Perhaps the far-right has been so deeply influenced by neo-liberalism that they've abandoned racial politics and reduced themselves to being an identity politics advocacy group, albeit one with a fascist pedigree and a propensity for violence. The Neo-liberal rot has set in so deeply that they even have to pander to political correctness, rather than fight against it openly as they no doubt would like. They've also for the most part moved to the right fiscally, Geert Wilders and UKIP being a good example of this mixture of "cultural nationalism" mixed with neo-liberal economics. The funny thing is of course they've made these decisions at a time when neo-liberalism was rampant and hegemonic, and class interests seemed to be a waning force in politics. They've got so worked up about cultural marxism they've ignored economic and class based political issues in favour of this approach, that following the financial crisis of 2008 and the re-emergence of class-based politics in the mainstream has left them looking a bit out of date. This opens up space for the left in my opinion. Look at the recent french presidential elections for proof of this. Everyone collectively shit themselves about the Front National getting 18%, but if I'm not mistaken that's only an incease of 1.6% over their previous best with Jean Marie Le Pen. Is that it? After a full decade of these scary new tactics, in a political climate stoked with fear of muslims and immigrants, during the biggest recession since the 1930's and direcly following an incredbly brutal and evil set of terrorist attacks in Tolouse, that was the best they could do? It gets worse for them the more you look into it. When Le Pen reached the second round against Chirac in 2002 what position was the left in then? The Socialist Party under Jospin was humiliated, the far-left was nowhere to be seen, and lets be honest Jean Marie was a shit candidate compared to Marine. However this time, despite everything in their favour, they managed only very modest gains on this period. I remember as I was following the election coverage this time round, for a good 2 weeks or so Melanchon was actually polling above Marine Le Pen, and forced Le Pen to shift quite dramatically to the left in the final stages of the campaign to sure-up working class support. For a party that's been flirting with fiscal conservatism in recent years, such a u-turn is very significant, and shows the limits that this kind of "racism expressed through a form of cultural idenity politics" really has.
The obssession with cultural marxism, and the shift to cultural nationalism rather than ethno-nationalism in the "new fascism" may actually end up being a huge disaster for them. We on the left have some experience I would hope of the limits of this kind of idenity politics and the importance of culture as a poltical actor. As Peter Cook once said "All the café's, burlesques and counter-culture of weimar germany didn't do anything to prevent the nazi's taking power" which is absolutely true, the danger of overstating the importance of cultural factors in political development is something we should be aware of, coz it's something the right seem to be completely oblivious too.
It's a little bit disingenuous I think what the IWCA, and some anarchists too mind, do when they campaign against multiculturalism in this way. It's the Alf Garnett effect, appealing to two opposed groups simultaneously by using a word that has different meanings and a different emphasis to different people. Obviously, before anyone bites my head off, I know that the critique of multiculturalism by these groups is based on solid, marxist in some cases, thinking, and no way implies any degree of support for racist politics, so please spare me that rebuttal coz I get it. The idea that we can solve problems of racial and religious bigotry in some liberal, legalistic way, by council-backed identity politics, establishing human rights commisions, introducing draconian hate speech legislation and banning demonstrations etc seems like a total failure to me. It does nothing to address underlying social and economic conditions that lead to the growth of racist idea's in the first place. Political correctness might well have a role, I don't believe it's right that people should be able to use bigoted and hateful language in public discourse and I don't care how liberal that makes me, but surely the point is to be able to stamp out racist attitudes in the first place, rather than preventing them from being expressed publicly? It's shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted in my opinion.
However outside of the small, left-wing theoretical masturbation groups where these kinds of things are discussed understood as such, does that critique of multi-culturalism have any traction? Is that what people are thinking when they publicly reject multiculturalism? Not that I can see. Whether your critique is sincere or not, and I think it is btw I'm not accusing anyone of being a closet nazi, when you campaign on the basis of rejecting multi-culturalism it means one thing to us, but something entirely different to most people. Like I said earlier, "rejecting multi-culturalism" is predominantly used today as a euphemism for "send 'em back" and unless you go to extraordinary lengths to point out the complex theoretical differences between this crypto-racist usage of the term and the context in which the left rejects multiculturalism, then it will be taken to mean the same thing as the Daily Mail. Frankly there's a point at which a principled left-wing objection to the failures of state-led multiculturalism can very easily morph into just incorporating the Daily Mail's rhetoric into your propaganda rather than challenging it.
These sorts of semantics are important, for example (this is something not fully covered in the article) the way in which "multiculturalism" is used as a euphemism for multi-racial reminds of what Ayatollah was saying about how "rootless cosmopolitans" was used as a politically acceptable euphemism for Jew in the 1930's. The same thing also applies to the phrase "cultural marxism" which was also used as a euphemism for Jew in this period, if the Nazi's accused you of being a cultural marxist in the 30's it was understood to be accusing someone who wasn't Jewish of behaving in a "Jewish" way. Today being "culturally marxist" means that you're an Al-Queada sympathiser, pro-immigration, in favour of very liberal and un-marxist applications of multi-culturalism and so on. The racial/religious group may have changed based on the times we're living in, as Muslims have now replaced Jews as the most visibly identifiable racial/religious minority in Europe so this is directed at them moreso than Jews, but the process is the same. The conflation between Marxism and Islam that gets made, the irrational and hysterical hatred of the left that comes from the right-whingers, is the umbelical chord which connects this new 21st century fascism with the old, where Marxism was considered a specifically Jewish phenomenon, an extension of Jewish influence into politics. An academic friend of mine told me that Terry Eagleton gets hundreds of death threats a day from all over the world for being a culturally marxist literary critic who is part of a conspiracy to destroy the white race, mainly because his name features on the wikipedia article for Cultural Marxism.
