TODAY, 90 years since the Nazis banned trade unions, the TUC has issued a call for solidarity across civil society in defence of democracy.

Any attempt to compare today’s anti-democratic legislation to stormtroopers seizing control of German trade union offices on May 2 1933 will be mocked — and of course things are nowhere near so extreme. 

Recalling where the Nazi crackdown on unions led is nonetheless worthwhile, as was Holocaust survivor Joan Salter’s warning in January that Suella Braverman’s anti-refugee rhetoric echoed the dehumanising language of the Nazis.

That comparison too was quickly condemned across “official” politics. Britain has a peculiar relationship with Hitler analogies, as one socialist commentator then observed: every passing public enemy (Milosevic, Saddam, Gadaffi, Putin) is a new Hitler, every missed opportunity to go to war “another Munich,” but at the same time even the most qualified attempts to apply lessons from the fascist period when analysing our own politics is howled down as inappropriate and offensive.

We should not shy away from some parallels. 

An increasingly authoritarian state is taking shape in an era of extreme and widening inequality, characterised by the steady immiseration of the majority while a plutocratic elite make a brazen display of unchecked extravagance. The “cost-of-living crisis” is simultaneous with what the Sunday Times Rich List calls “a golden era for the super-rich.” 

Luxury goods firm LVMH is recording its largest ever profits. Its wines and spirits divisional chief Philippe Schaus says the company is referring to the decade as a new “roaring twenties” age of excess. The roaring twenties collapsed into depression and the rise of fascism.

And fascism was about preserving capitalism. It offered the bourgeoisie a way to suppress political opposition when support for the capitalist system was collapsing. It was also associated from the start with the drive to war.

These tendencies are discernable now. Public support for the status quo is weakening across the West: we see it in the polarisation of US politics, in the Brexit vote and the Corbyn movement in recent British history, in the fact that the “centrist” French president was only elected because the majority of votes cast for a radical break with the system were split between the right (Marine Le Pen) and the left (Jean-Luc Melenchon).

Liberals might lament this; socialists can identify it with the inability of Western capitalism to maintain living standards or public services at a level people expect. That is driving the new authoritarianism.

We must not underestimate its seriousness. In Britain it involves very severe restrictions on protest rights, empowering police to shut down protest at a whim and to ban individuals from protests even if they have no criminal record. 

It involves a simultaneous assault on the rights to strike and to vote. It is accompanied by xenophobic hysteria about immigrants.

This is a war on democracy, and the labour movement can rally a wider movement in democracy’s defence. The TUC’s call to arms is timely.

But it does not go far enough. We should recall the words of Pastor Niemoeller: “First they came for the communists.” 

The Nazis moved against trade unions on May 2 1933; they had banned the Communist Party on March 6. It was the crushing of radical political opposition that enabled the fascists to smash all other forms of workers’ organisation. It is ultimately the socialist left, and not liberals, who form the front line of anti-fascism.

And resisting the new authoritarianism means understanding it. These attacks on our rights are designed to shore up a failed neoliberal system: and to prepare for war in its defence in light of the rise of the global South, especially China.

That entire project must be opposed. Opposing anti-strike laws while welcoming the new arms race is inconsistent: the two are bound together. The cause of labour is peace, and socialism.