Living in the slipstream of defeat: neoliberalism and the far-right

Abstract

This essay suggests stretching Saull's structuralist account of the relationship between neoliberal globalisation and the far-right to accommodate subaltern agency and resistance. Taking this step makes transparent that the rising fortunes of the far-right is indivisible from the historic defeat that neoliberal globalisation inflicted on the global Left in the 1970s and 1980s. The victorious neoliberal elites went onto produce a refashioned differentialist racism to replace the now discredited scientific racism but also married this to the ideology of multicultural capitalism to accommodate the new postcolonial centres of accumulation. However, in the absence of a socialist alternative to neoliberal globalisation and the continuing technical and political decomposition of class as a social force, the resulting political void since the 2007 crisis has been increasingly filled by the forces of the far-right. Tragically, the choice facing us today seems to be the slow but relentless asphyxiation of the remaining progressive elements of capitalist modernity or their overnight destruction through a fascist ‘big bang’ ideologically dressed as the restoration of ‘rights for whites.’