Symptoms of crisis
There have been some alarming trends in recent European elections, with Jean-Marie Le Pen's neo-fascists winning nearly 14% of the vote in French regional elections, neo-fascists winning large votes in Belgium and neo-fascists prominent in the current Italian elections. In Germany, neo-fascist gangs have taken to terrorising foreigners with relative impunity. In the USA also, David Duke and Patrick Buchanan represent far-right racist trends that have won some support.
Although the public face of the New World Order is by no means a pretty sight, its underside is an even more disgusting spectacle, infested with all sorts of would-be tyrants, from the petty, ignorant sex censors of the Sunday Telegraph to the race-hate politicians and basher gangs. As world capitalism continues to wallow in its worst crisis since the 1930s, the hymns of celebration to the supposedly final defeat of the left obscure the only rational, humane, democratic alternative to the hate-driven demagogy of the right. Ironically, in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, supposedly the scene of capitalism's greatest victory, the trends towards the dictatorial right are strongest as the supposedly magical market is revealed to have its foundations in unemployment, poverty and hunger.
Anger and desperation are the first response of many to the misery arising from capitalism's economic and social failures, and in the absence of mass support for the rational analysis and alternative policies of the left, some of this desperation grows into support for the irrational right, whose usual tactic is to heap the blame on some defenceless minority group such as Jews or immigrants.
Of course, serious errors by sections of the left have contributed to the present situation. The Social Democrats and Stalinists, the dominant left currents for several decades, have, each in their own bureaucratic way, heaped discredit on the whole left. But the best traditions of the left have always stood opposed to opportunist compromise for the sake of illusory power and to bureaucratic dictatorship.
Today, no matter what the ideologists of capitalism might say, the democratic left is the only current with effective antidotes to the racist, dictatorial ravings of the far right. The left's continuing relevance is attested by the mainstream editorialists themselves, who still direct most of their fire against the left despite the fact that it is the far right that is on the streets terrorising immigrants and seeking other targets for their brutal politics.