After Macron’s snap election call, which way forward against neofascism and war?

But Mélenchon’s Popular Front is not a force for peace and democracy. Its perspective is a government standing on capitalist property relations, defending the interests of French imperialism. It ties workers and youth to the pro-austerity PS, which supports war with Russia under the guise of “aid to Ukraine,” and whose record of back-channel ties to the far right dates to its foundation in 1971 by the former Nazi-collaborationist François Mitterrand.
The term “Popular Front” is associated with the worst betrayals of the working class. In the 1930s, it supported Stalinist slanders against Trotsky in the Moscow Trials and blocked a struggle of the working class for power and for socialism during the 1936 French general strike. The liberal and social-democratic parliamentarians of the French Popular Front ultimately in their majority voted dictatorial powers to Vichy leader Philippe Pétain in 1940.
The first challenge in fighting the resurgence of the far right is to explain how it came to pass. How is it that, in what was long considered one of Europe’s most left-wing countries, in which a mass movement of armed resistance to Vichy developed in the working class, that the political heirs of Vichy are poised to take power?

It is not that mass fascist paramilitary organizations like the Nazi Brown Shirts or the French Milice have emerged. But unlike fascist leaders of Hitler’s era, who had to fight mass communist parties in the working class, the far right today does not need such militias to grow. It gains strength firstly from the imperialist bourgeoisie’s relentless pursuit of war, austerity, and social inequality, to which the neofascists give the most determined expression.
Moreover, the neofascists feed off the bitterness and confusion produced among workers and middle-class people by decades of betrayals by social democracy, Stalinism and descendants of renegades from Trotskyism.
Mélenchon’s claim that his Popular Front’s policies are new is perhaps his greatest lie of all: It is repeating what Mélenchon has done for a half-century.

[wsws.org]

If you have been following WSWS for the past several years, you would have found a growing concern from within on the growing fascism that was taking place in Germany where they predicted an uptick of war with Russia using Ukraine. I always argue that the WSWS is about the best source in regards to conjecture towards predicting what the future holds for us. It has been a template for me on how to use history, as they so correctly manage to do so, towards seeing ahead.

{These anti-worker, anti-socialist and anti-Trotskyist arguments must be rejected. Threats of war and neofascist rule irrefutably show that capitalism is in a mortal crisis. The way forward is for the European and international working class to revive its connections to the heritage of the October Revolution. Workers must take control of world economy and industry from the war-mad capitalist aristocracy before it mounts a military escalation that could trigger a nuclear conflagration.
The far right’s rise indicates not the impossibility, but the urgency of the struggle for socialism. Trotsky made this point about the danger of the growth of support for fascism in the mass peasantry of France in the 1930s.}

It is false, thrice false, to affirm that the present petty bourgeoisie is not going to the working-class parties because it fears “extreme measures.” Quite the contrary. The lower petty bourgeoisie, its great masses, only see in the working-class parties parliamentary machines. They do not believe in their strength, nor in their capacity to struggle, nor in their readiness this time to conduct the struggle to the end. Leon Trotsky

{Today’s rising far-right vote, mainly among rural workers and workers in areas deindustrialized by successive PS governments, does not mean these workers oppose class struggle. Many have joined explosive movements like the 2018-2019 “yellow vest” protests against social inequality. However, they can only be won from the far right based on a determined, Trotskyist struggle against NATO, Macron and the corrupt bureaucracies of today’s Popular Front.
The Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES), the French section of the ICFI, advocates the broadest protests and strikes against fascism and imperialist war. Military escalation and austerity will bring Macron and NATO into collision with the workers in France and internationally. But to prosecute this struggle, it is necessary to build rank-and-file organizations of struggle in the working class, opposing fascism and war in an international movement for socialism.}