Capitalism and the Far Right: Revisiting the Pollock-Neumann Debate in the Era of Trumpism (original) (raw)

2021, Philosophy and Public Issues

[Preprint copy only] The events of the last decades have seen neoliberalism, despite its boosters’ famous promises, spectacularly fail to deliver a peaceable, pluralistic ‘end of history’. Economic 'deregulation' has instead created the conditions of social alienation, insecurity, and inequality which have paved the way instead since 2010 to today’s widespread political and cultural reaction, and the increasing willingness of voters globally to support authoritarian ethnonationalist candidates, even as they contest the basic legitimacy of constitutional, parliamentary modes of governance. This historical sequence, I argue, re-raises questions at the heart of the research program of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, before its rerouting into forms of cultural pessimism with The Dialectic of Enlightenment, and then the cultural, communicative, and recognitive turns. What is the recurrent historical connection between capitalism and forms of far-right politics, which much of post- and non-Frankfurt School critical theory is unable to robustly conceptualise, following the ascendancy of discourses on instrumental reason, the cultural industry, 'modernity', occidental metaphysics, and totalitarianism? Why did critical theory, even within the Frankfurt School, turn away from political economics, exactly preceding and then through much of the recent decades in which, as Wendy Brown and others have argued, neoliberalism set out expressly to destroy homo politicus, and replace this figure with homo economicus? Why has the touted liberation of the economy or of the rights to economic accumulation freed from public regulation, not produced wider forms of political liberation, but cradled forms of Caesarism and virulent cultural reaction? This paper [draft only = author's version of manuscript accepted for publication in 2021/22, to appear with revised title and responses to reviewers] addresses these questions by reexamining the Pollock-Neuman debate of the 1940s about the connection between capitalism and National Socialism. It argues that in form, bases, and content, Neumann's conception of 'totalitarian monopoly capitalism' to describe far right ethnonationalisms was both more accurate historically concerning Nazism, and more prescient subsequently, to understand today's rise of new forms of Bonapartism or authoritarian ethnonationalism.