By Richard Seymour
On the one hand, it is obvious that the recent rise of right-wing nationalism has something to do with the economy, and specifically with the global financial crash of 2008. The electoral record in Europe between 1870 and 2014 suggests that voters generally respond to financial crises by moving to the right, with the far right gaining the most. On average, far-right parties increase their vote share by 30 per cent after such a crisis.
On the other hand, decades of research have failed to find any evidence that voters respond to personal economic suffering by punishing the incumbent. Belonging to a group whose economic interests have been directly harmed seems only rarely to change political preferences.
We are passionate animals. Passion, as Karl Marx wrote, is our ‘essential force’. To understand what’s happening today, we must return to the passions.
Among the passions, the most important for this chapter is resentment. For good reasons, resentment is seen as a disreputable, destructive emotion. But it is also essential to the sense of justice. We feel resentment, not at accidental harms, and not even necessarily at deliberate harms, but at what is felt as unfair. And we often feel resentment on behalf of others so that, as Andrew Sayer writes, it ‘derives from the capacity for fellow-feeling’. Resentment is not purely a personal pathology equivalent, as one wit put it, to swallowing poison and waiting for the other fellow to die. It is a coherent and moral way of thinking and of acting on the world.
But we don’t always know who or what to resent. Many of the sources of our problems are obscure, remote and impersonal, and they can appear almost random… Another problem is that resentment can be quite an addictive emotional swamp. Max Scheler, in his study of resentment, describes how those possessed by it can be enthralled by the sense of powerlessness and victimisation, relishing the ‘growing pleasure afforded by invective and negation’.
In its most dangerous form, resentment becomes a politically enabled passion for persecution. The classic version of this is the witch hunt. In early-modern Europe, 100,000 people, three quarters of whom were women, were tried and 50,000 were executed for a crime now thought to be impossible. Witchcraft accusations were not usually initiated by religious or political authorities, or by witch-finders like Matthew Hopkins, the Puritan terror of East Anglia. They came from “ordinary, afflicted communities, who blamed misfortunes such as a child’s illness, dying cattle, straying husbands and death, on the diabolical malice of an unpopular neighbour: maleficium.
The witch hunt was, as Silvia Federici puts it, ‘the first unifying terrain in the politics of the new European nation-states’. But the stereotyped story of occult pacts, orgies and demons was less important than the injury breeding the accusation. The historian Robin Briggs points out that in most of the confessions extracted from these ‘witches’, the devil was ‘a very secondary figure, a shadowy presence behind angry neighbours.
Thought about in this way, the contagion of disaster nationalism flourishes, not merely because of disinformation and false beliefs, but because the economy of resentment circulating in modern societies makes these beliefs attractive. The modern witch, be it a ‘cultural Marxist’, ‘communist’, ‘Antifa’, ‘anti-national’, ‘Arab lover’ or some other ‘traitor’ who can be killed in the streets of Manila, Kenosha, New Delhi or São Paulo, offers a pseudo-explanation for a misfortune specific to the nation-state: how a sovereign people lost its sovereignty. And to restore the pacific union between people and government, nation and state, disaster nationalism provokes a familiar fusion of neighbourly malice, hostile testimony, inquisition, incitement and lethal political violence.
After decades of official omertà on terms like ‘class’, after years in which we were all ‘middle class’ and the burdens of class and work were glossed over in the giddy hubris of globalisation, class returned as a pseudo-ethnic identity. And its defining characteristic was not militancy, but ethnic loss.
Disaster nationalism profits immensely from a symbiosis with its erstwhile opponents in politics and media who, as Aaron Winter and Aurelien Mondon have shown, have systematically overstated the popularity of the far right’s agenda. This has led to well-meaning liberals and social democrats ratifying parts of the far-right platform or trying to patronise their opponents in a self-satirising attempt to ‘speak worker’.
The working class that disaster nationalists claim to speak for is not, of course, the labour movement. It is not even a class, properly speaking, but a passively resentful conglomeration of individuals who believe they obey the law, respect authority and resent queue-jumpers and outsiders. Evidence for this is that, wherever far-right politicians are confronted with collective working-class action, they fumble. ”
At best, the exaggerated attention to workers as an element of the far-right base is informed by a misguided sense that working-class support for right-wing politics is counterintuitive and needs special explanation. At worst, it is either scapegoating or wishful thinking.
The new nationalism, despite its serenading of workers, has little to say about toil that doesn’t romanticise ‘the dignity of hard work’ as both Mike Pence and Donald Trump Jr. put it. Hard work is the main source of personal dignity and moral status for workers in conservative ideology.
Civilization may make onerous demands on us, as Freud believed, but the greatest thief of leisure and libido is the uneven distribution of the necessity to work. All complex civilizations to date have been class societies in which the majority work for the few. Capitalist civilization’s unique dynamism derives from its ability to extract unprecedented effort from an ever-expanding global labour supply: an enormous caloric transfer in favour of the wealthy.
Work, for most of humanity, means working for others, in conditions one doesn’t choose, in which precarity of rights and survival leaves one exposed to coercion and humiliation. Nor has all this effort ever been extracted from all employees on equal terms. Employers need not depend on de jure segregation as they once did, but they prefer a segregated labour market in which certain groups of workers (women, migrants, ethnic minorities) ‘naturally’ come cheap and flexible.26 The rewards of all this productivity are prodigious, but, of course, the biggest rewards accrue to the owners and managers of capital. Shorn of all euphemism, work is exploitation.
A glut of research suggests that work is the single largest source of stress and anxiety in the world today. Contrary to corporate lore, it is not over-burdened managers who suffer the most from stress. The famous Whitehall studies of workplace depression showed that, as you descend the chain of authority in the workplace, and the job becomes more controlled and the employees more submissive, the cortisol levels rise, hypertension goes up and the risk of heart attack or stroke increases: class injuries. As Jeffrey Pfeffer’s work shows, no amount of research documenting this has convinced bosses to change their management practices.
Today, the crisis of democratic action that Alain Bertho describes in politics is mirrored in industry. Cultures of shame had historically been mitigated by class organising. Winning rights, welfare and minimum wages from Kentucky to Kerala was not just a material benefit: it established recognition and demonstrated that workers were not completely powerless. It was even possible for some to speak of class pride. However, the unions and parties of the working class have been disintegrating with force throughout the neoliberal era. Average union density in OECD countries fell from 30 per cent to 16 per cent between 1985 and 2019. With this fall came a prolonged fall in labour’s share of income, averaging nine per cent from across the wealthiest OECD countries from 1973 to 2013. Even this data is misleading, since it includes the most highly paid among the salariat and managers: the top 10 per cent of earners who receive just under half of all pay according to the International Labor Organisation.
A review of the evidence across fourteen OECD countries by political scientists Sarah Engler and David Weisstanner found that long-term rising inequality intensifies the perceived threat to income and status, not particularly of the most deprived workers (who tend to be more immunised to the nationalist contagion), but of those higher up the class hierarchy. This echoes other findings, which suggest that among workers it is the relative ‘winners’ of the neoliberal workplace who gravitate to ‘reactive nationalism’. Since work is so segmented and stratified, with proliferating ‘horizontal’ inequalities between workers, it no longer forms the basis for a durable class identity. In that situation, those who have just enough “security and prosperity to be satisfied with their lot tend towards a form of ‘affluence chauvinism’, identifying with the wealthy and seeing their nation as an island of wealth that must be protected from migrants and spongers.
Alongside the threat from the poor, there is the demoralising experience of failure, of downward mobility. In 2009 and 2017, surveys of voters in the United Kingdom found that those who had experienced relative downward mobility, rather than the poorest per se, were more likely to agree with anti-immigrant nationalism. ‘Resentful nationalism’ was found to correspond to personal experiences of downward class mobility and failure, among both working-class and middle-class voters. In Brazil, a significant part of Bolsonaro’s vote came from the downwardly mobile lower-middle class who, in their decline into precarious work after 2013, began to resent Bolsa Família payments for poor families and university racial quotas and were drawn into the orbit of Evangelical churches by their provision of social assistance programmes. The same pattern can be found among the Capitol rioters, complicating any neat distinction between ‘economic anxiety’ (downward mobility) and ‘status anxiety’ (racism).32 This suggests that the emotional core of ‘left behind’ ideology is the intolerable personal shame of failure, and the fear of becoming indistinguishable from those at the bottom.
The rhetorical shock tactics of Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi and Duterte, drilling their audiences with shots of adrenaline, exciting them with wild relief at the expression of the inexpressible, making them laugh at their own fear of expressing it, are not merely a paltry revolt against the liberal superego. To call Mexicans. Mexicans ‘rapists’ and ‘murderers’ (Trump), to deride Indian journalists as ‘presstitutes’ and secularists as ‘sickular’ ‘anti-nationals’ (BJP activists), to order Philippines soldiers to shoot female opponents between the legs (Duterte), to claim that wearing masks during a pandemic is ‘for fairies’ (Bolsonaro) is programmatic. It aims to channel the resentment. It aims to barbarise mores. It aims at barbarism.
When disaster nationalists talk up their working-class credentials, however disingenuously, it is not simply a ruse. The new far right is not just the same old business-minded conservatism. Like its twentieth-century forebears, it seeks a different relationship to workers than the parliamentary conservatives it is trying to eclipse.
“Ever since the franchise was extended to the working class, parliamentary conservatives have needed the support of working-class voters to win elections. However, as Michael Mann puts it, they have sought passive consent for a system that they regard as ‘essentially harmonious’. The far right, in contrast, recognised class divisions as a problem for nationalism. Given their support for private property and the state, and their social Darwinist belief in hierarchy, they were not interested in abolishing class. But neither were they absolute defenders of the system, especially where it undermined national unity. They aspired, instead, to ‘transcend’ class within a new nationalism. Transcendence, essential to the utopian programme of engineering the ‘new man’ and ‘new woman’, became ‘the central plank of fascism’s electoral program.”
Unlike in the first half of the twentieth-century, nowhere today's far right does “confront a powerful trade union movement, or even a robust social democracy, let alone a revolutionary threat. Insofar as the working class must be ‘nationalised’, it is because of the globalising tendencies of the capitalist system. Nor does the contemporary far right even propose a coherent alternative to globalisation. In the incipient fascisms of the Global South it rarely even attempts to. Today’s far right has been strongly affected by decades of neoliberal political economy.
“Where disaster nationalism does break with neoliberal political economy, it would seem, is in its repudiation of the institutions of neoliberalism, such as the European Union and NAFTA. Disaster nationalism chafes against the iron cage of ‘globalist’ constraints on the nation-state. Yet this is only partially true, and only in the Global North, where the extent of the rebellion so far has taken the form of trade wars, import duties and proposals for preferences for ‘native’ workers over migrants. Trump, Le Pen, the Brexiteers, Orbán and so on have yet to make a decisive break with globalisation; meanwhile Duterte, Modi and Bolsonaro are no friends of protectionism.
“The new far right does not, and cannot, apart from its neofascist fringes, propose class ‘transcendence’ in any shape. It is not, even in opposition, redistributive. At most it modifies the cutthroat competition it otherwise vigorously embraces with national preferences or alleviates its effects for certain groups of voters with cash transfers. Nor does it idolise the state as classical fascism did.
“Whereas interwar fascism was critically a phenomenon of late-developing capitalist nations, of so-called ‘proletarian nations’ as Mussolini described Italy, disaster nationalism addresses the problem of relative stagnation or decline in the international system. Whereas fascism took root in Germany and Italy partly as a colonial solution to their relative subordination, their being relegated down the ‘imperialist chain’ as Nicos Poulantzas put it, disaster nationalism fully embraces the curative powers of what Ravinder Kaur calls the ‘branded nation’ as a hub for investment. Indeed, as Kaur goes on to say, there is a natural symbiosis between the nation imagined as a bounded space of resources and the nation imagined through the lens of ethnic absolutism: between hypercapitalism and hypernationalism.
“What disaster nationalism offers, instead of transcendence, is muscular national capitalism.”
Richard Seymour, Disaster Capitalism, Verso, October 2024
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