Henry A. Giroux
Cultural Critic and Public Intellectual

Henry Giroux never fails to present us with constructions that challenge our conceptualization of the world and what we thought we knew about how things work. This article is no departure from that pattern, starting with Casrells’ concept of “digital time” where all time is in the present , and therefore flattens both time and experience making critical judgement difficult, if not impossible, for those stuck in its thrall. Of course the pull of that is intense for any of us who interact regularly with the current technology. Of course “forgetting” is much easier, and even expected, in a world with no past. As is trying to conceptualize a different future in a world that has none. – rw

“Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
— James Baldwin

The Greek chorus has finally been heard in that both the left and right are now calling Donald Trump a fascist or neo-fascist. Pundits and journals across the ideological spectrum now compare Trump to Hitler and Mussolini or state he is an unbridled tyrant. For example, the liberal magazine Slate finds common ground with the conservative journal National Review in denouncing Trump as a tyrant, while liberals such as former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and the actor George Clooney join hands with conservatives such as Andrew Sullivan and Robert Kagan in arguing that Trump represents a loud echo if not a strong register of a fascist past, updated to correlate with the age of reality TV and a fatuous celebrity culture. While such condemnations contain a shred of truth, they only scratch the surface of the conditions that have produced the existing political landscape. Such arguments too often ignore the latent authoritarian and anti-democratic forces that have a long legacy in US politics and society.

Unfortunately, recognizing that the United States is about to tip over the edge into the abyss of authoritarianism is not enough. There is a need to understand the context — historical, cultural, political and economic — that has created this moment in US society in which fascism becomes an endpoint. Trump is only symptomatic of the problem, and condemning him exclusively does nothing to contain it. Moreover, such arguments often ignore the fact that Hillary Clinton is the underside of the new neoliberal oligarchy, which indulges some progressive issues but is indebted ideologically and politically to a criminogenic culture of finance, racism and war. Put differently, she represents a less obscene, less in-your-face form of authoritarianism — hardly a viable alternative to Trump.

Maybe this is all understandable in a corporate-controlled neoliberal society that uses new communication technologies that erase history by producing a notion of time wedded to a culture of immediacy, speed, simultaneity and endless flows of fragmented knowledge. As Manuel Castells writes in Communication Power, this is a form of “digital-time” in which everything that happens only takes place in the present, a time that “has no past and no future.” Time is accelerated in this new information-saturated culture, and it also flattens out “experience, competence, and knowledge,” and the capacity for informed judgment. Time has thus been transformed to provide the ideological support that neoliberal values and a fast-food, temp-worker economy require to survive.

A Culture of Forgetting and Lies

Language has also been transformed to produce and legitimate a culture of forgetting that relishes in a flight from responsibility. Capitalism, racism, consumerism and patriarchy feed off each other and are mobilized largely through a notion of common sense, which while being contested as a site of ideological struggle shows little sign of losing its power as a pedagogical force. As a result, we are living through an ongoing crisis of democracy in which both the agents and institutions necessary for such social order are being dismantled at an accelerating rate in the face of a massive assault by predatory capitalism, even while there is growing resistance to the impending authoritarianism. It gets worse.

We live in a moment of political change in which democratic public spheres are disappearing before our eyes, language is turned into a weapon and ideology is transformed into an act of hate, fear, racism and destruction — all of which is informed by a dark history of political intolerance and ethnic cleansing. The war on democracy has produced both widespread misery and suffering and finds its ideological counterpart in a culture of cruelty that has become normalized.

The bankers, hedge fund managers, financial elite and CEOs who rule the United States’ commanding institutions have become the modern version of Mr. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. As Hannah Arendt describes them in The Origins of Totalitarianism, citing Conrad: “‘these men were hollow to the core, reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity and cruel without courage …’ the only talent that could possibly burgeon in their hollow souls was the gift of fascination which makes a splendid leader of an extreme party.”

In the age of Trump, anticipation no longer imagines a better world but seems mired in a dystopian dread, mimicking the restlessness, chaos and uncertainty that precedes a historical moment no longer able to deal with its horrors and on the verge of a terrible catastrophe. We now live in a time in which mainstream politics sheds its ideals and falls prey to choices that resemble a stacked deck of cards and mimic the values of an authoritarian society. All the while politics is being hollowed out as lawlessness and misdirected rage, while a loss of faith in electoral politics has given rise to a right-wing populism that is more than willing to dispense with democracy itself.

Demands to support Hillary Clinton as a lesser evil compared to Trump refuse to acknowledge that such mandates keep existing relations of power intact. Such actions represent more than a hollowing out of politics — they represent a refusal of the affirmative nature of political struggle. They also represent the surrender of any hope of moving beyond the enveloping fog of authoritarianism and a broken political system. Put bluntly, such choices sabotage any real hope for developing a new politics and a radical democracy. These limited choices also undermine the need to develop a broader vision of struggle, a comprehensive politics and the need to engage multiple publics in the quest to rethink the political terrain outside of a neoliberal notion of the future. At issue here is the moral blight that permeates the United States: a politics of the lowest expectations, one saturated in lies, deceptions and acts of bad faith.

Historical memory is saturated with the lies of mainstream politicians. The list is too lengthy to develop but extends from the Gulf of Tonkin falsehoods that led to the Vietnam War to the lies that produced the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, which have left 1.3 million dead. As documented by Elizabeth Hinton in From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, the politics of lying by politicians and their intellectual collaborators fueled a regressive neoliberal war on poverty and crime that morphed into a racist war on the poor and helped produce the carceral state under Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Clinton.

In addition, during the Obama administration, the politics of hope quickly became a politics without hope, functioning to legitimate and accelerate a flight from social responsibility that provided a blank check for Obama’s refusal to prosecute government officials who engaged in egregious acts of torture, to conduct immoral drone attacks, to expand the nuclear arsenal and to display a cold indifference to the criminal environment of Wall Street. All of this adds up to a notion of politics partly driven by a culture of ignorance and lying that has surpassed previous historical eras, marking an entry into what Toronto Star reporter Olivia Ward calls a “post-truth universe.” In this instance, the politics of performance denigrates language and shamelessly indulges a culture in which the truth is sacrificed to shouting, dirty tricks and spin doctors.

We now are approaching a moment in US history in which truth is either viewed as a liability or ignored; at the same time, lies become more plausible, because as Hannah Arendt argued in Crises of the Republic, “the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.” Lying is now the currency of mainstream politicians and finds its counterpart in the Wild West of talk radio, cable television and the mainstream media. Under such conditions, referentiality and truth disappear along with contexts, causes, evidence and informed judgment. A manufactured ignorance and the terrifying power and infusion of money in politics and society have corrupted democratic principles and civic life. A combination of arrogance, power and deceit among the financial elite is exemplified by Donald Trump, who has repeatedly lied about his business transactions, his former misdeeds with the media, the number of Latinos who support him and the claim he personally hired instructors for Trump University.

Desperation among many segments of the American public has become personal, furthering a generalized anger ripe for right-wing populism or worse. One consequence is that xenophobia and economic insecurity couple with ignorance and a collective rage to breed the conditions for symbolic and real violence, as we have seen at many Trump rallies. When language is emptied of any substance and politics loses its ability to hold power accountable, the stage is set for a social order that allows poor Black and Brown youth to continue to be objects of domestic terrorism, and provides a cover for corporate and political criminals to ravage the earth and loot the public treasury. In the age of Trump, truth becomes the enemy of governance and politics tips over into a deadly malignancy.

One thing about the political impasse facing the American public is that it finds itself in a historical moment in which language is losing its potential for imagining the unimaginable, confronting words, images and power relations that are in the service of violence, hatred and racism — this is the moment in which meaning slips into slogans, thought is emptied of substance and ideas descend into platitudes and sound bites. This is an instant in which the only choices are between political narratives that represent the hard and soft versions of authoritarianism — narratives that embrace neo-fascism on the one side and a warmongering neoliberal worldview on the other.

This is the age of a savage capitalism, one that the director Ken Loach insists produces a “conscious cruelty.” The evidence is everywhere, not only in the vulgar blustering of Donald Trump and Fox News, but also in the language of the corporate-controlled media apparatuses that demonize and prey on the vulnerable and proclaim the primacy of self-interest over the common good, reinforce a pathological individualism, enrich themselves in ratings rooted in a never-ending spectacle of violence and legitimate a notion of freedom that collapses into the scourge of privatization and atomization.

A New Language of Liberation

The left and other progressives need a new language to enable us to rethink politics, develop a militant sense of hope, embrace an empowering sense of solidarity and engage a willingness to think outside of established political orthodoxies that serve the global financial elite. We need a new vocabulary that refuses to be commodified, and declines to look away — a language that as the brilliant writer Maaza Mengiste argues “will take us from shock and stunned silence toward a coherent, visceral speech, one as strong as the force that is charging at us.”

Progressives need a vocabulary that moves people, allows them to feel compassion for the other and gives them the courage to talk back. We need a vocabulary that enables us to confront a sense of responsibility in the face of the unspeakable, and do so with a sense of dignity, self-reflection and the courage to act in the service of a radical democracy. We need a vocabulary that allows us to recognize ourselves as agents, not victims, in the discourse of radical democratic politics. Of course, there is more at stake here than a struggle over meaning; there is also the struggle over power, over the need to create a formative culture that will produce new modes of critical agency and contribute to a broad social movement that will translate meaning into a fierce struggle for economic, political and social justice.

What happens to language when it is reduced to a vehicle for violence? What does it take for a society to strip language of its emancipatory power and reduce it, as Mengiste states, to “a rhetoric of desperation and devastation molded into the incomprehensible, then vomited out in images and words that we cannot ignore though we have tried”? What does it mean to define language as a tool — rather than a weapon of domination — in the service of economic and political justice? What institutions do we need to sustain and create to make sure that in the face of the unspeakable we can resist and hold power accountable? Language is part of public memory, informed, in part, by “traces” that allow oppressed people to narrate themselves as part of a broad collective struggle, as we see happening with the Black Lives Matter movement, among other emerging social movements. That is, suppressed histories of violence become visible in such stories and form part of a genealogy that puts current acts of violence in perspective. For instance, capital punishment is framed within the historical context of slavery, lynchings and the emerging violence of a police state.

Domination in the Age of Trump

The hate-filled, xenophobic and racist dialectic among language, images and the stories produced in the age of Trump constitutes one of the most pernicious forms of domination because it takes as its object subjectivity itself: This dialectic empties subjectivity of any sense of critical agency, turning people into spectators, customers and consumers. Identities have become commodities, and agency an object of struggle by the advertising and the corporate elite. After 50 years of a neoliberal culture of taking, unbridled individualism, militaristic violence and a self-righteous indifference to the common good, the demands of citizenship have not merely weakened, but they have been practically obliterated. In their book Babel, Zygmunt Bauman and Ezio Mauro speak to the denigration of politics and citizen rights in an age of generalized rage and emerging right-wing populism. They write:

The “culture of taking,” divorced from all rights-duties of giving and of contributing positively, is not merely a reduction of citizenship relations to a bare minimum: it is actually perfectly instrumental to a populist and charismatic simplification of politics and leadership, or rather a post-modern interpretation of a right-wing tradition, in which the leader is the demiurge who can work out public issues by himself, freeing citi­zens from the burden of their general civic duties, and leaving them to the solitary sovereignty of their privacy, spurring them to participate not in national political events but in single outbursts of collective emotional reaction, triggered by the oversimplification of love and hate on which populism feeds.

The fusion of culture, power and politics has produced a society marked by a flight from political and social responsibility. In an age in which five or six corporations dominate the media landscape and produce the stories that shape our lives, the democratic fabric of trust evaporates, public virtues give way to a predatory form of casino capitalism and thought is limited to a culture of the immediate. Politics is now performance, a kind of anti-politics wedded to the spectacle.

As Mark Danner points out in The New York Review of Books, much of Trump’s success and image stems from his highly successful role on The Apprentice as “the business magus, the grand vizier of capitalism, the wise man of the boardroom, a living confection whose every step and word bespoke gravitas and experience and power and authority and … money. Endless amounts of money.” Not only did The Apprentice at its height in 2004 have an audience of 20.7 million, catapulting Trump into reality TV stardom, but Trump’s fame played a large role in attracting 24 million people to tune in and watch him in his initial debate with a host of largely unheard of Republican politicians.

Corporate media love Donald Trump. He is the perfect embodiment of the spectacle that drives up their ratings. Danner observes that Trump is “a ratings extravaganza” capable of delivering “audiences as no other candidate ever has or could.” A point that is well taken given “that the networks have lavished upon him $2 billion worth of airtime.” According to Danner, Trump’s willingness to embrace ignorance over critical reasoning offers him an opportunity not to “let ‘political correctness’ prevent him [from] making sexist and bigoted remarks, … [while reveling in and reinforcing] his fans’ euphoric enjoyment of their hero’s reveling in the pleasures of free speech,” and his addiction to lying as an established part of the anti-politics of performance and showmanship.

Beyond a “Lesser of Two Evils” Political Framework

The American left and progressives have no future if they cannot imagine a new language that moves beyond the dead-end politics of the two-party system and explores how to build a broad-based social movement to challenge it. One fruitful beginning would be to confront the fact that our society is burdened not only by the violence of neoliberalism but also by the myth that capitalism and democracy are the same thing. Capitalism cannot rectify wage stagnation among large segments of the population, the growing destruction of the ecosystem, the defunding of public and higher education, the decline in life expectancy among the poor and middle classes, police violence against Black youth, the rise of the punishing state, the role of money in corrupting politics, and the widening gap in income and wealth between the very rich and everyone else.

If some elements of the left and progressives are to shift the terms of the debate that shape US politics, they will also have to challenge much of what passes for neoliberal common sense. That means challenging the anti-government rhetoric and the notion that citizens are simply consumers, that freedom is largely defined through self-interest and that the market should govern all of social life. It means challenging the celebration of the possessive individual and atomized self, and debunking the claim that inequality is intrinsic to society, among others. And this is just a beginning.

When the discourse of politics amounts to a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, we enter a world in which the language of fundamental, radical, democratic, social and economic change disappears. What liberals and others trapped in a lesser-of-two-evils politics forget is that elections no longer capture the popular imagination, because they are rigged and driven by the wealth of the financial elite. Elections bear no relationship to real change and offer instead the mirage or swindle of real choice. Moreover, changing governments results in very little real change when it comes to the concentration of power and the decimation of the commons and public good. At the same time, politicians in the age of reality TV embody Neil Postman’s statement in Amusing Ourselves to Death that “cosmetics has replaced ideology” and has helped to usher in the age of authoritarianism. Power hides in the dictates of common sense and wields destruction and misery through the “innocent criminals” who produce austerity policies and delight in a global social order dominated by precarity, fear, anxiety and isolation.

What happens when politics turns into a form of entertainment that washes out all that matters? What happens to mainstream society when the dominant and more visible avenues of communication encourage and legitimate a mode of infantilism that becomes the modus operandi of newscasters, and trivia becomes the only acceptable mode of narration? What happens when compassion is treated as a pathology and the culture of cruelty becomes a source of humor and an object of veneration? What happens to a democracy when it loses all semblance of public memory and the welfare state and social contract are abandoned in order to fill the coffers of bankers, hedge fund managers and the corporate elite? What are the consequences of turning higher education into an “assets to debt swapping regime” that will burden students with paying back loans in many cases until they are in their 40s and 50s? What happens when disposable populations are brushed clean from our collective conscience, and are the object of unchecked humiliation and disdain by the financial elite? As Zygmunt Bauman points out in Babel: “How much capitalism can a democracy endure?”

What language and public spheres do we need to make hope realistic and a new politics possible? What will it take for progressives to move beyond a deep sense of political disorientation? What does politics mean in the face of an impending authoritarianism when the conversation among many liberals and some conservatives is dominated by a call to avoid electing an upfront demagogue by voting instead for Hillary Clinton, a warmonger and neoliberal hawk who denounces political authoritarianism while supporting a regime of financial tyranny? What does resistance mean when it is reduced to a call to participate in rigged elections that reproduce a descent into an updated form of oligarchy, and condemns millions to misery and no future, all the while emptying out politics of any substance?

Instead of tying the fortunes of democracy to rigged elections we need nonviolent, massive forms of civil disobedience. We need to read Howard Zinn, among others, once again to remind ourselves where change comes from, making clear that it does not come from the top but from organized social formations and collective struggles. It emerges out of an outrage that is organized, collective, fierce, embattled and willing to fight for a society that is never just enough. The established financial elites who control both parties have been exposed and the biggest problem Americans face is that the crisis of ideas needs to be matched by an informed politics that refuses the old orthodoxies, thinks outside of the box, and learns to act individually and collectively in ways that address the unthinkable, the improbable, the impossible — a new future.

As politics is reduced to a carnival of unbridled narcissism, deception, spectacle and overloaded sensation, an anti-politics emerges that unburdens people of any responsibility to challenge the fundamental precepts of a society drenched in corruption, inequality, racism and violence. This anti-politics also removes many individuals from the most relevant social, moral and political bonds. This is especially tragic at a historical moment marked by an endless chain of horrors and a kind of rootlessness that undermines all foundations and creates an uncertainty of unprecedented scale. Fear, insecurity and precarity now govern our lives, rendering even more widespread feelings of loneliness, powerlessness and existential dread.

Under such circumstances, established politics offers nothing but scorn, if not an immense disregard for the destruction of all viable bonds of solidarity, and the misery that accompanies such devastation. Zygmunt Bauman and Ezio Mauro are right in arguing, in their book Babel, that we live at a time in which feeling no responsibility means rejecting any sense of critical agency and refusing to recognize the bonds we have with others. Time is running out, and more progressives and people on the left need to wake up to the discourse of refusal, and join those who are advocating for radical social and structural transformation. This is not merely an empty abstraction, because it means thinking politics anew with young people, diverse social movements, unions, educators, environmentalists and others concerned about the fate of humanity.

It is crucial to acknowledge that we live in a historical conjuncture in which the present obliterates the past and can only think about the future in dystopian terms. It is time to unpack the ideological and structural mechanisms that keep the war machine of capitalism functioning. It is also time to recognize that there are no shortcuts to addressing the anti-democratic forces now wrecking havoc on US society. The ideologies, grammar and structures of domination can only be addressed as part of a long-term collective struggle.

The good news is that the contradictions and brutality of casino capitalism are no longer invisible, a new language about inequality is being popularized, poor Black and Brown youth are battling against state violence, and people are waking up to the danger of ecological devastation and the increased potential for a nuclear apocalypse. What is needed is a new democratic vision, a radical imaginary, short-term and long-term strategies, and a broad-based social movement to act on such a vision.

Such a vision is already being articulated in a variety of ways: Michael Lerner’s call for a new Marshall Plan; Stanley Aronowitz’s call for reviving a radical labor movement; my call for making education central to politics and the development of a broad-based social movement; Angela Davis’ call for abolishing capital punishment and the mass incarceration system; Nancy Fraser and Wendy Brown’s important work on dismantling neoliberalism; the ongoing work of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi of the Black Lives Matter movement to develop a comprehensive politics that connects police violence with other forms of state violence; Gene Sharp’s strategies for civil disobedience against authoritarian states; and the progressive agendas for a radical democracy developed by Salvatore Babones are just a few of the theoretical and practical resources available to galvanize a new understanding of politics and collective resistance.

In light of the terror looming on the political horizon, let’s hope that radical thought and action will live up to their potential and not be reduced to a regressive and pale debate over electoral politics. Hope means living without illusions and being fully aware of the practical difficulties and risks involved in meaningful struggles for real change, while at the same time being radically optimistic.

To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.

Henry A. Giroux, Contributing Editor

Currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His books include: Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (Peter Land 2011), On Critical Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011), Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (Paradigm 2012), Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories and the Culture of Cruelty (Routledge 2012), Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future (Paradigm 2013). Giroux’s most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), are Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, America’s Disimagination Machine (City Lights) and Higher Education After Neoliberalism (Haymarket) will be published in 2014). He is also a Contributing Editor of Cyrano’s Journal Today / The Greanville Post, and member of Truthout’s Board of Directors and has his own page The Public Intellectual. His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable

=By= Ken Ovenden

Kevin Ovenden argues for an internationalist approach to the European crisis in the second half of a two-part series on the European question

Don’t blame the Easterners

It is now fashionable in Brussels to talk of an “illiberal bloc”, comprising mainly Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Even some commentators on the left have given credence to that idea.

While there are some regional variations and affinities in the emergence of far right and fascist forces in Europe – the four so called Visegrad countries mentioned above and the “Peoples Parties” in Scandinavia, for example – they do not fit into a neat pattern. Certainly not one of the advanced and liberal West versus the backward and authoritarian East. Nor into creditor North versus debtor South.

The Front National began its advance in France in 1983, when the Iron Curtain still divided Europe. Gert Wilders’ far right party is topping the polls in the thoroughly modern European country of the Netherlands. The far right has advanced strongly in Croatia, but not in Serbia. Golden Dawn broke through in Greece, but there is no equivalent in Spain, Portugal or Ireland.

As if to underline that the radicalising right cannot be consigned as an Eastern European problem, Switzerland, which is not in the EU but where the anti-Muslim and anti-migrant People’s Party is the largest in the federal parliament, a few days after the result in neighbouring Austria lifted the ban on the Hitler salute; so long as it is used as a matter of “personal expression”, you understand.

As for the idea that it is a quartet of Eastern European states that is preventing the EU from taking a firm line in defence of democratic freedoms you have only to look at how Brussels responded to the emergence of the first authoritarian government of that supposed bloc, Victor Orban’s in Hungary, to see that the claim is a smokescreen.

Hungary and Vickto Orban

Orban leads a hard right party in government. It has similarities with the Austrian FPO. But in Hungary the outright fascist forces are organised separately in the Jobbik Party, very similar to Golden Dawn and, with 21 percent, the third party in parliament.

On taking office a second time in 2010 Orban began a serious clampdown on press freedom, civil liberties and human rights. There were detailed reports from organisations such as Amnesty International. The EU made some noises. Nothing was done.

The only time it seriously threatened action was when Orban looked like he was going to defy the EU’s Fiscal and Stability Pact rules on government spending and when he flirted with forging a closer relationship with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Brussels stirred. Orban backed down. The EU slumped back to inaction.

Poland’s Law and Justice Party

Now the same officials in Brussels say that it is the threat of a Hungarian veto that is preventing them from moving beyond a ponderous investigation into the flagrant breaches of judicial independence, women’s rights and the rule of law by the hard right Law and Justice Party that was recently elected in Poland.

Compare all that with Greece and the treatment of its left wing anti-austerity government last year. Within days of Syriza being elected, the EU had moved to throttle Greece’s financial lifeline and to lead the member states in a concerted effort to crush the government in Athens and the popular resistance in Greece to austerity.

The Europe question and the left

From Big Pharma, the Nazis and the Origins of the EU…[Paul Anthony Taylor] New Horizons 2014 – Paul Anthony Taylor

The EU is fully behind the French government of Francois Hollande. It has suspended basic freedoms under an eight-month old state of emergency and is using the militarised police to batter through new austerity measures passed not by parliament, but by executive decree.

If the EU will not willingly put up opposition to the far right, then perhaps it might find itself becoming some line of defence, if only because the far right will clash with it by threatening to break with the EU, or with the Eurozone, or with their rules?

That appears to be the hope of those on the European left who on the one hand say that they are fully aware of how undemocratic and reactionary the EU is, but on the other maintain that it is nevertheless an obstacle to racism, fascism and war, and that it must be defended against all the pressures to break it up. And then reformed.

This hope rests on a number of confusions. I will focus on just two. The first is that it accepts the now mainstream liberal-capitalist view that the future of Europe is either preserving the EU and its further centralisation (with reforms – all the leaders talk of those) or its breakup into reactionary national states with resurgent fascism and war. Or, as it is often put, the choice is between rational politics of the centre or “populism” of the “extremes”.

Many commentators, far from the left, now invoke as a parallel a dubious reading of the history of the 1930s in which a breakdown of trade and the global market led almost directly to the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Let us put to one side that peculiar and tendentious history of the 1930s, informed as it is by an ideological commitment to free market capitalism, which makes it all the more surprising that it is endorsed by the Keynesian economist Yanis Varoufakis.

The problem is that it is the very mechanisms of the EU itself, particularly in response to the succession of crises – the banks, the austerity, the refugees… – which are generating reactionary trends such as racism, chauvinism and authoritarian rule.

The far right and fascists give those a particularly dangerous and virulent form. But it was not the far right who did a deal with Turkey to keep out the refugees. Doing that creates the conditions for and necessitates widespread anti-refugee racism to justify the policy. That was the work of Angela Merkel, at the head of the pack of mainstream governments, including Francois Hollande, David Cameron and Alexis Tsipras.

Strengthening the EU does not mean less reaction. It means more, and out of it the potential further growth of the fascist right.

The future prospect is not the EU versus reactionary disintegration. It is an EU of crisis, constantly breeding reactionary forces even as it centralises in order to deal with renewing pressures to pull it apart.

And – the second confusion – it is not the case that the only anti-EU forces looking to break the bosses’ club up are reactionary ones. Nor is it true that the assorted far right and fascist groups in different European countries constitute a single block, each with the same policy of pursuing a national break from the EU.

The spectrum of radical right wing forces varies from racist and chauvinist populists such as UKIP in Britain through to out and out fascists, such as Golden Dawn in Greece.

Racism and Islamophobia are central to all of them. Here is not the place to analyse the structural and other differences between them, nor the specific nature of those that pursue a fascist, militarist strategy. But one difference that is relevant here is their diverse political positions in relation to the EU.

Four examples illustrate that. UKIP is for Britain leaving the EU. The fascists of Golden Dawn are for Greece staying in the EU – with all sorts of demands for further reactionary policies, for sure: but staying nonetheless.

The Law and Justice Party in Poland is firmly committed to the EU and to its twin, Nato. It is for more aggressive action by both of them against Russia. Its supposedly “Eurosceptic” rhetoric is directed against liberal values and against the Polish left, which it accuses of not being really Polish. On occasion it may sound off against German domination of Europe. But it is not for a rupture with the EU itself.

The Austrian FPO has the position outlined above of staying in the EU, violently opposing Turkish membership, and taking a hard economic line against the debtor countries of the European South (maybe kicking Greece out) and the “backward” countries of the East.

Other far right and fascist forces show similar variations. The fundamental reason for that is that the disparate far right in Europe is not the radicalisation – the taking to extreme – of some kind of “Eurosceptic feeling”, which is sort of floating around the continent.

The term “Eurosceptic” is, in fact, pretty useless for socialists. It was coined to describe British Tory MPs who rebelled against the Maastricht Treaty in parliament in 1992.

Since then it has been a catchall of the pro-capitalist media applied both to the French radical farmer Jose Bove, who attacked a branch of McDonalds to protest against corporate capitalism, and to the veteran French fascist, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who called the Holocaust a “minor detail of history”.

The raw material the far right are scooping up and radicalising is not the poorly constructed journalistic term: “Euroscepticism”. It is from the swamp of right wing and reactionary trends within each of the far right’s own nation-states and national political realities.

The far right and fascist parties are a radicalisation of the right wing of politics, and ultimately of the elites, in each of their respective countries.

That is why they do not have a common line on the EU and other questions relating to the divergent national and imperialist interests of their “homelands”.

So UKIP grew out of, and has radicalised, the anti-EU position of the right wing of the British Tory Party. All right wing forces in Greece – along with the whole of the Greek state and ruling class – are in favour of staying in the EU and euro. So, therefore, is Golden Dawn, despite rhetorical sallies against “German domination” of Europe.

The hard right Polish government’s position favouring Nato expansion against Russia and staying in the EU is a radicalised version of the policy of the mainstream Polish right and is the historical position of most of Polish big business. Apart from anything else, the EU subsidies to Poland’s elites, in order to build it up as a state on the frontier of a new Cold War with Russia, have been huge.

The FPO may try to channel the resentment at the base of Austrian society at the way the corrupt political system has further depleted democracy since joining the EU in 1995. But its position on EU membership is not fundamentally different from many on the right of the centre-right OVP.

This does not mean that the radicalising right is simply and directly an expression of the interests and policies of their respective capitalist classes. That is clearly not the case. Three-quarters of British big business are for staying in the EU on essentially the same terms as now. UKIP is definitely not.

But the main political instruments of big business that are meant to represent those interests – parties such as the Tory party in Britain – face a crisis everywhere in Europe. One side of it is in failing to come up with policies to escape the multiple crises: economic, social and political. The other is in their declining social and electoral support.

The bloodletting in the Tory Party over Europe is one extreme example of the consequences. They are not unique to the British centre right: Angela Merkel’s CDU is bitterly divided; the leader of the centre right in Greece recently expelled the entire youth section.

This is the context in which all sorts of far right forces are seeking to radicalise politics found on their mainstream, national right wings – and to grow. They, and the fascist formations especially, pose a particular danger.

They are political actors in their own right. Their demagogic rhetoric against “elites” and “the establishment” can give them inroads into unemployed and working class layers that the crisis-ridden centre-right parties struggle to penetrate.

But however much they portray themselves as independent from the wealthy elites, they require the support of at least a substantial layer of the capitalist class and of its state to advance seriously and to come to power.

So they constantly seek to offer a programme, however utopian and lacking in coherence, that may ultimately win the elites’ political support. They belong to the crisis of the political system and of capitalism’s strategies to pursue its interests. They are independent from neither.

The far right can be stopped

The far right is not the only political expression of European crisis. So too is the radical left.

The run-off round of the Austrian presidential election took place five weeks before the second general election in the Spanish state, after the earlier one six months before failed to deliver a government, even a grand coalition.

As Austria voted, Spanish polling showed that the radical left alliance of Podemos and the United Left held second place on about 24 percent. Whatever the poll movements up to 26 June, there is no far right party arising from the crisis of the Spanish political system.

Portugal is similar, as is Ireland, where the anti-capitalist and radical left broke through in recent elections, north and south.

It is hardly a sufficient answer, however, to the shocking near victory of a fascist in Austria to point to the electoral successes of the left in the Iberian Peninsula, Dublin, Belfast and elsewhere.

And in Germany, where the radical left Die Linke has existed for a decade, the far right AfD, founded only three years ago, has made serious advances. The radical left is on about 9 percent in the opinion polls. The AfD is on 14 percent – with the general election due in September next year.

The mere existence of a radical left party, even where it has parliamentary representation, as Die Linke does, is not in itself an answer to the far right threat. It is critical for the radical and anti-capitalist left to be at the centre of two other, related things.

The first is a mass and militant movement against fascism and the far right, but also fighting against the wider racist climate created by European institutions and governments. For it is that racism which is paving the way for the far right’s advance.

The launch two months ago of the Aufstehen Gegen Racismus (Stand Up Against Racism) initiative directed against the AfD and against the wider racist politics in Germany will, we must hope, encourage those in Austria who organised the magnificent solidarity with the refugees last summer in their efforts to create something similar to confront the FPO.

The second is to seek to situate the fighting left in, and to develop, the manifold struggles against austerity – from strikes and community revolts, to all manner of social movements.

Increasingly, that requires a preparedness to confront head on the forces of austerity, no matter who is in government, and to offer anti-capitalist answers when the movement runs up against the argument that there is no alternative in Europe as it stands.

Nowhere more demonstrates the potential power of the working class and allied movements to marginalise even a powerful and established fascist force than the current revolt in France.

There is very much more to be said about both of those crucial roles of the left. And it is a success of the anti-capitalist and radical left activists in Greece that despite the Syriza capitulation the drawing together of the struggles both against austerity and for the refugees is a major reason why the fascist right has been penned back over the last year.

There is 27 percent unemployment in Greece and there are 50,000 refugees stranded by the EU-Turkey deal. Yet a survey a month ago found that 85 percent of people say, “Greece must help the refugees.” That ought to be impossible according to much fashionable thinking. It was made possible by the movements at the base of Greek society and the initiatives taken there by the fighting left – often taken when they were not in fashion at all.

There is one final point. Austerity Europe and Fortress Europe are two faces of the EU and of the response of the European elites to the crisis.

The struggles against austerity capitalism and against racism are unfolding in each national context. They mean confrontation with governments of the member states of each of the 28 EU countries.

But the semi-organisation of those states and their capitalist interests into the cartel of the EU means that everywhere that cartel is throwing its weight against opposition movements, behind the governments imposing vicious measures and alongside the employers who are demanding more.

That means that for the radical left and for the movements the struggles need to be directed against the EU cartel as well as against the domestic national government.

Failure to do that leaves the space wide open for the far right parties to exploit the bitterness at Europe’s undemocratic and anti-working class institutions and to frame it with their brand of radicalised right wing politics, based on the national antagonisms and reactionary forces the EU produces. The ultimate aim is to serve the respective national elites.

A recent statement from three left wing unions – the RMT, ASLEF and BFAWU  – in Britain arguing for a left wing Leave vote in the referendum put it very well: “We are against a fortress Britain, so we are against a fortress Europe.”

That points to a unifying and fighting position for the left and labour movements across the continent: against the EU of austerity, racism and war. That means breaking it up, and building instead solidarity on an internationalist and anti-capitalist basis.

That perspective can help to develop the struggles against austerity and racism, and to overcome the efforts to blunt them by the failed establishment politicians who tell us to put faith in them and in their club in Brussels – and who wave as a stick to threaten us the very far right forces which the establishments, national and European, are producing and cooperating with as this crisis grinds on, and on.

Kevin Ovenden is the author of Syriza Inside the Labyrinth, which is being published this autumn by Pluto Press. Kevin is a longstanding socialist activist and writer in Britain who has closely followed Greek politics, society and culture for over twenty-five years. He was for many years a member of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain and then a leading figure in the Respect Party. He writes particularly on racism, the politics of the Middle East and the crisis of the Eurozone for a range of outlets.

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?