In summer 2016, an outbreak of stupidity took place which—to many—encapsulated the ugliness of the MAGA movement. While attending a pro-Trump rally in Phoenix, Zack Fisher—a 30 year-old lab tech who’s been variously described as “a tatted up juice monkey"^[1]—began to verbally spar with Hispanic counter-protesters. In spite of a police barrier having been erected, things soon escalated. Signs were ripped away, with the Trumpers taking particular offense at the presence of Mexican flags. Fisher then proceeded to unleash a string of racial invective that would turn him into a much-maligned Internet microcelebrity. “Get the fuck out of here,” he screams through clenched teeth, “our country motherfucker!” But it was the hateful howl that followed that assured his viral infamy: “go fucking cook my burrito, bitch […] and build that fucking wall, for me.”

It would be pointless to dwell upon the vileness of Fisher’s outburst—a vileness that will be immediately obvious to anyone not already in the thrall of far-right ideology. Nor can we assume that Fisher, with his tribal tattoos and guileless taunts, is the archetype of a Trump supporter. There are Trump voters who forcefully enjoin Hispanics to leave the US, or march through the streets with tiki torches chanting white nationalist slogans. There are far more who harbor no overt racial animus; who vote Republican for religious reasons, or who perhaps simply want a tax cut (something which could turn out to be more damaging to race relations in the long run).

No, Fisher’s rant is instructive for another reason. Namely, because it captures an aporia essential to the logic of the far-right as a whole. He begins by telling the counter-protesters to leave: get the fuck out of […] our country. But by the end of it, a curious reversal has taken place, in which they’re no longer being asked to leave, but instead to work for him: “cook my burrito, bitch.” In this matter, it seems even Trump’s border wall will require non-white labor: “build that fucking wall, for me.”

The use of direct racial language by Fisher, or anyone else, is not devoid of material significance. What is important to understand about his hate-filled tirade, is that—when one strips away its verbal extremities—it is essentially reflective of the structure of the US immigration system. The idea of legal immigration, as Dan Melo has shown, is in large part a myth, one reserved for a rarefied caste of upwardly social mobile applicants. For the rest, the prospects of being accepted are rather grim. The corporations that receive the largest delegation of H-1B visa recipients often sponsor between “0 and 1 percent of their workers”^[2] for citizenship; meanwhile, the average “wait for a visa for a Mexican sibling is now over 20 years.”^[3]

Well, okay, then don’t come, might be the obvious refrain here. But the paradox is that there exist several branches of US capital dependent on illegal immigration. This is most obvious in the case of agriculture, with 26% of US farming jobs belonging to undocumented workers; however, it is also true of construction (15%) and even to some extent service (9%) and manufacturing (9%).^[4] Given this, one might imagine that these industries would support naturalization. Yet time and again the opposite has proven true. US agribusiness, for instance, has consistently opposed legislation that would create a legal workforce. This might have something to do with the cost: an increase in wages of “40 percent or more”^[5] (“or more,” it would seem, because naturalized workers would be able to organize themselves without fearing deportation).

The constant scapegoating of immigrants, the calls for them to—as Fisher says—‘get out,’ take on a different meaning in this context. While dissenting voices exist, there has never existed a consensus amongst the US capitalist class to apply the draconian measures needed to truly end illegal immigration—an outcome that could only lead to significantly elevated wages, job shortages, or both. In the isolated instances where this has occurred, the results have been predictably ruinous, with Arizona’s SB 1070 law causing a deficit of over 5.5 billion for the state due to an inability to fill needed jobs while offering little benefit to native workers.^[6] Indeed, even during the Trump presidency, reductions in immigration levels predominantly (a) affected legal immigrants,^[7] and (b) owed more to the perception of Trump’s US as inhospitable than any specific policy change.^[8] The terrible persecutions of ICE, the use of high-grade military equipment to track immigrants who’ve never committed a minor offense—these will result in individual deportations. But all evidence points to them being, measured collectively, a feint—one intended more to create a precarized and terrorized labor force than to achieve the expulsion of necessary laborers.

Is Fisher, then, really so different from the US state? He says he wants immigrants—or at least those he imagines to be immigrants—to “get the fuck out.” At the end of the day, though, what he really wants from them is servility; the performance of menial labor. “Leave,” the US says to illegals. But we will still hire you at sub-minimum wage, accept your taxes, and—if you pay them dutifully—perhaps consider naturalization one day. Indeed, for most, this is the only way they’ll ever build a life in the US. Of course, Fisher—even more emphatically than Trump—identifies with this violence. That matters. But is he really worse than a government that prosecutes humanitarian aid volunteers who leave food and water for border crossers?^[9] Or that deported a woman after she accused ICE guards of sexually assaulting her?^[10]

All of this can tell us something about the far-right. Much has been made, particularly in the wake of COVID, of its use of conspiracy theories: the way that the liberal left is often cast by it as an appendage of a shadowy cabal of ‘globalist’ Satanic pedophiles, who—meeting in the backrooms of decrepit pizza parlors—plot the destruction of capitalism, the white race, or both. But this really only captures its esoteric dimension—one as important to its organization as it is limited in its appeal. What we find more generally—in the texts of Jordan Peterson, or in septic alt-right subreddits—is something else: the speaking of social reality. Fisher’s rant is one such example: though more an irrational outpour than anything resembling coherent speech, it succeeds in both condensing and affirming, in a few sordid phrases, the disavowed racism that defines the US immigration system. Often, though, this gesture takes on a slightly more discursive form. To clarify this, it will help to examine the comments of a popular—and by the standards of the genre, decidedly wordy—manosphere blogger, Heartiste, on the US gender pay gap:

The Bitches of Beastwick [Jezebel] are at it again, this time trotting out that gimp and repeatedly debunked — it’s been shot in the head a thousand times by now — hobbyhorse about a supposed pay gap between men and women. Femcunts, listen up: the pay gap is a lie. Reporting on it favorably and credulously as if it wasn’t already proven a lie makes you liars. Filthy, clam-baked liars. Once you control for hours worked, time away from career for family, and occupational choice (service sector and people person jobs that women innately prefer and FREELY CHOOSE generally pay less than male-oriented STEM and finance jobs), the pay gap DISAPPEARS. So why, given that these facts have been out there for years, do feminists like President Obama continue sticking their fingers in their ears and lying through their teeth? Eh, you may as well ask why a warthog is ugly. It comes naturally.^[11]

The language here is, again, deplorable. This does not mean the basic argument—that Obama’s claim that “the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns”^[12] is misleading—is just ‘wrong.’ Indeed, a similar conclusion was reached by the US Department of Labor, in a foreword it authored for a report it contracted from the CONSAD Research Corporation in 2009:

Although additional research in this area is clearly needed, this study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.^[13]

In the report, women’s lesser compensation is attributed primarily to (a) different occupational choices—the way women disproportionately elect to be “teachers” or “secretaries” or “nurses” rather than “managers” or “doctors” or “lawyers,” and (b) a range of other factors mostly related to child-rearing, from career interruptions to the effects of motherhood to the cost-shifting of maternity benefits onto women’s wages. Though not mentioned, it seems likely that child-rearing is the underlying impetus for both (a) and (b). It is not surprising, after all, that women’s educational decisions do not have the same “market orientation”^[14] as those of men given that not so long ago they faced severe obstacles to market participation, and still devote a far greater share of their time to activities which are not directly market-mediated (though this is admittedly self-reinforcing, in the sense that making less market-oriented educational decisions increases the likelihood one will receive a lower wage and thus—in the context of a two-parent family—end up taking a hit to their career).

The problem, however, arises in the way the findings of the report are framed. The US Department of Labor, as we’ve seen, treats the extended implications of child-rearing as a matter of “individual choice”—and on this basis, concludes that “there may be nothing to correct” in the market. On one hand, this is true—women can theoretically choose to be lawyers, much as they can theoretically choose not to have children. On the other, though, this phrasing represents a fundamental erasure of the imperatives associated with social reproduction. Much as the economy relies on immigrant labor, it also relies on the production of new laborers—that is, the birthing and raising of children and given the role immigration has played in compensating for a diminished birth rate, it would be fair to say there exists an inverse relationship between these needs.

This is clearly a form of labor, one overwhelmingly performed by women for reasons both biological and social. But its status as an unwaged form of labor means that women are disproportionately compelled to rely,^[15] to a greater or lesser degree, on the wages of their partners for provision. If they do not have partners, they will be forced to—alternatively—juggle precariously between the demands of work and childcare. Since these are not in many respects desirable positions to be in, it is understandable that—in the wake of the women’s liberation movement—many have sought to reduce their investment in the domestic sphere, resulting in a declined birth rate. One means of dealing with this has been increased immigration; that is, passing the burden of social reproduction onto women in the Global South. Another is the exertion of enormous pressures on women to conform to these roles. From a young age, women are exposed, both in the media and intersocially, to a constant stream of messaging that portrays patriarchal subordination as the highest calling of their lives. When they reach the age at which they’re eligible to consider marrying, they’ll soon discover—if they have not already—that it bestows an array of financial benefits, from reduced insurance costs to tax advantages to easier loan qualification. If they eschew it, or decide not to have children, they can expect to be exposed to ritual shaming—one is reminded here of J.D. Vance’s recent description of prominent Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies.”

None of this is inevitable. Women were not excluded from the wage in pre-capitalist societies because in these societies were not premised on wage labor (though sexism may have been reinforced in other ways). There have been, moreover, efforts to challenge this dynamic: the Italian “Wages for Housework” movement in the 1970s, for instance. More modestly, policies such as universal childcare and the mandating of paid parental leave can greatly reduce the difficulties associated with child-rearing.

It is hardly shocking that the CONSAD report does not address these issues in sufficient depth. Its authors were asked by the government to produce a study on the labor market, not to interrogate the fundamental structure of capitalism. It therefore resorts to a simplification: that women’s participation in social reproduction is a matter of “individual choice.” An innocent gesture, perhaps. Let us consider the consequences of it. If women are economically dominated by men due to their lower wages, and if these lower wages arise from “individual choices,” then it follows that they choose to be dominated. Here, one is already dangerously close to the view expressed by alt-right ideologues like Heartiste: that women who complain about the wage gap are “femcunts” prattling on about nothing, etc.

The views of the far right, we see yet again, are not divorceable from our economic structure. All they require is that one acknowledge, and identify with, the latent chauvinism perpetuated by it. If this has the air of subversion, it is in no small part because much of our politics is devoted to concealing this. Take Obama’s comments on the gender pay gap in 2014, made before the Paycheck Fairness Act was sent to Congress:

As Lilly mentioned, she did not set out to be a trailblazer. She was just somebody who was waking up every day, going to work, doing her job the best that she could. And then one day, she finds out, after years, that she earned less than her male colleagues for doing the same job. I want to make that point again. (Laughter.) Doing the same job. Sometimes when you -- when we discuss this issue of fair pay, equal pay for equal work, and the pay gap between men and women, you’ll hear all sorts of excuses about, well, they’re child-bearing, and they’re choosing to do this, and they’re this and they’re that and the other. She was doing the same job -- probably doing better. (Laughter and applause.) Same job. Working just as hard, probably putting in more hours. But she was getting systematically paid less.^[16]

Obama presents his discourse as a defense of women. There are people, he tells us, who deny that women receive less pay for the same work. These people are wrong: look at Lily Ledbetter, who worked as an overnight supervisor for Goodyear from 1979-1998—and only discovered as she was nearing retirement that she was paid substantially less than men at her workplace who held the same position. But what first appears as a defense of women will turn out, upon inspection, to be something more insidious: an obfuscation of the real causes of the gender pay gap. There is no evidence, to put it bluntly, that the sort of ‘pure’ prejudice Obama alludes to here is a significant determinant of the difference in earnings between genders.

Women in the United States make 79-83% of what men do; when that figure is adjusted to include factors like job title, education, and hours worked, it rises to 95-99%.^[17] That “unexplained” gap may owe to unadulterated discrimination; it may also owe to other factors studies do not account for—fatigue or lessened focus stemming from the assumption of a greater share of domestic responsibilities, to cite one possibility at random. Nor is the case of Ledbetter especially illuminating: she was underpaid by Goodyear in the 80s and 90s. During that period, the “unexplained gap” played a significant, if declining, role in gendered wage disparities. Since the turn of the millennium, it has not.^[18]

The obvious conclusion to draw from all of this is that, if one wishes to deepen wage equality, they must move the conversation beyond the prejudice of bosses and managers, posing hard questions about the prejudice inherent in capitalism itself. Obama does not do this; rather, he invokes an explanation—that of direct discrimination—with no meaningful statistical basis. Indeed: it would be an “excuse,” he tells us, to focus on the fact women are “child-bearing.” But the excuse here, construed structurally, is the real cause. Moreover, it would only be an excuse if one implicitly shares the implicit premise of both the CONSAD report and Heartiste: that “child-bearing” is simply something they “choos[e] to do”—and thus something they ‘deserve’ to suffer for economically.

Liberal Ideology, Conservative Ideology

This back-and-forth, unproductive as it is, is instructive with respect to the distinction between liberal and far right ideology. Capitalism requires for its functioning the derivation of value from sources that are not ‘freely’ circulated on the market. Historically, land appropriations and slavery were essential to its foundation; while slavery has largely been extinguished, appropriations still continue, as cases from Palestine to the Amazon attest. National borders both serve to transfer value from the periphery to the core by forcing poorer countries to ‘mark down’ the value of the goods they produce vis-à-vis the world market as well as to generate a non-citizen class of domestic workers whose labor power is devalued (though in some cases devaluation can attach itself to full citizens, as with e.g. black subproletariat labor in the US). The unwaged status of domestic labor provides an ‘exterior’ to the market without which the market could not exist. And the treatment of nature as an ‘externality’ means that—in spite of the obvious costs of environmental destruction—capitalists are not forced to account for it (though there have been some meek attempts to curtail this, through e.g. the imposition of carbon taxes).

To each of these corresponds certain specific abstractions. ‘Race’ is not an ahistorical category that has existed in all times and all places. Rather, it was developed—willfully and consciously—with the goal of justifying European colonialism and slavery within early modernity. ‘Gender’ as we know it is inextricable from the imperatives of social reproduction—and is reified through the social insistence on a strict dimorphism that does not fully correspond with biological reality (a fact which explains the tremendous hostility towards trans people, as well as those who otherwise do not conform to this dyadic structure). The portrayal of ‘nature’ as a passive externality is—as Jason Moore has shown—no older than the fifteenth century, having derived its impetus from the need for capitalism to widely appropriate resources outside of the commodity system, a process that culminated in “the conversion of the atmosphere to a dumping ground for greenhouse gases.”^[19]

The role of liberal ideology has changed overtime. In the nineteenth century, it served as the rallying cry for an ascendant bourgeoisie, who sought—by enlisting the state in the expansion of the role of the market—to extirpate vestigial social classes and peoples, and augment their power. In the twentieth century, it took a defensive posture, being driven by both the threat of communism and the power of labor movements to acknowledge the need for the state to play a role in market regulation and redistribution. More recently, it has—as a response to the decline of these—embraced the dictates of free market neoliberalism. But it has done so in a specific way. As much as Milton Friedman, it has accepted the idea that the market is not just a force for good, but “the major factor”^[20] in the dismantling of racism and sexism. With the market construed as emancipatory, these problems are thereby conceived as extraneous to capitalism. This is apparent in Obama’s speech: the gender pay gap, he assures us, is not a result of social reproduction (“child-rearing”). No, its cause lies elsewhere: in the decision of companies to pay women less than “equal pay for equal work.”

One of the odd aspects of this is it has enabled a conspicuous recuperation of anti-racist and anti-sexist causes that originally did not have a pro-capitalist orientation. Angela Davis appears at Democratic rallies; ICE celebrates Black History Month; Hilary Clinton—channeling Kimberlé Crenshaw—tweets about the “complex, intersectional set of challenges” facing the United States.^[21]

The issue with this ideological edifice, however, is that it is founded upon false premises. The chauvinistically coded forms of exploitation that capitalism employs cannot be simply ‘ejected’ from its structure. Without unequal exchange in the world market, without a low cost immigrant labor force, without an underpaid and racialized subproletariat, without unwaged socially reproductive labor, without environmental expropriation, capitalism would cease to be profitable—and thus cease to exist. A failure to recognize this, and a consequent pathologization of the vector of ‘pure’ prejudice, is a feature of most contemporary liberal social movements. #MeToo, for instance, has rightly taken aim at the mistreatment and abuse of women. But by focusing disproportionately on professional settings, it has too often neglected to address the institution most steeped in violence, and the one from which misogyny emanates—that of the capitalist family. Black Lives Matter, as Adolph Reed has pointed out,^[22] is correct in calling attention to the fact that the victims of police violence are disproportionately black. Where it has erred however is in not understanding that this is not a result of anti-blackness per se, but of the racialization of class—an approach that conveniently shields black elites from scrutiny, as well as obstructs cross-racial organizing. Movements of this sort have, moreover, frequently resorted—in lieu of a more systematic activism—to what has been derisively termed ‘cancel culture’: essentially, lobbying private corporations to cease providing support for individuals whose actions or statements have been deemed harmful. This does not mean they are incapable of incubating more radical forms of protest: even embattled celebrity athlete-activist and BLM figurehead Colin Kaepernick, for instance, has recently reached the conclusion that “black liberation simply isn't possible under capitalism.”^[23]

Right-wing ideology is harder to pin down than its liberal counterpart. This owes much to the status of liberalism as the capitalist ideology par excellence—a status that has put conservatism on the back foot, turning it into a floating signifier that has attached itself to various establishment causes, united only by their defense of vested privilege. It is well-known that the designation “right-wing” derives from the position of the aristocratic supporters of Louis XVI during the drafting of the French constitution—while those who backed the revolution sat to the left of his chair, those who opposed sat to its right. This serves as an effective précis of right-wing ideology in the nineteenth century, which served to both shelter pre-capitalist social classes from liquidation as well as to invest them with a role in the process of modernization. In Germany, a recuperation of modernity was mounted at the behest of the Prussian Junkers, who stripped it of its egalitarian impulse; similar patterns can be seen in Britain, where ‘Toryism’ became synonymous with the defense of monarchy and tradition, and Japan, where the Meijis pursued a campaign of top-down modernization with the goal of emulating the European powers.

In the twentieth, however, conservatism experienced an internal schism. On one hand there was fascism—a movement that sought to instigate a conservative revolution, radicalizing the reactionary commitments of its nineteenth-century iteration in a manner analogous to the way that communism had taken to its apotheosis the progressive aspect of liberalism. On the other hand was liberal conservatism—a tendency that, far more modestly, shifted to defending a classical liberal status quo that nominal liberals were quickly abandoning so as to stymy the spread of communism. While never fully expunged, the effective defeat of fascism in World War II made liberal conservatism the dominant alternative to ‘new liberalism’ of this type—a subordinate position it was only able to break out of through the championing of neoliberalism, represented by the emblematic figures of Reagan and Thatcher.

Liberal conservatism of the neoliberal type is, as is presumably known to everyone, is now in a decisively weakened state. To maintain electoral viability, it has been compelled to join forces with an ascendant—and more openly chauvinistic—“alt” or “far” right; in nations where this has not occurred, such as France, it currently teeters on the brink of extinction. How has this happened? Should it not have been the case that the engulfing of the world by free market capitalism after the fall of the USSR would lead to its corollary, the engulfing of it by liberal ideology?

Reactionary Synchrony

The incredulity that has greeted the rise of the far right largely stems from a misconstrual of its fundamental character. Often, we are told that it represents a defense of the “past.” The Lexington Herald Leader, for instance, has claimed that Trump “wants to take us back to the 1950s”;^[24] stretching back slightly further, ABC News has referred to him as “a 19th-century president facing 21st century problems.”^[25]

This line of thinking is neither restricted to the popular press, nor terribly new: Ernst Bloch for instance—in what amounts to a far more eloquent formulation—argued in the 1930s that the strength of fascism derived from its “non- simultaneity”; that is, its appeal to a peasantry and petit bourgeoisie that were out of sync with the rationalizing capitalist present. Yet the difficulty of applying this analysis to the far-right of the industrialized world today is that these classes have either been liquidated—as with the peasantry—or, in cases where they continue to exist, repurposed to function within a more unified set of capitalist relations in which they no longer can be accurately characterized as atavistic (even as Bloch saw this atavism as the site of a potentially fruitful contradiction for capitalism). Indeed, as Fredric Jameson states:

...the postmodern must be characterized as a situation in which the survival, the residue, the holdover, the archaic, has finally been swept away without a trace. In the postmodern, then, the past itself has disappeared (along with the well-known "sense of the past" or historicity and collective memory). Where its buildings still remain, renovation and restoration allow them to be transferred to the present in their entirety as those other, very different and postmodern things called simulacra. Everything is now organized and planned; nature has been triumphantly blotted out, along with peasants, petit-bourgeois commerce, handicraft, feudal aristocracies and imperial bureaucracies. Ours is a more homogeneously modernized condition; we no longer are encumbered with the embarrassment of non-simultaneities and non-synchronicities. Everything has reached the same hour on the great clock of development or rationalization (at least from the perspective of the "West"). This is the sense in which we can affirm, either that modernism is characterized by a situation of incomplete modernization, or that postmodernism is more modern than modernism itself.^[26]

If one accepts Jameson’s view, then it would follow that any attempt to diagnose the far-right—at least within the “West”—cannot rely, in the same way that Bloch did, on the notion of non-simultaneity. At the level of ideology, this is clear enough. The far-right of today does not typically trot out hoary racial sciences or shopworn imperialist platitudes; more often than not, chauvinistic sentiments are laundered through the prisms of identitarianism and standpoint theory (a shift perhaps most associable with the works of Alain de Benoist). Elon Musk, for instance, has asserted repeatedly that US institutions are “racist” against “whites”:^[27] a claim that brushes to the side any kind of systemic analysis in order to admonish (inadequate) corrective measures as racist in of themselves. Reflecting the larger failure to map the world-system that Jameson sees as the prius of postmodernism, the objective realities of discrimination are here simply denied: “truth isn’t truth,” as Rudy Giuliani so eloquently put it.

There is, moreover, a stark gap that separates the fascist romantic imaginary—Heidegger’s valorization of the humble German woodsman, say—and that of the current alt-right. Andrew Tate, appearing in a luxury robe through a cloud of cigar smoke to boast insipidly about the emissions count of his fleet of sports cars, or the vacuousness of Western women, has nothing to do with the past. His aesthetic is a blend of contemporary action films, MMA, and the hedonistic consumption celebrated within so much hip-hop. His message is no less modern. If he says that Western men should marry women from poorer countries, what is this but a projection of the logic of globalization onto the romantic domain? If he oscillates between denying climate change and trumpeting his right as an ‘alpha male’ to contribute to it, what is this by an affirmation of the stance of the Republicans and their masters in the fossil fuel lobbies?

All of this leaves us with an outstanding question. For if the far-right of today cannot be defined in terms of its defense of atavistic social remainders, what then does it represent? One of the problems with Jameson’s focus on totality or homogeneity is that—while it is true that capitalism has dispensed with many of the “enclaves of precapitalist organization it had hitherto tolerated and exploited in a tributary way”^[28]—it risks downplaying the significance of those enclaves which cannot be eliminated, and thus must be continually updated, due to the way capitalism depends on their structural exclusion. We have already mentioned the family and the natural world as two such examples; what is important to stress in any case that capitalist totality functions at a double remove, depending upon—in addition wage-labor exploitation of the ‘normal’ type—both a) the use of political and social mechanisms to devalue labor power (immigrants, racialized subproletariat, unequal value transfer in the world market), and b) the exclusion of sources of social reproduction from direct market mediation. Resurrecting a distinction that has been too often eschewed, we can refer to this as—in contradistinction to the capitalist mode of production; that is, the exploitation of labor within a frictionless, self-contained market—the capitalist social formation: the messy and corrugated way that it manifests itself in concrete reality.^[29]

It is through this distinction that we can understand the structure and genesis of the modern far-right. The essential hypocrisy of liberal ideology stems from the way that, while it avows itself to be anti-racist and anti-sexist, it cannot identify their systematic function, lest it be forced to reject a capitalism that depends on them. This is not merely a perspective; rather, it corresponds with the logic of the purified, capitalist mode of production. Though no stranger to strategic irony, the far-right plays no such games. It knows that sordid forms of oppression are the essential stuff of our system. Proceeding from the side of the social formation, it therefore puts forth a thought-experiment: what would it mean to actually end these prejudices?

If the US had open borders, many right-wing commentators have pointed out, the result would be the influx of immigrants into the US until the value of labor was deflated to the extent that there was no longer a point in coming. This is true, and accepting it means—if one wishes to remain within a left-wing standpoint—accepting the need to aim at nothing less than the transformation of our entire world-system. But the liberal left will not do this. It therefore remains mired in a performative contradiction, in which vehement denunciations of chauvinism can only manifest themselves in either hesitant and piecemeal reforms or, even more frequently, the simple act of bearing witness to suffering.

The central function of far-right ideology, then, is to actively defend the chauvinism immanent to the social formation. However, this in of itself does not explain why it has so gained in support over the past twenty years. Fascism of the vintage sort needed communism as its foil: what, then, has been the occasion for its (post)modern revival? Far too often, the rise of communism has been fixated upon as the cause of fascist seizures of state power without adequately paying attention to how—beyond the threat of its abolition—it impacted capital accumulation. One of the first decisions made by the Bolshevik government was to repudiate the extensive loans that had been provided to it by the Western allies; with characteristic punctuality, the US, UK, and France sent troops to northern Russia in 1918-20 with the goal of snuffing it out, to no avail.

Even more importantly, as Thomas Piketty has observed, the delinking of the USSR from the world market in order to pursue autarchic policies of auto-development led to a unique historical situation in which “Eastern Europe was not owned by Western investors”^[30] who could cheaply extract labor and resources from it, a process that has now resumed in Western-aligned nations such as Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.^[31] This explains why Hitler initially hoped the West would back his holy war against the USSR: if the Nazis took on the dirty work of dispensing with the Bolsheviks, he reasoned, the formation of a German empire on the ruins of these territories would be tolerated.

There are many other factors that could be dwelt upon: the way the ongoing presence of communism compelled substantial redistributive measures to mitigate against internal revolution, for instance. But what is essential for our purposes is to understand that state communism was—first in Europe, then globally—a tremendous crisis of accumulation, one that had to be held in careful check lest it spiral out of control. That particular crisis no longer exists: today, Russia and China nurse capitalist designs of their own, merely applying measures to ensure that capital remains under domestic control, with the key difference lying in the fact capital in China is—to a far greater degree—controlled directly by the state, rather than indirectly by state-approved oligarchs. Yet if the capitalism of the present is—as Jameson puts it—‘purer’ than that of the pre-neoliberal era, it is perhaps appropriate that the difficulties it faces are purer, in the sense of owing less to peripheral upheaval than to factors which are—so far as any can be said to be—internal.

The opening up of China and the disintegration of the Soviet bloc provided a great boon to global capitalism by stripping away the cordons that had long stopped it from exploiting cheap labor in these regions. But by outsourcing jobs en masse, and replacing them with—at best—precarized, service-sector alternatives, it achieved a heightened profitability at the cost of a crisis of effective demand, with workers in the imperial core lacking the purchasing power necessary to sustain accumulation. For a time, the full consequences of this were avoided, through the reduction in the cost of living enabled by cheaply manufactured goods as well as through the instrumentalization of unsustainable forms of consumer credit.

Both of these strategies were doomed in the long run. In China, real wages increased 300 percent between 1990 and 2005, sending up the price of commodities.^[32] And the 2008 financial crisis dramatically illustrated the limitations of using over leveraged debt to seal the breach of underconsumption—say, handing out home mortgages based on fractional payments. Meanwhile, amidst all of this, environmental catastrophe has been looming overhead—and would, if fully acknowledged, force us to thoroughly rethink, if not outright jettison, our entire global system.

There are, of course, potential solutions to all of these problems. Wealth can be redistributed in a manner that better reflects productivity gains, for instance. Equally, we could begin in earnest the agonizing transition to a carbon neutral global economy, though it seems inevitable now that ample destruction will occur regardless of the pathway we pursue from here on. But as each of these potentially takes us beyond the remit of capitalism as we know it, and requires a high level of counter-hegemonic organizing to achieve besides, what we have instead seen—over the past two decades—is a different ‘solution.’ Namely, the formation of a far-right that—outstripping the inaction of its unwitting liberal epigone—openly employs chauvinism as a means of protecting and furthering the expropriative impulse of the social formation.

Strict borders will be protected, because it is the division between citizen and non-citizen that makes possible the destitution of the latter. Reproductive rights will be targeted, because it is reproductive rights that have aided women in absenting themselves from the task of social reproduction. Racial antagonisms will be amplified, so as to maintain hyper-exploitable, subproletarian enclaves. Nations such as China that attempt to scale the international division of labor will be, aggressively if necessary, repulsed—their proper role is brute manufacturing, not the creation of advanced products. And well-established theses regarding climate change will be dismissed as baseless fear-mongering, advanced with the secret aim of foisting social engineering on an unsuspecting public—how else can the fossil fuel industry be protected?

The Sterile Debate Over Identity Politics

Faced with the Trumps and Le Pens of the world, who trumpet the inviolability of the capitalist social formation, how should socialists respond? The overwhelming tendency over the past decade has been to favor the assembling of strategic alliances with the liberal left—something seen most strongly in the English-speaking world, where a self-conscious attempt was made to seize control of the leadership of center-left, neoliberal parties (‘entryism’). This now appears to have failed; in any event, whatever advantages it may or may not have bestowed, the loss of autonomy it led to contributed to a failure to grasp the interplay between mode of production and social formation as the threadline of our current political impasse. Rather than a scientific analysis, what we typically were exposed to was an alternation between the repetition of liberal platitudes and the backlash against them, on the grounds that they represented a sullying of the hallowed canons of Marxism.

The most conspicuous symptom of this has been an often sterile debate over ‘identity politics’: that is, the politics of anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc., conceived of an individualistic vein. Typically it follows a familiar script. If one believes that the capitalism of the present is fundamentally anti-chauvinistic, then it follows that—by allying with identitarian causes—socialists are not opposing capitalism, but inadvertently aiding its expansion. If, on the other hand, one believes that capitalism is irredeemably committed to chauvinism, then it follows that strategic alliances of this type can help obstruct its continuance. This debate has import for questions of political strategy: for the view one takes will determine, ultimately, whether they see liberals or the far-right as the ‘principal’ expression of capitalism as a whole.

One of the most visible critics of the yoking together of ‘identity politics’ with socialism has been the Lacanian Marxist—or perhaps Marxist Lacanian—Slavoj Žižek. Quoting Marx’s well-known dictum from the Manifesto that capitalism “puts an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations,” he has written that:

This observation is studiously ignored by leftist cultural theorists who still focus their critique on patriarchal ideology and practice. Yet surely the critique of patriarchy has reached its apotheosis at precisely the historical moment when patriarchy has lost its hegemonic role – that is, when market individualism has swept it away. After all, what becomes of patriarchal family values when a child can sue her parents for neglect and abuse (implying that parenthood is just another temporary and dissolvable contract between utility-maximizing individuals)? Of course, such “leftists” are sheep in wolves’ clothing, telling themselves that they are radical revolutionaries as they defend the reigning establishment. Today, the melting away of pre-modern social relations and forms has already gone much further than Marx could have imagined. All facets of human identity are now becoming a matter of choice; nature is becoming more and more an object of technological manipulation.^[33]

It would be quite interesting to pose the question of whether Marx’s remarks on the sweeping away of pre-capitalist social relations in the Manifesto can be taken at face value—did he mean it literally? Or was he referring to a logic of capitalism, one that could only manifest approximately and messily? Certainly, we do know that the thesis of the simple liquidation of “motley feudal ties” is intimately bound up with another: that of the simplification of class antagonism; of the replacement of the “complicated arrangement[s]” of pre-capitalist societies by “two great hostile camps”—those of bourgeoisie and proletariat.^[34]

Yet in his later, political writings, when he brought himself to soberly survey actual capitalist societies, he was hardly so committed to this vision. Take the “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” in which he attributes the success of Louis Napoleon III to, among other things, his commanding of the allegiance of several other classes or quasi-classes: the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, etc.

There is, then, a level of epistemic uncertainty regarding the claim here made by Marx that Žižek takes as axiomatic. The limitations of the idea of a simple liquidation of patriarchal relations become, furthermore, apparent when we analyze the present. Is it really the case that the fact that—in certain highly isolated instances—children can sue their parents attests to their widespread withering? No one can deny that, particularly in advanced capitalist societies, the traditional strictures of the family have been slackened: divorces are far easier to acquire, and the rights of women and children have become—to a point—legally safeguarded. Yet, for all this, the family still exists. As it would have to: there is no way that capitalism can do away with unwaged, socially reproductive labor. It is therefore more apt, when speaking of the transformations affected by capitalism, to refer not just to the abolition of patriarchal relations but also their repurposing, so to both preserve and generate enclaves from which value can be indirectly derived. The implications of this are clear: that identity has not simply become—in spite of its partial fluidification— “a matter of choice,” and that the critique of “patriarchal ideology” is not yet exhausted.

If Žižek’s mistake lies in a downplaying of the importance of the social formation to the reproduction of capitalism, the opposite error is committed by the Italian Marxist feminist Silvia Federici. In the introduction to her famed work on the link between the witch hunts and primitive accumulation, Caliban and the Witch, she writes that:

Indeed, the political lesson that we can learn from Caliban and the Witch is that capitalism, as a social-economic system, is necessarily committed to racism and sexism. For capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations –the promise of freedom vs. the reality of widespread coercion, and the promise of prosperity vs. the reality of widespread penury –by denigrating the "nature" of those it exploits: women, colonial subjects, the descendants of African slaves, the immigrants displaced by globalization […] It is impossible therefore to associate capitalism with any form of liberation or attribute the longevity of the system to its capacity to satisfy human needs.^[35]

For Federici, Marx failed to fully grasp the necessarily patriarchal character of capitalism for two reasons. First, he treated it from the side of “the viewpoint of the waged male proletariat,” thereby failing to fully grasp the impact of “subjugating women's labor and women's reproductive function to the reproduction of the work-force”^[36] (a claim that would be questionable in so far as the issue here is not maleness per se, since there were plenty of female wage laborers in Marx’s time, but the gendered implications of the treatment of social reproduction not as a form of labor but as a determinant of the value of commodities it exhausts—food, clothing, etc.) Second, he saw primitive accumulation—that is, the expropriations necessary for the creation of capitalism—as a “foundational process,” the violence of which represented “a necessary step in the process of human liberation.”^[37]

Set alongside each other, Žižek and Federici almost seem like they’re talking about completely different kinds of capitalism. And in a way they are: while Žižek is clearly alluding to the most advanced segments of the imperial core, where the logic of the mode of production is more apparent, Federici’s work makes a link between the aggressive appropriations of early modernity and the ongoing ones she witnessed in Nigeria while teaching there in the 1980s. Yet therein lies the problem: neither of these standpoints can be said to represent the entirety of the capitalist system. Capitalism is capable of both oppression and liberation, racism and anti-racism, sexism and anti-sexism. If it tendentially affects an equalization of diverse agents qua labor power, it undermines this by both fostering divisions between workers so as to devalue it as well as maintaining an ‘exterior’ to the market through which appropriations persist. What would be mistaken is to see one of these axes as its true identity, and the other as a false one. Having made this error, Federici proceeds to put forth a functionalist analysis according to which, by her own admission, capitalism cannot bring about “any form of liberation.” This leads her down the path of a remarkably one-dimensional interpretation of capitalist history—condemning Cartesian dualism, for instance, as necessarily anti-emancipatory and anti-feminist, while ignoring its influence on feminists such as Mary Astell as well as the role it played in inspiring the French Revolution.

That capitalism contains within it both patriarchal and anti-patriarchal elements should caution against putting forth any sort of bald teleology regarding its progressive development. It is often taken for granted, for example, that women’s rights will, by some stroke of eschatology, necessarily incline. Anyone who’s been carefully following global politics over the past few decades would know better—one only need look at the stark regression seen in nations such as Afghanistan or Iran since the 1970s. But what recent developments have underscored forcefully for those in the West is that there is no guarantee: that causes which have fallen fallow are susceptible to losing ground, and that the imperatives of the social formation do not respect any linear arc.

That may sound like a foreboding vision. But socialists only have to fear the decline of the liberal order if they are unable to define, and advocate for, an alternative to it. Over the past decade we’ve made abundantly clear our opposition to prejudices once hidden, now proudly avowed. What we have not done is illustrated, with sufficient thoroughness, the Janus-faced character of capitalism: how mode of production and social formation are always intertwined, and how their competing demands have manifested in the bisection of our current, bourgeois politics. Only by doing this can we lay the foundations for an independent standpoint—one capable of staving off co-optation from both liberal left and far right.

1. Matt Keohan, “That Tatted Up Juice Monkey Who Threw A Tantrum At The Trump Rally Has Spoken Out,” BroBible, June 22, 2016, https://brobible.com/life/article/dude-threw-tantrum-trump-rally-speaks.

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2. Daniel Melo, Borderlines: The Edges of US Capitalism, Immigration, and Democracy (Zero Books, 2021), 30.

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3. Ibid, 79.

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4. Jeffrey S. Passel and and D’Vera Cohn, “2. Occupations of unauthorized immigrant workers,” Pew Research Center, November 3, 2016, https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2016/11/03/occupations-of-unauthorized-immigrant-workers.

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5. Melo, Borderlines, 26.

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6. Lauren Godles, “Arizona as a Test Case for Immigration Effects on Employment,” OnLabor, April 29, 2016, https://onlabor.org/arizona-as-a-test-case-for-immigration-effects-on-employment.

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7. Alex Nowrasteh, “President Trump Reduced Legal Immigration. He Did Not Reduce Illegal Immigration,” Cato Institute, January 20, 2021, https://www.cato.org/blog/president-trump-reduced-legal-immigration-he-did-not-reduce-illegal-immigration.

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8. Muzaffar Chishti and Jessica Bolter, “The ‘Trump Effect’ on Legal Immigration Levels: More Perception than Reality?,” Migration Policy Institute, November 20, 2020, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/trump-effect-immigration-reality.

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9. Tim Stelloh, “Members of group giving food, water to migrants convicted of misdemeanors,” NBC News, January 21, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/members-group-giving-food-water-migrants-convicted-misdemeanors-n960816.

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10. Lomi Kriel, ICE Deported a Woman Who Accused Guards of Sexual Assault While the Feds Were Still Investigating the Incident,” ProPublica, September 15, 2020, https://www.propublica.org/article/ice-has-deported-a-woman-who-said-guards-sexually-assaulted-her-while-the-investigation-is-ongoing.

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11. James C. Weidmann, “The Pay Gap Is A Lie,” Chateau Heartiste, April 17, 2012, https://heartiste.org/2012/04/17/the-pay-gap-is-a-lie.

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12. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Equal Pay for Equal Work” (speech, East Room of the White House, April 8, 2014), Obama White House, National Archives, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/04/08/remarks-president-equal-pay-equal-work.

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13. Charles E. James, Sr., “Foreword,” in An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women, by CONSAD Research Corp, 2, January 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20120411153834/http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf.

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14. CONSAD Research Corp, An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women, 7, January 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20120411153834/http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf.

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15. Notwithstanding those professions which assist in social reproduction but are waged, as with e.g. childcare workers.

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16. Obama, “Equal Pay for Equal Work.”

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17. “Gender pay gap,” Wikipedia, last modified October 17, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap.

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18. Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn, “The Gender Pay Gap: Have Women Gone as Far as They Can” in The Inequality Reader 2nd ed., eds. David B. Grusky and Szonja Szelényi (Routledge, 2018), 414-16.

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19. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), 20.

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20. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 109.

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21. Ashok Kumar, Dalia Gebrial, Adam Elliott-Cooper, and Shruti Iyer, “Introduction: Marxist Interventions into Contemporary Debates,” Historical Materialism 26, no. 2, https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/marxist-interventions-into-contemporary-debates.

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22. See Adolph Reed, “We Must Avoid Race Reductionism: An Interview with Adolph Reed,” by Jennifer C. Pan, Jacobin, May 4, 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/05/adolph-reed-race-reductionism-black-freedom-movement-class-politics.

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23. Jennifer Bowers Bahney, “Colin Kaepernick Says He Joined With Marxists To Edit New Book Because ‘Black Liberation Simply Isn’t Possible Under Capitalism,’” Mediaite, June 19, 2023, https://www.mediaite.com/uncategorized/colin-kaepernick-says-he-joined-with-marxists-to-edit-new-book-because-black-liberation-simply-isnt-possible-under-capitalism.

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24. Honi Goldman, “Trump wants to take us back to the 1950s, where women and minorities had no rights,” Lexington Herald Leader, July 11, 2024, https://www.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article289959289.html.

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25. Julia Azari, “Trump Is A 19th-Century President Facing 21st-Century Problems,” FiveThirtyEight, ABC News, August 28, 2017, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-a-19th-century-president-facing-21st-century-problems.

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26. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Verso, 1991), 309-310.

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27. Lora Kolodny, “Elon Musk calls U.S. media and schools ‘racist against whites & Asians,’” CNBC, February 27, 2023, https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/26/elon-musk-calls-us-media-and-schools-racist-against-whites-asians-.html.

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28. Jameson, Postmodernism, 36.

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29. So far as it continue to be used at all, the term ‘social formation’ typically refers—following the “general illumination” passage of the Grundrisse, or the work of Althusser—to the predomination of one mode of production over others which continue to exist, as well as absorb its influence. While interesting, one of the problems with this approach is that it raises a host of subsidiary questions regarding what is and isn’t a mode of production: can we speak, for instance, of a “kinship mode of production” that has existed since the foraging era, and that furnishes the embryo of the modern capitalist family? And can the modern-day capitalist state be seen as a vestige of a lapsed, tributary mode? To avoid these sorts of issues, which would require a separate Marxological essay to address, the term ‘social formation’ is here used to refer to the ways capitalism reproduces itself above and beyond the exploitation of the labor power of workers in a unified market endowed with full and equal rights. For a schematic rundown of the history of the concept, see Tony Burns, “Marx and the Concept of a Social Formation,” Historical Materialism 13, no. 2, 1-30.

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30. Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 640.

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31. Ibid, 639.

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32. Moore, Web of Life, 236.

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33. Slavoj Žižek, “What the ‘Woke’ Left and the Alt-Right Share,” Project Syndicate, August 3, 2022, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/woke-alt-right-fake-civil-war-between-capitalist-interests-by-slavoj-zizek-2022-08.

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34. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore, Marxists Internet Archive, 14-15, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf.

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35. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Autonomedia, 2004), 17.

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36. Ibid, 12.

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37. Ibid.

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