Building a Community of Resistance
Community is not fixed—like everything else in society, it changes as the material conditions of the world change. Today, conservative myths of community are being mobilised not only by the far right, but regrettably by sections of the left too. If we’re serious about building a better world, revolutionary socialists must envisage community not as a place of exclusion, but as something forged in practice through solidarity and resistance.
Far-right myths
The far right promotes a myth that in Ireland, our pure, indigenous, white population is under threat. This myth is rooted in a conspiratorial belief in the “Great Replacement Theory” theory, which is based on fear of a loss of status and power, while the “others” (refugees, immigrants, Muslims, etc.) gain status and power instead. The “left-leaning” global elites and their “Jewish conspirators” are painted as the orchestrators of this anti-Semitic conspiracy. For many working class people who are caught up in far-right conspiracies, the fear stoked up by the Great Replacement Theory is evidenced in their minds by their own genuine economic hardship and desperation. The far right wants to lay the blame on migrants, refugees and “woke” liberals. This idea of an “imagined community” of white, homogenous Irish people who are being culturally threatened by migration is a racist myth that covers up the real causes of hardship in society.
It is true that in many ways, neoliberalism has hollowed out public life, and the far right exploits the resulting felt sense of instability and social loss. If we look at the gentrification of Dublin’s docklands in particular, we can see how working class people have been pushed out of what used to be an industrial heartland in favour of housing the offices of tech giants and corporations, causing the rents to skyrocket. The so-called destruction of community is frequently painted as the root cause of far-right radicalism, but this explanation obscures the fact that the far-right are an organised, conscious force that want to protect the system whilst shifting the blame elsewhere.
The far right argues the line that modern, mass society, particularly due to its migratory nature, has destroyed community. But what they seem to actually have a problem with is that there is too much community. They despise people collectively uniting, whether that is as a class, across gender and sexual lines, or across the racial and religious divides they so badly want to solidify. Moreover, the far-right defence of the local community is a defence of capitalist individualism – a very contradictory individualism that sees white people as homogenous. They wish to protect this individualism from any progressive social pressures that might cause it to change.
Even worse, they paint the imagined white community as a kind of “phenotype” – arguing that human beings are biologically wired to be unable to relate to one another outside of their racial categories. This racism becomes untenably contradictory in the Irish context. Historically Irish people were forced to migrate across the globe because of colonisation, and were subject to racist stereotypes by the British and American establishments – painted as lazy, savage and violent. Our eventual racial assimilation was predicated on our very acceptance and upholding of whiteness – so to shamefully defend the myth of our racial specificity, is to assert white Irish supremacy. This process of assimilation in America was not linear, however – many pockets of solidarity defy the idea that this was a natural development. The 1892 New Orleans General Strike resulted in the introduction of overtime pay and a 10 hour working day, despite employers’ serious attempts to stir up racial division between the united black and white workers. Events like this show that racial division amongst workers is not a natural outcome, but a political strategy – one that has to be politically resisted.
Imagining the Nation
In Benedict Anderson’s 1983 book Imagined Communities, he says that when the nation is imagined as a community, it is always conceived of as a deep horizontal comradeship – and that it is this fraternity that in part makes it possible for millions of people to be whipped up into sacrificing themselves in wars across the globe. It is our task to constantly expose this imagined community as an illusion – to show that this crude nationalism only serves the interests of capital.
The far right promotes the classic capitalist idea of national community; an all-class community that is ethnically and culturally homogenous. This is at odds with people’s real-life conditions, where they have little in common with white millionaires but work side-by-side with workers of all ethnicities and backgrounds. It is this reality that shaped Marxist historian Noel Ignatiev’s view that race could not be a biological fact – as he observed workers in America of all backgrounds coming together in solidarity on the factory floor. In contrast, the capitalist idea of a national community requires workers to choose between either rejecting capitalism, or rejecting their own class and substituting it with national identity.
Nationalists tend to characterise community in cultural terms rather than through critiquing the exploitative relationship between workers and the ruling class. This flattened view of the nation ignores the glaring reality that the gap between the rich and poor grows ever wider in today’s capitalism, across the borders of nation states. However, the national community does mean something, particularly in the context of colonisation. James Connolly understood that oppression under the British brought different classes together even if they sought different goals. This meant that socialists had to not only advance the cause of national liberation, but also understand that anti-colonialism was an integral part of working class consciousness. The lens of national liberation offers a way for socialists to couch their arguments to dismantle capitalism in a framework that relates to people’s real material need to live freely from colonial oppression.
Another World is Possible © Hannah Lewis
The far-right’s attempts to manipulate people through ideas of community that are based in conservatism, crude nationalism and division must be resisted. In response, socialists must draw out the differences between the creation and cultivation of real communities that enrich our lives and enable our collective power – versus the dead-end, imagined communities of national and racial sovereignty that the far right try to make a claim to. Crucially, this means exposing increasing visible diversity of the working class – and defending the fact that the working class by definition has never been a homogenous group.
Community or Class
Dublin City Councillor Ciarán Perry described his perspective on ‘community organising’ in a video last year. He talked about how the problem in communities is that the community development sector is not indigenous to the local area, and that people “outside” the community are coming in to do the work. No doubt, local services have been widely outsourced under neoliberalism, and there has been a damaging co-option of local activism and community solidarity as a result of this. But this issue is not going to be resolved by the suggestion of “people being nominated from their own communities to represent their own communities”.
Whoever is doing this so-called ‘representing’ will still have to reckon with the housing crisis and under-resourced communities. And critically, they will have to have answers about what to do about a far right that is actively seeking to stir up hate. If this is what ‘deep organising’ is allowed to mean then we’re in deep trouble.
Perry’s video is an example of how some on the left fetishise ‘community’ as something that allows us to transcend the discussion of class and oppression. There is often talk of the need for “deep community organising”; an amorphous concept that on the surface seems unobjectionable, but too often is counterposed to directly mobilising against the far right. Such views are profoundly mistaken, and can lead to a vulgar fetishisation of the local community.
Furthermore, what communities are being referred to here? In 2023, the census showed that in Dublin City non-Irish citizens accounted for 21% of the population – aren’t they a part of the community? In fact, the massive expansion of Dublin since the free state was established meant that the majority of what we might think of as “Real Dubs” are often more rooted in rural Ireland than the dispersed population of the inner city. It is also the case that with the ongoing housing crisis and lack of social housing, urban areas such as Dublin City are more transitory than ever. The effects of gentrification aside, the increasing diversity of Dublin City requires us to be more careful about echoing right wing talking points about “insiders” and “outsiders” – and to be prepared to organise coherently across differences in nationality and so-called indigeneity.
Eddie Dempsey, the General Secretary of the British Rail, Maritime and Transport Union, spoke at the Robert Tressell festival in Liberty Hall last year about the importance of class. He declared; “Don’t fall for the trap of people from the professional middle class and left liberals who are always more interested in the ideas going on in people’s heads. We’ve gotta fight on the class issues. History shows if you campaign on those issues it is far more effective than any other means to do away with divisions in society.”
Without denying the centrality of class, his argument risks promoting a crude economism that effectively leaves the far right unchallenged. In the context of the far-right Reform party now polling over 30% in Britain, it is clear that economic struggle alone is not enough. We cannot win on these so-called “class issues” without directly addressing the divisive poison of racism and engaging in political struggle against all forms of oppression. It is actually the movements against racism and imperialism that have recently brought people together in a way very few trade union struggles of late have managed to do. It is the mass movement for Palestine in Britain that has brought millions upon millions onto the streets, united across racial, gendered and class lines – an example of an international community formed through struggle, solidarity, and resistance. There are many problems with liberal identity politics, which bring everything down to the individual. But simply wishing oppression away, ignoring it, or dismissing it as politically inconvenient would be a grave mistake in the current climate of polarisation. Fighting oppression is class struggle.
Clearly, communities of identity are not homogenous. But liberal identity politics tend to hijack the language of liberation to police the left and reinforce capitalist hegemony. The former Fine Gael Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was of Indian descent and gay. Yet he opposed adoption for same‑sex couples and single parents when debating civil partnerships in 2010, despite later coming out in support of marriage equality with his party Fine Gael, and in 2023 argued for firmer border enforcement and quicker deportations of asylum seekers. Whilst identity groups may share common interests, these are primarily tied up in their social experiences.
As socialists, taking our local community work seriously is essential to what we do, but if we are too cowardly to politically challenge oppression, we will fall into the traps of economism and class reductionism, which see only ‘bread and butter’ issues as those which will encourage class consciousness.
Mobilising New Communities of Resistance
In a recent interview with the New Left Review, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who led La France Insoumise within the Nouveau Front Populaire to push back the far-right Rassemblement National from taking power in France last year, made some interesting points on his idea of a French community. He said that “when confronting fascism we need to provoke a full-frontal cultural war at the same time as waging an economic battle. We mustn’t be afraid. Obviously it can be unpleasant, but this is how people come to understand human reality most deeply. We may be workers, but we are also lovers, poets, musicians – and these identities also have their place in politics.” For Mélenchon, it is not just those who have already been sucked into far-right ideology that we are trying to win. It is the disillusioned masses that we are fighting for – those living in working class neighbourhoods, including migrants and young people. And far from just agitating with these people around economic issues, their cultural and emotional realities have to be engaged with too.
This approach has a direct parallel with DSA candidate Zohran Mamdani’s recent successful campaign in NYC where he won the Democratic primary for mayor. The campaign prioritised the expansion of their political base, and didn’t just try to appeal to traditional Democratic voters. Mamdani’s campaign focused both on flipping Cuomo voters and pulling in new populations of voters – in particular young people and racialised communities with a traditionally low voter turnout.
Mamdani’s commitment to the Democratic Party will undoubtedly prove an obstacle to achieving his political goals, but placing Palestine as well as cost of living at the centre of his campaign was a huge step forward. Mélenchon has already found that mainstream left partners in his broader electoral alliance can thwart the political aims of his supporters. Nevertheless, both of these campaigns have shown how working class people of all backgrounds and identities can mobilise in large numbers against racism and the far right whilst also mounting serious challenges on economic issues. These movements show the beginnings of a new community rooted in solidarity – not a return to some imagined traditional idea of community.
The radical and revolutionary agency of the working class extends much further than the stereotype of the disgruntled, socially conservative, white male industrial worker. How many of the great political movements and revolutions in the 20th century were spearheaded by struggles of oppressed communities who would not be considered the traditional subject of the working class?Think of the women’s strike that triggered the Russian Revolution, or the Stonewall Riots that were led by trans women sex workers of colour, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, the BLM movement, or the Women, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran. To promote and defend the increasing diversity of the working class is not just liberal identity politics – it is a defence of the complexity of our collective power to resist.
Raising Political Sights
It is not right to let bourgeois ideology set the margins for how we talk about trans rights, racism, or women’s oppression. We should argue against those on the left who want politics to stay within the realms of respectability. Lenin, dismissing the liberal critique of the revolutionary socialist movement which was facing setbacks in 1901, spoke of the “Intellectual opportunists who foist upon the workers their own narrow conception of the tasks of the proletariat – degrading them to the level of bourgeois moderation”.
He went on to describe class struggle as a process of raising the political sights of the working class, concluding by saying “Let ruthless struggle first decide the choice of path”. Real change in society comes not through concessions to reactionary ideas, but through uniting all communities across differences in a shared struggle for justice – and being unafraid to walk the ever-evolving and unpredictable path to liberation.
As we can see, the debate around the relationship between class and identity is not a new one. Revolutionaries have had to grapple with these questions throughout history. Just as revolutionaries did in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution, we need to meet working class people where they are at, but concurrently seek to strengthen their broader political sights.
That means joining with the many working class people whose experience has already convinced them of the need to be anti-racist, and to strengthen the recognition that it is capitalism which is the real cause of their misery and exploitation. It also means that when working class people are being scapegoated and marginalised by racists and fascists, we show up in solidarity to stand by their side unconditionally.
This way of tackling reactionary ideas when they emerge in the working class has precedence. It is the same one which Marxists have advocated for over the decades when taking up the issue of racism among white workers in America, or when tackling loyalism in the North. In each instance no quarter is given to the poison of reaction, yet Marxists never write off workers in their entirety. While presenting an open and forthright challenge to racism or sectarianism, we retain the ambition and commitment to pulling workers away from these right-wing ideologies and winning them to the politics of solidarity and socialism.
The narrow visions of community promoted across the political spectrum reflect a deep pessimism about what level of transformative political change is possible. Worse still, the far right are attempting to paint their desire for a white supremacist community as “common sense”. But this myth is only a hollow alternative to the type of mass politics we need to fundamentally change the world. Strengthening class unity requires political clarity and principled opposition to racism, sectarianism and other divisions – and the demanding of a future community not mired in the muck of ages, but forged through struggle and solidarity.
It is possible to “raise the activity of the working masses” only when this activity is not restricted to “political agitation on an economic basis”…Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected.
– Lenin, What is to be Done (1902)
