Socialism, fascist-style: hostility
to capitalism plus extreme racism
The far right share with Bernie
Sanders supporters a desire to change the system – but the society they wish to
build would only benefit white people
Jason Wilson
@jason_a_w
Sunday 20 August 2017 11.00 BST Last modified on Sunday 20
August 2017 12.31 BST
The groups that marched through Charlottesville last weekend
with clubs, shields and cans of mace were clearly drawn from the most extreme
and violent end of America’s far right. But key elements of the ideology of at
least some of them echo themes that have animated populist groups across the
political spectrum, including on the left.
In their chants and placards, the marchers were explicitly
fascist, racist and antisemitic. One of their number is accused of murdering a
leftwing activist with his car and injuring many more. They came prepared to do
violence to leftists, whom they consider to be existential enemies. They
weren’t shy about any of this, and the event was the crest of an extremist wave
that has been swelling since well before Donald Trump’s inauguration.
But at the same time, some of the groups that marched evince
a hostility to neoliberal capitalism, which is equal to that of the most ardent
supporters of Bernie Sanders, the leftwing populist who mounted a vigorous
challenge to Hillary Clinton during last year’s Democratic primaries – although
for the far right it comes inextricably linked to a virulent racism. Many also
support the enhancement of the welfare state.
For example, those marching under the red and blue banners
of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) have signed up to a manifesto that
supports a living wage, sweeping improvements in healthcare, an end to sales
taxes on “things of life’s necessity” and “land reform” for “affordable
housing”.
An establishing principle in the document written by their
leader, Jeff Schoep, is that the state “shall make it its primary duty to provide
a livelihood for its citizens”. It calls for “the nationalisation of all
businesses which have been formed into corporations”.
The manifesto of Matthew Heimbach’s Traditionalist Worker
Party calls for “opportunities for workers to have jobs with justice”. And in a
manifesto issued on the day of the Charlottesville march, the noted far-right
figurehead Richard Spencer wrote that “the interests of businessmen and global
merchants should never take precedence over the wellbeing of workers, families,
and the natural world”.
Spencer has previously spoken out – including at the
American Renaissance conference, a gathering of far-right activists in
Nashville in July – in favour of “single payer” universal healthcare.
At the conference, Spencer gave Trump just three out of 10
when invited to rate him – because he was “too focused on the Republican
agenda” of tax cuts and dismantling Obamacare.
These critiques of capitalism and mainstream conservatism
are key to the socialist element of national socialism. Observers of the far
right argue that understanding this is essential to demystifying the far
right’s appeal, especially to the alienated millennial men currently swelling
its ranks.
Matthew Lyons is a researcher into far-right movements, and
the author of one book on rightwing populism in the US, and another, recently
published, on the alt-right. He argues that a lot of the “socialist” content in
the ideology of movements such as the NSM is vague, and is at one level “a
prime example of how the far right takes elements of leftist politics and
appropriates them for their own purposes”.
But he adds that “there is a broad hostility to an idea of
the capitalist ruling class”, within a “notion of capitalism centred on stereotypes
of Jews”.
He talks of “a long tradition in Nazism and other parts of
the far right of drawing a distinction between finance capital and industrial
capital”, with the former, identified with Jews, being seen as “parasitic”.
This identification is apparent on the web pages of NSM, and
– until the site was purged from the internet – on the website of Vanguard
America, the group with which the alleged murderer James Fields marched in
Charlottesville.
“Jewish finance” is consistently nominated as the principal
enemy of these groups. Lyons explains that this distinction is an antisemitic
variant on the ideology of “producerism”, which is common across the populist
right and privileges the makers of tangible things over those engaged in more
abstract pursuits. “They define industrial capitalists as ‘good’ capitalists,
or even as workers,” he says, adding that this was how the noted antisemite
Henry Ford described his role at the head of a giant auto manufacturer.
So there is a notion of class conflict, and even a
revolutionary perspective, says Lyons. But the society they plan to build on
the wreckage of the one they overturn will be constructed for the benefit of
whites.
Their socialism, explains Lyons “is not universalist. It
rejects any notion of an international working class.” In their utopia, the
state would only be used to tend to the needs of white people. And many groups
also reject the idea of equality even among whites.
Alexander Reid Ross is the author of Against the Fascist Creep,
a sweeping history of fascism from the early 20th century to the present. He
argues that while contemporary fascists try to “make nationalism palatable for
the working class”, ultimately what they envision “has nothing to do with
socialism; it’s absolutely inegalitarian”.
He also points to the historical example of fascist states
during the inter-war period, where workers lived on less food, received lower
wages for working longer hours, and enjoyed no collective bargaining rights,
and then were fed into the meat grinder of the second world war.
Similarly, for the new wave of national socialists, Ross
says, “socialism means kicking out immigrants, sequestering black people, and
establishing an authoritarian state within which they can live out their fantasies”.
Implicitly and explicitly, they offer a critique of the free
market capitalism that has been recent conservative orthodoxy throughout the
developed west.
Shane Burley, researcher and author of a forthcoming book,
Fascism Today: What it Is and How to End It, says: “What they want is a
situation where the economy is not left up to the free market – where it is
instead under the control of an elite.”
He points out that the trend of mobilising socialist ideas
and rhetoric “really dates back to the ‘Strasserite’ section of the Nazis”, and
helped pull support from areas that would normally go to the far left. “It
would be a socialism that retains hierarchy, where classes are determined by
God or ‘science’.”
A preoccupation with the source of inequality was on display
at July’s American Renaissance conference, where speakers flourished IQ data,
and even images of different-sized brains, in their accounts of the reason for
social divides. There, and at other alt-right events this year, it has been
evident that these views are very attractive to a particular slice of young,
millennial men.
In Charlottesville, hundreds marched sporting white polo
shirts and distinctive, undercut “fashy haircuts”. At the Nashville conference,
they made up half the crowd. In the breaks between speakers, many sought out
Spencer to take candid selfies.
Ross said that in the unresolved aftermath of the 2008
economic crisis, those seeking out fascist groups resemble those of the
interwar period: “veterans who are pissed off about the way that society treats
them”; and “an educated strata who don’t feel they can find a place in the
current economy”.
Observers argue that Trump’s campaign rhetoric runs parallel
to the racialised economic populism of the far right, and opened up a space in
which they can proselytise.
Lyons says that as president, Trump “has mostly pursued a
familiar conservative agenda”, but as a candidate, his platform of
protectionism and xenophobic economic nationalism marked out the place where
“civic and racial nationalism coincide”.
In the wake of the Charlottesville protests, and as Trump’s
presidency continues to melt down, it remains to be seen whether socialism,
fascist-style, will retain its allure for so many resentful, violent young men.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário