Guerrilla History - The Far Right of a Special Type - 10 Theses w/ Vijay Prashad

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring back on our friend Vijay Prashad to talk about one of the latest newsletter articles from the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, titled Ten Theses on the Far Right of a Special Type.  Here, we have a bit of a theoretical discussion before diving in and discussing each of the theses in turn.  Be sure to read the article, critically engage with it, and critically engage with our discussion here as well!   Also, check out our previous episodes with Vijay, Washington Bullets, COP26 Dispatch (alongside Chris Saltmarsh), and The Fragility of US Power (alongside Noam Chomsky)!   Vijay Prashad is director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, editor of LeftWord Books, and the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, author of numerous books, and is a multiple-time guest of Guerrilla History.  Follow him on twitter @VijayPrashad. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? No. The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to God. Gorilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history,

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Akamaki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing well, Henry. It's great to be with you. Yeah, it's nice to see you too. I feel like it's been a while since I've seen you, but I'm very happy to see you now. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation with a returning guest who the listeners will inevitably be quite familiar with. But before I introduce the guest and the topic, I just want to remind the listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to Patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with what Adnan and I are doing

individually, as well as what the show is doing collectively, by going to Twitter and looking at at Gorilla-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Skore pod. As I mentioned, we have a terrific returning guest. He's been on about three times in the past, I want to say, maybe four. We have Vijay Prashad, who the listeners will know is with the Tri-Continental Institute and also author of several books, which we've discussed a few of on the show. You'll remember we talked about Washington Bullets in our very first episode of the show. And we also had him on along with Noam Chomsky about a year and a half ago, I want to say. So Vij, it's nice to have you back on the show. How are you doing today?

Great, terrific. I wish it was warmer here where I am, but I'll take what I get. Ah, yeah. Well, you're not in Russia, so it could always be worse. So we're going to be talking about a really great newsletter that came out from the Tri-Continental. It's the 33rd newsletter of the Tri-Continental title, 10 Theses on the far right of a special type. We'll have this newsletter linked in the show notes, listeners, in case you want to read it. It's short, and it's quite a good read. Adnan, I'm going to turn it over to you for the introduction and the introductory question then.

Sure, thank, Vij. It's great to. have you on. This was a really important piece that was provocative and got me, at least, thinking about topics that people on the left have been discussing the last several years. And you had a very important insight, I think that is the main point. You quoted Ajaz Ahmed or referred to a wonderful thinker, Ajaz Ahmed, you know, probably one of the first great critiques from the global south of Edward Said's Orientalism, among other, contributing. But you pointed out that he has said that there is a special kind of intimate embrace between liberalism and the far right. And it seems that this is one of the key points that

you're trying to get across is that liberalism is no antidote. It is not even oppositional. But in fact, it has been a crucial component in the rise of new forms of far right movements. And I wondered if you could unpack that a little bit about why fascism as a term itself is insufficient and what we gain by understanding and how we can understand that intimate embrace between liberalism and far right politics. Since right now the Democratic National Committee is going on, and of course their whole conceit is that we need, you know, us liberals, we have to get together to stop the fascism. of Trump. Perhaps you can enlighten us a little bit on that key insight and how you substantiate it. Yeah, you know, let's go back to Hannah Arendt's 1951 book on the origins of totalitarianism. It's a very interesting book. And, you know, Hannah Arend is no slout. She knows her Western history really well. And it's a command performance of a kind because what she does there is she

unifies fascism and communism as two forms of authoritarianism and suggests that the alternative or the antidote is liberalism, you know, is liberal democracy. And in a way that book was hugely promoted by Western democracies because it essentially was, you know, it was like what Hegel does for Napoleon and for the Prussian state, you know, saying that, well, we are the culmination of world history, and Iran does for liberalism. And for the idea of liberal democracy, you'll remember that in that period, the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. government latched on to the term freedom. Freedom was their word. You know, it was like a committee for, you know, cultural freedom, a radio free.

Europe and so on against, you know, totalitarianism, which was the combination of fascism and communism. That was the kind of Arend moment. It's interesting because liberalism, whatever self-image it might have had in 1951, certainly doesn't have that any longer. There is really no robust liberal defense. I mean, who's the Hannah Arendt of our period? In the last 10 years, let's say. Who have you read that has come up with a compelling argument to suggest that liberalism is the antidote to everything? I mean, the last big account was a tiny essay by Francis Pukoyama called The End of History and The Last Man, where he basically put Hegel and Nietzsche together to make a, what I thought was a pedantic point. But, you know, drawing from Hegel's end of

history and Nietzsche's the last man, sounds really erudite, but I found it an empty account. I mean, really, it's over, you know. And then, you know, the essays published in, I think, 1989, not long thereafter the anti-globalization movement starts. History really doesn't end like that. So, you know, the reason I'm starting here is that liberalism today has been quite definitely a compromise by its. association with a form of economic policy that we call neoliberalism. In other words,

liberalism, which might be, say, the defense of liberal principles and values and so on, has yoked itself to the idea that market capital, that it is to say big business and so on, should be free to do whatever they want. Freedom is their freedom, not necessarily anybody else's freedom and that you know you need labor market reforms to basically anoint capital with the freedom to do whatever it wants labor market reforms effectively takes away the freedom of workers to organize unions and such like so the freedoms of neoliberalism actually curtail the freedoms of a very large number of people because not only do you say no trade unions labor market reforms, you also end up saying more austerity. That means people don't have state support.

They don't have free time to be free. I mean, to be free, you need free time, which is leisure. If you don't have free time, you're not a free person. You're working, you're captured by social reproduction, by the time you get to your bed, you start watching some serial on Netflix and you're half asleep before the credits show up. I mean, you know, that's not freedom. And that's the epitome of today's liberalism. It has compromised itself with neoliberalism. And so liberalism, or its neoliberal for political and economic form, has a very difficult time creating a mass base.

You can't go to people and say, listen, we're going to do austerity against you. We want to come to power and we're just going to fire all of you. and, you know, you can't do that. So liberalism and its neoliberal form have found it hard in democratic electoral politics. They just can't succeed. And so what you're beginning to see is a pattern in most societies

where a right has emerged, which can appeal to people, the people who are hurt by austerity, who are hurt by the very economic policies pushed by the liberals, this kind of new Far Right has emerged, which picks up this strand of suffering. Trump famously called it American Carnage at his first inaugural address. It's a very stunning phrase.

Sounds like the name of a film, American Carnage. The Farah picks up these people and then attacks, you know, somebody else, not the liberals. They attack the liberals in name, but are really going after migrants and others who become scapegoated. So there's something about this intimate embrace between liberalism and the far right at even this level. The level of the electoral, first is the neoliberal, then it's the far right, then it back to the liberals, then it's the far right. This has become the contours of politics. and there really is what Ajax called the intimate embrace between the two, because in fact the far right of a special type is not interested in establishing a different dispensation.

In office, it's perfectly happy pursuing neoliberal policies, as we see with examples around the world. So that in a sense, you know, that is the intimacy between liberalism with its neoliberal economic, policy and this far right of a special type. I want to hop in here quick before Adnan goes in with a follow-up question. Just to mention somebody who I've translated, Domenico Lusurdo, talking about liberalism and talking about this conflation of totalitarianism. These are topics that Lacerdo examines quite in-depth in several of his works. In the work liberalism, he takes a look at how liberalism as a concept has always been

misportraying what it actually is. If we look at what liberalism actually was built on, liberalism was built on genocide, it was built on settler colonialism, it was built on slavery, it was built on exploitation, all with the name of civilization and liberal values. But if we look at what they have actually done, even just setting up this dichotomy between civilized West and barbaric hordes that they would then have to civilize, this was in pursuit of wealth extraction from other parts of the world by the liberal West. So even if we're looking prior to the rise of neoliberalism, what we're seeing is a process from an ideology that portrays itself as upholding individual freedoms and individual values of liberty, but what it is actually

doing it is upholding wealth and upholding exploitation of other people around the world. Like I said, we can go back to the genocides of indigenous people and the settler colonial relations of those liberal democracies in some cases and liberal monarchies and others dominating indigenous people. And that carries on all the way up to today. So that's a work that really examines that highly in depth. And I highly recommend the listeners to check out liberalism. But also, shameless plug in Stalin history and critique of a black legend, which I say shameless plug because I co-translated that book for Isker Books. You can download it for free, Iskriebooks.org.

That book also quite in depth looks at this Arendtian notion of totalitarianism. The far left and the far right are dual pillars, these evil pillars. And then there is also this dichotomy that's set up between Stalin and Hitler, this false dichotomy, of course, but this dichotomy is set up for the purpose of denigrating and attacking those of us who are on the left and the left end of the political spectrum is essentially just fascists of a different color. And Lucerto in that work, Stalin history and Catech of a black legend, spends quite a bit of time dismantling this twin pillars argument, twin pillars of totalitarianism that you mentioned quite a bit in your last answer, VJ. So I just wanted to throw that

out there and recommend those two books from Losurdo to the listeners, if you haven't already read them, they really would be useful for understanding this relationship. I don't know if you want to say anything, Vijay, otherwise, I know Adnan has a follow-up as well on what you were saying. I mean, I think Losurdo is very important on this. I just want to come to a slightly different point on liberalism, which is I really appreciate his critique of liberalism. On the other hand, there has been a deterioration of liberalism. I mean, this is one of those difficult things to say, because despite the fact that liberalism is rooted in property relations, liberalism for a time had connected itself to welfareism, had connected itself to certain forms of adherence to the rituals of free speech and so on.

All of this has deteriorated badly, and it's deteriorated not because of a turn by liberals to authoritarian thinking, but by liberals to put the principle of freedom into the market rather than into people. You know, that switch that took place with neoliberalism really corrupted the liberal principles. I'm not even, I don't have a naive sense of the principles, but even the principles were in a sense corrupted. So today's liberals are about essentially the freedom of capital. much more than the freedom of humanity, that those phrase like the freedom of humanity sounds naive and idealistic to a kind of liberal elite person

who's much more interested in the freedom of capital, which they believe or they say they believe will engender the full freedom of humanity. That's a decline in the character of liberalism. However much it's rooted in a market logic and has been forever, much it's rooted in colonialism. It itself has its history. And, you know, despite its ontology, its history demonstrates this deterioration. I think that's such an important point

about the deterioration of liberalism. And the fact that it hasn't been able to reconstitute, as you're pointing out, some new articulation since really the end of the Cold War. And so, you know, the point is that also the liberals have the, the The new liberals, the liberals of our time, have become so comfortable with the idea of authoritarian use of the state or use of controls within social media for censorship and for suppression of political speech and political organizing. So there's been a complete flip in some sense that is an index of how, you know, mainstream, far right authoritarian ideas have come, you know, into. liberal culture itself and points to the fact that it isn't that division actually between democracy and authoritarianism that is putting into the market. So I thought that that was very valuable. You called those sort of four theoretical elements in this argument. I wanted to say I thought of them

as a historian as being very much more historical and contextual analyses that then lead to these sort of theoretical reflections and that you can't really understand those without seeing and tracing as you did the outlines of that history and what the profound consequences of those are that liberalism itself has changed. It's not that just when we're trying to do an anatomy, which we're going to turn to in a moment, of the new far right movements that we have to just update fascism because fascism may have been too specific and too historical. rooted a particular form of far-right organization and movement, but it's also that liberalism itself has changed, and that's the dialectic of history, is that the new right is a response

and is an outcome of the neoliberal conditions that have formed and framed it. I'm wondering if you had any thoughts on how to look at that as a kind of continuous dialectic that both the right and the left, so-called, well, liberal, both the right and the left have changed. Maybe at some point later, we'll have to ask you, after we go through some of this anatomy of the far right is, well, how should the left change or need to change or re-access its fundamental principles to meet the fact that both liberalism and the far right have shifted and changed in their expression and manifestation in our time? Well, it's very clear, Adnan, how liberals want to, that is to say political liberals, want to use the language of fascism as a way to

get a market advantage in elections. You know, it's convenient for the Democratic Party to say, well, Trump is, you know, is outrageous, he's a fascist. You know, they use this language, you know, because for them to portray Trump and that stream as so far right that it's untouchable gives them an open lane to do whatever they want. You see this across the world. You see this in France, for instance, where Macron, his entire political worldview is that I will prevent Marie Le Pen from coming to power. And what happened there, of course, it's another story, but they're the left outflank Macron because they came to the people and said, wait a minute, we have an agenda. He doesn't. In many cases, there is no agenda. You know, the way in which, in India, for

instance, you can't just run against the Vartya Janta Party of Mr. Modi by saying it's a fascist organization. You can't. You just cannot prevail because they have actually addressed some of the issues that are compelling to people. And for that reason, simply using language from the 1930s, you know, in an act of analogy, you know, analogizing the present, using analogy as the framework, is insufficient. We're not doing the kind of analysis we need to do. I mean, for the left, the real lesson is that, look, the theory of fascism that we take as gospel from Dimitrov's very important intervention in 1935, that was a conjunctional statement. That was Dimitrov. That was Dimitrov talking about the situation in 1935, the nature of capital, the nature of monopolies and so on.

You know, in our institute, we published a paper in January on hyper-imperialism. Somebody said to me, oh, you're junking Lenin. Not at all. Lenin's text on imperialism is a conjunctural text. He's writing about the Great War. Why did everybody go to war? It's not a trans-historical text. It's not even a text at a level of theory.

He's not trying to theorize imperialism. He's writing a conjunctual text for the moment. So it behooves us not to be lazy and to just draw concepts wholesale, you know, preta potte off the shelf, you know, just put on the jacket and say, oh, he's a fascist. I get the moral implications here. You know, it's enjoyable to say, that person's a fascist. Okay, I've won t-shirts which say, no. fascist, whatever. I can see the moral thing, but we have to go for accuracy. The fact is that these political formations are not themselves fascist. They are the far-right in our opinion of a

special type. The Bharatiya Janta Party in India, as an example, is not a fascist organization. It's an election machine. There are fascistic currents like the Rastya Swam-Sewksang, the RSS, that are involved in the BJP, but they are not identical to it. Trump might have some fascistic, actual fascistic political parties. Some Nazis and white supremacist might back Trump. But Trump is also leading the Republican Party, which is an election machine. And he is articulating a certain politics that we need to listen closely to, not to mimic. I think that's a problem that I see some people doing.

They say, well, we can learn from the far right. I don't think you can learn from them. I think you have to learn what they are doing in order to confront them and, in a sense, to create a new path, not to either become them just because the right, the far right of a special kind, this is the reverse problem. The liberals say the far right is fascist and want to dismiss them. There are some people, even on the left, who grasp the right-wing critique of liberalism, like this fascination with Karl Schmidt. You know, Karl Schmidt was a real Nazi, and he wrote in critique of liberalism. But why do you need a Nazi to teach you what's wrong with liberalism?

Why can't you undertake your own analysis? And in fact, at the time when Schmidt was writing in Germany as a Nazi, which gets cited till today in contemporary theory, there were lots of Marxists who were writing contemporaneously about the limitations of liberalism and Nazism. Look at them, this fascination of the binary between the far right and liberals is always interested me. And the Schmidt thing has been with me for a long time. Why do you need to go to a real Nazi to critique liberalism?

What is the necessity of it? Well, that's because, firstly, you established this false duality. The critique today that comes from the far right of liberalism is shallow. It's not real. I mean, you know, when Trump goes after people, it's mainly spectacle. I mean, what is he really critiquing? He says that they don't care about America. That's an absurd statement, you know.

I mean, they continue to say it's a greatest country. Today, again, Kamala Harris said, it's the greatest country. Only this great country could make me and so on. That's a drama. Then he says they don't invest in the country. Well, Trump, you were president for four years. Netflix capital didn't go up. during your four years, how much investment was there?

I get the credit. It cut taxes on the rich. It cut taxes. So his policies are basically a mimicry of the other. Now, again, somebody will say, yes, but, you know, Biden gave, you know, 200 million for this thing, which Trump didn't. Yes, but then that's hardly, 200 million is a rounding error in the U.S. budget. You know, neither of them touched the U.S. military. Okay, that was a red line.

Neither of them. You look at the liberals in Europe. I mean, the Green Party in Germany is more to the right than the far right party, the Alliance for Deutschland. The Green Party is more to the right. And less liberal in allowing freedom of speech. Like they want to shut down any pro-Palestinian speech much more than anybody else, you know, the liberals. So when we come to this question,

of you know how how we as the left should see this the first thing one needs to do is what i always say about all our studies is we build our theory from the facts we don't build our theory from what we've read you know from the past we honor our traditions we learn i go back to read the grades adnan you know i go back and read them to sharpen my thinking not to go and look for lessons i don't read capital by marks as if it's like, you know, the Bible. Now, capital resonates a lot with me because Marx did do a theory of capitalism.

It's not a conjunctional text. His 18th Brumet is a conjunctional text. It's useful, but it's not replicable. You can't just take the analysis from the 18th Brumer and say, well, you know, Marie LaPen is Bonapartist. It doesn't work because... History doesn't always repeat. as a, you know, tragedy and then comedy, you know, like, not always.

He's not making, you know, theoretical arguments. Right. Exactly. I mean, you know, this, and you see this a lot in particularly left writing where people take the term Caesarism from Gramsci or Bonapartism from Marx's 18th Brubmere and just apply it to the present day. But, you know, we need to learn how they did it, the method, the thinking, the structure of historical materialism and so on.

But we need to do our own work. We need to go to the grindstone and grind our own theories out of the facts, you know, not just again, pull them off the shelf. Well, you know, relying entirely on quotations is a very un-materialist, undilectical way of thinking and way of analyzing things.

I had tweeted recently to that effect, I said, far too many Marxists understand Marxism only dogmatically is a series of quotations, and not as a living science and methodology that can change as more data and information is added and can adapt to the environment it's operating in. We have to think of socialism and Marxism as a science. My background is in the sciences, so I typically think of it in that way anyway.

But people who adhere to Marxism should adhere to scientific socialism. You can't uphold a quotation dogmatically because it was written in a book 150 years ago. That's not how science works. not everything that Isaac Newton wrote in was absolutely true. We adapt as more information comes in, and we adapt to the conditions that are present at that time. That's how science works, and that's how Marxist analysis should also work. So I think that that's a really important point that you made, VJ. I want to make sure that we have time to get to the 10 Theses within this article and have a bit of discussion about each of them. So what Adnan and I had planned on doing here

is we'll read the the theses one by one for the listeners. And again, the entire article is linked in the show notes. So you should definitely read the rest of the article. We're only going through theses right now. And then we can have a discussion. You can elaborate VJ. You can use examples, et cetera, on each of these theseses. And I think that they're a really good discussion point. Each of them is a very good discussion point. So beginning with thesis one says the far right of a special type uses democratic instruments as much as possible. It believes in the process known as the long march through the institutions, through which it patiently builds political power and staffs the permanent institutions of liberal democracy with its cadre, who then push their views into mainstream thought. Educational institutions are also key to the far right of a special type since they determine the syllabi for students in their respective countries.

There is no need for this far right of a special type to set aside these democratic institutions as long as they provide the path to power not just over the state, but over society. So Vijay, can you elaborate on that point? Yeah, I mean, it's about democracy. Like, democratic structures are not closed off from allowing the far right to enter. You can have professors come into the university. They are patiently building their trenches inside society. You'll find in many countries,

the far right makes its appearance through, you know, all kinds of institutional spheres, entering into television broadcasting, into this, into that. And as long as the door is open, people walk in and they do, and why shouldn't they? I mean, the issue is, I don't have a problem with this. The problem we have is not that they enter and have a long march through these institutions, but that this is not something that liberalism seeks to ever. They don't contest the space. You know, they just allow it to happen.

Why aren't you contesting the space? And interestingly, when people mainly have a liberal persuasion will leave the state structure because of lack of high pay and so on and go into the private sector, they became the state institutions and an enormous number of people of the far right who are motivated politically, enter these institutions, and begin to produce different forms of institutional power. I mean, this is there as much in the global north as in the global south. It's just the literature in the global south is richer on some of this stuff.

But you see this in the north as well. I mean, you know, if you go into the permanent bureaucracies in the United Kingdom and so on, I mean, that's what a lot of these people, you know, this kind of aristocratic, heritage. People have just gone in there and remain and sit there. The career of Boris Johnson and his cronies is instructive. They all went to the very best schools and colleges. And then they all entered the institutions. You know, Boris Johnson enters into the media world, rises quickly to the top. Some of his friends go into the Treasury Department in the UK. They are in the out there. They're not in making money in finance outside. They often come.

from very rich families, but they're in the financial sector of the state. They've come in with 20, 30 year careers built there. They're tunneling underneath. And nobody's contesting them. That's the issue. Again, I'm not saying that they should be banned from entry. Let's contest them. But liberals don't contest them. They, in fact, welcome them in. Well, the issue here is that these institutions and pathways to the institution are intentionally left open, but open to people that are upholding the capitalist system. That's why we don't see that contestation happening from these so-called, you know, liberal anti-far-right politicians who, in many cases, hold substantial amounts of power

at given time, but they do nothing to change the way in which those institutions can then be co-opt that are taken over by forces of the far right. The reason for that is by allowing these institutional pathways to remain untouched, they can appear to be fully democratic and use that as a campaign slogan against the far right. Well, you have to vote for me and my party because if you don't, this pathway is open for the far right to take over. But you don't ever see that contestation happening when the far right actually does utilize those pathways or when those pathways are vacated in order for them to come in. The reason being both of those forces uphold the capitalist system. It's not the end of the world for them as a political institution if the

capitalist system is upheld because both of those forces are upholding that system. Great. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's also what we see is when a so-called soft left to enter a lot of these institutions instead of contesting and fighting they end up being absorbed into precisely those structures of power and we've seen quite a lot of that

but your point the thesis too was the far right of a special type is driving the attrition of the state in transferring its functions to the private sector maybe we might say particularly the social and regulatory function because of course the surveillance

and military and policing as you're going to say and the third, the repressive functions are a little bit privatized, but they're still within state power. You gave the example, in the United States, for instance, its proclivity for austerity is helping gut the quantity and quality of cadres and core state functions such as the U.S. Department of State. Many of the functions of such institutions now privatized instead take place under the auspices of non-governmental organizations led by newly emergent billionaire capitalists, such as Charles Koch, George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, Bill Gates. And so these NGOs take over a lot of these functions. And, of course, they operate under other dictates.

And they're not, you know, subject to democratic control. They're actually tools of billionaire capitalists. So what do you think are some of the crucial components of this neoliberalizing, you might say, of state functions into the NGO non-governmental world? Yeah, this is a very complicated thing. Because, you know, it's obviously true that Peter Thiel, people like that are just, you know, far-eyed scumbags. I mean, he's just a horrible person. You know, when he speaks, you shudder.

Yeah. And he's the biggest backer of J.D. Vance. And, in fact, J.D. Vance is the creation of Peter Thiel. He had only existed before Thiel created him out of artificial intelligence. But it's the liberal end of this that's actually most distressing in a way. Bill Gates, for instance, also apparently a repellent person individually. I guess we should read his divorce filing, what his wife's wife says about him and so on. But Bill Gates and Melinda Gates, they started this whole project in Africa on medicine.

And in fact, the entire process of the Gates Foundation is to privatize medicine and medical relief across the global south. I mean, they push for pharmaceutical companies. They push for privatization of care. So what are they doing differently than, let's say, the Koch brothers, you know, they have the same kind of agenda, which is to push the rule of private capital when it comes to things like, you know, basic needs that should not be privatized. There's universal agreement across all sectors. But the main point there is that deterioration.

of the carter of people. You know, it is actually a unifying thing that drain the swamp idea that comes out of the U.S. far right has become global. You know, Javier Milley in Argentina wants to drain the swamp. You want to shut it all down.

They don't want competent people to be in the sections of care that are responsible for care and regulation in the state sector. Like, they don't want, Too many people in departments of labor or in regulating finance. You know, you have the, like, you know, it's like the kids who come, you know, in the bottom fifth of a class, are the ones who will get those jobs.

And indeed, you know, used to be a time, like when the new states emerged in the 1950s, where if you were to become a public servant, a civil servant, you had to go to the Institute of Public Administration, you had to take classes, you had to learn about your moral responsibility, they confronted corruption with morality, not just with legal threats and so on. You learned that. You know, the carder of the personnel in the state was up, but now that whole thing is irrelevant. You know, you don't need good people there. I mean, I occasionally, you know, when I watch reels on Instagram. I don't know, for some reason, reels have been coming up from the TV show, The Weet, you know, with Julia Dreyfus playing the vice president.

And man, it's hilarious because it's a really bad show. But what's hilarious is they mock the caliber of people in these high areas of government who are around senior political officials. They're all, you know, completely incapable of doing their jobs. There's always one woman who's competent and everybody else is just a joke. That actually, that mockery of that, that carder of people in the state is not only a reflection of what's reality, but it I think also produces a reality. Because the last thing you want to do is to work as, you know, the coffee boy or errand person of somebody who's the senator, you know.

When in fact, those jobs are key, you know. Yeah, yeah. You know, what's interesting is there's such a difference, for example, from VEP and the image of, you know, government officials compared to, like, yes, minister, where it was the elected politician who's a joke, but it's really the bureaucrats who know how to do things, who run things. And their main job is keep these foolish politicians from messing up the way things actually are running properly. And of course, it was an anti-state sort of anti, you know, there was a, you know, right-wing kind of ideology. But it was a a different one because they were reacting to a very different situation at that time. Yeah, I mean, I, by the way, occasionally see clips from that show and I know it's dated and so on, but I still find it really funny. Yes, Minister, one of the things that's interesting about shows like that from that era was the conservatism. And I mean it in the small sea conservatism of a state structure. States were meant to preserve a certain form of, you know,

continuity. And there's something attractive about that. In China, for instance, one of the highest principles is continuity. You know, we're just going to publish a fabulous essay by Wang Hui in October, the Tri-Continental dossier, where he talks about the way in which the Chinese project has had a considerable continuity from late Qing till now, like right across the Republican period, across the Chinese Revolution. I mean, there is something to the importance of state stability. You know, it creates its own form of social order and social, you know, possibilities. State stability is not necessarily authoritarian. It could actually produce a kind of reason, you know, of like efficiency that allows people to grow in

society. I mean, it's when the state is filled with confusion and chaos and incompetence and you don't know what's going on, that it creates all kinds of insecurities in society as well. You know, this is an old... Like the neocons targeted the Iraqi state. They wanted to destroy the state. They said it was about like these ideology. It said it was Saddam and Baathism and all, but it was really about destroying the state and that just unleashed such chaos. That's where ISIS and these kinds of, you know, reactions, right-wing kind of movements and reactions come is when there's such a collapse of the state that actually had contributed something significant to social advancement, social progress because of the institutions. They collapse those institutions and then it's easy to really, you know, change the character of the society, you know, radically very quickly. Exactly.

I mean, society is traumatized. That's the point, I think, the second thesis is sort of trying to make on the side. Turning to the third thesis, you say, the far right of a special type uses the repressive apparatus of the state as much as legally permissible to silence its critics and demobilized movements of economic and political opposition. Liberal constitutions provide wide latitude for this kind of use, which liberal political forces have taken advantage of overtime to quell any resistance from the working class, peasantry, and left. I mean, we see that every time that there is a movement against police brutality, police overreach, and any of the repressive apparatuses of the state, who is it that defends those apparatuses to the hilt? It's the liberal establishment that ensures that those repressive apparatacies of the state are maintained, and they often do it under the veneer of liberalism in terms of protecting against far-right radicals.

But when far-right radicals are then in positions of power, those institutions are already in place. And what we see is there's actually not much of a quantitative difference, or sorry, there's not much of a qualitative difference in terms of the repression, just perhaps a bit of a quantitative difference. But that institution is already set up and it's supported by both of those political establishments. So anything that you would like to add on that, VJ, I think that that's a really important point. But I think it's super self-evident. I mean, you know, it's very hard to find. I mean, you know, I mean, I live in Chile. It's this current government is a supposedly central left government came to power in opposition to the use of the Carbaniero's, the police against protesters from 2019.

This president is a big fan of Salvador Allende on the 50th anniversary of Salvadori Yende's overthrow. and the coup in Chile. I was marching toward the cemetery where Ayanne is buried. We were in a group with the mayor of Recoleta, Daniel Hardway, who's now in jail, and we were tear-guessed by the police. On the way to honor Salvador Allende on the 50th anniversary of the coup.

I mean, you know, you don't need examples for this thesis. It actually exemplifies itself. Yeah, sadly, that is. a very recognizable feature to many people now, I think. You mentioned in thesis four, I thought this was a very interesting one. The far right of a special type incites a homeopathic dose of violence. Interesting phrase in society by the more fascistic elements within its political coalition to create fear, but not enough fear to turn people against it. Most middle class people, the world oversee convenience and are disturbed by inconvenience to themselves, such as that,

by riots, et cetera. But on occasion, an arm's-length assassination of a labor leader or an arm's-length threat made to a journalist is not blamed on the far right of a special type, which often hastily denies any direct association with the fringe, fascistic groups, which are nonetheless linked organically to the far right. We might think of, you know, the riots that were taking place in the UK in this kind of a context to sort of recharge now that there's a liberal government and they're kind of realigning themselves on how to deal with that after the Tory party was, you know, resoundingly beaten. But also it reminds me that the, you know, this climate of fear, this politics of fear has been a feature, a very strong feature, of course,

of the Cold War, the communists, you know, red under the bed. But then in the post-Cold War era was produced through the global war on terrorism as something that just justified all kinds of you know, sort of government intervention, war abroad, and suppression of dissent domestically. And so I'm wondering about the interaction here, how you see this politics of fear being very constitutive of the new right and its sort of special features. See, there's a premise to this thesis which would be contested, which is that the middle class globally has a certain unified character of convenience seeking. I mean, you know, middle class people all around the world in a modern society want

no traffic jams. You know, they want electricity, water connection. I mean, what's the most disturbing thing is if your refrigerator breaks down or, you know, these things just can't tolerate inconvenience. Your kid must get into the correct school. You know, they should come home on time. there should be no disturbance, the neighbors should pick up the dog shit. I mean, convenience is what the middle class seek,

and inconvenience is what they hate the most, which is why a truly fascistic breakout in society would provoke a middle class revolt. The middle class would not like a permanent disruptions. You know, they just can't tolerate that. Strikes, for instance, were in a way, okay when there was a strong working class culture in society.

Then a strike could be supported by large sections. But today as more people identify as middle class and as there are people who have middle class aspirations and not a working class culture strikes are seen as an aberration, as an abomination, as creating inconvenience.

So governments can say, look, these train drivers are striking. You can't get to work. Or they're blocking the roads. You know, these kids in L.A. are rocking the roads for Palestine. They're inconveniencing you. But that is exactly why I have wondered, and I've said a couple times on Twitter,

is that I don't think those are the most productive forms of political protest where you can educate and build some sort of solidarity because you're dealing with a very different kind of mentality. What you want to do is maybe target the arms manufacturers, target the politicians, the policymakers. But, you know, if you inconvenience, these middle class people, then there's no appetite, you know, for thinking politically about geopolitics. Like, well, I don't care what happens over there. Look, you're making me late catch my plane, you know. Yeah, no, I just need to get to old foods or whatever the situation

might be. I mean, so here, this actually, in my opinion, holds in check the excesses of a fascism. Fascism is held in check in a way by the fact that the ground is not there for people to tolerate, you know, even a military dictatorship, like in Egypt, cannot come out now as a military dictatorship. It has to appear in suits. You know, the Egyptian president, you know, he is, Mr. Abdul Fattel-L-CC, has just appointed a new finance minister who used to be the chief economist at the World Bank. You know, CC has been in power since 2014. There's no real elections in in Egypt or in Rwanda, where he won with 99.5% of the vote. United States is, you know, having convulsions about Venezuela.

Paul Kagame just won an election this year with 99.5% of the vote. How free is that election? You know, but the people in charge of the state will all be neoliberals, and they understand the dangers of going after the, the conveniences of the middle class. I think that's a kind of internal break. At least that's the premise of, in a way, the thesis number four. On to thesis number five, we have the far right of a special type provides a partial answer

to the loneliness that is woven into the fabric of advanced capitalist society. This loneliness stems from the alienation of precarious working conditions and long hours which corrode the possibility of building a vibrant community and social life. The far right does not build an action. community, except when it comes to its parasitic relationship with religious communities. Instead, it develops the idea of community, community through the internet, or community through mass mobilizations of individuals or community through shared symbols and gestures. The immense hunger for community is apparently solved by the far right while the essence of loneliness

melts into anger rather than love. And this, I think, speaks a lot to what we were talking about earlier, Vijay, about how the right has an analysis of liberalism, but that analysis is shallow. Similarly, while they may identify some of the issues that are inherent within liberalism, any potential solution that the far right offers is also going to be similarly lacking because their analysis itself is lacking. And as you mentioned earlier, is also why it's a problem when we have people on the left who are just trying to co-op these far-right movements to their own means. Because if you are co-opting a movement that is based on very shallow analysis and is not offering actual

solutions, what are you actually co-opting? You cannot just put forth a different solution that adheres to your political ideology if the entire movement is based on shoddy analysis. You have to offer an alternative analysis. So I think that one of the things that's really interesting about this point is exactly that, that we're looking again at that far right does have an analysis of liberalism and is identifying some of the problems that we would also identify, but their analysis is shallow, and therefore, the solutions that they offer rhetorically address those issues, but if we look at what the result of those actions are, they don't actually go about addressing those issues. They just go towards the direction of strengthening their own

political movement. But also they do answer some of the hunger. That's the point. I mean, you know, it is an interesting issue that, you know, this is not a point about the internet alone, because I've been to big rallies of the far right, and there is a lot of, you know, let's call it communion taking place there. People see each other. It's a little bit like a rally of any kind, or even, you know, if you go to a big musical concert, you go to see, you know, Tom Morello in concert, you're all wearing your rage against a machine t-shirt. shirts, you know, and you recognize each other of a certain generation, which album is your favorite and so on. There is a way in which these anonymous yet real communities exist in

other forms, you know, sports teams. Those are anonymous but real communities. I mean, you go to a stadium, you're wearing your whatever, you know, your Madrid, Real Madrid t-shirt. Arsenal. Arsenal, whatever. You're wearing an Arsenal t-shirt. You don't know anybody there, you know, but you're in a community. And that's actually what I was thinking about with this thesis is that it's not a false community. That's the thing. There's nothing false about it. It's real. When you go to a musical concert or a sports game, those are real experiences. They really move you. You know, you come back home, you buy it, you know, some other emblem, put it up on your wall. That defines you. You know, you call your friends over. You have exact this

debate. Is it Arsenal? Is it Manchester United? Fuck you. You know, whatever. That kind of thing. It produces a real sense of community even though there is no community, even though you remain isolated. So it solves a certain problem.

I mean, where's like, you know, let's go back to the U.S. When Trump arrives, Trump creates this form of community. It's a sports team. You go there, people wear Trump T-shirts, they're so happy. They're like the Trump's insignia. You know, I love being with you guys.

I hate everybody. I hate my liberal neighbors. I love you guys. And then you go back to your world. Yeah? And you hang up your Trump's shirt. And you hang up your MAGA cap. And, you know, you basically are back to being isolated.

Because there really isn't a community. You know, I mean, in that sense, it is different from liberalism. Because liberalism hasn't tried for a long time to be a sports team. For a very long time, it has just not tried that. I mean, you know, maybe occasionally charismatic people arrive, Obama, Bernie Sanders, whatever, I'm still on the United States. Occasionally charismatic people arrive. But by and large, you know, it's not a movement that attempts to make itself a community. I mean, most liberal political parties, the social democrats in Germany, you know, the strange kind of political center of France.

the Labour Party in the UK, you know, maybe even to some extent the Canadian liberals, you know, to some extent and so on. I mean, they've just become comfortable as an election machine. They don't have structures. In most of these parties, you don't have party meetings. You don't have neighbor party discussions. There is no party life. There's no enriched life in the part. And so in that sense, they have made politics a very long.

lonely business as well. It becomes electoralism. You know, it becomes something other than giving you a community of fellows, opinions about the world and so on. You know, it's not true that people don't want to discuss politics or don't want to discuss how things should go.

It's just the avenues for it. A super limited. You know, in many countries, you gather as friends and people are like, hey, let's not talk about politics. Give me an addict. You know, let's stay with sports or whatever. Let's not go there. That's a normal reaction. You know, that's not an unnatural reaction. That's normal because the spaces for

discussion are not there. Then arrives groups like the far right of a special type, which basically authorize certain kinds of discussions in certain spaces. By the way, the best depiction in a negative way, the negative of this was in the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David figures out that if he buys a mega cap, he can eat lunch by himself. I mean, I think that is the, it's a negation of the point I'm making, you know, that if you buy the mega cap in Hollywood, you go to a cafe, nobody's going to talk to you. He gets to experience the loneliness that he so craves, yes, in this case, yeah. But you know, this whole problem of the loneliness, you know, the atomization of neoliberal mass

consumer society, late capitalism, however we want to characterize it, it does produce this sense of, you know, all forms of social solidarity, of social organization are targets of these massive forces that just atomize people and valorize individualism and that you, you know, create some sense of identity through, you know, what you wear, what you buy, et cetera, but it's not rooted in something beyond that. And that's how some of these. these fake, real but fake communities, you know, are created through consumer society and identification and MAGA is, you know, one of these, one among, among many of those. But you say in thesis six and, you know, in seven things that build on this, but I felt that

there might be a little bit of a contradiction here between thesis seven and thesis five than I want to come to. So thesis six is the far right of a special type uses its primary. proximity to private media conglomerates to normalize its discourse and its proximity to the owners of social media to increase the societal acceptance of its ideas. This highly agitational discourse creates a frenzy, mobilizing sections of the population, either online or in the streets, to participate in rallies where they nonetheless remain individuals rather than members of a collective. The feeling of loneliness generated by capitalist alienation is dulled for a moment, but not overcome. But I would say also,

is like, do you feel like we are also seeing the mimicry of this on left? I feel like people have no outlet for genuine politics also on the left. And so they populate, you know, Twitter, social media. We go to our, you know, protest movements and so on. But genuine connection and collaboration in social transformation is not happening. These are kind of performative things. It makes us feel better in the moment. We get a little, you know, frisson of community. And that, are people who agree with me, you know, and then we have to retire back into our atomized social existences and we're not finding other ways. But you mentioned in Thesis 7 that the far right seems to have found some ways to create a tentacular organization with its roots spread

in various sectors of society, which means it's more embedded in some ways in a conscious way. It operates wherever people gather, whether in sports clubs or charitable organizations, it aims to build a mass base in society rooted in the majority identity in a given place, whether race, religion, or a sense of national being by marginalizing and demonizing any minority. In many countries, this far right relies upon religious structures and networks to ever more deeply embed conservative view of society and the family. And so I wanted you to maybe meditate a little bit on how and why they are capable of embedding themselves more in this kind of structures of society or spaces within society.

But also one little thought I had here is one thing when you talk about these bigotries by creating inclusion and exclusion on race or religion, is that globally speaking, it's not absolutely universal, but I would want to highlight that one of the specific features of how that dimension is operating in our age seems to be, the transnational value and work that Islamophobia does. It seems so useful, whether it's in India, you know, for Hindutva or in Europe across the West, it provides a kind of rationale for both domestic exclusion and marginalization, as well as geopolitical rationales that can

reinforce this. So that's another wrinkle that I wanted to add to the discussion there. fascinating. The sixth point, the key words are agitational and frenzy. In a sense, that was really what I think we need to have a serious reflection on the agitational and frenzied nature of the far-right language. The far-right doesn't talk necessarily in the kind of sober way that maybe others do. You know, it has a certain frenzy that I think riles people up much more. The left doesn't have the capacity for that. You know, partly, it's not a mode that the left has been familiar with for a very long time. It might have been like that during the era of trade union organizing, you know, the kind of muscular trade union organizing in the early years, in the

mines and in the, you know, in the factories and so on. There was an agitational discourse, that has largely been lost, you know, and in many parts of the world, left discourse has become more, you know, rational and reasonable and professorial. You know, even our political party leaders talk as if they are professors in a way, you know, professors of the working class, not, you know, agitators and frenzy is driving the discourse. But you see that in the right, inclusive of writing academics, who write in a kind of frenzied way, you know, who take people on, you know. I mean, people ask me often, why don't you debate other people? And I say, I don't like debates, you know, debates go against my personality. I like having a conversation, you know, I prefer that.

But they like debates and defeating people and, you know, crushing their opponents. And I just, you know, find that our lot don't think like that. We don't have that as a core. you know, part of the way we think and the way we want to act. You know, we don't want to be seen as somebody who's crushing somebody else, you know. When you have a discussion, I bet both of you, Henry Adnan, when you're talking to somebody you don't agree with, you're looking for commonalities, you're looking for ways to suggest to also maybe enlighten them, change their opinions, move the conversation. You're not trying to crush them, you know.

we are not schooled in that kind of political terrain and in a sense whether the right has this axiomatically it's the nature of the right or whether this is something to do with their political culture I can't say I don't know enough about that I feel it's relatively axiomatic that there's something about the right wing's will to power that's much stronger for historical reasons

You know, the language of Nietzsche, for instance, and I know people debate what Nietzsche's politics are. I'm not interested in that debate, but the language of Nietzsche for is a real departure from the language of German philosophy. You know, German philosophy cultivated this sort of, you know, paired version of analytic philosophy. You know, God, for instance, laborious, laborious pages in page. of explanation and slow movement of the point, you know. The point is almost walking, not even running, whereas, you know, Nietzsche jumps on a horse and gallops down the road. He's not interested in the laborious, and there's something about that frenzy, and there's no wonder that he loves the phrase will to power. It's so important, you know, and so I think there's

something axiomatic about their frenzy, their agitational discourse, and so on. You're right, there is a contradiction between 5 and 7, and there has to be in a way, because on the one side, thesis 5 is about, in a way, the incompleteness of the desire to create community. You know, the incompleteness in the nature of modern society. It's not restricted to the far right.

I could abstract from this, talk about, as I said, sports, communities, and so on. I mean, look, the three of us, we have never met in person. You know, we have these conversations. It would be so different if we went out for a drink and got to know each other and, you know, I didn't know you like Arsenal, you know, whatever. We talk, I don't know much about you guys' backgrounds, you know, we chit-chat, you know,

where did you grow up, what did you mean? This, you'll form a deep sense of love for the person and so on. In this case, we develop a kind of political, intellectual friendship, yeah, but it has its limits. And this is what I mean, the limits for that kind of. of fellowship are set by the structure. Now, it is also true, and this is why I said it is a contradiction. But less than a contradiction, it's just that these things are manifesting and we don't know where they are going.

It is religious structures, certainly, in Christianity it's easy to point to the attack on Vatican 2, the dismissal of liberation theology, the return of conservative Catholicism, which had its impact on conservative Protestantism, you know, anti-abortion, anti-whatever, women's rights in many ways, and so on. There it's clear that the far-right has an advantage, which is why in so many societies the far-right incubates its politics around religious freedom,

around, you know, what is religious doctrine, abortion, and so on. In your right as well, this interesting point you made about Islamophobia, But this Islamophobia point goes the other direction as well. It conservatizes Muslim societies where people say, you know, they return to religion. I mean, once I arrived at Dhaka airport about, I don't know, eight years ago, and I didn't look at the schedule well enough to understand that I had arrived at the airport the same time as the Tabliqi Jamaat people were coming from all around the world. And Tabliqi Jamaat is a kind of massive Protestant.

Islam, you know, and people say there's no Protestantism in Islam. You've got to meet the Muslim Brotherhood and Tabligi Jamah. These movements are forms of Protestantism in the Islamic world. And they are... They say Islam needs a reformation.

But no, no, please, no. No, thank you. He's already had its representation. These guys. And, you know, there was a doctor on the queue for the visa on arrival with me. And he was from, you know, from Rice

University, I think, or somewhere in Texas. He was traveling bare feet because he came all the way from Texas without shoes because he was coming from the Tabligi Jammat Convention. I mean, even the Tabligis in Bangladesh were wearing shoes. But this guy came without shoes. He was wearing this white outfit. Not for the Hajj. That's different.

There's a different kind of outfit. And so there's a conservatizing there. And this produces its own orientation towards the politics of the right. Why? because these structures of, let's say, family and so on, have a temptation to the right, much more than the possibility to the left. And to read this, you actually could go back to William Reich. And Reich's work on conservative, on fascism and the family, the role the family plays, the role of the father, the role of law. And the more difficulty families face in controlling their children,

children's destiny, the more conservative they become. So, for instance, you know, in an age like now where kids are sitting in their room with their phone, you don't know what they're looking at, you don't know what's in their head. And the desire to go and trap them into some conservative box increases. So it's interesting because on the one side, there are these tentacles in society that favor the far right. But these tentacles are also themselves. They are not, not as strong as they seem because they have their own vulnerabilities. You know, children will reject the parents as children sometimes do when they are put in a box. And so then you create your own problems.

They turn against the right. I mean, sometimes families go this long road into right-wing ideology inside the family to find it exhausting. I mean, there's all kinds of interesting things that can happen. So it is true that they have their... gifted with history's conservatism, you know, whereas the left is not gifted with anything. The left has to produce the future society. We don't have a gift. You know, the family is not a left-wing institution. The family is a right-wing institution. It might produce care and comfort, but it's organized in a way to favor the right because of

generational power, patriarchy, all of that, you know, all the basic elements of the family. Hegel loved the family. Why did Hegel love the family? It was the stabilizing institution for the state. You had family, then you had civil society. I don't think he was actually as keen on civil society as the Hegelians after claim, including the young Hegelians, who wanted to use the idea of civil society against their own state.

And then, of course, the state. I think for Hegel, it was family to state. And that is the far right of a special line's direct line From family to the state, civil society is not something that they are big on. You know, this idea of like dissenting voices and, I mean, these are the people that get killed. You know, Bangladesh is a key example, 2015, the murder of bloggers who tried to talk about, you know, what is Islam today and secularism and so on. They were assassinated. One or two of them had to flee to of all places, the Gulf countries.

So, yeah, I mean, your right to identify this, but in a way, this is a tension, correct, between, you know, the impossibility of realizing the community within these structures, and yet they have the opportunity of these structures given to them, which we don't have, you know, we just do not have. History has been very unkind in that sense to socialism. You know, I would love to hear more of this discussion regarding religious institutions and the far right, especially considering Adnan, as a director of a school of religion, perhaps we'll have time for that in the conclusion of this episode. But I want to make sure that we have enough time to get through the 10 feces while you're here, VJ. Thesis 8 relates to a couple of things that we've talked about already. You had talked about the level of aggression and hyper-masculinity on the far right. And we've also in the conversation previously, and it's something that I talk about very frequently, is the fact that there's this rhetorical push against the state by the far right. But in actuality, they're not really pushing against the state because, again, they are both liberals and conservatives are upholding the system of capitalism and the capitalist world order. They're pushing against the state rhetorically only. And thesis eight relates to this as well. And again, the point of hypermasculinary. It says, the far right of a special type attacks the institutions of power that are the very foundation of its socio-political basis. It creates the illusion of being plebeian rather than

patrician when in fact it is deep in the pockets of the oligarchy. It creates the illusion of the plebeian by developing a highly masculine form of hypernationalism, the decadence of which drips out in its ugly rhetoric. This far right straddles the testosterone. her own power of this hypernationalism while playing up its portrayed victimhood in the face of power. I think that that really ties together several of the threads that we've talked about before. So I don't know if you have anything else that you want to add on that thesis, VJ, but I mean, that's really been several of the threads that we've explored already. You can easily call this, you know, I'm a victim, but I'm going to bomb you.

Well, that in a nutshell, very good. Well, I want to just make. group Thesis 9 and 10 together because they both fit, I think, nicely as the little contrast that you can maybe clarify and elaborate on. Thesis 9 is that the far right of a special type is an international formation, organized through various platforms such as Steve Bannon's, the movement, the Vox Parties, Madrid Forum, the Anti-LGBQ Plus Fellowship Foundation. These groups are rooted in a political project in the Atlantic world that enhances the role of the right wing in the global south and provides them with the funds to deepen right wing ideas

where they have little fertile soil. They create new problems where they did not exist at the scale before, such as the fanfare over sexuality in Eastern Africa. These new problems weaken people's movements and tighten the rights grip over society. And that's something we definitely have seen as the internationalism.

That's a new interesting. Of course, in World War II, there was an agreement of the Axis Powers, but what's interesting about this period is that there is actually a kind of internationalist sort of concept and really it's not just hyper ultrationalism and society. And not only when they're in power, which is also the interesting point, very different than we had seen in previous generations where there was these alliances between governing

far right parties, whereas now we're seeing movements of far right individuals and far right organizations outside of power that are allying themselves with one another. And I would say that they draw very helpful for them is the sort of clash of civilizations type theory. So, you know, why can we have in certain kinds of the far right, a critique of the Ukraine, you know, thing is a situation, not for the right reasons, but because actually Putin is a Christian leader and we need to kind of be pulling together in a broad tent of the West of Christian, you know, culture and civilization against, you know, the Islamic world and China, you know, this is like what Huntington said, basically. He was like, watch out

for Islam and China. And if they get together, boy, that's it for us. So there is this internationalist kind of component that's new. But then you also draw a distinction between how it manifests, even though it may seem a global phenomenon, that there are differences, as you say, between how it manifests in the leading imperialist countries versus the global south. In the global north, both liberals in the far right, vigorously defend the privileges that they have gained through plunder over the past 500 years, colonialism, imperialism, et cetera, through their military and other means, while in the global south, the general tendency amongst all politicians. political forces. So you meet here both right and left is to establish sovereignty. That's, of course, because they were victims of colonialism and they were victims of the kind of post-war, you know, World War II, you know, post-colonial order. So what do you think is at stake here in these, in this kind of different manifestations, but the fact that it is an internationalist kind of

movement that's new? I mean, look, firstly, the issue of the internationalism is interesting because you're quite right. It's different from the 1930s. What's, I think, slightly ignored about these political tendencies is that they are more interested in having power over society than having power over the state, far more interested. Because they understand that their project is a long-term project. It goes back to this long march through the institutions, which was a phrase that comes to us from a new left guy in Germany, you know, who coins the phrase in the 1970s.

We're going to do a long march through the institutions. But the leftists didn't have the resources to do that. The right did. In 1977, when a new government came against the Indira Gandhi government, a united government, the then people who later formed the BJP, They were leaders of the Janta Party, like Lal Krishna Advani, later the president of the BJP, the Bhartya Janta Party. Advani didn't ask for the finance portfolio.

He didn't even ask for home ministry or foreign ministry. I profile. He asked for information and broadcasting. So then they packed their people into the Indian radio, television and print regulation site. Because they understand it's a long project. You see, what the left would have taken. And indeed, when the left came briefly into coalition, one section of the left, Indyid Gupta became the home minister. So why you want to run the police department against the people?

Like, I would never take that ministry in a coalition government. I would take education. I would take culture. And I would take information. Those are the ones I would take because they are the long-term battle of ideas. Or I would take social welfare and the family because I would drive left. doing policy of the family. I would argue for having crashes on every street. I would argue for building popular clinics so that people can take their children and themselves to be seen

by medical people on their road. I would argue for a monthly neighborhood cleanup where everybody has to participate in the voluntary, where I would argue those are all entering the lineaments of society. And the right is very good at that. I mean, when you look at the kind of things that the Balanites talk about, they're not talking about coup d'is. That's why it's wrong to call them fascists because you're looking for them

to do a co-data. You think January 6th is the most important date. In fact, the most important date is the date that they came into all the institutions and they started to enter the government buildings and they basically took over policymaking, you know, around, for instance, on the international level,

whether you should give health care aid for women's reproductive health in the Global South. You know, that office, who's running that office? That is far more consequential than January 6th. Bannon is not calling for an insurrection. Bannon is calling for a resurrection of society where they just take charge of everything, you know. and that's I think something we are looking in the wrong place if we are to build a strategy against the right it's my view from thesis you know number nine

we're looking in the wrong case we are looking for the insurrection but they are doing this other thing now when it comes to north and south this is not a trivial point because when you look at say India India is genuinely led by a far-right political front on the other hand when the foreign minister was asked, are you going to join NATO? He said quite bluntly, we don't accept the NATO mindset. They are trying to assert India's national interests.

They don't want to have their national interests be defined by Washington's national interests. This desire to push for sovereignty creates some differences between the far rights in the north and the south. And I don't want to push this point to an extreme level. It's just that one should be slightly wary of saying Trump and Modi are the same, you know, then not exactly the same. Their consequentiality is different. And also, in fact, Modi is constrained by a whole different set of obligations. For instance, he cannot afford to allow 100 million Indians to die from starvation. He just can't.

And 100 million Indians could die tomorrow from starvation because standard of living is so low. So when the war in Ukraine took place, India was under pressure to stop buying fuel from Russia. India could not stop buying fuel from Russia because if Modi did that, a hundred million people would die. Because if there was not cut price fuel coming into the country, fuel inflation means inflation of all food goods, means 100 million people will die. So there are constraints to the far right. when it comes to their location in places like India and so on. You know, it's not like Modi is, you know, a bastion of liberalism and nothing like that.

It's just that he cannot afford politically to allow such a big catastrophe. You see, in Uganda and in India, it's one thing for the government to go against homosexuality, let's say, right? Big way to go against homosexuality. But they can't afford to allow 20 million people to starve to do. death. So this is the other end of the difference, you know, whereas in the United States, the gap between Trump, the far right and the liberals, the same people are dying. It's not a huge difference, you know. The same people are perishing, are starving, the children are not able to go to school. I mean, there is no difference. The difference might be that, you know,

different people from their political obligations might be slightly happier. So when a far-right person is in power, if I'm a far-right supporter, I'm happier. It's like when your football team wins. You know, there is that level of juie-saint, so there's some adrenaline in you, and the other side feels demoralized. I think that psychological thing, sociosychological thing occurs. But otherwise, you know, the net consequences are not such. that they can't drive certain kinds of agendas.

But in the South, you know, the needle is much more sensitive. You make a little change, you can wipe out an entire population. You know, it's very much more sensitive. That's very interesting to think about those differences within this broader analysis. And, you know, what it suggests to me is my last question. Henry has another one, but by way of concluding, you've been so generous with your time, is, you know, well, what does, now that you, we've done a kind

of anatomy of the new far right movements, I've been alluding to here and there where I think, you know, maybe there's been too much mimicry by left groups of some of these techniques. What would you say when you do this kind of, you know, analysis, what kinds of recommendations would you make about what the left has to do that's both some continuities, but also adaptive differences in its approach and its thinking or tactics to meet the specific conditions and features of the new far right of the special type. Of course, one thing is, you know, don't rest on liberalism. They may not end up being real allies. But in fact, actually, they've been the enemies, you know, alongside the far right. But what else in this?

analysis, what do we take from it as recipes and suggestions for what the anatomy of an effective new left has to be? I'm very cautious about this because I always feel that different countries have different balance of forces and you really need to be quite specific in your prescription. You know, so... Well, I would say our audience is mostly global north and does. So that's maybe more where we should be looking at these kinds of... Right. Oh, let's stay with the United States, which is going into an election now where this is already coming in. I mean, in a way, the temptation, you know, they always say the loneliest place on earth is the voting booth in the United States for a progressive. Because it's at that

point where you, even though you've said, I'll never vote for the Democrats, you basically in the voting booth end up voting for them anyway. I mean you know I'm sure it's similar in Canada you know you go in there saying I'm never going to vote for the liberals and you say well the conservatives are so much worse and the

NDP is zero and I'm just going to might as well pull the lever for I mean there's a communist candidate but they'll win 15 votes I'm just going to pull the lever and here goes the liberals one more vote okay so there's a similarity there you know it's kind of inertia

Like, there's F-all that I can do, so I'm going to do this. But one of the things in affluent countries that's, I think, important is this idea that the far right has made its gains much more in society first. That's where it made its gains. And, you know, for the left to believe that the locus of its political ambitions needs to be around the ballot box is a big error. that the left cannot really in many countries maybe in Germany right now it's different where the Bundes Sara Wagenek

is having a real impact on German political debates and discussions around Ukraine funding because they are going to prevail in the regional elections. Not prevail, they're going to get 10, 12% in the regional elections in eastern Germany which is going to hammer the social democrats.

They're going to lose everything. DeLinka is going to be wiped out. And the SDP, Greens, they're getting, it's basically Bundes Sardavagenet and the Alliance for Deutschland that are going to do well. But again, you know, that's a different in particular circumstance. Other parts of the world, I think the issue should never be about the presidential election or the parliamentary election or whatever. You've got to build in society.

That's the oldest axiom. And all of this analysis brings us right back. it's interesting in the 1930s, Togliati, Palmyro Togliati, leader of the Italian Communist Party, was for a time outside Italy and he was in the Soviet Union. While he was in the USSR, he met the PCI, the Communist Party of Italy's Carter that were in exile there. And he gave a series of classes called lectures, which were later published his lectures on fascism. In fact, I wrote the introduction for a reissue of this. this book, lectures on fascism. One of the lectures, Togliati goes in great depth and he says to the

comrades, he says, listen, to confront the fascist menace, we must go into the realm of culture. Like, why aren't we playing football in the local neighborhood football leagues? Why aren't we singing in the choir? Why aren't we in theater groups? Not making our own theater groups. Why aren't we in the public arena and try to influence society, you know, go to the football leagues, play football with people, become part of society, influence the culture. If you win the culture, then it's easier to prevail politically. You can't prevail politically without being there in society. And I think that is a, that lesson, I keep learning this lesson from different things that. I read or analyze or when I go and see political formations in Brazil, the landless workers,

they produce these encampments of, you know, million people. And in these encampments, they produced a culture of belonging. And so you walk into Rio de Janeiro, you go to a grocery store, you may see somebody with the MSD cap. They are not with the MSD, but it's part of the culture. You know, it's like wearing a cap for a, I don't know, know, you know, whatever sports team, football team, they just wear the MSD cap. Because it has entered into popular culture. And that, I think, is something that the left in many parts of the world doesn't always grasp. We tend to sectarianism, whereas the far-right of a special type, bizarrely, doesn't tend to sectarianism.

It tends to society. Our tendency is to go away. I mean, you know, this happens a lot. you know, with academic people of the left. The difficulty of just engaging with people who are not other academics becomes difficult. You know, like having friends who are not academics becomes difficult. And I think that is equally so of people of the left. You know, you don't want to hang out.

Because why? We are compelled by some god-awful moral superiority to always talk about politics. And we don't just rest in society. So that's the point that Togliati makes in that lecture. And I think it's actually really quite useful today to reflect on that, is that are we capable of becoming normal people in society? Muriel Rukhizer wrote a great poem where she said, Communists are exiles from the future.

That's true, you know. And so therefore you feel completely removed from the present. You know, we've already liberated ourselves. we are better at, you know, whatever, you know, we're not racist, we're not this. Somebody makes a racist joke. We are like, hey, listen, that's not on, you know. And they're like, man, we can't hang out with you, you know. No, that's not, one should never normalize racism or sexism.

But the problem becomes acute when over time you become the moral authority among your group of friends, you know, and then you're not leading them in a sense. You are the police of them. and nobody wants the cops to be around when they are relaxed. So how do you become a moral authority without being the cop? I mean, all of this is the kind of realm of lessons that I would say we should at least begin to digest. Yeah. And before I ask the closing question, which will be a short one, Vijay, don't worry.

I just have to mention something which is completely off topic. But, and I didn't plan on bringing this up, but you mentioned Toliyati and you mentioned Footiati and you mentioned Foot. in the same answer. And so I have to mention that the football club that I've supported since 2006 and the first thing I did when I moved to Kazan was become a season ticket member of Rubin Kazan, beat Akron Toliyati last week in football. Of course, there's a city in Russia named after Toliati. And yeah, we beat them in football last week.

Last minute winner. Great game. But in any case, that's not the point of this discussion. I just couldn't help but throw it out there. The last question, it's really just a conclusion to this entire conversation that we've had regarding this creation of an anatomy of a far right of a special type. The question, just to reiterate this point for the listeners, why is it important for us to construct these sorts of anatomies of the far right,

and in this case the far right of a special type, in order for us to analyze them in the way that we then can do based off of the anatomy that you put together with your folks at Tri-Continental? I mean, the answer is pretty straightforward, really. It's not special, which is that you do these things to better understand what they are doing in order to better understand how to contest them. You know, that's, in fact, what this is. But this is also slightly a not a warning.

Because I think warning is the wrong word. It's like a flare into the sky for our own people to not fall into the liberal trap of demonizing the far right of a special kind in order to normalize liberalism. The demonization of fascism ends up with the normalizing of these neoliberal forces, which I think is the great trap of the present where sometimes you may need in certain societies and in certain. certain political conjunctures, you may need to make tactical alliances with liberals, even neoliberal, against the far right. Certainly, many times, you may need to make these. But it has to be important to understand it's a tactical alliance. It's not a strategic alliance. In other words, they may help you defeat the far right here and there in certain moments. But they are not going to be your strategic allies against the far right. You know, they will not be a strategic ally.

They could be a tactical ally. And I think that distinction for me is very important because it also saves us from sectarianism. You know, I see a lot of young people walking around quoting Mao's combat liberalism. I mean, Mao wrote that text at a certain time. It's an excellent text. But he's not talking about our tactical and strategic universe. He's talking about his own. So once again, we return to quotation politics.

You know, liberalism isn't evil. liberalism is its own thing it's a social force none of these things are evil we are just trying to establish socialism that's at least the the path that we want to follow so we have to learn to motivate and mobilize different political tendencies and constantly fight against our own the worst case obliteration and the second worst case marginalization you know which is why you occasionally have to make tactical alliances with different forces to drive in a gender. And so I think this demonization, normalization, discourse of the liberals is really what this text is intended to, to some extent, you know, send up a flare about. Again, listeners, our guest was our friend returning for the third or fourth or fifth time, VJ Prashad, director of the Tri-Continental Institute. Thanks again, Vijay, for coming back on the show. Can you tell the listeners where they can find you in your work on social media and where the Tri-Continental can be found.

I wish I remembered the social media handles, but it's something like Tri-Continental, and it's a long, long word. It's just tri-continental, so just go and look and find it. Yeah. Yeah, and of course, we'll have that and your personal accounts linked in the show notes as well, so listeners, you can just click on the show notes and then click, and it'll direct you to VJ's social media and the Tri-Continental social media. Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other excellent podcast?

Well, you can find me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N. And check out the M-A-J-L-I-S about Middle East, Islamic World, Muslim Diasporic Culture. We don't have too many recent episodes. We were on hiatus, but we'll start again. This is fall, so check it out. And I just want to also thank Vijay again for a very important article to stimulate a conversation that we need to have all across the global left. And the only thing I would say is that we need a better name for the far right of a special type. We have to come up with something.

But you're right to anatomize it and say they are a special type. So anyway, we can work on that. Listeners, if you have suggestions, post them on social media because we do need to, make this kind of analysis very important, and we need to know what to call them when we're referring to them, and fascism just won't do. But thank you so much, Vij. Thanks a lot. Take care of yourselves. And I also want to let the listeners know that when Adnan says that there's going to be the Mudgellis coming back very soon, we have a Mudgellis guerrilla history crossover episode coming very soon on Al-Mushtarek, a legendary, historic text

by a legendary Iraqi Communist Party leader that was just published by Iskra Books. It just came out two days ago at the time of recording, so we'll be one of the first interviews about that translation project of that book. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1995, go Rubin-K-K-K-N-N-N-N-K-R-R-B, and you can find the show at Guerrilla-U-L-A-U-R-R-I-L-L-A-U-P, and you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And until next time, listeners, solidarity. Thank you.