Anti-Austerity on the Far Right

Abstract

After almost a decade of punishing austerity and social-democratic paralysis, the electoral success of the far right appears as a real and credible threat across Europe. This chapter focuses on the resurgence of a specifically anti-neoliberal or national-social far right in Europe today and investigates its complex relationship with a hitherto hegemonic neoliberal far right. This resurgent anti-capitalist far right has obvious affinities with the German conservative revolution of the Weimar Republic and the National Socialism of the Third Reich. But it also has more proximate origins in the French Nouvelle Droite of the late 1960s, which very rapidly distinguished itself through its opposition to neoliberal economics and its mimetic relationship to the new left. This chapter looks at the disquieting parallels between the German debt deflation of the 1930s and the long aftermath of the sovereign debt crisis today. It then turns to the complex relations between the pro-neoliberal and anti-neoliberal factions in the European far right, focusing in particular on the key influence of the French intellectual Alain de Benoist in articulating an anti-capitalist neofascism for the twenty-first century. The chapter argues that the left needs to take the anti-capitalist far right more seriously than it often does. Show more