Richard Saull has produced a compelling analytically driven account of the recurring rise of the far-right since the middle of the nineteenth century. His defining theoretical contribution is to demonstrate how the fortunes of the western far-right are shaped and enabled by international political economy and geopolitics. Or, as he puts it, national far-right politics are always conditioned and structured by the ‘international’ even constituting the domestic political context within which the far-right emerges (Saull 2023a, xi). This approach undergirded by the perspective of uneven and combined development (UCD) has profound implications for the interdisciplinary field of far-right studies; most notably it prods scholars to move beyond historicisation and methodological internalism and look instead to ‘the longer-term set of historical structures and processes out of which far-right politics has been continually reproduced as an artefact of liberal-capitalist modernity’ (Saull 2023a, 19). Thanks to Saull, research on contemporary ‘national’ far-rights will now have to factor in the structuring force of the ‘international’, while this orientation will also help prise open new lines of investigation into understanding historical movements of the far-right, including German Nazism and Italian fascism.

Inserting subaltern agency into Saull’s conception of the international

In this contribution, I focus my comments on the second of Saull’s two volumes, particularly his related account of the relationship between neoliberal globalisation and the far-right and how the 2007 financial crisis and policy responses helped turbocharge its rise. Saull (2023b, 82) describes the connections between neoliberalism and the far-right as ‘paradoxical and ambivalent’. On the one hand, neoliberalism is ‘structurally antithetical to the social interests of the far-right’ (Saull 2023b, 84). The architects of neoliberalism produced national economies that were increasingly inter-connected and where the reproduction of dominant fractions of capital became dependent on ‘transnational circuits and structures of exchange resulting in a loosening of their national locations and a political orientation towards the consolidation and expansion of such international and transnational networks’ (Saull 2023b, 83). On the other hand, this same cosmopolitan neoliberal globalisation also opened up political opportunities for the far-right to present itself as the principal anti-system alternative as a result of the deleterious effects it had on the social fabric of nation-states. Most significant among them has been the growing rates of social inequality produced by the exponential acceleration in uneven and combined spatial development characterised by the presence of de-industrialised and depopulated zones alongside internationally networked cosmopolitan hubs that form key nodes of neoliberal political economy (Saull 2023b, 83). When this is overlain by the internationalisation of national labour markets, curbs on social welfare spending and the flatlining of living standards, the corrosive effects of neoliberalism are stark to behold. And it is this growing social inequality within nationally defined centres of capitalist accumulation that has enabled the far-right to re-insert itself into the political field and acquire a growing audience for its racialised explanation of these transformations.

While Saull’s account is rigorous and compelling, I suggest it could be further refined and expanded by considering the extent to which the rising fortunes of the far-right under neoliberal globalisation is indivisible from the defeat that neoliberalism inflicted on the global Left. This would involve stretching Saull’s conception of the international in the Fanonian sense to encompass subaltern agency on a global scale. Currently, the full span of the world revolution of 1968 (Wallerstein and Zukin 1989) is occluded by Saull’s tendency to locate the emergence of neoliberalism narrowly with the breakdown in the organisation and workings of the early 1970s international economy (e.g. the oil crisis, the world recession and the class confrontations that followed in their wake). That is, the eventual establishment of neoliberalism as a policy framework of global consequence is understood as a product of the breakdown of the ‘sustained period of economic growth’ in the West (Saull 2023b, 78):

…the 1970s were characterized by social and political polarization whereby the domestic social and political settlements of the post-war era came apart as the international framework and economic structures that helped consolidate them disintegrated, and this was particularly pronounced in Britain and the United States (Saull 2023b, 80).

From a world historical perspective, the relative peace and prosperity in the West in the two decades that followed WW2 was exceptional; elsewhere, this same period could quite reasonably be described as the age of decolonisation, a cycle of anticolonial rebellion and political revolution that saw the most sustained wave of democratisation in modern history. For example, the number of people under British colonial rule fell from 700 million to five million between the election of the Attlee government in 1945 and the Wilson government in 1964 (Virdee and McGeever 2023). Significantly, by the mid-1960s, this mood of global insurgency would also boomerang into the West mediated principally by racialised outsiders already resident within imperial metropoles (Virdee 2014). From the civil rights and black power movements in the USA to the struggle for racial justice undergirded by the project of political blackness uniting Caribbean and Asian peoples in the UK (Narayan 2019), new socialist-inflected concrete utopias emerged aimed at building new worlds. These visions and movements didn’t just relativise the present but laid bare the major divisions of interest within each society. This was a profound moment of political indeterminacy where progressive horizons opened up on a scale not witnessed since the fall-out from the Russian Revolution of October 1917.

Further, these expanding horizons created by the movements against decolonisation in the East and for racial justice in the West also became sites of learning, encouraging oppressed groups in the West like women, lesbian and gay people and others to think more sharply about new tactics, new possibilities and new freedoms (Roediger 2017). While organised labour in the USA failed to move in step with this global emancipatory tide, the USA and wider western movement against the Vietnam War helped symbolically re-connect the struggles for freedom in the West to the anticolonial struggles beyond it. Meanwhile, western European states like the UK and France witnessed a flourishing of multi-ethnic working class collective action catalysed by the expansive imaginaries of racialised outsiders within the imperial metropolis (Virdee 2014). Large parts of the global subaltern were in collective motion in pursuit of that most basic of human desires—to make life more liveable. The actualisation of subaltern solidarity signified the erosion of one of the principal ideological ballasts of modern capitalist rule—the essentialisation and hierarchical ordering of difference of the global subaltern. Cracks were appearing in the system of domination because many had withdrawn their cooperation with the system; they were no longer willing to remain indifferent to the suffering of their fellow humans.

The tendency of critical international political economy perspectives to analytically separate struggles against racism (as well as other oppressions) from those against class exploitation leads them to underestimate the scale of the subaltern revolt that marked the transition from a Fordist to a flexible regime of accumulation (Harvey 1993). In fact, there was a two-decade interregnum defined by a sustained and intensifying multi-level conflict from which not one, but two political alternatives emerged. The first was the neoliberal alternative of Thatcherism intent on reversing the post-war welfare state settlement in the West (Hall et al 1978), but the second was the New Left alternative of social justice for all aimed at deepening the existing democratic settlement in the West, including through a reckoning with the enduring material and symbolic legacy of racism.

My argument is that the transition to neoliberalism was driven by the growing threat posed to orderly capitalist rule by the global Left, including within the West. Mrs. Thatcher’s insistence that ‘there really is no alternative’ was a recognition that there was an alternative, that there were two competing counter-hegemonic projects and the New Left project had to be defeated for capitalism to continue. Cracks had started to appear in the system of domination because different parts of the working class and others were envisioning alternative futures that relied on solidarity, not in enforcing social divisions between its component parts, including in the West. These movements presented a concrete, albeit fragmentary picture of an alternative to capitalism, a route out of a global system whose survival was dependent on the maintenance of misery for the majority. This is why I believe neoliberalism should not be understood narrowly as an elite response to the breakdown of the post-war social contract in the West. It was more than that; it was a global capitalist counter-revolution whose ascendency can be measured by the shattered dreams and broken bodies of subalterns around the world. And crucially, the far-right re-emerges onto the stage of history over the trampled remains of this global left (Virdee forthcoming).

Neoliberal racism and multicultural capitalism

We cannot understand why racism is so central to neoliberalism unless we integrate this threat from a multi-ethnic global Left into our conception of the ‘international’. But as Saull reminds us, this neoliberal racism is also a very different kind of racism—a differentialist racism—to that which we associate with the capitalist imperialist era. While Saull does an excellent job in plotting its changing coordinates, he only partly addresses why such a mutation occurs. In part, this stems from his occlusion of the anti-systemic movements and the cultural transformations they effected even in the wake of their catastrophic defeat. The anticolonial revolutions in the Global South followed by the anti-systemic racial justice movements in the USA and UK thoroughly discredited the scientific racism of the capitalist imperialist epoch—not just in the eyes of the western elites but significant swathes of the wider white population. With the citizenry of the West bifurcating on the deployment of scientific racism, there was no possibility of a return to the past. Instead, the ideologues of neoliberalism navigated this altered cultural terrain by incrementally instituting new modes of ideological classification and stigmatisation which they hoped would restore the sense of hierarchically ordered difference between subaltern populations that is so intrinsic to capitalist reproduction (Virdee forthcoming). This is why, particularly since the 1980s, racialised minorities in the West find themselves subject to discriminatory behaviour through claims that parts of their culture are somehow incompatible with membership of the nation. From well-worn tropes that emphasise the tendency towards excessive levels of criminality and religious extremism to the development of newer tropes that point towards their inherent sexism and homophobia, cultural racisms have evolved which no longer require the signification of colour or the idea of race (Farris 2017; Lentin 2020).

At the same time, Saull ignores that alongside the development of these cultural racisms, neoliberalism has simultaneously opened the door to upward mobility for individual minorities through assimilation into this new set of racialised institutional arrangements. For example, in the UK we can see how social neoliberal (Davidson 2023) political formations like New Labour have come to understand the objective of racial equality as the requirement to ensure that the socio-economic position of different racialised groups mirrored that of the white British population. The resultant social policies helped facilitate the creation of a growing British Asian and Caribbean middle class. Since the 1990s, there has been a striking transformation in the class structure of different racialised communities suggesting that some fractions have thrived and flourished under the neoliberal regime (Virdee 2006). This doesn’t contradict that fact that for the large majority of racialised minority communities their economic circumstances have sharply deteriorated under neoliberalism. But we must contend with how both in the UK and the USA—the original heartlands of neoliberalism—significant parts of the South Asian, Caribbean, African American and Hispanic populations now occupy positions in the upper and middle class.

These structural transformations are already having profound effects in the field of politics. Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has sharply bifurcated each racialised community with the culturally conservative and business-minded stratum securing a greater voice in public life at the expense of progressive currents that have been actively repressed. In the UK, these narrower forms of politics can now be pursued not only through the Labour Party but also the Conservative Party. This is just one way in which neoliberalism in the UK which drew its initial inspiration from Enoch Powell (Shilliam 2021) has been modified and refashioned to partially encompass black and brown Britons. Without these structural transformations, it is difficult to imagine how three of the four highest offices of state in early 2023 could be held by Conservatives of British Asian and Caribbean descent—Rishi Sunak (Prime Minister), Suella Braverman (Home Secretary) and James Cleverly (Foreign Secretary). And it is surely no coincidence that these developments run with the grain of geopolitical transformations that have taken place under neoliberalism, including the rise of new centres of accumulation and geopolitical power in the Global South like China and India. It has given the global capitalist system a degree of legitimacy in communities that would otherwise have never given their consent. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see how the increasingly multicultural face of neoliberal capitalism was the route through which western-led capitalism survived the insurgent challenge it faced to its rule from the world revolution of 1968.

Pushing at an open door: organic crisis and the far-right resurgence

According to Saull (2023b, 215), the 2007/08 North Atlantic financial crisis.

…detonated the contradictions established within the neoliberal era as the combination of the drive for capital accumulation, the weakening of public and democratic-collectivised oversight of the economy and the disruptions associated with the integration and rise of China exploded….

This was rapidly followed by the imposition of austerity in the wake of the government bail out of the banks. The consensus of this policy choice to the crisis stretched from conservatives to social democrats and it exposed ‘the limits and bankruptcy of neoliberal centrism….the political ground shifted towards an anti-elitist populism’ (Saull 2023b, 215). Saull continues.

…the political decisions as to how the crisis was managed and who would bear the cost of its resolution, became key to the type of politics that was to emerge from it. And in the absence of a collectivist political response based on the cultivation of international working class solidarities, a political space opened up for a different kind of collectivist response rooted in space, nationhood and race (Saull 2023b, 209).

I want to think through how the effects of the defeat of the global Left that I drew attention to earlier have percolated through the system over the past three decades because it has important implications for the precarious nature of the conjuncture we find ourselves seemingly locked into. I contend that the absence of ‘international working class solidarities’ that Saull points to in the present moment is the direct outcome of the crushing defeats inflicted by neoliberalism as it ascended and consolidated its position as the dominant modality of capitalism. This victory didn’t occur overnight but incrementally over the course of the 1980s. In much of the West, it took the form of a series of heavy defeats for powerful contingents of organised labour across a range of industries. Accompanying this was the technical decomposition of class through deindustrialisation and political class decomposition including the incremental disappearance of once powerful cultures of solidarity and socialist infrastructure built over the course of the welfare settlement. The underside of neoliberal-capitalist victory then was the destruction of the spirit and combativity of multi-ethnic working class communities across the West and beyond (Virdee and McGeever 2023). And with it went the language of class such that today more often than not working class people display a strong sense of class disassociation, if not actual dis-identification (Skeggs 1997).

This fracturing of the historic relationship forged between the subaltern class, organised labour and its political representatives has contributed to a significantly greater degree of volatility when it comes to political allegiances. The psychological pummelling that accompanied the process of technical and political decomposition has also contributed to a sort of resigned acceptance of one’s fate. At the same time, reactionary formations have re-energised their publics in these same locations leading to a transformation of their political complexion. Real working class pain—which in the West is a multi-ethnic process—has come to be understood by substantial numbers of older working class people through a racialised lens. Such a working class break from the neoliberal settlement is not a sign of an emergent class consciousness but an indication of its long-term absence. This is most tragically demonstrated by how a part of the working class has been summoned into the camp of the far-right representing the ‘white working class’ as the main victims of neoliberalism (Virdee and McGeever 2023).

Tragically, the political choice facing us today seems to be a continuation of a neoliberal globalisation that brought us to the present moment and a far-right that wants to establish a mythical nation-state of an idealised past undergirded by cultural and racial homogeneity. The first involves the slow but relentless asphyxiation of the progressive elements of liberal capitalist modernity while the second its overnight destruction through a fascist big bang ideologically dressed as the restoration of ‘rights for whites’.

In many ways, neoliberalism’s decisive victory over the global Left in the 1970s and 1980s contained within it the seeds of its own destruction. Walter Benjamin (1940/2006) compared capitalism to a runaway train with the socialist revolution understood as the attempt by passengers on that train to activate the emergency brake. But who can pull the lever to stop the train from derailing today? Who to use Marx’s evocative phrase is the ‘capitalist gravedigger’ of today? What are the possibilities of constructing a counter-hegemonic politics in relational opposition to both neoliberalism and the far-right? Where are the resources of hope for those seeking more progressive solutions to the organic crisis of neoliberal capitalism? Saull certainly does a valuable job in identifying important countervailing trends and we must take hope from this. However, the most important obstacle to any sustained renaissance of the Left remains the absence of concrete utopias. Concrete utopias as Levitas (1990) reminds us, are anticipatory and reach forward to a possible future and involve not only wishful thinking but wilful thinking. In that sense, they seek to both anticipate and effect the future. That is, they seek to give history a nudge to hasten the arrival of the good society.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, socialist-inflected concrete utopias aimed at building those alternative worlds leading socialism to become the counterculture of capitalist modernity. However, the idea of socialism as an alternative to capitalism has largely disappeared from the public imagination since the defeat of the world revolution of 1968, the end of the cold war and the so-called victory of capitalism. Without the renaissance of socialism across wide swathes of the population, subaltern populations have few means to relativise the present and prise open the possibility that what exists today is neither natural nor given. In its absence, our options remain bleak, including the growing possibility that we face the common ruin of the contending classes (Marx 1848/2002).