Lea Ypi: The Right is successfully building a connected international project
The rise of the far right and fascism is a response to the crisis of liberal capitalism. This was true in the 1920s and it is still true today.
History will not repeat itself in exactly the same way, but the current rise of the right can be seen as a response to the failures of social democracy on the one hand and liberal capitalism on the other, much like in the 1920s and 1930s.
The Spanish Civil War was the last moment of true left internationalism. After it, the left, both socialist and social democratic, committed itself to the nation state. In this sense, it is not a project that would be able to adequately respond to the current crisis, which is essentially transnational. Today, we see above all the inability of the left to form a broad international front with a clear vision of where it wants to direct its criticism of capitalism.
Meanwhile, the right is apparently very successfully building a coherent international project, and it started long before it took power. Let’s think of Steve Bannon and his role in uniting the various right-wing movements in Europe and America: even then there was a strong transnational mobilization around the ideology of the nation and the state. They argued that capitalism is transnational and therefore any attempt to criticize it from the right must also be transnational. These people systematically built networks: think tanks, media platforms, individuals who acted as connecting links. They were ready for power.
The reasons for the left’s relative failure to make a similar connection, however, lie in the abandonment of the critique of capitalism as a class project. We have an environmental left, a feminist left, an anti-racist left, and at the same time a critique of universalism has developed, which has made it difficult to connect these identity struggles into a unified vision.
Source: Saturday supplement of Dela
