We Need Class Struggle And Organic Anti-Racism Not Performative Politics

The counter-demonstration held by United Against Racism (UAR) against the large anti-immigration march on the 26th of April 2025 is rooted in a liberal worldview that misleads activists and workers alike.

When tactics and strategies are conceived of from moral rather than pragmatic needs, a variety of morbid symptoms appear. Not the entire movement, but worryingly, a considerable part of the socialist left has taken on a middle class moralist “petit-bourgeois” attitude to the question of the rise of racism.

In this article, we hope to course-correct this flawed approach. Let us proceed from first principles.

The Marxist principle is that the truth is always concrete. Truth does not proceed from sloganeering, but from a careful examination of material conditions. Slogans are crafted after the examination has concluded. The material conditions that present themselves in front of us are as follows.

In the past few years, immigration to Ireland has risen. At the same time there are many poorer working class communities who feel completely left behind by Irish capitalism. This has led to an outbreak of anti-immigration sentiment with some communities demanding consultation before the establishment of asylum shelters, stricter immigration policies and the relocation of migrants.

The far right have capitalised on this situation spreading myths about “unvetted men” and representing immigrants as a threat to working class communities.

This has snowballed into a situation where a crowd of 5,000 to 10,000 working class people marched behind the far right on the day expressing discontent not only with immigration policies, but the state’s social policies on housing, cost of living, healthcare and the like.

The middle class left’s response to the anger out there has not been able to capture and direct the energies of this frustration in the estates towards progressive ends, because it has not been able to separate the inner class truth from the illusions some working class people hold and proceed to engage in a strategy grounded in this material reality.

Of course the reformist Irish Congress of Trade Unions has made sure that the main battallions of the working class are kept out of the class struggle which in turn feeds frustration in the class.

The videos of the counter-demonstration plainly demonstrates that the middle class left is not engaging with the material reality of the composition of these protests. The chants of “Nazi scum off our streets!” demonstrates a detached and dogmatic line of thought which positions the left on an offensive path against an imagined enemy.

This is a simulacrum of anti-fascist politics that tries to recreate the heroic feats of the 1936 Cable Street protests in which Edward Mosley and his blackshirts were humiliated at the hands of the working class. It also eviscerates support from the confused sections of the working class for left-wing politics by playing into the classic trope of petit-bourgeois moral lecturing from the sidelines.

Language is never neutral. Every slogan, every speech, every chant outlines the shape of a political subject. When the message is moral condemnation against an imaginary enemy, rather than sober analysis fused with a class based solution, a detachment occurs from the world-as-it-is.

A bubble of abstract idealism is set up into which activists recede. The socialist answer to migration must be elucidated as an outcome of material analysis and this information transmitted to the working class. To start with, the situation at hand differs from the rise of the fascist movements in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.

In reality, the minuscule far-right groups within Irish society operate in a symbiotic relationship with the middle class left, each feeding off the culture war and their respective overall irrelevancy to the wider working class. Sure, there are no formal links, but one must look beyond this, because there are material links, driven by internal organizational bureaucracies that seek growth, recruitment and visibility, establishing a mirrored, bi-directional ‘vested interest’.

The leaders of the far right are drawn from the middle class as are many leading activists on the socialist left. Entangled in a political dance, the spectre of rising Nazism is employed as a rhetorical device to funnel well-meaning activists into ‘anti-fascist’ work, often into Trotskyist groupings that have no real analysis of present-day material conditions.

The call to action by UAR featured Justin Barrett and the National Party, alongside pictures of the SS, creating the scarecrow of an imminent fascist takeover that demands an immediate activist response. This absolutizing paradigm - where all the anti-immigration protestors are subsumed under the umbrella of a fascist organization - is typical of middle class left dogmatists who do not care to analyse real-life conditions.

It is easier to establish a dogmatic image of thought and conjure up a phantasmic apparition than it is to expound on the complex mechanisms driving these protests, formulate a coherent response from the left, and act accordingly. It is easier to drum up a moral panic, to march, to shout and then to hand sign-up sheets to people - strengthening the position of one’s own organisation in the political sphere - than it is to engage in deep organizing.

This ‘theory of change’ falls flat on its face as it is rooted in a liberal worldview that appeals to an imagined audience for a few hours, decries a moral wrong, and then dissipates, not addressing the material conditions of working class life through sustained organizing. It is plainly obvious to those with a keen eye that the anti-immigration protests draw out thousands because of local organizers with some grassroots ties to a community.

The National Party, and their former leader Justin Barrett, in turn, hold no mass popular support beyond social media appearances. The concrete balance of forces do not suggest any sort of fascist takeover in Ireland, but merely the massive discontent of working-class areas at various issues, and that the claim of a mass influx of migrants serves as an ‘anchor’ to present this, but which has led to the co-optation by a far right, reactionary leadership and the misdirection of some of this anger.

How should the socialist left respond?

First, an analysis of the issues raised by the working class. An extraction of the class content of real concerns raised by working class people separated from the reactionary form of its expression. Then a surgical operation that cuts, copies, pastes and merges, establishing a solid assemblage in which a sublation (which means to negate or eliminate something, but preserve a partial element in a new synthesis) has taken place - then we are ready to present as universalist, socialist and pro-migration response, to be digested by the working class.

This assemblage should be constructed as follows: representing a materialist response to the issues posed by migration, modified as necessary for each community’s particular issues. At the core of it, lies the idea that the concerns are followed by a real left-wing solution to problems communities face; and that we make sure that the posing of the concerns does not betray a ‘racist’ attitude, but that the answer that follows, either the reactionary or the progressive one, is what ultimately defines the essence.

So instead of the branding of ‘racist’ - which is a discursive short-circuit, the entire issue is sublated.

At the outset, under an unplanned, neoliberal economy, migration seems to place pressure on public services. It doesn’t have to. And migrant workers contibute hugely to our hospitals and schools and economy as a whole.

But false resource scarcity - that’s the economy we live under. The working class has noticed this. The socialist left should focus on presenting a concrete plan to ensure the integration process is smooth, making sure asylum seeker centers are not concentrated solely in poor communities without significant supports, that they and surrounding public services are properly resourced, and that real initiatives are in place to connect migrants with the local population.

Consulting with communities and engaging with their class concerns, while remaining firm on the need to welcome migration with open arms can be done by presenting clear plans. Plans, not sloganeering. Material analysis, not idealistic abstraction. There are certain material-temporal constraints on what can be done with regards to the influx of migrants under neoliberalism, as well as on the construction of proper accommodation for asylum seekers, so that they do not have to suffer in makeshift emergency accommodation.

Material scarcity under capitalism is artificial. These are not insurmountable challenges, but these resources should be managed tactically and strategically, and the plans for this expounded under a minimum framework. It is possible to hold this view and to support the free movement of workers around the world, as has been an essential part of Marxist politics since its inception.

Minimum demands are those we make on the capitalist system today, maximum demands are those that come after the working class has taken power.

It becomes significantly easier to argue under our maximum framework. For example, it should also be stressed that under a socialist economy, because it is democratically planned, everyone will have a job and be able to contribute to society, and that the seizure of vacant homes will aid the question of housing. In any case, messaging should not focus solely on ‘racism’, but working class solidarity, and through this attack the state for its austerity at every turn and its knock-on effects on health, homelessness, addiction, poverty and social cohesion.

‘Anti-Racism’ without class struggle is a virtue-signalling ontology (theory of being) that does not grasp the issue at its roots. Participation by socialists in local councils is of paramount importance and so is the painstaking work of door knocking in working class areas. This is the theoretical position of many of the groups involved in ‘anti-fascist’ work, but it is not the practice. The practice has veered off into a pseudo-left approach of organizing counter-demonstrations, standing around with party flags literally opposite to elements of our communities, and calling everyone ‘racists’.

Counter-demonstrations may be important in specific cases, such as when the composition of a protest is overwhelmingly fascist, or when they plan to attack migrants, but they cannot be substituted for deep organizing, and patiently explaining the socialist answer to migration.

It seems that the pseudo-left fails to differentiate between what is a resourcing issue and its reactionary solution and what is a resourcing issue and its progressive solution, excluding themselves from the ongoing political discourse. Instead of the differentiation, they recede into dogma, where they merely proclaim that it is just the austerity-driven government of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil that has led to the impoverishment of communities. They create the context.

However, what this fails to account for is that this is open to attack by those stating the material fact that migration, under an unplanned economy, puts some pressure on public services, further exacerbating the situation. It doesn’t have to. We don’t want it to. A planned economy would not face this problem.

Instead, the socialist left should accept these facts as a given and then capture this discourse by putting forth slogans that highlight that if united, the interests of the migrant worker and the Irish worker are objectively one and the same in terms of resources, wages, housing and the like. The competition for resources between workers is, in this way, dissolved by way of class solidarity.

If there are slogans, then let them be rooted in a proper analysis, and let them be socialist slogans; bring class into play, and decenter pseudo-left identity-politics. At the same time, in demonstration of the principle of humankind united, the socialist left should directly organize migrants into community associations (trade unions, tenant unions, migrant rights groups) embedded within each locality and integrate these projects with the local councils, so that they can hold various events, mixers and workshops and thus connect the locals with the migrants in an organic way, help with language skills and job-seeking.

However, If one does not respond directly to the point of the ‘concerned citizen’, including by sketching out the socialist plan for migration, then one is leaving them open to the influences of reactionaries.

It is hoped that this short tour of contemporary issues facing the socialist left and its response to migration will inspire a concretization of the issue.