Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

so is he the favorite to win now

I would say yeah. His opponent is handicapped by popular disillusion towards the party he hails from (how merited is a matter up for debate).

A backlash:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/merkels-bavarian-allies-tried-to-pander-to-the-far-right-now-theyre-paying-the-price/2018/10/12/cc1df1aa-c71d-11e8-9c0f-2ffaf6d422aa_story.html?__twitter_impression=true&noredirect=on&utm_term=.42a5fd445d28

The CSU was always "the party the nazis fled to after WWII" to my parents.

Polish president and PM set to join fascist march in Warsaw

Cool cool cool.

so the nazis' levelling of poland during wwii was just... the wrong type of fascism?

This is a better write-up of the situation:

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/09/fears-of-violence-as-polish-state-intervenes-in-nationalist-march

It’s a mess and not as straightforward as the Freedom article presents it.

The original neo-Nazi March was banned by the Mayor of Warsaw and the government came in to replace it with a, supposedly more inclusive, alternative along the same route. The ban was overturned and the original march is back on - suggesting they might have two separately organised marches on the same day. It looks like the government has tried to negotiate with the Nazis to combine the marches but drop the Fascist trappings but it’s not clear whether that has been successful or how the two matches will engage each other. It is not simply a case of the PM marching in the explicitly Fascist one.

There is a big crossover between the far-right and the PiS vote but the march is also internationally embarrassing enough for them to want to squash it.

thanks!

I think the PM, Duda, did join in 2015 or 2016 tbf.

The march has become more explicitly Fascist over time as it has attracted more white nationalists from elsewhere. It was last year that it really came to the attention of the international press.

This was a good overview from last year btw.

https://newsocialist.org.uk/poland-2/#

Spain far-right Vox party gains foothold in Andalusia election
Electoral earthquake in Andalusia

Ultimately, those who believe in democracy and popular sovereignty should aim at tearing the EU down — not at reforming it. https://t.co/MyJShItO06

— Jacobin (@jacobinmag) May 26, 2019

i don't know enough about the EU not to be forced to listen when people who live in it tell me it simply can't be made into the cuddly democratic socialist international of my dreams; it certainly does seem to have been constructed by and for technocratic executives, and i certainly think a "parliament" without the power to make law is farcical. i also think that local struggles are vital and primary. but this kind of thing--

The absence of a European demos with its integral class divisions prevents the existence of “normal” politics in the EU. There are no social cleavages applying uniformly across EU member states that could be organically reflected in political contestation within EU institutions. … No class or other social divisions in Europe take a homogeneous ‘European’ form, for there are no occupational, organizational, habitual, cultural, and historical norms able to create such an overarching social integration. Actual class divisions in Europe always take a national form, as do the party politics that correspond to these divisions. In Marxist terms there is neither a European capitalist class nor a European working class.

--does strike me as weird to the point of alarming for any kind of marxist to say. surely a key feature of marxist class categories is that they cut across national and geographical divisions the same way they do across divisions of race or gender. of course such divisions exist and must be recognized for a functioning democracy to be installed but "there are no social cleavages applying uniformly across EU member states"? there are no rich and poor? no owners and workers? certainly european capitalists do not behave as if their interests are unbridgeably cleaved from one another's-- nor from the interests of american or russian or chinese capitalists-- not even when they think and say otherwise. how can workers hope to oppose them if they behave as such themselves?

even in the fascist utopia of permanently warring genocidal tribes it is the owners and managers in each state who harvest the wealth from conflict, and the workers who together do the building and the dying. of course the official view in such states is that class is only a division of labor and the entire society is uniformly strengthened by war and isolation, and i know the linked argument is not that local workers and local owners are distinct organs in a harmonious body-- yet to claim that it is class conflict within the nation alone that produces politics and history nevertheless seems a kind of corporatism. a closed machine that works by friction is still a closed machine.

maybe i am strawmanning? maybe this is just a "don't get obsessed with the EU parliamentary elections" article? i guess the point is supposed to be that global class conflict somehow emerges naturally (fractally?) from various local class conflicts in which various national demoi are directly engaged? but expecting that process just to hum victoriously along in the absence of supernational institutions-- especially when global capital makes full use of such institutions itself-- seems a little naive here in the 21c. how can any heir to a political tradition shot thru from birth with references to global brotherhood and global struggle turn around and claim not only that there is no world proletariat but that there is no meaningfully united proletariat even within a podunk provincial subcontinent like europe? at least when stalin floated this stuff he was in charge of the biggest country in the world. and look what happened to it!

anyway tl;dr this is why you posted it in this thread obv. just wanted to be clear that for me it is not "giving up on the eu" per se that scans as right-wing: only cryptonationalism.

The Jacobin is shit, but the left has been anti-EU for ages. The story there is that they've stopped recently. In Denmark, the left anti-EU party lost their seat for the first time in forty years, while a moderately more pro-EU party took one instead.

--does strike me as weird to the point of alarming for any kind of marxist to say. surely a key feature of marxist class categories is that they cut across national and geographical divisions the same way they do across divisions of race or gender. of course such divisions exist and must be recognized for a functioning democracy to be installed but "there are no social cleavages applying uniformly across EU member states"?

I haven't read the piece (and no time rn) but this is otm to the extent that Left wing groups across Europe do reach across to other similarly red European parties. I think its in the "organically reflected" where the work is happening in that sentence that I can't quite parse but I suspect that a lot of what is local is very easily lost, which leads to huge disparities in voter turnout across European countries. If there is 20% turnout in one country how does politics really happen for that place as reflected in Europe?

More widely, whatever happens to this specific European project its clear that the challenges facing us - a lot of it driven by climate change but not always - will need to be tackled in an organised way across borders. Otherwise there is potential for destructive war and conflict, all too awful to contemplare. Ultimately the borders will need to be beyond Europe, and that is a left project.

hello?

hi

Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me
Is there anyone at home?

I'm here. In a corner. Belgium has voted far right last sunday. :-(

Italian police arrest a bunch of people, including former Customs officer and a Forza Nuova activist, with a cache of weapons including machine guns, grenades and a working surface to air missile.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48987723

It's part of an investigation into Italians who may have fought in Ukrainian paramilitary groups.

The broader risk is that more of the right-wing dopes from across Europe who went to join Azov, etc, took similar 'souvenirs' with them.

Thats triggered my memory regarding something about Brazilians(?) that fought in Ukraine. Think it was Brazilians but can't remember the story

Yes, there was recruitment from the Brazilian far-right, but lots of Scandinavians, French, Germans, etc as well.

despite the Italian police statement saying they fought against pro-Russian separatists the BBC initially reported it as them fighting for pro-Russian militants. It might have just been a mistake, but a tinfoil hat type on my twitter line is calling it as dezinformatsiya!

You did have oddballs on both sides but if they're packing Nazi insignia it's a fair bet they were Azov or aligned.

Politico seems to have been the original source of error. The wording they used - "participated in the Russian-backed insurgency" - might be a case of their house style guide mandating "Russian-backed insurgency" instead of "war" - but it's absolutely misleading in this context.

I trawled a few Italian newspapers for more info on this and none of them mention which side the suspects fought for. So unless English-language media outlets know something their Italian colleagues don't, this does seem to be a case of leaping to conclusions.

https://www.thenationalherald.com/253767/setting-golden-dawn-having-trouble-paying-rent/

ATHENS – Bounced out of the Greek Parliament in July 7 snap elections after falling out of favor with voters, the accused neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, with all its 15 lawmakers on trial on charges of running a criminal gang, can’t afford the rent on its headquarters.

Unfortunately most of their voters have been lured back to the right-wing party they were originally supporters of - now in power.

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-how-ultranationalists-infiltrated-greece-s-new-ruling-party-1.7485494

guys

A “woman-first feminist social network” launched on the Gab Social open source code today, becoming the 2nd largest Gab Social server instantly.

Tell me again how Gab is for the “far-right” only.

This is the future: decentralized, open source, unstoppable, for everyone. pic.twitter.com/TkmFhRayZA

— Gab.com (@getongab) August 12, 2019

can you give some more context there? is this a rightward drift, or?

Spinsterf

tldr: "gab" is a right/alt-right social media network. they have now launched a women's version (?) AND THEY HAVE CALLED IT "SPINSTER"

a TERF version, aiui

there's still maybe a right-wing drift in the west but i feel like even more of a characterization of politics in the west atm is a total inability to accomplish anything or lead in any kind of meaningful way. the US is terribly dysfunctional in this regard and you might say it's specific to our system but the UK seems no better (assuming this election returns another Tory gov that'll be what- 3 in a row elected without a clear path to enacting Brexit?), and Israel is heading into its third election. the right-wing autocrat-leaning leaders are real but they aren't really good at doing shit it seems like. maybe this is the truth about politics in our age - not a drift to the right or left but just drifting?

Brexit requires others outside of the U.K. to play along. A substantial Tory majority would likely still see them tripping over their own feet, to some extent, wrt negotiations with the EU, attempting to balance rhetoric with adherence to international obligations, etc, but they’d be able to force through a raft of right-wing domestic policy. In the specific context of the U.K., the left has moved noticeably to the left but it’s often underestimated how far the right is moving to the right - culling MPs seen as too moderate, trying to ignite a US-style culture war, positioning the importance of their ability to govern effectively as more important than maintaining constitutional checks and balances, governing transparently, following the rule of law, and so on. Up to now, the resurgent left has partly hampered the effectiveness of the right but a huge factor was lack of cohesion within the Tory party. They’re set to be much more ruthless and bound by internal loyalty this time around.

the right-wing autocrat-leaning leaders are real but they aren't really good at doing shit it seems like

I think Modi is an exception to this statement, but I also think the extremely long-term rise to power of the RSS & BJP (and, especially, the way they've infiltrated civil society over the decades) shows why some of the other autocrats are less successful. The need a cult of personality leader but you also need organization

The far-right government party in Estonia has attracted some attention, less so in Latvia, I think. This is not good:

https://en.rebaltica.lv/2019/12/azov-movements-race-war-plans-find-sympathetic-audience-in-latvian-government-party

Logo something of a tip off.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Alliance_(Latvia)#/media/File%3ANacionālā_Apvienība_(National_Alliance)_logo.svg

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Alliance_(Latvia)#/media/File%3ANacionālā_Apvienība_(National_Alliance)_logo.svg

there's still maybe a right-wing drift in the west but i feel like even more of a characterization of politics in the west atm is a total inability to accomplish anything or lead in any kind of meaningful way. the US is terribly dysfunctional in this regard and you might say it's specific to our system but the UK seems no better (assuming this election returns another Tory gov that'll be what- 3 in a row elected without a clear path to enacting Brexit?), and Israel is heading into its third election. the right-wing autocrat-leaning leaders are real but they aren't really good at doing shit it seems like. maybe this is the truth about politics in our age - not a drift to the right or left but just drifting?

― Mordy

this is, imo, sort of the trap of existing systems - the current system of neoliberal democracyish global capitalism was essentially universalized (possibly created) in the '90s. the people who hold those beliefs are unable these days to consistently leverage that system to obtain positions of power, but enough people still accept it as The Way Of Things that nobody has the authority to actively change those norms. i don't think the people in power have an inability to "lead" - given institutions more, uh, amenable to their norms they could do quite a lot of "leading" - but creating that system is quite beyond them. this applies to the left and the right more or less equally, i would argue.

to resort to cliche, things will have to get worse before they can get "better" - in this case meaning merely meaning "functional".

A Danish writer Rune Møller Stahl wrote that we're in what Gramsci called an 'interregnum', a 'nonhegemonic time'. The neoliberal consensus has broken down, but it's still unknown what the way forward is going to be longterm. A resurgence of neoliberalism? Right-wing populism? Left wing neo-keynesian socialism? Nobody really has enough power to do what they want to do yet, so it's all just a frustrating slog. Socialism is going to win out in the end, though, imo. The tools of neo-liberalist economics fundamentally don't seem to work anymore, and the right-wing populist movememt is extremely dangerous, but in the end self-defeating.

It also occurs to me that our new visions of society are for the most part reruns of previous attempts. The big alternative offered by the left (socialism, or communism even) are projects now centuries old. I go between two possibilities for this - one is a sort of political philosophy low hanging fruit. Maybe there are only so many ways to organize society and so we're rehearsing these old debates. The other possibility is just a failure of imagination to think of something new.

The imagination is there. Most of the practicalities have been worked out. The problem is the getting of power off those whose present state of living depends on us not having it.

The imagination is there. Most of the practicalities have been worked out.

I don't think both of these things can be true.

In this sense the left has its own end of history problem (tho even worse since its biggest projects were the ones discredited by capitalism’s end of history). I don’t personally find “we know how to make a perfect society we just need to get the media on board / wait for old people to die” particularly compelling. The eco leftists also waiting for something else before they can enact utopia (the end of civilization) which gives them some sort of novelty but again there’s nothing really to inspire here just waiting for godot.

Yeah, the new left is obviously looking backwards, how can that even be up for discussion? Corbyn and Sanders are links to the past, warriors who have kept up the good fight since the seventies. And that might be enough, it might be that Mordy's first idea is the right one.

Power needs to be taken, not waited for - I agree!

The imagination is there. Most of the practicalities have been worked out.

I don't think both of these things can be true.

Why not? Borrowing has been low for a decade. We have fully costed plans for radical social transformation from a number of policy research groups, and even a couple of real political parties. Imagination isn't the problem. Practicalities aren't even the problem. But being right, as we appear to be discovering again and again, ISN'T ENOUGH!

I don’t personally find “we know how to make a perfect society we just need to get the media on board / wait for old people to die” particularly compelling.

same

but as ever to me it's clear that post-religious societies would move right, and I know that I'm just pissing in the wind saying this on ILX

TH, what Mordy is saying is that the imagination of the left only amounts to rehashing ideas from ca 1870-1979. What Mordy isn't really saying is that this is necessarily a bad thing.

Mostly young people are floating the ideas and doing the work. Sanders and Corbyn providing periods of leadership doesn't mask that.