Tag Archives: Populism

Bookchin, Cockburn and Libertarianism.

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8.22.20

Anarchists are often at their best when they critique communists for unhealthy admiration of order and authority. This tradition is captured in the term of abuse “tankie”, which is anarchist shorthand for a communist who does not shy from bringing out the tanks to crush rebellion, like those deployed during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968 in then Czechoslovakia. Murray Bookchin, a social ecologist, and philosopher of libertarian municipalism whose writings continue to animate leftists from Rojava to Seattle, often wrote with a profound contempt for the more authoritarian traditions found in various expressions of Marxism and socialism. If he were alive today, he would not be a “tankie”. As an anarcho-communist, I am sympathetic to many of his views. For instance, the quote below is an effective broadside against the kind of Marxism that needs cops, commissars, and soldiers to keep everyone in line.

 

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That’s great stuff. But there is another Murray Bookchin, a writer who, for whatever misbegotten reason, was a featured speaker at the 1978 national convention of the Libertarian Party USA in Boston, Massachusetts. The following year the party nominated the billionaire David H. Koch for Vice President. You can look up Bookchin’s presentation online. It is not his finest hour. He also contributed this to a right-wing journal.

“There was a period of time, indubitably, in Jefferson’s time, when the farmer, the yeoman—the American yeoman, standing on his land with his musket—represented a forward step for individuality. But today the millions that flow in and out of New York anonymously, through mass transportation, through the tunnels and over the bridges that lead into and out of the suburbs—these are among the most de-individualized people I’ve encountered in 57 years of living. Most of them are organization men and women and have become denuded of all personality and uniqueness. They’re figments; they’re creatures, in fact. They’re creatures of the mass media and of the corporate world that has rendered them totally homogenized and anonymous. Now already the attempt to preserve what we in America would call private property, the rights of US Steel and the rights of General Motors, has become literally a step in the direction of the de-individualization of the American people and their reduction to masses.” (Interview with Murray Bookchin Reason Magazine 1979.)

I have long maintained that libertarianism in the United States constitutes a deep reservoir of reaction completely antithetical to anti-fascist praxis. Together with Christian nationalism, American libertarianism functions as a political pipeline that transports the raw material of white reaction to the toxic refineries of 21st-century fascism. It has always had its center of gravity in the American South, where fetishes for private property and “individual liberty” run through so-called “states rights.” The entire philosophy and praxis of libertarianism are anathema to revolutionary anti-fascism. There is no bargaining with it, cozying up to it, or riding alongside it that doesn’t involve the wholesale betrayal of our principles.

Fuck libertarians.

That yeoman farmer was also a white settler, a slaveholder, a nascent bourgeois individualist, and a colonialist monster. This abstract individual is favorably contrasted with a de-individualized, homogenized, and anonymous “creature.” This contrast between the agrarian individual and the urban masses –New Yorkers in particular — between the inherent worth of the individual and the mind-numbing, worthlessness of the masses is not a part of any anarchist tradition I am very fond of. In fact, I find it repulsive. I am familiar enough with Bookchin’s later work, when he attempted reconciliation between Marxism and anarchism, to know this is not representative of his entire corpus. Perhaps he clarified such comments elsewhere? In any case, I think efforts on the part of leftists to find “common ground” with organized libertarianism are at best misguided and at worst potentially fatal to our revolution. Our time is better spent reconciling anarchism and communism, a project I think possible and worthwhile.

My problem with Bookchin is similar to my problem(s) with the late Alexander Cockburn. While Louis Proyect, the “Unrepentant Marxist” has posthumously conferred upon him secular sainthood, I’m less inclined to exalt Cockburn. His frequent attacks on the anti-racist liberal/left are now a matter of historical record; so too his veneration of the tea party as a welcome riposte to liberal identity politics. But he was blind in the white eye; he couldn’t see the bigotry at the heart of the Tea Party as anything other than unfortunate, and irrelevant, a holdover from another era. How wrong he was. As someone once noted: The past isn’t dead; it’s not even past.

One can find much in the vast body of work of Bookchin and Cockburn that is important to uphold today; there’s also a great deal there that was crap in the 1980s and 1990s and has only gotten stinkier with time. Had he lived to see the election of Trump in 2016 to the U.S. presidency, can anyone seriously doubt where Cockburn would now stand on the so-called ‘populist right’? I’m pretty sure that his anti-anti-racism and warm feelings for the so-called right-wing populists of the Tea Party era would have propelled him to make arguments similar to those now being made by Crystal Ball and Glenn Greenwald about the desirability of a right-left realignment across “populist” lines. That’s a fool’s errand.

Cockburn and his ilk could not grasp racism as anything other than labor market competition and a cynical ploy foisted on the white working class by clever elites. But racism has always been more than that, and always at the center of ruling class command and control in the United States, a structural feature of American capitalism and empire. It is a fundamental pillar of inequality, not a vestige of a bygone era.

All socialists, anarchists, and communists, whether of the “tankie” or “insurrectionist” varieties, are simultaneously anti-racists and anti-fascists; or should be. Any fundamental, lasting, and desirable change must run through Black liberation. That’s partly why we chant, “Black Lives Matter!” The other reason being, of course, that for so many people, Black lives so obviously matter so little, if at all.

END

Fascism and Populism

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Fascism: A Very Short Introduction by Kevin Passmore

2002 Oxford University Press

As a primer on fascism this little book is useful. I’ll use it as a jumping off point for my arguments about fascism and populism. So don’t expect a thorough review.

Passmore opens with a series of historical vignettes set in France, Italy, Romania and Germany that illustrate the varied character of what have been called ‘fascist’ movements and regimes, their distinctiveness and specificity on display. He does this, however, with an eye toward upholding what is common between them, setting the stage for a later use of the term ‘fascism’ that has both general applicability and analytical clarity. This tension between the diversity of forms of fascism and what they all have in common and the seemingly contradictory nature of that relationship is an important problem Passmore identifies early on through a quote by the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset that opens the book.

“Fascism has an enigmatic countenance because in it appears the most counterpoised contents. It asserts authoritarianism and organises rebellion. It fights against contemporary democracy and, on the other hand, does not believe in the restoration of any past rule. It seems to pose itself as the forge of a strong State, and uses means most conducive to its dissolution, as if it were a destructive faction or a secret society. Whichever way we approach fascism we find that it is simultaneously one thing and the contrary, it is A and not A…” (Sobre el Fascismo, 1927).

Passmore restates this problem in a more contemporary fashion:

“In the 21st century interest in the history of fascism and its cries is perhaps greater than ever. Yet how can we make sense of an ideology that appeals to skinheads and intellectuals; denounces the bourgeoisie while forming alliances with conservatives; adopts a macho style yet attracts many women; calls for a return to tradition and is fascinated by technology; idealizes the people and is contemptuous of mass society; and preaches violence in the name of order?” (p. 11).

The short answer here is racism. We will get to that.

Passmore then poses this seeming conundrum as one that has vexed scholars of and activists against fascism as ‘the problem of definition’. To solve this he outlines three broad approaches to fascism: Marxist (1935 Comintern, Trotsky), Weberian (Max Weber), and Totalitarian-nationalism (Hannah Arendt).

All three approaches don’t adequately handle what W.E.B. DuBois succinctly called “the color line”. Passmore does a somewhat better job of this than most when he seeks to borrow useful aspects from all three traditions, while dispensing with their limitations, so as to formulate a synthesis. He makes some progress toward this end, but fails. That failure has a name: Ernesto Laclau. But more on that in a bit.

My own definition of fascism proceeds from a different premise than that of Passmore: a definition of fascism that is analytically sound must serve human liberation. Another way of saying this is that there is no ‘true’ definition of fascism possible because we formulate that through struggle. Ours will be different from theirs. That struggle is not only carried out in the ‘marketplace of ideas’. If we want to define fascism our dream of the future and our belief in the desirability and possibility of that future must inform our definition of ‘fascism’ within a historical framework that can facilitate its defeat and our triumph. As an Anarcho-Communist, I believe the struggle against fascism is inextricable from those struggles against capitalism and the state and the exploitation and domination that are their defining features. A more or less useful definition of fascism can only be constructed from a theoretical framework that derives from a hybrid of anarchist and communist philosophies. Part of doing as much requires a recognition that the use of terms such as ‘populism’, ‘liberal democracy’, and ‘race relations’ is incompatible with that project. These terms usually dispense with the notion of a political right or left. When there is no right or left arranged along a spectrum informed by inequality, there is no possibility of analytical clarity in regards fascism or of much else. But there is a left, distinguishable from a right. Even when there isn’t a viable left, there still exists that wellspring of ideas and actions that we call socialist, anarchist and communist. If your dream of the future is limited to liberal democracy, your understanding of fascism will be bound up with the presumptions that undergird that philosophy. As fascism thrives within conditions liberal democracy depends, one must theorize the end of that system as a solution to the problem of fascism. Liberals, conservatives, purveyors of the ‘populist’ thesis all are forced to imagine the end of the very institutions that give meaning to their lives. Unfortunately for them, this is a prerequisite for the defeat of fascism. This they will not do; so we shouldn’t expect it of them. So I don’t of Passmore. But he does have much to offer, nonetheless.

If one’s frame of reference is democracy vs authoritarianism as liberal, Weberian, and totalitarian approaches utilize, there is virtually no way to account for the continuity fascism has with modernity, progress and capitalist institutions. Fascism, on this reading, represents a discontinuity with capitalist progress. It is an outlier, a deviation, an anomaly. On the other hand, if one follows the 1935 Comintern definition of fascism as “the open, terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialistic elements of finance capitalism” the relatively independent nature of fascism is lost. It shares too much in common with capitalism and cannot be distinguished from it. So too the role of racism as a primary structuring feature of fascism and the particular form of that in anti-Semitism is obscured. One cannot really account for the wholesale destruction of European Jews at the hands of Nazis and fascists throughout Eastern Europe well past the point of Aryanizing businesses, to the point where such activity undermined the general war effort and had no benefit to fascist regimes. A failure to understand eliminationist racism as a central feature of fascist ideology risks a misunderstanding of fascism as solely a product of a crisis within capitalism. Much of this is tricky, but it is not splitting hairs, so much distinction without a difference. It is important.

Passmore does hold racism as central to fascism, but he doesn’t really flesh it out, not least in how it continues to occupy a central role in contemporary fascism. This is the case today as well as 2002 when he wrote this book.

Here’s another humdinger: Fascism is a constitutive feature of a particular type of capitalism, that found in Europe and North America. In writing this I am not arguing, much as Ta-Nahesi Coates does, for the existence of what amounts to a ‘primordial’ white supremacy, that fascism somehow attaches itself to ‘white’ genes or that whiteness is somehow eternal in the imagination of white people. I am arguing that fascism has a political geography that roughly corresponds to what I call the ‘white belt’. In this sense there is a fascist international in formation, a social and cultural process within such geo-political formations as the European Union that made its construction possible. Racism was baked into its cooking, regardless of the lofty humanitarian principles that animate its pronouncements. This process of fascistization underway throughout ‘the West’ seeks to rectify regional differences between fascist programs (Catholic here, Protestant there; urban vs rural, worker vs capitalist, etc.) in favor of a pan European whiteness that can only be conceptualized as against a dark, swarthy, foreign other. This is as fundamental to understanding anti immigrant racism as labor markets and competition over jobs. It cannot be understood apart from the larger divide between North and South, Core and Periphery. This is key to understanding the appeal of and prospects for 21st century fascism. In a frightening way, the ‘super fascism’ of Julius Evola, the ‘Imperium’ of Francis Parker Yockey and the snarky postmodern ‘race realism’ of Generation Identitaire foreshadow much worse to come. The future of fascism is there. If much worse is to come, it will ride this horse, and not that of the German donkey or the Italian mule.

In response our struggle cannot be limited to the terrain of the national, according to the rules of liberal democracy, within the suffocating possibilities of the here and now. We fight here, on this contested terrain of the national, but from an internationalist standpoint. Solidarity is a non-negotiable principle. We also should not pretend social democracy is up to the fight; the ‘populist’ leaders of France Insoumise and Podemos are social Democrats, but without a strong base within organized labor, so they cannot lead this fight. We must. If the broad struggle remains within the confines of the social-democracy, and we are unable to envision and fight for a communist future, we will be trampled, staring at a digital jackboot forever.

In his attempt to offer a redefinition of fascism Passmore gets much correct. But his effort lacks a grounding within a liberatory communism and will therefore be stuck within one or another of the schools of thought above. His observation that the strength of the Marxist approach, as he understands it, is that it illuminates the relationship between capitalism and fascism that other approaches either dismiss or ignore, allows us to make a more important argument, that fascism is constitutive of ‘progress’. Just as poverty and exploitation are essential components of economic development, rather than unfortunate errors of that development, so too does fascism necessarily exist, always and everywhere, within the general capitalist mode of production. It never left, most people just didn’t pay attention.

This informs my insistence that fascism never went away and that a primary problem scholars and activists have with defining and fighting fascism is that they tend to begin and end their efforts with classical fascism, giving short shrift to the subsequent eras of the movement. Rather than yet another dense scholarly work about Hitler’s relationship to his German Shepherds, how about a monograph on how fascism persisted in the war between South Africa and Angola? How about a close reading of that extraordinary experiment in anti racist communist organizing that was the Sojourner Truth Organization? How about a treatise on American white nationalism and fascism? Is American white nationalism a unique form of fascism? Or is it part of a generalized development of fascism that is trans national, the peculiarities of Trump an expression of something much larger? Perhaps it’s not fascism at all? I have offered up my opinions about all of these questions; most radicals appear fixated on Trump’s style of rule, the latest trade tariffs, or the coming national elections. They seem unable to formulate a useful question. Better questions help us reach better conclusions.

Over its 100-year history, through its now three distinct eras (Classical, Cold War and 21st century) fascism is as much a permanent feature of capitalist society as it is a threat to that society. It is both, but not in the sense that Arendt used it, as a fundamentally ‘revolutionary’ reorganization of society that is the doppelgänger of ‘communist totalitarianism’. Passmore, writing in 2002, gets an important part about the uses and abuses of ‘totalitarianism’ correct when he writes: “as a scholarly idea the term enjoyed its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, when anti-Marxist social scientists favoured a concept that discredited communism by linking it with fascism.” That link, by the way, is mostly bullshit and in any case not nearly as important as the link between capitalist democracy and fascism. That general academic project, always a political project in the sense it twists history to fit unsupported premises, is still operative today and informs virtually all non-Marxist interpretations of fascism. Most of that work, especially as it is rendered by journalists, is deeply flawed. Unfortunately, the Marxist rejoinder tends to remain stuck with scholarly work and frames of reference from the Classical period alone. Will the bourgeoisie fund the fascists? Will the fascists seek a red-brown alliance against monopoly capital? Yes, they are funding them. All capital is monopolistic. Meh. This will not do.

Passmore will end up articulating a ‘post-Marxist’ position on fascism, indebted to Ernesto Laclau’s theories of ‘populism’. My central problem with this is that Laclau’s theories are not transferable to the capitalist core–Europe, the United States, Canada, etc., because of the fascist element. Has anyone ever argued this? Someone should. One cannot construct a successful program for ‘populist hegemony’ on this terrain without dismantling the white supremacy, now expressed politically as white nationalism, within it. That demands a discrete fight that is not possible within the thought world of populism. Left wing hegemony cannot be achieved here through a program of populism because that program is both too reformist–it doesn’t offer anything to the most oppressed among us that addresses their particular forms of exploitation and domination (reparations, open borders,etc) yet is also too radical–it proposes universal programs that capitalist power will not accept. Furthermore the populist program is electoral, with a social movement component as an adjunct. Direct action movements must drive electoral politics, not the other way around. The discourse on discourse is too discursive, if you will, chasing public opinion and ideas as though the variability of their meanings float somewhere above and separate from the material conditions of existence. Sociotopes make the animal; the animal does not exist within conditions of its own making.

The limits of the ‘pink tide’ movements in Latin America, which ubdoubtedly owed much to this theory, are now evident everywhere. While acknowledging the contributions of Marxist theory Passmore seeks to articulate a theory beyond the centrality of class but he has picked a frame of reference that only applies, and in a limited way, to the global south.

I agree with Laclau and other ‘populists’ or ‘hegemonists’ however, that social class needs to be re-theorized beyond an industrial proletariat as the agent of history; beyond a peasantry that can surround the cities or a Black lumpenproletariat that can ignite an urban rebellion. Today, add or subtract however many agents of history to however many points of production however much one likes, it will amount to a pointless search for a vanguard that will never emerge. This then is what is different from then to now. What may have been possible in Russia of 1917 cannot be reproduced today. And it shouldn’t be. Something has changed. What is it?

My own unique contribution to this problem is to expand social class without diluting it; rather than an amorphous ‘people’ or ‘populism’ a new set of social actors could be theorized by examining the role of Border, Manse, Factory and Bit in our current mode of capitalist production. The fulcrum for these new social classes is the city, ground zero for insurrection. And, in what is surely to be regarded as a confusing twist, I think a central locus of rupture with capitalism is precisely where it is most wasteful–those centrally located, densely populated, impossibly tall, blindingly bright at night, giant penises we call skyscrapers. Here, where the most pointless of activity takes place in that utter waste of space called the office, by human beings so alienated from themselves and the products of their own labor they don’t even want a union because they prefer the taste of boot, under the watchful eyes of the permanent panopticon, is ground zero of the greatest insurrection in the history of humanity. Oh. That and our ruling class, holding their own dicks, are so blinded by hubris as to locate their primary loci of social reproduction in many of these same buildings. They live where their networking power is concentrated. It’s great that they have it all in one place. This fact will provide us with a wonderful teachable moment.

Today, borders and prisons create social class as much as a factory. So too the Manse is a point of social reproduction that shapes and conditions our existence. If social class is social, then it seems one locus of its reproduction is the home, where, apart from work, socialization takes place. Theirs and ours. While it is true that we live in the street, in a home much larger than theirs, we will take back that which is ours, which is everything.

Social Reproduction Theory is an essential tool for understanding this. The overarching theme here, and its the same one since 1968, is RCG–Race-Class-Gender.

The unification of anarchist and communist theory proceeds from here, where it must tackle the question of fascism.

END

When Fascists Are Naughty Or Nice

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“Two Roads For the New French Right” by Mark Lilla, New York Review of Books December 18, 2018.

Mark Lilla has written an essay on the French Catholic Right without using the term laïcité’, an achievement of sorts. It strikes me as a bit like writing an article about The National Rifle Association and not mentioning the Second Amendment, which you can do, but only if you are Sacha Baron Cohen, and its not an article you are writing, but a satirical sketch.

Come to think of it, Lilla also manages to explore a good chunk of the French far-right ecosystem without once using the term ‘fascism’. This will not do.

A liberal heavyweight of ‘populism’ studies and a critic of identity politics, Lilla writes that something is underway in France that is more than “xenophobic populist outbursts”. A “New French Right” is being assembled by some characters with questionable democratic credentials.

But what Lilla purports to identify as a new political phenomenon is not in any sense new to veteran anti fascists. It’s only new to him. Lilla, who understands not a bit of the essence of fascism, waxes cheerily about the hip, countercultural credentials of this latest iteration of the French far-right, as though this is the first time a political movement has raided the nostalgia box of May 1968.

For instance, what he describes as a New French Right owes much to the 1980-90s writings of Alain de Benoist, an obvious progenitor of the ideas that are the focus of his essay. de Benoist and his Nouvelle Droit (New Right) of the 1980s and 1990s was also influenced by Gramsci, and I think de Benoist coined the term ‘the right to difference’ way back when. The Génération Identitaire fascists of today, with their millionaire funders behind their slick tech savvy media stunts, are similarily fascsinated with Gramsci and hegemony,  the counter culture, environmentalism, etc. So is it a new, new French Right? Let’s not go down this road, for I fear we will end up reinforcing what is already a lexical hell.

Through this critique of Lilla’s essay, I will try a different approach.

The 3rd generation neofascist from the Le Pen stable, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, (pictured above on her Granddaddy’s lap in a Riefenstahlesque National Front poster of yor) gets a treatment that reads like a human interest piece. She is a “stylish Frenchwoman” with a “slight, charming French accent” who politely opposes what she calls a “nomadic, globalized, deracinated liberal system”. “Deracinated” translates here as “uprooted”, but it works in the other sense, too.

Lilla writes that French intellectuals dismiss these new-right Gramscians as closet National Front supporters and therefore of little political significance. He then laments that “The left has an old, bad habit of underestimating its adversaries and explaining away their ideas as mere camouflage for despicable attitudes and passions.” We probably don’t agree on what is referenced above as “the left”, but what Lilla doesn’t understand is that it is not all of the left that is guilty of this, just part of the left.

Comrades within the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) who beat the living shit out of a National Front organizer during a recent Saturday protest are not paralyzed by attempts to parse French fascism into naughty and nice. But that’s what Lilla trys to do here.

Lilla is wringing his hands, as all liberals do when they sense the salience of their ideas approaching a denouement. One solution, of course, is to hop in the sack with the fascists by calling them conservatives.

“One possibility is that a renewed, more classical organic conservatism could serve as a moderating force in European democracies currently under stress. There are many who feel buffeted by the forces of the global economy, frustrated by the inability of governments to control the flow of illegal immigration, resentful of EU rules, and uncomfortable with rapidly changing moral codes regarding matters like sexuality. Until now these concerns have only been addressed, and then exploited, by far-right populist demagogues. If there is a part of the electorate that simply dreams of living in a more stable, less fluid world, economically and culturally—people who are not primarily driven by xenophobic anti-elitism—then a moderate conservative movement might serve as a bulwark against the alt-right furies by stressing tradition, solidarity, and care for the earth.”

Note how encouraging the nice French New Right could have a positive effect on democracy. And that’s the crux of the problem here: if the liberal democratic state is “under stress” and in need of a “moderating force” then the possibility that capitalist democracy is itself the problem is out of the question. This is the key concept around which all descriptions of ‘extremism’–from right or left–are constructed. And it is dangerous for antifascists to traffic in this stupidity.

The other possibility, according to Lilla, is this:

“A different scenario is that the aggressive form of conservatism that one also sees in France would serve instead as a powerful tool for building a pan-European reactionary Christian nationalism along the lines laid out in the early twentieth century by Charles Maurras, the French anti-Semitic champion of “integral nationalism” who became the master thinker of Vichy.”

So we have a passive and an aggressive conservatism that are behind what he calls the French New Right.

Both of Lilla’s scenarios are bunk. What is underway, and has been for some time, is a continental project of neo-fascism that has outstripped and scrambled familiar liberal categories. The only way to unscramble them is to reject both using a theoretical framework that is antifascist and socialist–from the left and below.

Lillla’s second scenario unconsciously references what I call the political geography of white nationalism within which all of this is taking place. This, together with neoliberalism, are what condition and structure this ‘new’ expression of the French far right, not vague notions of a global economy about which peope feel a generalized anxiety.

Let’s call it what it actually is: a fascist international in formation.

Also, just because one political creature of the far right prefers terms like “culture war” or “social organicism” in place of “race war” and “white nation” doesn’t mean such efforts have any empirical value for antifascists. Such  rhetorical flourishes cannot help us distinguish ‘good conservatives’ from ‘bad conservatives’.

All of this is ripped from history, as when Lilla writes “This is consistent with trends in Eastern Europe, where Pew [Research Center] found that Orthodox Christian self-identification has actually been rising, along with nationalism, confounding post-1989 expectations.”

Confounding whose expectations, exactly? Most antifascists I knew in the 1990s correctly predicted a profoundly destructive unleashing of far right forces once they were freed from the Cold War parameters that had previously limited their political options. Much of this neo-fascism had a Christian bent–not surprising at all if you understood the twin pillars of fascism to be white nationalism and the Chrisitian Right. If, however, at the time you believed in the righteousness and stabilizing influence of the post Cold War American led neoliberal order–the end of history, the universal utopia of the European Union, the expansion of ‘free markets’ and civil society, etc.,–there was no real threat of a renewed fascism, only a gradual diminishing of those ancient prejudices that would accompany progress. But that was never going to be the case.

Some of us were arguing way back when that a pan-European white nationalism was developing into what can only be described as a fascist international. The collapse of the Soviet Bloc didn’t unleash long buried ancient prejudices that ‘communism’ kept artificially suppressed, as some inept anthropologist or another wrote, it burst the Cold War anti-communist consensus and opened new horizons for fascism to challenge capitalist democracies and authoritarian states alike.

Perhaps most disturbing, however, is that Lilla, together with so many of his dim witted colleagues, never tire of fretting about the ‘anxiety’ and ‘xenophobia’ that supposedly accompanies (excessive) immigration. Exhausted from such intellectual turbidity, they have nothing left for an analysis of why people from the Global South move northward. To do so would mean bringing up the pulverizing wars, economic super exploitation and social dislocation that is always justified, when it is even acknowledged, by a zero-sum racism that says, effectively, “that’s the nature of the nation state. You can’t change that, only fight for your piece of the pie within it.” That successive French governments and corporations have played no small role in prosecuting these wars for profit and conquest is totally ignored.

In any case Lilla gets it backwards: immigration doesn’t drive xenophobia. The de facto racism of the French state (or American) and its beneficiaries drive the manufacture of immigrants, creating the finished product that becomes refugees. It’s a global killing machine, with an engine that uses humans as fuel. Liberals are incapable of getting this, which is why Hillary Clinton recently floated her ‘tough on immigration’ proposal, clearing the way for Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to offer Trump $1.5 billion for construction of his border wall. Will Democrats provide a ceremonial signature brick in that wall? How convenient and despicable, yet predictable and predicted. But I aggress.

As everything continues to slip sideways, the ground shifting beneath our feet, yesterday’s comrade today’s foe, everyone is reaching, struggling to capture what the fuck is going on. Lilla’s fumbling about illustrates my point: precisely when everything appears to be up in the air, fascism begins to thrive and has an opportunity to arrive.

“In countries as diverse as France, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and Italy, efforts are underway to develop a coherent ideology that would mobilize Europeans angry about immigration, economic dislocation, the European Union, and social liberalization, and then use that ideology to govern. Now is the time to start paying attention to the ideas of what seems to be an evolving right-wing Popular Front. France is a good place to start.”

No, it’s not a “right-wing Popular Front”, but a fascist international.

“The prerequisites for a European Christian nationalist movement may be falling into place, as Hungarian president Viktor Orbán has long been predicting.”

Again, this is fascism in formation and we don’t need a Hungarian dictator to point it out. Lilla has no problem expressing awe for the supposed prognosticatory powers of Orbán, but he can’t bring himself to say as much about antifascists who have predicted as much for thirty years. Orbán, by the way, isn’t only ‘predicting’ such a social transformation, he’s actively bringing it about. That’s called a self fulfilling prophecy, not a prediction. And as long as academics such as Lilla continue to use the framework of liberalism vs populism to try and apprehend 21st century fascism, and comrades on the left ape that analysis, then Orbán and his fascist humunculi will be rendered as oracles, rather than the fascist meat sacks they actually are.

It’s good that Lilla is reaching for a way to apprehend this transformation of the European Right, but trapped as he is within the sociology of ‘populism’ and the liberal assumptions that go with them he does not have much to offer.

Yanis Varoufakis and Bernie Sanders are fumbling in a similar manner with their newly launched ‘Progressive International”, which is at once progressive, but not socialist, and international, but not internationalist. From this confused and confusing framework both continue to waffle on the so-called ‘issue’ of immigration, which is not an ‘issue’ at all, only an expression of racism vis a vis the eternal and inviolable right to movement, which it denies. In any case, about the time Lilla, Varoufakis and Sanders get their shit together to confront the so-called ‘populist threat’,  the terrain has probably shifted again underneath their feet.

Academics and their postmortems.

END