US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty

by Lance Selfa

  The delegation of power to the state therefore exists because of what Draper calls “the political inaptitude of the capitalist class” compared to other ruling classes in history. It is not only that feudal lords combine an economic and political role while capitalists perform only the former; it is also that the necessity for capitalists to devote their time to the process of accumulation and their own multiple internal divisions militates against their functioning directly as a governing class.11 More broadly, Bernard Porter notes that capitalists “tend to be hostile to ‘government’ generally, which they see mainly as a restraint on enterprise and, on a personal level, don’t find ‘ruling’ half so worthwhile or satisfactory as making money.”12 This arrangement is quite compatible with the exercise of bourgeois hegemony over society as a whole, although even in this respect, some sections of the bourgeoisie tend to play a more significant role than others; but politically, as Fred Block has written, “the [capitalist] ruling class does not rule.”13

  As a result, two other forces have tended to rule jointly in place of the capitalists themselves: politicians and state managers, in other words, the senior component of the permanent state bureaucracy. In both cases the very distance of the groups involved from direct membership of the capitalist class allowed them to make assessments of what was required by the system as a whole. Politicians need not belong to the same class as the capitalists: indeed, it was landed aristocracies who played this role for much of modern European history down to 1945. “A plainly bourgeois society—nineteenth-century Britain—could, without serious problems, be governed by hereditary peers,” noted Eric Hobsbawm.14 Social democracy—originally a working-class political tendency at least nominally committed to overturning capitalism—has intermittently done so afterwards, and similar patterns can be found in most other Western nation-states.

  Throughout the long boom after World War II, the capitalist class had called to order social democratic politicians when their policies were perceived, however unreasonably, as being too concerned with defending the interests of their supporters. Their normal methods for disciplining disobedient politicians involved currency speculation, withholding investment, and moving production—or at least threatening to do so, which was often sufficient to achieve the desired effect. These police actions by capital were often aided by state managers who tended to be more conscious of what capital would find acceptable or permissible than mere elected representatives of the people.

  But economic or bureaucratic resistance to government agendas is a blunt instrument, capable of blocking or reversing one set of policies and making others more likely, not of bringing about a complete reorientation in policy terms. Capitalist states are sets of permanent institutions run by unelected officials who act in the interests of capital more or less effectively; parliamentary government is a temporary regime consisting of elected politicians who act in the interests of capital, more or less willingly. But, in times of crisis, capital requires politicians who will decide on a particular strategy and fight for it with absolute conviction, if necessary against individual members of the capitalist class themselves.

  During the 1930s, Antonio Gramsci discussed this type of ruling class response to crisis as “an organic and normal phenomenon”: “It represents the fusion of an entire social class under a single leadership, which alone is held to be capable of solving an overriding problem of its existence and of fending off a mortal danger.”15 Gramsci was thinking of Italian fascism, but a similar shift took place during what I call the “vanguard” phase of neoliberalism under Thatcher and Reagan. It would be quite wrong, however, to imagine that new strategic initiatives are necessarily beneficial to the operation of capitalism.

  Contrary to extreme functionalist or economic determinist positions, representatives of the dominant classes are not infallible or all-knowing. As Gramsci once noted, we have to allow for the possibility of error, but “error” is not reducible to a “mistake”: “The principle of ‘error’ is a complex one: one may be dealing with an individual impulse based on mistaken calculations or equally it may be a manifestation of the attempts of specific groups or sects to take over hegemony within the directive grouping, attempts which may well be unsuccessful.”16

  In one sense, however, neoliberalism has been too successful. For it has weakened, to varying degrees, the capacity of capitalist states to act in the interest of their national capital as a whole. The relationship between neoliberal regimes and capital has, since the 1970s, prevented states from acting effectively in the collective, long-term interest of capitalism and leading instead to a situation where, according to Robert Skidelsky, “ideology destroys sane economics.”17 It is true that neoliberal regimes have increasingly abandoned any attempt to arrive at an overarching understanding of what the conditions for growth might be, other than the supposed need for lowering taxation and regulation and raising labor flexibility.

  Apart from these, the interests of the total national capital are seen as an arithmetical aggregate of the interests of individual businesses, some of which, to be sure, have rather more influence with governments than others. These developments have led to incomprehension among remaining Keynesians of the liberal left.18 But their assessments are correct in noting that, insofar as there is a “strategic view,” it involves avoiding any policies that might incur corporate displeasure, however minor the inconveniences they might involve for the corporations, which of course includes regulation.

  The weakening of the labor movement and consequent rightward shift by social democracy may therefore ultimately prove self-destructive for capital since, as we have seen, one of the inadvertent roles that it historically played was to save capitalism from itself, not least by achieving reforms in relation to education, health, and welfare. These benefited workers, of course, but also ensured that the reproduction of the workforce and the conditions for capital accumulation more generally took place. But with the weakening of trade union power and the capitulation of social democracy to neoliberalism, there is currently no social force capable of either playing this “reformist” role directly or by pressurizing nonsocial democratic state managers into playing it.

  That leaves the state apparatus itself, but the necessary distance between the state and capital (or between state managers and capitalists), to which I earlier alluded, has been minimized. Any longer-term strategy in the overall interests of capital would have to address the dysfunctionality of the financial system, the refusal of firms to invest in productive capacity, and low levels of tax intake attendant on a fiscal system massively skewed towards the wealthy. But state managers are no longer prepared to do this and neither are most politicians—with the exception of one tendency: right-wing populism.

  Varieties of Right-Wing Populism

  Given the hysteria about Trump’s supposed incipient fascism, it is important to begin by distinguishing between fascist and non-fascist variants of the hard right. All wings are united by two characteristics. One is a base of membership and support in one or more fraction of the middle class (i.e., the petty bourgeoisie, traditional middle-class professionals, or the technical-managerial new middle class)—although as we shall see, this does not mean that they necessarily lack working-class support. The other is an attitude of extreme social conservatism, always in relation to race and nation, sometimes in relation to gender and sexual orientation: far-right politicians in the Netherlands, for example, have rhetorically invoked the relative freedoms of women or gays in the West as way of denouncing the supposedly oppressive beliefs of Muslims. The political goal is always to push popular attitudes and legal rights back to a time before the homogeneity of “the people” was polluted by immigration, whenever this Golden Age of racial or cultural purity is deemed to have existed, which is usually at some undetermined period before World War II.

  There are nevertheless large differences between these two types of organization. As Jan-Werner Müller has pointed out, “National Socialism and Italian Fascism need to
be understood as populist movements—even though, I hasten to add, they were not just populist movements but also exhibited traits that are not inevitable elements of populism as such: racism, a glorification of violence, and a radical ‘leadership principle.’”19 More specifically, Michael Mann argues that non-fascist far-right parties are distinguished from fascism by three characteristics: 1) they are electoral and seek to attain office through the democratic means at local, national, and European levels; 2) they do not worship the state and, while they seek to use the state for welfare purposes for their client groups, some (e.g., the Austrian Freedom Party or the Tea Party) have embraced neoliberal small-state rhetoric; 3) they do not seek to “transcend” class: “These three ambiguities and weaknesses of principle and policy make for instability, as either extremists or moderates seek to enforce a more consistent line that then either results in splits and expulsions, such as the makeover of the Italian MSI and the disintegration of the German Republikaner in the mid-1990s.”20

  The first of these distinctions, adherence to bourgeois democracy, is crucial, since it indicates the fundamental distinction between the fascist and non-fascist far right: the latter, as Peter Mair notes, “do not claim to challenge the democratic regime as such.”21 Activists and commentators often draw an absolute distinction between fascism and other forms of right-wing politics, based on the way the former rely on paramilitary organization and violence as part of their strategy for attaining power. In that sense, Golden Dawn in Greece is a classic fascist formation in a way that the Northern League in Italy is not. The distinction is important, not least in determining the tactics of their opponents, but fascism is not defined simply by its recourse to extraparliamentary or illegal activity. Here, Trotsky’s analysis remains relevant: “When a state turns fascist… it means, primarily and above all, that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism.”22

  Fascism, then, is revolutionary, and the non-fascist far right is not; but what does revolutionary mean in this context? Many Marxists are reluctant to use this term in relation to any modern political movement not of the left, with the possible exception of nationalisms in the Global South. But if we consider fascist seizures of power as political revolutions—in other words, as those which change the nature and personnel of the regime without changing the mode of production, then there is no reason why the term should not be applicable.23

  The second major difference, which flows directly from the first, is their respective attitudes to society, which they are trying to build. As Roger Griffin points out, the “revolution from the right” in both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany claimed to be using the state to socially engineer a “new man and woman” with “new values.” This is a project of transformation. The non-fascist far right, however, insists that the people are already the repositories of homogeneity and virtue: “By contrast, the enemies of the people—the elites and ‘others’—are neither homogeneous nor virtuous. Rather, they are accused of conspiring together against the people, who are depicted as being under siege from above by the elites and from below by a range of dangerous others.”24 The purpose of the non-fascist far-right is to return the people to their formerly happy condition before these twin pressures began to be applied: “This is not a Utopia, but a prosperous and happy place which is held to have actually existed in the past, but which has been lost in the present era due to the enemies of the people.”25 This is a project of restoration.

  The revival of the far right as a serious electoral force is based on the apparent solutions it offers to what are now two successive waves of crisis, which have left the working class in the West increasingly fragmented and disorganized, and susceptible to appeals to blood and nation as the only viable form of collectivism still available. This is particularly true in a context where the systemic alternative to capitalism—however false it was—had apparently collapsed in 1989–91. The political implications are ominous. The increasing interchangeability of political parties gives the far right an opening to appeal to voters by positioning themselves as outside the consensus in ways that speak to their justifiable feelings of rage.26

  The potential problem for the stability of the capitalist system is, however, less the possibility of far-right parties themselves coming to power with a program destructive to capitalist needs than their influence over the mainstream parties of the right, when the beliefs of their supporters may inadvertently cause difficulty for the accumulation process—as in the impending withdrawal from the EU in the case of the United Kingdom or, potentially at least, a halt to migration from Mexico and Central America and the mass deportation of all undocumented immigrants at the behest of the Trump presidency in the case of the United States. Here we see emerging a symbiotic relationship between one increasingly inadequate regime response to the problems of capital accumulation and another increasingly extreme response to the most irrational desires and prejudices produced by capital accumulation. Again, this is not a new problem for capital.

  There is a problem with some left analyses of the hard right and its far-right component in particular, which is the assumption that it represents the “real” face of capitalism unmasked (“the naked dictatorship of monopoly capital” and so forth). In fact, in the developed world at least, it is only in very rare situations of dire extremity—and usually after facing the kind of threat from the labor movement that has unfortunately been absent for several decades—that capital has ever relied on the far right to solve its problems. Right-wing social movements can relate to the accumulation strategies of capital in three ways: 1) they are directly supportive; 2) they are compatible with and/or indirectly supportive through strengthening ideological positions that are associated with capitalist rule, but that may not be essential to it; or 3) they are indirectly and possibly unintentionally destabilizing.

  Until recently, at any rate, examples of type 1 have been very rare indeed, since, as I have argued above, capitalists prefer to use corporate pressure rather than mass movements to achieve their political goals. Examples of type 2 are the most frequent, but, as I will argue below, we are currently seeing, and are likely to see more, examples of type 3, which raises the question: What is the relationship between the far-right politics and capitalism? What if a fascist or far-right movement came to power that implemented policies against the needs of capital—not because they were “anticapitalist” in the way that the Strasserite wing of the Nazi Party were (falsely) supposed to be, but simply because their interests lay elsewhere?

  The Nazi Regime performed two services for German capital: crushing an already weakened working class and launching an imperial expansionist drive to conquer new territory. But while racism and anti-Semitism were important for the Nazis, notes Ulrich Herbert, they were not for German national capitals:

  Any attempt to reduce the Nazi policy of mass annihilation solely or largely to underlying economic, “rational” interests, however, fails to recognize that, in the eyes of the Nazis, and in particular the advocates of systematic racism among them, the mass extermination of their ideological enemies was itself a “rational” political goal. It was supported by reference to social, economic, geopolitical, historical and medical arguments, as well as notions of “racial hygiene” and “internal security.” Racism was not a “mistaken belief” serving to conceal the true interests of the regime, which were essentially economic. It was the fixed point of the whole system.27

  It is therefore true, as Alex Callinicos points out, that “the extermination of the Jews cannot be explained in economic terms.” He sees the connection between the Holocaust and German capitalism as an example of an interpenetration of interests, in this case between “German big business” and “a movement whose racist and pseudo-revolutionary ideology drove it toward
s the Holocaust.”28 The position that Callinicos is articulating here was first expressed by Peter Sedgwick in 1970: “German capitalism did not need Auschwitz; but it needed the Nazis, who needed Auschwitz.”29 But where did the Nazi “racist and pseudo-revolutionary ideology” come from in the first place? Callinicos only sees a connection with capitalism as arising from the immediate needs of the economy at a time of crisis; but the ideological formation of the Nazi worldview took place over a much longer period, which saw the combination of a series of determinations arising from the contradictions of German and European capitalism, and including the authoritarian character of a subordinate middle-class that had never successfully developed its own political identity; extreme right-wing nationalism first formed in response to the French Revolution, racism in its anti-Semitic form, disappointed imperialism, a taste for violence acquired in the trenches, and so on.30

  Adapting Sedgwick then, we might say that German capitalism didn’t need the Holocaust, but the long-term development of German capitalism produced, through a series of mediations, the ideology of Nazism, which contained the possibility of a Holocaust, and when German capitalists turned to the Nazis in its moment of crisis, they were given the opportunity to realize that possibility, however irrelevant and outright damaging it was to German capital’s more overarching imperial project. In other words, the barbaric ideology of Nazism and the socioeconomic crisis of Germany (to which the Nazis provided one solution) were already connected as different moments in the mediated totality of capitalism.