Alex Lantier

12 November 2019 • excerpted

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he rapid rise of the fascistic Vox party in Sunday’s Spanish elections is a warning of serious political dangers facing workers in Spain and around the world. As it faces mounting political protest and anger against social inequality, the ruling class is moving to set up fascistic police states tasked with violently repressing social opposition in the working class.

ABOVE: Javier Ortega Smith, Secretary General of far right party Vox, addresses supporters gathered outside the party headquarters waiting for results of the general election in Madrid, Sunday, April 28, 2019. (AP Photo - Manu Fernandez)

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Vox officials have publicly hailed the record of the “national army” of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator who launched a coup in 1936 against growing radicalization in the working class under the Spanish Second Republic. The resulting Civil War led to over a quarter million deaths and the imposition of a dictatorship that ruled Spain until 1978, three years after Franco’s death. Franco interned hundreds of thousands in concentration camps, banned strikes and political parties, censored the press and had thousands tortured by the secret police.

The Franco regime was so despised by workers in Spain and across Europe after it fell that, when Vox was founded in 2014, it attracted virtually no support. For several years, despite its extensive connections inside the army brass and the Popular Party (PP), Vox won 50,000 votes or less, well under one percent of the vote.

Vox’s vote surged, however, after the brutal police crackdown on the peaceful Catalan independence referendum of October 2017, and particularly amid Spanish nationalist attacks in the media against mass protests in Barcelona opposing last month’s jailing of Catalan nationalist political prisoners. On Sunday, Vox won 3.6 million votes, or 15 percent, doubling its parliamentary fraction from 24 to 52 seats—third behind only the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and the PP.

Vox’s rise is part of a broad trend in European capitalist politics towards the growth of neo-fascist parties, nationalism and the official public legitimization of fascist dictators.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is currently the third-largest party in Germany, after years of propaganda by right-wing extremist professors and state officials to legitimize militarism and minimize the genocidal crimes of Nazism. Mass protests against the AfD have only intensified the ruling elite’s determination to rehabilitate Nazism. Last week, parliamentary president Wolfgang Schäuble denounced a “pacifist attitude” as the disastrous result of the Nazi defeat in World War II, which he called “the catastrophe of 1945.”

In France, as he launched a brutal crackdown on “yellow vest” protests against social inequality a year ago, President Emmanuel Macron hailed Nazi-collaborationist dictator Philippe Pétain as a “great soldier.” Amid growing anger at his social cuts, Macron continues to appeal to the far right, recently granting an interview attacking migrants and the Muslim veil to the far-right Current Values magazine. As a result, polls show he would now barely defeat neo-fascist candidate Marine Le Pen in a presidential election, by 55 percent to 45 percent.

The growth of fascism in official European politics does not signify a return to the mass popular support enjoyed by the Nazi Party, Mussolini’s National Fascist Party or the Francoite Falange. For now, it is a carefully staged political campaign, driven from the top, to promote violent, right-wing and nationalist opposition to social and political protest.

Vox’s rise is a classic example. While it has surged based on its anti-Catalan propaganda amid the wall-to-wall media denunciation of the independence referendum, no mass movement has emerged in Spain taking up Vox’s calls to deploy the army and execute political “criminals” in Catalonia. Polls confirm that large majorities of Spanish people support a negotiated settlement in Catalonia, despite the anti-Catalan hysteria in the media.

The promotion of Vox and of Franco comes overwhelmingly from the state machine. The PSOE allowed Vox to officially join its public prosecutor in persecuting Catalan officials who were given decade-long jail terms last month for organizing the peaceful 2017 referendum. And the Supreme Court in June issued an extraordinary ruling honoring “don Francisco Franco,” declaring that his October 1, 1936, self-proclamation as ruler of Spain during the Civil War made Franco the head of state—effectively ruling that Franco’s coup was legitimate.

Finally, the ruling elite focused the election campaign entirely on attacking mass protests in Catalonia, which were savagely repressed, with hundreds of arrests. Issues of concern to workers, like jobs, social programs and a halt to military-police violence, were off the table. The caretaker Socialist Party (PSOE) government, speaking for the entire capitalist class, had already written to the European Union (EU) pledging billions of euros in social cuts and military spending increases. All of this had the effect of boosting Vox.

The bourgeoisie’s failure to elicit broader support for its pro-fascist campaign up to now cannot, however, be a cause for complacency. The fascist threat is growing and its parties are winning increased support thanks to their constant promotion as the only alternative to the despised official parties.

Three decades ago, bourgeois propagandists proclaimed that the [Russian] bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant the “End of History” and the triumph of capitalist democracy. In fact, none of the contradictions of capitalism that drove the European bourgeoisie to stake its fate on fascist regimes in the 1930s had been resolved. Facing explosive anger at social inequality produced by decades of post-Soviet EU austerity and mass unemployment, the ruling class is again preparing dictatorship.

Sunday’s Spanish election revealed the breakdown of the parliamentary system established in 1978 in talks between the Francoite fascists, the PSOE and the Spanish [Communists]. The PSOE-PP duopoly at the heart of that regime has collapsed. Each of the four elections in Spain since 2015 has resulted in a hung parliament, and no party has been able to muster a parliamentary majority since then. The ruling class is responding, through Vox, by turning back to Francoism.

The critical task in this situation is to build an international revolutionary leadership <>. Deep, historically rooted opposition to fascism and nationalism exists in the European working class. But it cannot be mobilized without a political reckoning with faux left professors, army officers and union bureaucrats making up Podemos.

Founded in 2014 as a “radical democratic” party, Podemos has since 2015 called for coalition governments with the pro-austerity, pro-war PSOE. Constantly promoting Spanish nationalism and indicating his support for the devil’s bargain of the 1978 Transition, Podemos General Secretary Pablo Iglesias boasted in 2017 that he was a better nationalist than the right wing: “We will not allow them to say that they are more patriotic than we are.”

Podemos is hurtling further to the right, completing its integration into the police state machine. Last month Iglesias again pledged loyalty to the PSOE as it cracked down on the Catalan nationalists, touring Catalonia to applaud the police and declaring happily that “institutional relations between the police forces are working.”

It is the pseudo-left posturing and reactionary nationalist politics of Podemos that blocks working class opposition to the PSOE on its left, allowing Vox to posture as the only opponent of the alliance stretching from Podemos and the PSOE to the PP.

Explosive mass protests and struggles of the working class are already unfolding across Europe and beyond. The struggle to unify workers across all linguistic and regional divisions in Spain, together with their class brothers and sisters across the European continent, in a struggle to take state power and build a socialist society, will undermine the reactionary and unpopular nationalist politics of the bourgeoisie.

Alex Lantier

This is a repost. The original date of publication for this article is Oct. 25, 2012.

The question of whether or for whom to vote in 2020 is acquiring momentum again, and the usual arguments are being heard, this time with greater urgency given the colossal disgrace sitting in the White House. Is 2020 the year that justifies voting for a Democrat? Below the reasons why this may still be a political error. However, the mike's open and we're ready to listen.

Paul Mitchell

14 January 2015

Downton Abbey has become one of the most popular television period drama shows in the world, and has won numerous accolades, including several Emmys and Golden Globes. The fifth series finished airing in the United Kingdom last month and started in the United States on January 4.

The drama, set in Yorkshire, depicts the lives of the Crawley family, including its patriarch Robert, Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), and its 16 servants, in the early decades of the twentieth century amid a long, drawn out decline in the fortunes of the aristocracy. Robert’s central problem is the failure of his American heiress wife, Countess Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) to produce a male heir. The hunt begins to find their eldest daughter, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), a suitable husband who will keep the estate within the family.

To explain the popularity of this series, several things should be kept in mind. Downton Abbey is a lavish production, with elegant locations, accomplished actors, plenty of nostalgia and numerous love stories. Broadcast on a Sunday night, the period piece is doubtless seen as something for viewers to indulge in before their return to work on Monday morning.

     For a certain percentage of the viewing public, confronted by so many films and television programmes that celebrate violence and psychotic killers (or policemen in various guises) and employ endless quantities of special effects and computer-generated imagery, or drool over the super-rich and demean the lives of ordinary people, Downton Abbey clearly comes as something of a welcome escape. Here is a series with quasi-intelligent dialogue, consistent characterisation, a narrative that holds one’s interest (within limits), and it has some logic to it. This is not Tarantino or the recent films of Scorsese, this is not a comic book, this is not about super-heroes. To a certain extent, Downton Abbey is popular by default.

What it is, at heart, however, is a superficial, rose-tinted soap opera that adds up to a crude distortion of history. It is a far cry from the reality—profoundly, extensively and subtly criticised by many socialists and artists who lived during the period. The series reflects the protracted decline of drama production and culture generally, the turn away from any interest or engagement with great social problems and the conditions of wide layers of the population. Instead what is sought is a way to distract and soothe the public at a time when rebellion and conscious action are needed.

The series’ creator—actor, writer, director and Conservative member of the House of Lords Julian Fellowes—is clear about his perspective: that everyone should abide by his or her station in life. He wants us to abide by the “rules” and “choose something where you have a reasonable expectation of fulfilment”.

To this end, Fellowes falsifies the actual class relations of the time and creates a myth of stability and orderliness in a period, from the mid-1910s to the mid-1920s, beset by war and revolution. He intends this as a lesson for today. He admits as much, indicating he wanted Downton Abbey to be “history light” and hold back on the harsh realities for those living “below stairs.” Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Fellowes declared, “I think the—well, not even the subtext, the supertext [of Downton Abbey ] is that it is possible for us all to get on, that we don’t have to be ranged in class warfare permanently.”

With this approach, Fellowes jettisons the reality of class conflict to a large extent, and substitutes a bucketful of unconvincing sub-plots providing suitable melodrama and infused with the kind of middle class politics that permeates cultural conversation today. All this is framed by familiar events that have become clichés—the sinking of the Titanic, the Great War where “nothing will ever be the same again,” and so on.

Fellowes and his missus.

Historical records reveal that servants were sharply differentiated and segregated from their masters during this period, often having to face the wall when the latter passed by. Not so in Downton Abbey. The aristocrats and servants are depicted as partners and confidantes in the crusade to save the estate. We are meant to empathise with them. Lord Grantham never evicts tenants despite his load of financial problems; Lady Mary tells one servant to take a few days off to look after his ill mother; and the Earl’s youngest daughter, Lady Sibyl (Jessica Brown Findlay), gives career advice to her maid.

All of this reaches its implausible apogee in the figure and fate of chauffeur Tom Branson (Allen Leech). Initially an Irish Republican and Marxist, Branson abandons his political principles, instead deciding that the Bolsheviks are the enemy because of the killing of the Romanov royal family. Branson marries Lady Sybil and proceeds to help make the estate profitable. The ex-radical muses, “It’s strange for me to be arguing about inherited money and saving estates when the old me would like to put a bomb under the lot of you”.

Having belittled the essential axis of modern society—the class division—and written out the more fundamental social and economic sources of poverty, exploitation and oppression—Fellowes instead focuses on themes that will appeal to a complacent middle class audience whose current outlook is summed up by identity politics.

Another relative, Lady Rose (Lily James), falls in love with visiting black Chicago jazz musician Jack Ross (Gary Carr) and wants to get married, but, fortunately for all concerned, Jack does the honourable thing and calls off their engagement. Various intrigues revolve around gay servant Thomas Barrow (Rob James-Collier), and the Earl’s middle daughter, Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael), who bears an illegitimate child.

Fellowes explains that one of his objectives in creating Downton Abbey was to counteract the influence of the “intelligentsia”, who in the late 1960s and early 1970s had portrayed an “absolutely horrible” class-based British society, and to overturn the conceptions underlying the “leftist” dramas of the period. Chief amongst those were Upstairs, Downstairs (the 1971 television series) and TheForsyte Saga (twice made into television series, in 1967 and then again in 2002, based on the John Galsworthy trilogy), which attracted large audiences.

What is Fellowes attempting to overturn? For all its serious limitations, Upstairs, Downstairs ’ depiction of the lives of the Bellamy family in Edwardian London “upstairs” and their servants “downstairs” presents a far more truthful picture of the social and economic changes occurring in the era that Downtonchronicles. Even then, of course, British television executives were keen to soften the down-to-earth tale of the lives of servants by the show’s writers, Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins, and demanded that some upstairs glamour be added.

The Forsyte Saga tells the story of a large Victorian capitalist family, similar to Galsworthy’s own. Unlike Fellowes, Galsworthy challenged traditional moral, cultural and social values, even refusing a knighthood on grounds of principle in 1917. His works dealt with social issues such as inequality, women’s rights, prison reform, censorship, anti-Semitism and the oppression of the working class. In the Forsyte Saga, he wonderfully satirises the Forsytes’ stultifying obsession with money and status.

How does Fellowes compare? Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes—Baron Fellowes of West Stafford—became a Conservative member of the House of Lords in 2011. He has had a long-standing gripe over the rules of royal succession regarding his wife, Emma, a Lady-in-Waiting to one of the Queen’s hangers-on. Emma is niece of the present Lord Kitchener and is unable, to acquire the aristocratic title, which will die out because Kitchener has no male heirs.

Fellowes has even derided former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair for abolishing hereditary peerage and putting in its place “a curious amalgam of record-producers and early flatmates of the Prime Minister in an orgy of patronage reminiscent of the court of James I”.

These views find expression in the banalities and rather predictable themes of Downton Abbey. Fellowes uses his talents to articulate the concerns of the upper middle class layers, outside the top one percent of society but perhaps still close enough to see the prospect of joining the elite. The outcome of all of this cleverness is a series that may soothe a section of its largely middle class audience, but fails to deliver a serious look at an important historical period