kernow writes:

"The Challenge of the New Right"

David Garcia, Precarity Forum Provocation #2

This began off list when I engaged Patrice Riemens in discussion. As this meeting is taking place in the Netherlands I think that it is important to learn the lessons of the rise of the new european right. Unlike the mainstream centrist parties the new european right has made significant political capital out of the fact that the globalised free market has losers as well as winners even in the rich countries. In doing so they have outflanked the old political parties, moving with great effectiveness to exploit the dislocations and insecurities created by the global free market to re-ignite the old mix of racism and xenophobia.Indeed the version of this tendency that has emerged in the Netherlands is one of the most successful as its unusually slippery combination of inflammatory rhetoric and libertarianism has helped it appear to slip free of all the usual political stereotypes and in the process attained a very wide electoral appeal.

Phillospher and commentator John Gray pointed out that this movement, unlike the Fascism of the 1930's which was born of hyperinflation and mass unemployment has emerged in the more afluent European countries. Although highly aware of the precarity issue the new european right is economically orthodox, it "promotes a high tech economy and global free trade but insulated from the worlds poor by a ban on immigration. If this is facism it is the facism of lap-tops not jackboots”.

My provocation is to ask whether the time has come to learn from their success in creating a popular political movement and challenge them on the territory of electoral politics. Hasn't the "movement of movement's" refusal to engage the mainstream forum of electoral politics not simply handed the initiative exclusively to the extreme right who have no qualms about using the platform of party politics to propel their values into society and thus popularise their insidious solutions to the pressures of precarity unchallenged.

Patrice replied:

Mmmmm... that is very interesting question, thank you for asking it (and now, unlike politicians, I will try to actually answer it!;-)

My instant reaction is that David is putting the finger on a very tricky issue, may be even in the wound (of the new/old left). One of the movement of movements' main features is that it has left the classic political arena altogether and is acting 'somewhere else' (in the streets, or on the networks) in order not to get bogged down like the old left. The thing that is usually refered to as 'Exodus' I believe. Now this clearly creates a void, the new right is all too happy to jump into. The more so since both its message and its constituency has something very 'leftish' about it (lower class losers, to put it bluntly - at the same time as the left seems inclined to social alpinism, a phenomenon known in France as 'la gauche caviar', but equally apparent in Tony Blair's Britain). In France ATTAC the biggest and most successfull avatar of 'anti-globalisation' is on the verge of splitting (and is in any case not growing anymore) because of exactly that dilemma: its (self appointed, or anyway unelected) figureheads drifting towards 'representativity' and urging the movement "to take its responsabilities" and "honour the hopes the people have put in us".

I have no clear solution to this. I am (or rather, have become — I used to be a 'statist';-) profoundly anti-hierarchical and really distrust organisations, so I do not (want to) think in these terms. That leads to me not adressing the issue David is pointing to. It's that simple. (but not good enough, I know).