A specter is haunting the West — the specter of a working class whose political home has been foreclosed. For decades, seduced by the “third way” siren songs of former US president Bill Clinton, former British prime minister Tony Blair and former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, center-left forces jettisoned the language of class struggle.
However, in their rush to become respectable, and prove themselves more efficient and fairer managers of capitalism, they ceased to speak of exploitation and chose to ignore the inherent antagonism — even violence — of the capital-labor relation. They banished workers’ words, mannerisms, way of being and aspirations from political discourse altogether. Then they denigrated their former constituents as “deplorables.”
When downward mobility and impecunity take over large hinterlands where a once-proud working class now feels abandoned, and from which the established parties avert their eyes, a yearning for a new dignity-restoration project — for a narrative that pits a collective “us” against a powerful “them” — takes shape. A decade ago, a venomous storyteller with a century-long experience of filling such voids stepped into the new one: the xenophobic far-right.
Movements and leaders that centrists clumsily labeled “populist” did not create this yearning — they merely exploited it with the cynicism of a seasoned monopolist spotting an untapped market. From the working-class areas of south Piraeus, Greece, a stone’s throw from where I am writing this, to the formerly “red” suburbs of Paris or Marseille, France, we can see voting blocs shift from communist and social-democratic parties to those created by the political heirs of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Like their forebears, these political chameleons pose as the standard-bearers for a disenfranchised working class. Meanwhile, in the US, white supremacists, Christian fundamentalists, technofeudal lords and fed-up former Democratic voters vibrate together passionately in a coalition that has won the White House twice.
The comparison, which many are making, with the interwar period can lead us astray if we are not careful, but it is pertinent. While the left’s tendency to call all conservative or centrist opponents fascists is inexcusable, the fact remains that fascism is now in the air. How could it be otherwise? When working-class people were abandoned all over the West, it was easy to restore their hope with the promise of a national rebirth built upon a fictional golden age.
Once the bait was taken, the next step was to divert their wrath from the socioeconomic forces that had driven them to poverty to some nebulous cabal — “globalists,” the “deep state,” or some George Soros-directed plot to “replace” them in their own land. Riding high on the passion thus inspired, ultra-right politicians begin taking aim at liberal elites, bankers, rich foreigners abroad and wretched aliens at home — people who can be portrayed as usurpers of the golden age and obstacles to national rebirth.
Then — and only then — comes the dismissal of the class struggle, ruling out political representation of the working class’s economic interests. The wrath at the US owners who close their local factory and ship it wholesale to Vietnam is redirected against Chinese workers. The fury at the bank that foreclosed on the family home becomes hatred for Jewish lawyers, Muslim doctors and Mexican day laborers. Anyone who reminds them that capital accumulates by devouring, displacing and eventually ditching the labor of people like them is treated like a national traitor.
In the 2020s, just as in the 1920s, the ultra-right rose on the back of this process. It did not happen overnight. The process of losing the working classes, initially to hopelessness and eventually to the fascist mindset, began with the end of Bretton Woods in 1971. However, what triggered the transformation of the far right from a protest movement within conservative politics into an autonomous force that takes power, shamelessly demolishes bourgeois liberal institutions and embarks on a project of annihilating “cultural Bolshevism” — a term dear to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ heart?
Two developments stand out. First, the 2008 global financial crisis, our generation’s 1929 moment, led the centrists in power to impose harsh austerity on the working class while extending “socialist,” state-sponsored solidarity to big business. Second, as in the 1920s and 1930s, centrists and non-fascist conservatives feared and loathed the democratic left more than the authoritarian right.
The lesson for the left is agonizingly clear. To focus exclusively on identity — on race and gender — while ignoring the material reality of class, is a catastrophic strategic error. It is to disarm in the face of an enemy that has weaponized the very story center-left parties renounced.
The task is to integrate the vital struggles against racism and patriarchy into a renewed, robust critique of class power. We must reclaim the vocabulary of solidarity and exploitation, demonstrating that the true enemy of the working person is not the immigrant, but the rentier, the technofeudal lord, the monopsonist employer and the financier who treats their future as a derivative to be speculated on. New leaders such as New York City’s mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani must help find a synthesis that speaks to the whole person.
The alternative is to remain spectators in our own political tragedy, watching as the left’s forgotten people are marched off to fight in a right-wing fantasy of national purity. The working class matters. It is time to start acting like it.
Yanis Varoufakis, a former finance minister of Greece, is leader of the MeRA25 party and a professor of economics at the University of Athens.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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