To defeat the far-right surge in Germany, socialists must defend democracy
First published at Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
Some things take my breath away. I read that in former East Germany, 37 percent of Germans agree that our country is in danger of being swamped by foreigners. In western Germany, that figure is 23 percent. I read about the abominable way in which Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader Friedrich Merz whips up resentment of refugees, the wretched of the earth, who he says are receiving dental care under false pretences at the expense of native Germans. He is dividing in the hope of ruling.
I read that Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) members and other far-right figures recently cooked up a plan to deport our fellow citizens by the millions. Five years ago, leading AfD figure Björn Höcke was already saying that, “in addition to protecting our national and European borders, we will have to institute a large-scale re-migration project. And in this context … it will not be possible to avoid a policy of ‘finely tuned cruelty’”. I remember the Nordkreuz and Südkreuz groups, the far-right networks in government bureaucracies, in the police and the armed forces, their hit-lists. But I also read about the complicity of the “traffic light” coalition, which destroys hopes, works hand-in-hand with corporations to attack the weakest, and cuts social benefits. The coalition trampled on those who braved the perilous Mediterranean crossing to reach this place. It pursued a climate policy that exacerbates social divisions and the existential anxieties of the poorer half of society. In this way, it helped to strengthen the Right and undermine support for climate policy.
All of this makes me afraid. We have seen the emergence of a radical nationalist party, the AfD, in which a modernized, barely disguised fascism coexists with right-wing conservatism and authoritarian neoliberalism. What binds these tendencies together is an anti-pluralist conviction that they alone defend the interests of “the people” against treacherous elites (even if it is members of the petty bourgeoisie, managers, and entrepreneurs who set the tone in the party leadership) and their contempt for refugees and migrants, whom they view as a burden, as a threat, and as external and internal enemies.
From this standpoint, “the people” (das Volk) are viewed as a nation: here since time immemorial, united by custom and ancestry, and as in fascism in its classical form, beleaguered by incessant threats against which they must be defended and renewed. The clever ones speak of an “ethno-cultural unity”, the purity and therefore the existence of which is threatened; the less sophisticated talk about “race”.
Why now?
The AfD’s success and the increasing significance of its ideology cannot be explained mechanically. It is not the case that, finding that they have no money, people clap their hands on their bellies and rush to the polls to vote for the Right. Nor is it true that only those who have always been on the right will ever vote for the right or adopt fascist ideas. To understand the AfD’s success, we have to consider the interactions between the processes that shape people and the attitudes they espouse, between the social and political crises of our time, and between the struggles and the creative work of political actors.
Over decades, social scientists have documented the presence of right-wing populist and right-wing extremist attitudes in the German population. Marxists specifically have investigated the interplay of class positions and suffering, on the one hand, and authoritarian, racist, and antisemitic ways of dealing with them on the other (see for example the work of Klaus Dörre). Indeed, neoliberalism has generated a social climate that the New Right can exploit.
Neo- and post-fascist movements can therefore be understood as what Adorno called “wounds” or “scars” of a democracy that exhibits oligarchic characteristics and has undergone authoritarian reconstruction, in which mainstream parties have fostered inequality, poverty, insecurity, and the power of capital, in addition to isolating refugees and promoting economic nationalism. However, researchers have typically warned against explaining political orientations simply on the basis of socially induced suffering. Some precariously situated people may turn to the right when they feel humiliated by their social position — but far from all do.
The post-fascist movement draws its supporters from all classes and social strata; it addresses people far beyond the mass petty bourgeois character of historical fascism. As Michela Muria writes in How to Be a Fascist: A Manual, “A real populist deals with everyone according to their needs: the poor receive some free fish every year; the middle class receive a fridge to store what’s left over; and the upper classes receive the pond where everyone will have to pay to fish.“
Rather than look for a cause, it is more helpful to ask under what conditions racist attitudes find expression in racist opinions and a willingness to take violent action; when it is that things that were once merely thought are now also spoken aloud; how scepticism about migrants can turn into fear. Two things are important in this regard: first, reservoirs of tolerance are depleted in times of crisis and stress. As Helmut Dahmer writes, “In every crisis situation, our tolerance towards that which is different from ourselves shrinks, and the circle of identity draws tighter around us. Things that we were able to tolerate in better days, that even aroused our curiosity and sympathy, fall under an advancing shadow of panicked estrangement.”
Second, parties do not merely represent that which already exists. That also create a mental space of their own, promote certain thoughts and ideas, and push back against others — the simple fact of a party’s success has the effect of confirming its ideology. This ongoing ideological and cultural work has the capacity to change not only everyday consciousness, but also what is conceivable and what is sayable. To paraphrase Gramsci, a party has achieved hegemony when its own arguments are put forward by its opponents. When the old neo-Nazi slogan “the boat is full” is trending across the entire political spectrum in the German asylum debate, uttered no less readily by Sahra Wagenknecht than by the CDU/CSU, then that indicates that the radical nationalist right has become hegemonic.
Fascization?
The AfD has become the mainstay of a radical nationalist camp that is home to a variety of right-wing forces. The party consolidates a bloc that is fighting to bring about an authoritarian, violent, and racist shift; it is a playground for radical conservatives and racist, authoritarian neoliberals such as Alice Weidel. But over the last few years, the AfD — and with it the entire camp — has in general shifted to the right under the influence of the post-fascist, Björn Höcke.
Post-fascists do not claim fidelity to the tradition of classical fascism (unlike, for example, with groups like the Third Way). On the contrary, they attempt, whether plausibly or not, to appropriate other political pedigrees, such as the Conservative Revolution of the Weimar period. Post-fascism is not a transitional phenomenon, but rather an attempt to modernize fascism under twenty first-century conditions. “Blood and soil”, for example, becomes the “cultural community” and “survival space” (Kulturgemeinschaft and Überlebensraum), while open scorn for democracy becomes the promise of achieving (or restoring) popular sovereignty by the radical right. At the same time, the marks of classical fascism — for example, the focus on a movement and militancy, radical anti-socialism, anti-liberalism, and the nationalism by which violence “against others” is legitimated — are present.
Post-fascism propagates a view of the world that, while delusional, also generates meaning. It offers people warmth, belonging, and a deformed kind of solidarity that appears as comradeship. The linchpin is the idea of being a victim of forces that one cannot control and of people who supposedly enjoy unearned advantages — and a revolt against all of these things.
The issues that post-fascists take up are not entirely arbitrary, but they do display a certain flexibility. Their criticisms always serve to highlight the corruption of the republic and to mark out their enemies as enemies. Thus, for instance, they claim that Germans today are victims of the Great Replacement. The idea is that socialist elites are bringing Muslims and other migrants to Germany in order to destroy the nation and its people. Or that an elite that is fixated on ecological ideology is deliberately destroying the prosperity of the German people, its industries, and its way of life.
We are in the midst of a process of fascization, the rapidity of which is difficult to assess. The fascization of the 1920s is not comparable with that of the 2020s, but the elements are there, even if they are not yet fully developed. A sizeable minority of those who make up the popular classes has become deeply estranged from the ruling political elite. Nationalism is whipped up by the CDU/CSU, the Free Democrats, FDP, sections of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, and the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). It is rooted in the day-to-day consciousness of broad sections of the population. Post-fascists seize on it and intensify it. Their slogans invoking a nation in need of protection from the Great Replacement function like firebombs, as the underbrush is already dry.
In the 1920s, right-wing conservatives and monarchists brought the fascists to power. Today we are witnessing debates within the CDU and CSU over whether they should cooperate with the AfD at the federal or state level; as far as local government is concerned, they have been cooperating for a long time. These debates are crucial: will the AfD manage to ascend the ladder of democracy and take state political power in order then to do away with parliamentary democracy?
The willingness to use violence is there, both on Pegida’s margins and, as a fantasy, at the centre. It is apparent in the hit lists that circulate among conspirators in the armed forces and the police and in the mock gallows from which traffic-light politicians hang in effigy. It is in the arson attacks on refugee accommodation and apartments inhabited by migrants, in the murders in Hanau and Kassel, and in all the places where the republic has failed to protect its citizens.
For a republican antifascism
We thus have no time to lose, and it is therefore good and important that people organize against the Right and take to the streets together against the AfD. We need a republican antifascism that forges broad alliances and even tries to win over CDU/CSU and FDP supporters, that works with them to defend the republic that we socialists find insufficient. We need an antifascism that defends freedom and political and social rights, and that strives to constrain the space of the sayable as far as the far right is concerned.
That presupposes a positive relationship to the republic, a left-wing republicanism. According to Austro-Marxist theoretician Otto Bauer, democracy is the form taken by the rule of the bourgeoisie. And yet it rules under political and legal conditions where the workers’ movement is able to freely organize, evolve, grow, and exert pressure in support of its demands. Under capitalist conditions, a republic is only ever half-way democratic, because the bourgeois form of property inevitably leads to inequality and the concentration of economic power, and thus also of anti-democratic economic power.
For this reason, left republicanism aims to change the existing property relations and structures of wealth. A full democracy and a republic in which the people themselves rule will only become possible with the creation of a welfare state that provides a comprehensive system of social security and strengthens worker power, and with the democratization of the economy. Popular sovereignty in this sense can only exist in a socialist society. This socialist strain of republicanism is centred on the idea of political citizenship as understood by the radical democratic tradition — the citizen as an active human being who has the capacity to shape society, and on the ideal of equality. For this reason, it is also imperative to defend even the half-way democratic republic, given that civil society and bourgeois freedoms — which we criticize as insufficient, but nonetheless wish to preserve — are at risk of being destroyed. It is true that in the fight against the radical right we cannot simply rely on the state, however we must defend existing achievements and make use of the constitutionally enshrined rights that make both a democratic path to socialism and an effective struggle against fascists possible.
Republican antifascism must defend democracy, our citizens who have immigrant backgrounds, the diversity of our ways of life, and the achievements of feminism, the labour movement, and the LGBTQ movement, which the Right so despises. Those who will not fight against the fascists and alongside Social Democrats, Greens, and even Christian Democrats (whose policies we firmly oppose), or those who maintain that their policies are as right-wing as those of the AfD, may well live to feel the pain of the difference when all of us are interned together in post-fascist camps.
I admit that this is not easy. The concerned face of Chancellor Scholz, who participated in the Schröder government at a time when it was pushing millions of people into poverty and social insecurity, may be hard for some to stomach. And who is not disturbed by the thought of demonstrating alongside members of the Bundestag who vote in favour of the so-called “repatriation bills” and continue to hollow out the right to asylum?
Nonetheless, we should keep an eye on the debates among Christian Democrats and within the FDP, the outcomes of which are not predetermined. Hans-Georg Maaßen and Friedrich Merz are not Ruprecht Polenz or liberal CDU municipal councillors who take a public stand against racism. I would prefer not to see any of them in government — but I would like to hinder a rapprochement between the CDU/CSU and the AfD. Whether that can be accomplished is by no means certain.
For a socially progressive antifascism
Republican antifascism is something we ought to breathe life into, but that alone won’t be enough to defeat fascism. Fascism feeds on despair and hatred. For this reason, we must also build a strong, socially progressive antifascist movement that will fight the Right by advocating for a social and ecological transformation — for better wages and decent pensions, for a strong welfare state, for effective, socially responsible climate protection, for humane asylum and immigration policies, against racism, antisemitism, and nationalism, for the rigorous prosecution of right-wing conspirators within government bureaucracies, the police, and the armed forces. Two things need to happen at the same time: the stressful conditions mentioned above, which deplete people’s capacity for tolerance and produce conditions that favour the right, need to be ameliorated in order to simultaneously begin the struggle for genuinely new social and ecological arrangements that will improve the lives of millions.
We ought to place socially progressive antifascism at the heart of our coalition work at both the federal and local levels. This does not mean forgoing participation in broad-based antifascist alliances. However, our republican antifascism must not let itself be co-opted by eco-social-liberal positions such as those espoused by the mainstream parties. On the contrary, our democracy and our republic will only become attractive to those who currently feel insecure, are wavering, or run the risk of going over to the post-fascist camp, once we are in a position to develop an independent movement for a socially progressive and ecological shift. Yes, we must fight for the republic — but for one which drains the low-wage swamp, in which pensioners no longer have to collect empty bottles, which effectively protects the climate, and — yes — allocates enough funding so that local authorities can adequately house and integrate refugees.
It is possible that an antifascist alliance pushing for this kind of socially progressive and ecological transformation could be built up starting from the recent demonstrations; it may need to complement them. It is also conceivable that those who want a socially progressive antifascism could take part in these protests as a distinct bloc. The inclusive debate that we need to have about key turning-points could be one important step.
We will defeat fascism when we initiate a political project that inspires hope and offers a real alternative to both mere eco-liberal crisis management and intensifying post-fascism. It can emerge through a unified struggle for a socially progressive antifascism. Why not initiate a crossover process linking supporters of various parties, trade unionists, and climate activists — all of those who have similar yearnings and goals? That kind of dialogue could give rise to a social movement for a change of political direction.
Of course we have to fight the AfD — but ideally by simultaneously organizing jointly for a genuinely socially progressive and ecological republic in our unions, our cities and villages, in schools and universities, in gardening associations, and at work. It’s easier to fight against something when you also have an inspiring goal. We need the concrete social and ecological utopia that even people who are on the fence would be willing to take to the streets for.
This is also how we will thwart the political game played by those who want to divide insiders from outsiders, making it the top issue in public debate. Of course we will have to explain precisely how people who seek asylum or immigrate are supposed to become part of our society. But ultimately, this is a question of distribution and class — of the provision of resources to kindergartens, schools, and public services, and not least of all of union organizing in the multiethnic working class that already exists in Germany today. Socially progressive antifascism could ensure that we debate the mother of all political problems, instead of debating its symptoms: the grotesquely unequal distribution of wealth and the (extreme) power of corporations and concentrated wealth that undermine our democracy.
For a cultural antifascism
Post-fascists and radicalized conservatives are waging a culture war that many leftists would rather sidestep. The argument: the culture war only serves the Right and (social) liberals and weakens the Left because it raises polarizing moral issues and leads people to stop talking about the funding needed for public services, about policies aimed at fighting poverty, or about wage policy.
On closer inspection, the argument lacks cogency. Rather, it is astounding how post-fascists, conservatives, and the right wing of the SPD manage to talk simultaneously about the labour market, investment policy, domestic security (surveillance and punishment), migration, identity, and lifestyle while appealing simultaneously to both hearts and minds, the intellect and the emotions. Stuart Hall remarked on this capacity of the (then) New Right early on in his analysis of English neoliberalism (Thatcherism).
The Thatcherites did not restrict themselves to discussing the economy but were also virtuosic in talking about moral and cultural issue. People without morality or culture simply do not exist, and thus morality and culture also need to be politicized by the Left. Even — and especially — left-wing antifascism needs to be attractive to people. Only those who present themselves as advocates of the (diverse) majority, rather than as outsiders or representatives of marginal special interests will be able to lead and appeal to wide sections of the population.
In recent years, the Right (and some former leftists), supported by the corporate media, have been very successful at portraying the Left as intolerant, egotistical, out-of-touch elites. They have cannily combined this with talk of “common sense”, hostility towards migrants and refugees, resentment over the supposed laziness of the unemployed, and disgust at ecological moralists.
We will only challenge the post-fascists if we make radical humanism and solidarity tangible, and offer a culture of togetherness and the common good, republican universalism and internationalism, equality and ecological security. Their morality versus ours — we want everybody to be able to be somebody and lead a good life; they want some people to be unable to be anything. We won’t win if we don’t clearly identify the underlying values of post-fascist (as well as conservative and eco-liberal) politics, if we don’t refute them and provide our own answers to the problems they raise. Without a left-wing philosophy of everyday life, the right-wing philosophy will win.
Thomas Goes is a member of the Lower Saxony state executive board of Die Linke and works as a sociologist in Göttingen. This article first appeared in LuXemburg. Translated by Marc Hiatt and Joseph Keady for Gegensatz Translation Collective.