The Hard Right and the Political Parties of Capital

2nd in the Socialist Register 58 Series: Old Polarizations, New Contradictions: The Crisis of Centrism

BILL FLETCHER                  Trump and the Danger of Right-wing Populism in the US
SAMIR GANDESHA            Identity Crisis: The Politics of False Concreteness
INGAR SOLTY                       Market Polarization Means Political Polarization

Bill Fletcher’s essay on the “Danger of Right-Wing Populism in the US” presents a careful appraisal of the forces marshalled on the right over the course of the Trump presidency, leading to the insurrection of January 2021. Fletcher’s longstanding contention, put forth in his widely-noted ‘Stars and Bars’ essay in the Politics of the Right volume, was of the dangers of a rightwing mass movement emerging in the US.

Samir Gandesha seeks an answer in what he identifies as ‘a fragmentation of the universalism that had historically underwritten the struggle for socialism’ leading to what he terms a ‘politics of false concreteness’ centered on forms of identity politics on both the left and the right. Indeed, in the absence of a ‘left universalism’, Gandesha argues, ‘we can only expect the logic of polarization to drive an already accelerating authoritarianism, as rightwing demagogues mobilize support based on racialized grievances’. This can only be met by a ‘class identity’ that seeks a universalism ‘in its own self-dissolution’, that is, in the struggle against classes as such and thus capitalism.

Ingar Solty’s “Market Polarization Means Political Polarization” is a third assessment of this particular moment. Solty’s contention is that the social polarizations that result from the market processes set in motion by neoliberalism bring with them a political polarization in the form of fissures in the party systems of liberal democracies, allowing the hard right new political space to occupy and permitting varied forms of authoritarian nationalism to take hold. He concludes with the gravest of warnings: unless a new organized working-class politics emerges, this world world will further and further slip down the slope of liberalism into fascism’.

IN MEMORY OF LEO PANITCH • 1945-2020  / All of us at The Marxist Education Project appreciate all that Leo did and is continuing to do following his untimely death one year ago this past December. This series which begins on February 20 is presented in his memory as it represents a few of the many fruits that still spring from the myriad seeds that Leo has planted.

BILL FLETCHER JR. is a long-time trade unionist, writer, and a past president of TransAfrica Forum.
SAMIR GANDESHA is Professor and Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
INGAR SOLTY is Senior Research Fellow in Foreign, Peace and Security Policy at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Institute for Critical Social Analysis in Berlin.

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