(PHOTO CREDIT: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
By Youssef Shawky Magdy
After Donald Trump won 2016 elections, many theorizations emerged about the rise of the right in the capitalist West. This was exacerbated by Boris Johnson's victory in Britain, and the vision became clear that there would be a tug of war between a US-British economic and political alliance against Europe under the leadership of Germany. In addition to the rise of the right-wing movements in many European countries as Germany itself and France (some expected Marie Le Pen would win or that Le Pen will succeed Macron). But what does the rise of the right mean basically?
Since the end of the nineteenth century, the period of competitive capitalism ended and capitalism has been entering the framework of monopoly capitalism, which was characterized by the close union of financial and industrial capital. Lenin wrote about that stage, stressing its close connection with imperialism, and we still live in the highest stage of capitalism with the change of imperialism from a national situation to a globalized one. The question here is when does "fascism" — or what can be called more broadly the "savior right" — rise?
The savior far right rises as a response to a comprehensive social crisis represented by an economic decline in the rate of capitalist profit that cannot be compensated for by "more foreign imperialism"(imperialism against others), in addition to a political crisis represented by the dissolution of the ruling-class coalition and the collapse of its hegemony. Besides the ideological crisis represented in the collapse of the principles and myths supporting the status quo.
This is accompanied by an increase in the pace of progressive movements of a left-wing nature that offer popular and progressive solutions to the crisis, such as fair wages, a fair distribution of the surplus, and an increase in workers' power and authority within productive enterprises. Perhaps the solutions become more revolutionary that try to change the entire social system.
And when those progressive movements fail for subjective (strategic and tactical) and objective reasons, the fascist right rises up as the representative of the bourgeois class, which is in crisis. So the right tries to fix the situation in favor of monopoly capitalism, but in a populist fashion. So, the crisis is emptied of its content and the process of displacement is installed, which projects the problem to any demographic or cultural phenomenon, such as projecting the crisis on immigrants, for example. The right represents the middle class but in a deceitful manner.
And now, after we knew the conditions and aspects of the savior right, are these conditions and appearances fulfilled in the current capitalist West?
Of course, the capitalist West has been going through an economic crisis since the 1990s, and the Iraq war was a temporary attempt to alleviate the crisis, but the opposite happened. The goal of securing the oil wells was achieved, but the return was serious economic and political losses. The crisis reached a dangerous stage in 2008, and with Covid-19 crisis, the severity of the crisis increased in several situations. The profit rate reached very low rates.
Regarding the political crisis, the United States has been suffering since the Iraq war from a decline in its hegemony over the world and the consumption of exorbitant resources in its wars, which has led to Trump's tendency to reduce those interventions and limit the intervention only to very necessary situations such as threatening to intervene in Venezuela or Iran. In Western countries themselves, liberal democratic governmentality suffers from a deep problem represented in the vulgarization of the meaning of democracy and its focus on the representative type only. The public’s distrust of that governmentality has been increasing.
Regarding the ideological crisis, liberal democratic values are proving their failure day after day, from their forced application on the third world countries within the framework of pushing them towards economic openness (which is failing for various reasons, the most important of which is that these projects are completely unpopular) to the failure of that values in the West to achieve the desired happiness.
In addition to the neoliberal ideology that fuels religious and ethnic conflicts.
As for the signs that indicate the rise of the right, we find that they are available to a large extent; for example, Trump tells us that he is “the president of the peasants and workers!” Right-wing nationalism is spreading again, in addition to anti-immigrantism. Racist crimes are increasing day by day.
The question here is whom the rising right represents now?
In the pre-globalization era, the right "truly" represented big monopoly capitalism that was still associated with "nation-state". That link was largely structural. So we find that the laws and rules regulating the economy were related to the framework of the nation. The economic production cycles were deeply related to the state’s economic cycles, such as the payment of salaries, allowances, official holidays..etc. In addition, industrial capitalism prevailed, not financial capitalism. The first, of course, needs an organization and a specific context in which to work. In one word, capitalism was capitalist "statism". Consequently, when fascism escalated, it rose in a context that made it easier for it to perform its rescue tasks, and the statism turned into hyper-statism. The bailout has come in a national context to represent monopoly capital of a national character.
But in our time, the era of globalization, capital divorced from the national context; the globalized economic cycle, in all its complexities, has separated from the national context and Financial capital prevailed. In fact, the crisis of global monopoly capitalism needs a solution of the same size and level of complexity, that is, it needs a global solution.
The savior right cannot provide solutions but national solutions, and thus its representation in that era is limited to capital, which is not so large as to leave the context of the nation-state. In general, there is a conflict with those small capitalist strata, and the globalization project led by big capitalism, which seizes and controls the market and has relatively little production costs. The protectionist measures (of all kinds) promoted by the right contradict the globalization project.
Even if an extremist right-wing project succeeds in a western country, it will be overthrown by the global system, as happened in the Second World War as When the right fails to manage the crisis, it turns to violence that is forcefully defeated.
This is how we should understand Trump's rise and fall. The rise was a response to the crisis but an inadequate response. The new US administration is more homogenous with the world order. Therefore, it will participate in the global solution to the crisis.
Biden's victory and the defeat of Trump have not signified the success of any progressive coalition, as some liberals think.
Some believed that Trump's rise would result in a counter-left movement, and that did happen with the rise of Bernie Sanders, but that movement was defeated. Ultimately Biden does the same job as Trump, but in a more understanding and rational way.
