[News] Ten Theses on the Far Right of a Special Type

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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*Ten Theses on the Far Right of a Special Type: The Thirty-Second 
Newsletter (2024)*


Dear Friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
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There has been widespread consternation about how to understand Donald 
Trump’s emergence as a serious candidate for US president since 2016. 
Far from an isolated phenomenon, Trump rose to power alongside other 
strongmen 
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such as Viktor Orbán (prime minister of Hungary since 2010), Recep 
Tayyip Erdoğan (president of Turkey since 2014), and Narendra Modi 
(prime minister of India since 2014). People like this, who came to 
power and cemented their rule through liberal institutions, seem to be 
impossible to permanently remove through the ballot box. It has become 
clear that a rightward shift is taking place in liberal democratic 
states, whose constitutions emphasise multi-party elections while 
allowing the space for one-party rule to be gradually established.

The concept of liberal democracy was and is a highly contested concept 
that emerged from European and US colonial powers in the 18^th and 19^th 
centuries. Its claims of internal pluralism and tolerance, the rule of 
law, and the separation of political powers came at the same time as its 
colonial conquests and its use of the state to maintain class power over 
its own societies. Liberalism today cannot be easily reconciled with the 
fact that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) countries 
account 
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for 74.3% of world military spending.

Countries with constitutions that emphasise multi-party elections have 
increasingly seen the gradual establishment of what is effectively 
one-party rule. This one-party rule may at times be masked by the 
existence of two or even three parties, concealing the reality that the 
difference between these parties has become increasingly negligible.

Helios Gómez (Spain), /Viva octubre/ (Long Live October), 1934.

It has become apparent that a new kind of right wing has emerged not 
only through elections but by exerting dominance in the arenas of 
culture, society, ideology, and the economy, and that this new kind of 
right wing is not necessarily concerned with overthrowing the norms of 
liberal democracy. This is what we called 
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‘the intimate embrace between liberalism and the far right’, following 
the writings of our late senior fellow Aijaz Ahmad.

The formulation of this ‘intimate embrace’ allows us to understand that 
there is no necessary contradiction between liberalism and the far right 
and indeed that liberalism is not a shield against the far right, and 
certainly not its antidote. Four theoretical elements are key to 
understanding this ‘intimate embrace’ and the rise of this far right of 
a special type:

 1. Neoliberal austerity policies in countries with liberal electoral
    institutions vanquished the social welfare schemes that had allowed
    liberal sensibilities to exist. The state’s failure to take care of
    the poor turned into a harshness toward them.
 2. Without a serious commitment to social welfare and redistributionist
    schemes, liberalism itself drifted into the world of far-right
    policies. These include increased spending on the internal
    repressive apparatus that polices working-class neighbourhoods and
    international borders alongside the increasingly stingy distribution
    of social goods, disbursed only if the recipients allow themselves
    to be stripped of basic human rights (such as by ‘agreeing’ to the
    obligatory
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    use of birth control).
 3. In this terrain, the far right of a special type found that it
    became more and more accepted as a political force given the turn by
    the parties of liberalism to the policies for which the far right
    had advocated. In other words, this tendency to draw from far-right
    policies allowed the far right to become mainstream.
 4. Finally, the political forces of liberalism and the far right
    unified across the board to diminish the left’s grasp on
    institutions. The far right and its liberal counterparts have no
    fundamental economic differences regarding class. In the imperialist
    countries, there is a very high confluence of viewpoints on
    maintaining US hegemony, hostility and contempt for the Global
    South, and increased jingoism, as seen by the full-throttled
    military support for the genocide Israel is conducting against
    Palestinians.

After the defeat of Italian, German, and Japanese fascism in 1945, 
commentators in the West worried about the incubation of the far right 
in their societies. Most Marxists, meanwhile, recognised that the far 
right had not emerged out of nothing, but out of the contradictions 
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of capitalism itself. The collapse of the Third Reich was only a phase 
in the history of the far right and the development of capitalism: it 
would emerge again, perhaps wearing different clothes.

In 1964, the Polish Marxist Michał Kalecki wrote the stimulating article 
‘The Fascism of Our Times’ (‘Faszyzm naszych czasów’). In that essay, 
Kalecki said that the new kinds of fascistic groups that were emerging 
at the time appealed ‘to the reactionary elements of the broad masses of 
the population’ and were ‘subsidised by the most reactionary groups of 
big business’. However, Kalecki wrote, ‘the ruling class as a whole, 
even though it does not cherish the idea of fascist groups seizing 
power, does not make any effort to suppress them and confines itself to 
reprimands for overzealousness’. This attitude persists today: the 
ruling class as a whole fears not the rise of these fascist groups, but 
only their ‘excessive’ behaviour, while the most reactionary sections of 
big business support these groups financially.

Mario Schifano (Italy), /No/, 1960.

A decade and a half later, when Ronald Reagan seemed to be on the 
threshold of becoming the president of the United States, Bertram Gross 
published /Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America/ (1980), 
which drew liberally from /The Power Elite/ (1956) by C. Wright Mills 
and /Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social 
Order/ (1966) by Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy. Gross argued that 
since large monopolistic firms had strangled democratic institutions in 
the United States, the far right did not require jackboots and 
swastikas: this orientation would come through the very institutions of 
liberal democracy. Who needs tanks when you have the banks to do the 
dirty work?

The warnings of Kalecki and Gross remind us that the intimacy between 
liberalism and the far right is not a new phenomenon but one that 
emerges from deep within liberalism’s capitalist origins: liberalism was 
never going to be anything but the friendly face of capitalism’s normal 
brutality.

Liberals are using the word ‘fascism’ to distance themselves from the 
far right. This use of the term is more moralistic than precise since it 
denies the intimacy between liberals and the far right. To that end, we 
have formulated ten theses on this far right of a special type, which we 
hope will provoke discussion and debate. This is a provisional 
statement, an invitation to a dialogue.

*Thesis One*. The far right of a special type uses democratic 
instruments as much as possible. It believes in the process 
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known as the ‘long march through the institutions’, through which it 
patiently builds political power and staffs the permanent institutions 
of liberal democracy with its cadre, who then push their views into 
mainstream thought. Educational institutions are also key to the far 
right of a special type since they determine the syllabi for students in 
their respective countries. There is no need for this far right of a 
special type to set aside these democratic institutions as long as they 
provide the path to power not just over the state, but over society.

*Thesis Two. *The far right of a special type is driving the attrition 
of the state and transferring its functions to the private sector. In 
the United States, for instance, its proclivity for austerity is helping 
gut the quantity and quality of cadre in core state functions, such as 
the US Department of State. Many of the functions of such institutions, 
now privatised, instead take place under the auspices of 
non-governmental organisations led by newly emergent billionaire 
capitalists such as Charles Koch, George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, and Bill 
Gates.

*Thesis Three*. The far right of a special type uses the repressive 
apparatus of the state as much as is legally permissible to silence its 
critics and demobilise movements of economic and political opposition. 
Liberal constitutions provide wide latitude for this kind of use, which 
liberal political forces have taken advantage of over time to quell any 
resistance from the working class, peasantry, and left.

Maryan (Poland),/Personnage /(Character), 1963.

*Thesis Four*. The far right of a special type incites a homeopathic 
dose of violence in society by the more fascistic elements within its 
political coalition to create fear, but not enough fear to turn people 
against it. Most middle-class people the world over seek convenience and 
are disturbed by inconvenience to themselves (such as that produced by 
riots, etc.). But, on occasion, an arms-length assassination of a labour 
leader or an arms-length threat made to a journalist is not blamed on 
the far right of a special type, which often hastily denies any direct 
association with the fringe fascistic groups (which are nonetheless 
linked organically to the far right).

*Thesis Five*. The far right of a special type provides a partial answer 
to the loneliness that is woven into the fabric of advanced capitalist 
society. This loneliness stems from the alienation of precarious working 
conditions and long hours, which corrode the possibility of building a 
vibrant community and social life. This far right does not build an 
actual community, except when it comes to its parasitic relationship 
with religious communities. Instead, it develops the idea of community, 
community through the internet or community through mass mobilisations 
of individuals or community through shared symbols and gestures. The 
immense hunger for community is apparently solved by the far right, 
while the essence of loneliness melts into anger rather than love.

*Thesis Six*. The far right of a special type uses its proximity to 
private media conglomerates to normalise its discourse and its proximity 
to the owners of social media to increase the societal acceptance of its 
ideas. This highly agitational discourse creates a frenzy, mobilising 
sections of the population either online or in the streets to 
participate in rallies where they nonetheless remain individuals rather 
than members of a collective. The feeling of loneliness generated by 
capitalist alienation is dulled for a moment, but not overcome.

*Thesis Seven*. The far right of a special type is a tentacular 
organisation, with its roots spread across various sectors of society. 
It operates wherever people gather, whether in sports clubs or 
charitable organisations. It aims to build a mass base in society rooted 
in the majority identity in a given place (whether race, religion, or a 
sense of national being) by marginalising and demonising any minority. 
In many countries, this far right relies upon religious structures and 
networks to ever-more deeply embed a conservative view of society and 
the family.

*Thesis Eight*. The far right of a special type attacks the institutions 
of power that are the very foundation of its socio-political basis. It 
creates the illusion of being plebian rather than patrician, when in 
fact it is deep in the pockets of the oligarchy. It creates the illusion 
of the plebian by developing a highly masculine form of 
hyper-nationalism, the decadence of which drips out in its ugly 
rhetoric. This far right straddles the testosterone power of this 
hyper-nationalism while playing up its portrayed victimhood in the face 
of power.

*Thesis Nine*. The far right of a special type is an international 
formation, organised through various platforms such as Steve Bannon’s 
The Movement (based in Brussels), the Vox party’s Madrid Forum 
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(based in Spain), and the anti-LGBTQ+ Fellowship Foundation 
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(based in Seattle, Washington). These groups are rooted in a political 
project in the Atlantic world that enhances the role of the right wing 
in the Global South and provides them with the funds to deepen 
right-wing ideas where they have little fertile soil. They create new 
‘problems’ where they did not exist at this scale before, such as the 
fanfare over sexuality 
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in eastern Africa. These new ‘problems’ weaken peoples’ movements and 
tighten the right’s grip over society.

*Thesis Ten.* Though the far right of a special type might present 
itself as a global phenomenon, there are differences between how it 
manifests in the leading imperialist countries versus the Global South. 
In the Global North, both liberals and the far right vigorously defend 
the privileges that they have gained through plunder over the past five 
hundred years – through their military and other means – while in the 
Global South the general tendency amongst all political forces is to 
establish sovereignty.

The far right of a special type is emerging in a period defined by 
hyper-imperialism 
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to mask the actuality of hideous power and pretend that it cares about 
the isolated individuals that it instead harms. It knows human folly 
well and preys on it.

Warmly,

Vijay

P.S. Unless otherwise noted, the art in this newsletter comes from the 
dossiers /New Clothes, Old Threads: The Dangerous Right-Wing Offensive 
in Latin America/ 
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(2021) and /What Can We Expect from the New Progressive Wave in Latin 
America?/ 
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(2023).

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