universal oppression, based on selling our labour-power to Capital for wages. The universalism of class is foundational to solidarity, resistance and emancipation from the rule of Capital. This is not at all to deny the history of slavery, colonialism, and their impacts on the lives and consciousness, fears, hope and deaths of the enslaved and colonised people, nor the development of racism, lynchings, and a thousand macro-and micro-aggressions. Marx himself noted the “divide and rule” strategy of the ruling capitalist class, writing that “division of labour seizes upon, not only the economic, but every other sphere of society and everywhere lays the foundation of that all engrossing system of specializing and sorting men (sic)” (Marx, 1867/1999, online).

To repeat, in addition to oppression and discrimination, notably at interpersonal and institutional levels, the working class is also subject to economic exploitation. One result, a matter of life and death, is that within the working class the less well-paid layers/strata have shorter lives and poorer health. How long you live and how sick you get is related to social class. In the UK, for example, there is an 18-year life-expectancy difference in healthy life between the richest and the poorest (Hill, 2022).

Outside Marxist circles, it is little remembered that it was, and is, working class organisations as parties, trade unions and their leading cadres, who are often the initial and primary targets of killings and imprisonment under fascist and Nazi regimes. When fascists are trying to seize power, they routinely vilify and scapegoat various ethnic and religious minorities. This has been obvious with the Far-Right riots and attacks on Asylum Seekers` hotels in England in July 2024, with for example, a Far-Right mob trying to burn down an Asylum Seekers hotel in Rotherham (Socialist Worker, 2024). However, when Fascists and Nazis are in power, and prior to seeking it, it is those organisations and local/national leaders of the working class, those who directly threaten Capital, who are among the first to be incarcerated, tortured, and killed.

Capitalism in its current neoliberal and neo-Fascist form: Intensified class war/ extraction of surplus value

Capitalist Intensification

We see the global rule of Capital intensifying: (‘racialized’ and gendered) working class immiseration and impoverishment are visible and intensifying. This intensification is firstly in economic terms, and, secondly, in terms of increased visibility and awareness.

Regarding the intensifying economic exploitation of workers, while superficially it appears that the worker receives a ‘fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work,’ the extraction of surplus value reveals the deep reality of class exploitation. The gulf in incomes between the rich and the rest has grown wider and wider. CEO (Chief Executive Officer) pay “has soared 1,209% since 1978 compared with a 15.3% rise in typical workers’ pay” (Bivens & Kandra, 2023). Referring specifically to the USA, they report that, in 2022, CEOs were paid 344 times as much as a typical worker in contrast to 1965, when they were paid 21 times as much. In the UK, for tens of millions in Britain, there is a cost-of-living crisis; prices of energy and food have increased far more than workers’ incomes. There has been a savage cut in the standard of living of the poorest in Britain. Four million people in the United Kingdom were living in poverty in 2024.

Neoliberalism is one of capitalism’s intensifications and can be considered as morphing into another form of fascism (Hill, 2021a, 2022). Today’s ‘late capitalist’ neoliberalism in its economic, fiscal and political forms, is accompanied by increased authoritarianism, increased repression and increased nationalism and xenophobia, all of which blend into neo-fascism.

As the gulf between the billionaire class and workers increases exponentially, and welfare benefits and services deteriorate, worker anger and the delegitimization of mainstream political parties, parliamentary democracy and populism within the Left and Right grow (Leopold, 2024), thus underpinning worker resistance. For example, the strike wave in Western Europe in 2022-2023 and the Gilets Jaunes in France 2018-2020) illustrate working class alienation (Hill, 2021a, 2021b, 2022; Hill & Zhao, 2024). In response to such worker resistance, there have been repressive laws in various states, such as Minimum Services Provision laws, restricting the right to strike as well as an increase in police brutality and the severity of prison sentences in various countries.

Capitalism has never been a warm embrace for the working class as a whole. However, in the post-Second World War social democratic version of capitalism, very few people in the richest countries of the world had to use food banks, and fewer people than today died of hypothermia or of simply not being able to afford to live. (It was very different in the colonies and empires, where genocidal and super-exploitative capitalism has ruled for centuries with scant regard to the cries and deaths of millions).

As Westmoreland (2024) notes: “The older generation that grew up in the 1950s and 60s and remember living under the post-war consensus that a protective, welfare state was necessary to keep the working class onside after the horrors of the 1930s and the war”. I grew up in a poor, single parent working (factory) household in the late 1940s and 1950s. We had no holidays away, did not know what the inside of a restaurant looked like, and our pocket money as youngsters was one iced lollipop a week on a Friday (payday) night. This was standard for working-class families in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. But we were clothed, fed and housed on a single worker’s wage. Such has been the degrading of the worker’s wage in recent decades that, for millions, this is no longer possible, even on two wages. We now have a period characterized by an explosion of ‘in-work poverty’.

Extreme neoliberalism and the move to the xenophobic and repressive Far Right

What we have seen with extreme neoliberalism is the establishment of the radical philosophy of Ayn Rand, what I call her ‘economic and moral Nazism,’ together with Margaret Thatcher`s ideological hero, Friedrich von Hayek.

Ayn Rand and Friedrich von Hayek were quite happy to consign people to destitution and death: “if they can’t look after themselves, then they can perish”. For Ayn Rand and von Hayek, humanity becomes truly human only when it is self-sufficient, and not a burden on the State. This economic Nazism, of the tiny State shrunken by its welfare responsibilities and funding, has taken hold, for example, in what were the wilder reaches of the Conservative Party in Britain. These ‘swivel-eyed’ small State ideologues have controlled the Conservative governments and party in the UK in recent years, and, in 2025, under the leadership of Kemi Badenoch, still do.

The Conservative Party has moved very far on the ideological spectrum, embracing increasingly unequal, corrupt, xenophobic, nationalist policies and practices compared to 50 years ago. Discourse within Conservative Party mainstream politics has now veered into openly racist and fascist National Front slogans of the 1970s. In Western Europe, traditional conservatives in Finland, Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands have jumped into governmental bed with far-right parties, whose histories, traditions and demands are rooted in fascism. In the Netherlands, for example, “The far right is not a foreign body in an otherwise healthy organism, but rather an expression and product of the shift to the right of the entire ruling class” (Zora & Schwarz, 2024).

In terms of pedagogy, public pedagogy as well as formal (institutional) pedagogy, there have been thousands of articles and books written about the conservative movement clamping down on the curriculum, on the right to protest, for example, about genocide in Gaza, and also about the repression and privatisation/quasi-privatisation of education in different countries. In fact, I was dismissed from one of my jobs when one of the British governments of the 1990s effectively removed most issues of class, race, gender, politics and sociology from the teacher education curricula (Hill, 2003). The Conservative government renamed “teacher education” as “teacher training,” and became far more about ‘teaching skills’ without theory and critique.

At my most recent dismissal, termed ‘redundancy’, I was actually accused of setting up a Marxist ‘cell’ of staff and students. If that is what you can call the weekly Wednesday morning meetings of radical left and Marxist comrades, then, indeed, I was.

Capitalism and the unmasking of Bourgeois democracy

We are seeing a huge, much-remarked-upon swing to the Far-Right globally. Capitalist democracies during the period of managed capitalism gained legitimacy through the appearance of the separation of capitalist ownership rights in the marketplace from the political institutions that govern capitalism. During this period, Social Democratic parties in Western Europe, and to a lesser extent, the Democratic Party in the USA, paid some amount of attention to labour unions and mass constituents in formulating their policy agendas.

The era of neoliberalism (late 1970s to the present) has broken any such appearances, with the dominant political parties, regardless of party label, moving rightward to embrace many of the same economic policy agendas. As Cox and Skidmore-Hess (2022) elaborate, the period of neo-liberal dominance has been a period when the capitalist class, and governments of various political hues, have used the state “to prevent democratic movements from interfering with capitalist accumulation and market imperatives” (see also Patnaik, 2016).

The far-right programme does not so much refer to the classic jack-booted fascism of the 1930s, but rather to the aim of accelerating and deepening the neoliberal model, with an increasingly ‘deconstructed’ State… (except for the military and police spheres) accelerating the ‘freedom’ of capital’s power to reactivate expanded accumulation. The neo-fascism of the 21st century, with a discourse based on class, ethnic, and gender hatred appeals to fear and resentment to wage the `cultural battle` for ideological hegemony.

And at both a demagogic and a state enforcement level, xenophobia flourishes, stimulated by the radical right, quasi-fascist politicians as various as Donald Trump, the AfD in Germany, and many of the UK Conservative Party Cabinet members 2015-2024 and leadership in opposition since then, such as Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, Kemi Bademoch. Neoliberal capitalism is simply one version of capitalism, one of the most extreme versions of capitalism, a version which is currently, in the mid-2020s, veering, plunging and marching into neo-Fascism. Not only has the exploitation of workers become intensified, with the diminution of the actual wage, and the shredding of the social wage, shredding the previous version of the `welfare state, ` the more social democratic `welfare capitalism` of the three decades or so after World War II, it has become more widely obvious, more naked, more authoritarian, and more openly xenophobic, nationalist and cruel. Capitalism has never been a warm embrace for the working class as a whole.

Trump, in the USA, embraces ultranationalist fascistic groups such as The Proud Boys and others, who are celebrated at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) (Díez-Gutiérrez et al., 2024)

Increased political and social and ideological authoritarianism, Neo-Fascism

This embrace of ideas, rhetoric and policies of fascist, authoritarian, communalist, xenophobic and ultranationalist currents is, today, global. We see it with Modi in India, Erdogan in Türkiye, Javier Milei in Argentina, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Donald Trump in the USA. We also see it, more ominously, in countries such as the UK, France and Germany, whose leaders and governing parties have tried to restrict the right to strike and protest, and have popularised xenophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-minority rhetoric. In the UK, the Far Right, in July 2024, elected their first-ever MPs, galvanising and being galvanised by posh xenophobes, such as Nigel Farage, lauded by the right-wing Press, and by street-level operatives such as Tommy Robinson and his followers (Kimber, 2024).

Capitalist democracies during the period of managed capitalism gained legitimacy through the appearance of the separation of capitalist ownership rights in the marketplace from the political institutions that govern capitalism. During this period, Social Democratic parties in Western Europe, and to a lesser extent the Democratic Party in the USA paid some amount of attention to labour unions and mass constituents in formulating their policy agendas.

In many countries there is the very real danger of actual fascism, and, with it, the destruction of the welfare state by what Grace Blakely has termed `vulture capitalism`, where “corporations circle over decaying social infrastructure, swooping to gobble up profitable morsels and leaving skeletal monuments of the welfare state behind” (Westmoreland, 2024). In recent years, we have witnessed a resurgence of the far right around the world. The terms ‘neo-fascism’ and ‘pre-emptive fascism’ (Hill, 2025) are now appropriate to describe the forces currently occupying the far-right space.

Capitalism, social murder and genocide

Capitalism accepts that people will have to be sacrificed. If people are not useful for Capital or stand in the way of capitalist imperialism/ neo-colonialism and its geopolitics (as is the case with the current genocide in Gaza), then they die. This class war is a war that most representatives of the working-class trade union leaders, social democratic leaders and representatives of the Labour Party have renounced fighting. They are, indeed, fighting the class war, and they are fighting it on the side of the capitalist class.

In the UK, as Westmoreland (2024) notes, `At the end of the day, the role of the trade-union leaders is always to negotiate the rate of exploitation and act as the managers of strikes`. In response to this intensification of exploitation, to this intensification of pauperization, there is increased resistance to the rule of Capital and an upsurge of resistance in the form of strikes, marches and demonstrations, since 2023, in particular marches of millions against the genocide in Gaza. This has become so much more evident, exemplifying the revulsion at the hypocrisy of the imperialist-colonialist-capitalist project regarding the support of many Western governments, and parties of both Right and social democratic Left, for the Israeli genocidal war on and in Gaza (Nineham, 2024). The Biden-Trump-Sunak-Starmer-Macron and largely Western cast-iron support for the Israeli government and armed forces has, for millions, torn away the mask of Western /USA decency, humanity, and, importantly, also the mask of Western bourgeois parliamentary democracy.

This form of “democracy” is decidedly centred around pro-capitalist parties of the Right and the social democratic Left scrambling to demonise and penalise any criticism of the state of Israel is castigated as ‘antisemitism’. Governments of various states, such as USA, UK, France and Germany, and the Chief Executives of various universities, particularly in the USA, deploy brute force and dismissals against peaceful protesters. In July 2025 the Starmer led UK Labour government proscribed the peaceful group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation- the first non-violent group ever to be proscribed in the UK.

Marxist analysis, program and strategy regarding capitalism and resistance: Marxism and reforms/reformism

Resistance: Strikes, social movements, demonstrations, Gaza

The ruling classes referred to above are concerned about social explosion and about rage on the streets. They are concerned that there will be mass riots, mass rebellion, and organised working-class direct action through strikes and other manifestations. Across Western Europe and beyond, trade union movements have exploded into a widely supported public consciousness (Smith, 2023). Trade union memberships, while halved or more in the last 50 years, grow when there are militant strike actions. People around the world are now seeing more critically and clearly through the pro-capitalist (always contested) hegemonic ideology. The material conditions of people’s lives, living and lived conditions, have changed and appear to be changing dramatically for the worse. We can grasp this through Gramsci`s (1971) famous quote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.

Prior to October 2023 and continuing today, there has been an upsurge in militancy on the streets and in the workplace. For instance, over the last 20 or so years, we have seen massive growth of social movements like Black Lives Matter, Me Too, and Extinction Rebellion. I have been going on marches in my city (of Brighton and Hove, with a population of a quarter of a million, in England) for over 60 years, since I was a teenager. Other than the anti-Iraq Invasion marches in 2003, the demonstrations in the last few years have been the biggest in the history of this city, particularly those condemning the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza and murderous apartheid in the West Bank.

Writing as a revolutionary anti-capitalist Marxist, and as a revolutionary critical pedagogue, then, together with Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and others, we all work for and accept reforms.

I will be 80 years old in October 2025. I grew up in the welfare state. I had free orange juice, I had free milk, free dental treatment, free medicine, and free visits to the doctor or the hospital. In the National Health Service (established in the UK in 1948), all of these were totally free at the point of demand (until 1951-2), paid for by us all through the tax system. (In Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, prescriptions of medicines are still cost-free to the public today).

I also benefited from free secondary education, and, indeed, because of family poverty, was given vouchers for vests, underpants and other clothes. To enable me to stay at school from 16 to 18 and then go to university, not only did I have a free university education, in addition, I had a living grant from the government (payable via the local authority/ municipality). Like other working-class students, I also worked during vacations, in my case, usually on building sites/construction sites, with my brothers and father, who were carpenters. So, I, and tens of millions of others, benefited from these reforms, which were inaugurated in the UK by the post-war Labour government; these were reforms demanded by workers and trade unions before, during and after the 1939-1945 war.

I am a child of what was a fully functioning Welfare State. A major difference between Marxist and non-Marxist socialists (that is left social democrats, such as Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn in England, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the USA) is the belief that reforms are not sustainable under capitalism. Of course, Marxists fight for reforms. Marx and Engels (1848/2010, online) emphasise, in The Communist Manifesto:

The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.

But they continue, “they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat”.

Such reforms can be developed using a strategy of “anti-capitalist structural reforms”, such as nationalisation and public control, as Mandel (2008) set out in Marxist Economic Theory. A programme of left social democratic reforms, such as the 2019 Manifesto of the Corbyn-led Labour Party could also be seen as what Trotsky called ‘a transitional programme,’ one with demands that seem reasonable to a majority of the population (e.g., widespread public control, taxing the rich and corporations more heavily) but which could not be countenanced by Capital.

As Trotsky explained,

The strategic task of the next period – prerevolutionary period of agitation, propaganda and organization – consists in overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard (the confusion and disappointment of the older generation, the inexperience of the younger generation. It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demand and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat. (Trotsky, 1938/2006, online; See also Hill, 2012, online; Joyce, 2024 for explanations of the Transitional Programme).

Reforms can always be snatched back, which is what capitalism does in times of crisis. Marxists understand that reforms are stripped away when there are the (inevitable recurrent and systemic) crises of Capital, such as the 1930s, 1970s, 2008 and since COVID-19. For Rosa Luxemburg (1900/1999, online), reform and revolution had never been opposites: they complement each other. She opens her major pamphlet, Reform or Revolution, as follows:

 Can we contrapose the social revolution, the transformation of the existing order, our final goal, to social reforms? Certainly not. The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the Social-Democracy the only means of engaging in the proletarian class war and working in the direction of the final goal – the conquest of political power and the suppression of wage labour. Between social reforms and revolution there exists for Social Democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means, the social revolution, its aim.

Classical Marxists, like Marx, Lenin and Luxemburg, welcome reforms, without being reformist. Rosa Luxemburg explained how “superficial and temporary changes to the economy did not constitute a fundamental break from the past”. Socialists cannot, Luxemburg argued, choose between reform and revolution, as if they were choosing different sausages from the buffet of history (Cox, 2019).

That is why people who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. … Our program becomes not the realisation of socialism, but the reform of capitalism; not the suppression of the wage labour system but the diminution of exploitation, that is, the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of suppression of capitalism itself. (Luxemburg, 1900/ 1999, online).

What left Social Democrats and Revisionist Reformist Marxists do not want is Marxist revolution, the replacement of Capitalism by socialism and, ultimately, by communism. Revolutionary socialists, such as Rosa Luxemburg, argued that socialism can only be achieved through the self-emancipation of the working class through an act of revolution.

On the other side of that debate, the Reformist side, within the SPD (Social Democratic Party in Germany, then the largest and best organised of all socialist parties in Europe, and globally) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, led by Eduard Bernstein, were the reformists, or revisionists. These argued, and still argue, that capitalism had reached a stage in which it was no longer necessary to call for a revolution, but that enough reforms could be put into place, including more democratic rights, more social welfare programs and so on.

Many Marxists have adopted the ‘stage theory’ of communism. Colonial communist parties in the second half of the twentieth century, and also in pre-revolutionary and revolutionary Russia (for example, the Mensheviks), argued that a proletarian revolution could not take place until there had been a bourgeois democratic revolution (overthrow of feudalism or colonialism and replacement by capitalism). In pre-revolutionary Russia, `stage theorists` such as the Mensheviks argued that underdeveloped countries such as Tsarist Russia must first pass through a stage of capitalism via a bourgeois revolution before moving to a socialist stage.

How do we achieve democratic Marxism, what some describe as Socialism? It is not easy to define differences between socialism and communism; the terms are sometimes used antithetically and sometimes coterminously. This is so historically and today (See Hill, 2021b).

It is not just the party or movement leaders, activists or writers of revolutionary anti-capitalist articles, though all have a part. It is not just about card-carrying party or movement members, street canvassers, leaflet deliverers, or workers in state educational institutions. It is not just teachers, lecturers and professors but also neighbours, trade unionists, community activists and political activists. Of course, journalists, political media influencers, radical rap, folk and rock stars and players, dance groups and choirs, poets, professors, lecturers and teachers, writers and actors all have a privileged position of being public pedagogues. The clearest, most powerful and most threatening direct action, threatening the ruling class and their profits, and, indeed, their control and ownership, is strike action, whether of a handful of workers or a mass strike, such as a national strike by a union, or a general strike of all or most trade unions.

It is also the case of direct takeovers of factories (such as the biennio rosso, the two red years of factory occupations in Turin, 1919-1921) (Trudell, 2007) and in the farmworkers’ takeovers that are led by the Communist Party, of the latifundia, the landed estates, in the Alentejo southern region of Portugal, during the Portuguese anti-Fascist revolution of 1974 (Hill, 1983).

I fought numerous elections for the British parliament, the European Parliament and at the municipal level when I was an activist in the Labour Party. That is when Labour was far more left-wing than today, when there were several Labour members of Parliament who were socialist, such as members or supporters of the Militant Tendency, and when the annual party conference was generally oriented toward the left social democrat posture.

For example, standing for the mass reformist party, the Labour Party, I became leader of a Labour Group of nineteen Councillors on a County Council through the mid-1980s. When I stand for Marxist coalitions, such as TUSC, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, then I do not get elected. Marxists and communists can act as tribunes of the people during the campaign, in the pre-campaign period, and can publicise causes and events and policies. Candidates and campaigns can get publicity for socialist/communist/Marxist beliefs.

It also allows us, socialists/communists/Marxists, to gauge how much support we have and, thereby, how much we must do. The electoral arena is valuable, even when the standard/typical far Left/ Marxist/ Trotskyist campaigns score a standard, relatively small 1%-5%, more or less, of the vote. The votes for Left/ Socialist, pro-Palestine candidates in the July 2024 UK general elections were astonishing; five Independent Left Members of Parliament were elected, and many more came close.

Election campaigns mobilise activists and supporters, distribute thousands of leaflets with socialist/ Marxist policies, publicise ideas and ideology, and put our ideas and program before the electorate and the population. General elections are times when many, even most, people are more tuned into mainstream politics than usual. Many people question the existing political system and focus on what different parties and campaigns have to offer, and the actual campaigns are generally limited to the goalposts within which the main political parties are permitted to expose their mainstream positions.

Social movements, sects and Marxist parties, broad parties of the Left

What should our relationship be with social movements and with sectarian or Broad Left parties or coalitions? It has been very interesting for me in recent years to work with a variety of groups who I have never worked with before in my over 60 years of political activism, groups such as Anarchists (in the ‘Don’t Pay UK’ movement), Trans activists, Queers for Palestine, or Muslim and Middle Eastern groups focusing on Gaza and Palestine.

For example, I co-initiated, co-organised and collaborated in the general election campaign of Tanushka Marah, a pro-Palestine, socialist and anti-austerity parliamentary candidate, in my own city of Brighton and Hove, in the constituency of Hove and Portslade. At the June 2024 general election, we secured 3,049 votes, 5.9% of the total in that constituency (Hill, 2024). In recent years, I have been going on marches, demonstrations, zooms and meetings in public spaces and in pubs to discuss with the people involved in Black Lives Matter, in XR, Extinction Rebellion, and in the Don’t Pay UK campaign of 2022-2023, which was run by anarchists.

As Marxists, in terms of where we put our activism, our time and our capabilities, we have a number of choices regarding who we work with. We can work in sects, in Broad Left parties, or in United Fronts. Why do we go into tiny Marxist sects/ groups? At various times in Britain for the last 50 years, Militant, now `The Socialist Party of England and Wales` (SP or SPEW), and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) have had some thousands of members. The Revolutionary Communist Party (formerly the Militant ‘Grantites,’ not to be confused with the RCP/Living Marxism group of the 1980s and 1990s) has over 1,000 members presently. All have some impact, in terms of education and activism, in developing class consciousness and experience.

Do we, revolutionary anti-capitalist Marxists, go into broader parties of the Left (left of the traditional social democratic and Labour parties), known as Broad Left parties, such as Podemos, Die Linke, O Bloco Esquerda, Syriza, Left Unity in Britain, or into electoral coalitions in Britain, such as the Socialist Alliance, TUSC, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Alliance. Some of the Broad Left parties started off as coalitions of communist and far-Left, Marxist parties. Currently, in the UK, ‘Collective’ and earlier this century, Respect and Left Unity earlier this century was a mix of a United Front from Below, and United Front from Above. As United Fronts from Below they embraced and included members in some numbers who were not joining because their existing small Marxist party did. Both Respect and Left Unity comprised ‘individual’ members, but having said that, most of their members and activists were there because they belonged to/ were members of existing small bureaucratic-centralist parties such as the SP or SWP. Respect and Left Unity were also thereby United Fronts from Above- the coming together of existing parties- in particular, the SP and the SWP. With any new United Front type party, there is the danger of overweening, over-dominant personal leadership, for example, with the various incarnations led by George Galloway in the UK, Respect, the Workers’ Party.

 At the parliamentary, regional, and municipal levels, do Marxist and left-wing social democrat groups enter coalitions with the pro-capitalist Greens, Liberals, and (right-wing) Social Democrats? There is a literature about ‘Broad Parties of the Left’. A critique of these Broad Parties of the Left is that when they do get into local, regional or national government, they end up carrying out cuts demanded by their less left-wing coalition partners.

Such parties become submerged, rendered ineffective by the more right-wing pro-bourgeois parties/groups with whom they have/had thrown in their lot. What happens is that the parties nominally Marxist, or anti-capitalist, end up ‘tailing’ the parties to their right. The far-left party keeps quiet its revolutionary aspirations and programme in order to ensure the survival of the more right-wing political groups with which it is allied.

Tailism is where it is argued that Marxists, or Far-Left, or the Communist parties should not take the lead in a revolutionary situation, but should allow economic events– crises, strikes, unrest–to unfold on their own.

Mao Ze Dong criticised ‘tailism’ very clearly: “Tailism in any type of work is also wrong, because in falling below the level of political consciousness of the masses and violating the principle of leading the masses forward it reflects the disease of dilatoriness”. Mao Ze Dong continued: “Our comrades must not assume that the masses have no understanding of what they themselves do not yet understand. It often happens that the masses outstrip… when our comrades are still trailing behind certain backward elements” (Zedong, 1966, p.127).

The website World Socialist Website (WSWS) is full of castigating such ‘betrayals,’ where the WSW asserts (rightly in my view) that the Left/Marxist/Communist parties entering such coalitions ‘provide a left cover’ for right-wing policies and coalitions, which, although nominally Left, and using Left language, carry out right-wing, austerity and foreign policies.

The United Front

Do we take part in Marxist United Fronts, with each group, such as some of the groups I belong to? For instance, OKDE-Spartakos, in Greece (part of the International Revolutionary Tendency of the Fourth International), keeps its integrity, organisation, program and leadership, while working with other Workers` parties that are clearly revolutionary socialist and have different traditions of socialism/Marxism in the Antarsya Coalition. This is the favoured perspective of my group in the UK, The Campaign for a Mass Workers Party (CMWP) as well. As Trotsky, (1922/2007) declared, in a classic definition, at the 4th World Congress of the Communist International: “the united front tactic is simply an initiative whereby the communists propose to join with all workers belonging to other parties and groups and all unaligned workers in a common struggle to defend the immediate, basic interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie.” I have broken up the rest of Trotsky’s speech (1922/2007, online) into five separate points, summarizing the essential points:

1. How could revolutionaries who formed and continue to form a minority in a working-class movement achieve change and work with reformists despite working within the class and despite the great majority of people holding reformist ideas? How could revolutionaries spread their ideas while working with reformers against specific aspects of the system or specific issues?

2. Now, the united front allows a set of demands, which are acceptable to revolutionaries and indeed to the section of the working class who are not yet revolutionary, to be put together.

3. It is important to stress though that, despite this, there is no idea here of liquidating your politics. It is about separate groups coming together, remaining independent and able to pursue goals that are independent from the united front. It is about working together in the united front to articulate a wider political vision.

4. It is also, of course, a place where contestation happens, where debates can happen in a key way, where revolutionaries can build revolutionary parties via the united front and through conversations about strategy and tactics.

5. It is particularly important, when using the united front tactic, to achieve not just agitational, but also organisational results. Every opportunity must be used to establish organisational footholds among the working masses themselves (factory committees; supervisory commissions made up of workers from all the different parties and unaligned workers; action committees; etc.).

Many other writers (e.g., Choonera, 2007; Williams, 2024; Hill, 2024) have pointed out that a trade union is ‘a rudimentary form of the United Front in the economic sphere’. To repeat one of Trotsky`s points above, what the United Front does is it allows for putting together a set of demands which are acceptable to revolutionaries and to sections of the working class who are not yet revolutionary. As a parenthesis, Trotsky, and others in the Trotskyist tradition, point to the highest form of United Front achieved.

Factory Councils are like United Fronts of workers because they combine both revolutionary Marxists or Communists and reformists. United Fronts try to bridge the gap between the revolutionary parties, revolutionary Marxists, and the bulk of the working class. Conscious and organised revolutionaries are a minority inside the working class, but to make a socialist revolution, the working class needs revolutionary Marxist ideas, organisation, and leadership.

Regarding working within Broad Parties, such as the Corbynite campaign or parties, or in the current parliamentary electoral campaigns in the UK running on anti-austerity and pro-Gaza-Ceasefire programs, there is also the danger of “liquidationism,” as highlighted by Trotsky, above.

The United Front is about separate groups coming together, remaining independent, and being able to pursue goals independently of the United Front while also working together to articulate a broader political vision. It is also a place where contestation happens, where debates can happen, including about the content to put on election leaflets and posters, about speeches and about relations with local Trades Councils (local coordinating bodies in the UK of trade unions) and trade unions.

In China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established two ‘United Fronts’ (1926-1928, and 1931-1937). The Second United Front was forced on Chiang Kai Shek following his capture by two northern warlords, who insisted that Chiang Kai Shek fight the Japanese, not the communists. This became the Workers’ and Peasants’ Democratic United Front (Mao`s original suggestion for the name was the ‘Anti-Japanese National United Front`). The Second United Front was on the basis of a “bloc without” alliance between two separate groups, with both retaining separate armies.

Riddell (2011) presents a comprehensive description of united fronts, with examples of these in Hungary, Germany, the UK and China, notably during the interwar period. It includes the refusals of communists in Italy and Germany to carry out united front work to stop Fascists and Nazis. There have been recurring debates about ‘a united front from below,’ or a ‘united front from above’, for example, by agreement with the leaderships of other workers’ political parties. Brand (2021) poses the distinction between ‘a fraternisation of party leaders,’ on the one hand, and, alternatively, ‘the association of all workers, whether communist, anarchist, social democrat, independent or non-party’ (Brand, 2021)

Perhaps the most egregious example of separatist, anti-united front policies in history was the Soviet dominated Comintern between 1928 and 1934. Having adopted (Communist International) a policy of supporting the United Front in 1922, over the opposition of many, including the French and the Italian communist parties, the Comintern, the Communist International, between 1928 and 1934, adopted a policy described as `ultra-leftism` with the German Communist Party, the KPD, classifying the social democrats (SPD) as social fascists and refusing joint actions with the socialists (Sewell, 2024).

Socialist democracy and economic democracy as opposed to Bourgeois democracy

To summarise the potential roles of an organisation such as CMWP: CMWP plays three roles. firstly as a distinct, separate revolutionary Marxist anti-capitalist grouping/ network/ organisation; secondly as part of a Marxist United Front, or what could be termed a Revolutionary Marxist United Front. And this serves as a Left Bloc within, thirdly, the broader United Front, such as in the UK, left social democratic developments involving Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn.

Marxist alternatives to Bourgeois democracy are a mixture of economic democracy and direct democracy. There are numerous examples of economic democracy and varieties of workers’ control (of factories, farms, offices or enterprises). Examples are the early Soviets in Russia, workers’ control in Tito’s Yugoslavia (Tito, 1950/2006), workers’ occupations in Britain during the 1970s, such as Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, agricultural collectives in post (1974) Portuguese Alentejo, and Argentina’s worker-controlled shops, factories, schools or clinics in the last quarter of a century (Workers`Control.Net, 2011). Journals such as Workers control.net, and workers’ cooperatives or collectives throughout history have established various forms of Workers’ Control (see Socialist Worker, 2008). Sometimes, this has been defensively (to stop an enterprise closing, to protect jobs and livelihoods), sometimes offensively (to move towards and secure non-capitalist work and economic relationships).

Sewell (2018) asks: “What is the importance of workers’ control?” He answers: “for workers’ control, the abolition of so-called business secrets, the right for workers’ representatives to inspect the company’s books …… would expose the real workings of the capitalist system”. It would also reveal the full extent of the exploitation of the working class: “The abolition of ‘business secrets’ is the first step toward actual control of industry,” as explained by Trotsky in The Transitional Programme (1938/2006, online).

Workers no less than capitalists have the right to know the “secrets” of the factory, of the trust, of the whole branch of industry, of the national economy as a whole. First and foremost, banks, heavy industry and centralized transport should be placed under an observation glass.

The immediate tasks of workers’ control should be to explain the debits and credits of society, beginning with individual business undertakings; to determine the actual share of the national income appropriated by individual capitalists and by the exploiters as a whole; to expose the behind-the-scenes deals and swindles of banks and trusts.

In terms of Direct Democracy, workers’ control of industry, etc., control from below is counterposed to ‘public control from above,’ for example, with the state nationalisation in post-war (WW2) Britain and the monolithic state control of industry in Soviet Russia under Stalin where the capitalist elite was replaced by an unaccountable bureaucratic elite and there was no true democracy or workers` control of industry.

Marx was enormously influenced by the Paris Commune. His pamphlet, The Civil War in France (1871/2009), saw the Commune as the first example of a working-class revolution in history. Marx was fascinated by its organisation, its direct democracy, its workers’ control of the functions of the state (as well as of enterprises) and its strategy of replacing (rather than using) existing state machinery in history.

Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police were at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and always revocable, agent of the Commune. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman’s wage…

Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune. Having once got rid of the standing army and the police – the physical force elements of the old government – the Commune was anxious to break the spiritual force of repression, the “parson-power”, by the disestablishment and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies…. The whole of the educational institutions was opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of church and state. (Marx, 1871/ 2009, online).

Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable (Marx, 1871/2009). Mandel (1985), followed Trotsky’s theory of ‘socialist democracy’ in Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Socialist Democracy (in the second section, Workers-council power and the extension of democratic rights for the toiling masses). In various writings (e.g., in the 1938 Transitional Programme), Trotsky summarised socialist democracy as synonymous with multi-party socialist representation, autonomous union organizations, workers’ control of production, internal party democracy and the mass participation of the working masses. This was very different from Stalin`s top-down, bureaucratised and non-democratic government.

Conclusion

It is basic Marxism to seek to replace the economic and social relations of production under capitalism with socialist relationships. And seek to do so, for example, through developing class consciousness, through the actions of Marxist political activists, media, teachers and critical pedagogues, neighbours or co-workers.

To use the classic quote from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx, 1845/ 2002), not any change, not just reforms, not just change for ‘the democratic republic,’ but socialist change and the proletarian revolution.

Class consciousness does not follow automatically or inevitably from the objective fact of the economic class position. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx observes:

In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that divide their mode of life, their interests and their cultural formation from those of the other classes and bring them into conflict with those classes, they form a class. (Marx, 1852/1974, p. 239)

Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy (1847/2009) distinguishes between a `class-in-itself` (an objective determination relating to class position) and a `class-for-itself`.

That is a class aware of itself as a class in the Capital-Labour relation, a subjective appreciation and understanding of class position. To refer to a classical Marxist injunction from The Poverty of Philosophy, (Marx, 1847/1999), the key political task facing communists is “the formation of the proletariat into a class”, that is, a “class for itself”, a class aware of itself as a class in the Capital-Labour relation.

The Communist Manifesto explicitly identifies `the formation of the proletariat into a class ‘as the key political task facing communists. The process that links economic and social classes is that of class consciousness. The class conflict arising from class consciousness and as a constituent of class consciousness is that class struggle, which is fundamental to understanding economic, political and educational change. Marx states, in an analysis glaringly prescient about neo-fascist/pre-emptive fascist capitalism today, that it is in periods of extreme class differentiation and polarisation that we experience the intensification of the extraction of surplus value-profit from the labour power of workers, that more and more workers perceive, subjectively, the objective nature of their exploitation.

Nineham (2010, p. 15) draws on Lukacs concerning periods of capitalist crisis: “in the midst of panic, the role of state institutions is exposed, as politicians vote to bail out the banks, or police forces attack unemployed protestors”. This is Marxists’ political and pedagogical importance of party, organization, leaflets, newspapers, booklets, books, media, social media and all of the ensuing analysis and debate. Here, as well as in the classroom, in conversation and in rhetorical speeches, we carry out the role of socialist analysis, of revolutionary pedagogy, of connecting the here and now of a rent strike, a pro-immigrant rally, an anti-austerity march, a picket line of a zero-hours contract employer, a Black Lives Matter or an Extinction Rebellion march, or an occupation of a tax-avoiding multinational company-owned shop. These are valid and extremely valuable reforms, political reforms.

It is by connecting these with developing a subjective socialist class consciousness, by demanding and propagandizing the need for an anti-capitalist, socialist revolution, a change in the economic relations of production that a change from capitalism to a socialist reality, and ultimately, a communist economy and society in which “class” itself is abolished will occur. In Lenin`s words, “In the struggle for economic emancipation, for the socialist revolution, the proletariat stands on a basis different in principle and it stands alone” (Lenin, 1902/1990, online). We have to be activists, as it is not enough doing Zooms, doing lectures, making speeches, doing stalls and ‘selling the newspaper’.

These are all very important, but in addition, we have to get involved in movements in trade unions, direct political action, and other forms of political action and solidarity. We need to have a clear socialist vision. To conclude this section on the United Front, my own analysis is that Marxists and revolutionary anti-capitalist Marxists need to maintain their/our own organisation, analysis and program, avoiding the following: (a) collapsing into mass leaderless ‘spontaneism’, (b) without losing, in effect, or dissolving ourselves into social democratic parties or Broad Left parties, or (c) without being satisfied with top-down, Trades Union Congress or other non-democratic occasional mass rallies, as useful those are at developing solidarity, and (d) needing to avoid the ‘substitutionism’ of becoming and behaving like a sect, substituting and prioritising the interests of our own organisation/party over the interests of ‘the class’.

Silverman (2024, p. 22) asks: “So how do we overcome the duopoly of the twin-headed Tory/Starmerite dictatorship?” His response (p. 24) is that:

what is needed is not just yet another pop-up party under a self-appointed leader hawking a readymade programme and shopping around for a rank and file. …. The Labour movement will create its own party; it will formulate its own programme; it will appoint its own leaders. Within that party socialists will be patiently explaining the need for a decisive break with capitalism and a clear socialist programme.

My own analysis is that:

We insist on the need for political independence of the anticapitalist left, which also entails being organizationally distinct from reformists, and not dissolve in a broader left political front, which is something different from the necessary united front of all militant forces, workers’ organizations and parties of the left in action. We stand for the political independence of the anticapitalist and revolutionary left from the capital, the state and its institutions, we insist on the anticapitalist overthrow (Hill, 2012, online).

By joining forces to present candidates, we can take a first step, and help speed up this process, to help launch a mass workers’ party, campaigning for a clear socialist programme. Thus, we have to be there, with our experience, working with those who are developing their knowledge, working with their experiences and knowledge to join in the battles that are a part of the class war. The importance of solidarism, solidarity with each other and ideological, political and emotional solidarity is fundamental. We are not the only socialist or revolutionary or Marxist or anti-capitalist in the workplace, or in the rally or in the street.

We need courage. And we need solidarity. So, solidarity comrades.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Stephen Beresford, Paul R. Carr, Mike Cole, Jesus Jaime-Diaz, Glenn Rikowski, Bill Templer and Spyros Themelis for their comments on a draft version of this chapter. Any errors, of course, remain mine.