Rising populist parties in Europe and liberalism

Leon Trotsky, one of the foremost leaders of the October Revolution, defined fascism as the totalitarian organization of society by monopoly capital. Magnates of large-scale monopoly capital are acutely aware that their profits cannot be safeguarded in the absence of authoritarian political power. Thus, fascism finds its bedrock of support among capitalist forces, the grand bourgeoisie, monopoly capital circles, and major landowners. We are all too familiar with the calamities fascism wrought upon the world in the era preceding the Second World War.

The post–World War II era is often commemorated as the golden age of capitalism—a period characterized by robust growth rates and low unemployment. Real wages climbed, social rights expanded, demands for a welfare state remained vibrant, and the pursuit of a social state yielded tangible results. This era ultimately met its demise in the 1970s, undone by shifts in the regime of accumulation and structural economic crises.

Today, across Europe, political parties that could virtually be characterized as the direct successors to pre-WWII fascist movements are consolidating their electoral gains. Germany, France, and Italy serve as quintessential examples. These parties weaponize poverty, unemployment, and anti-foreigner, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Middle Eastern sentiments, while capitalizing on the incompetence of traditional center-right and center-left parties and taking a deeply Eurosceptic, critical stance toward the European Union. They employ caustic rhetoric against the political elites who have dominated governance for decades. Receiving endorsement from both US President Trump and Russian leader Putin, they draw substantial support simultaneously from working-class constituencies—traditionally the bedrock of the left—and from grand capital circles. While monopoly capital quietly pats these populist movements on the back, it simultaneously winks at liberal-democratic and increasingly indistinguishable social-democratic parties that champion unbridled capitalism and aggressive liberalism. Beyond France and Germany, examples abound from Italy to the United Kingdom…

The interests of grand capital, which back populist regimes and advocate authoritarian governance, also champion localization. For the erosion of the national, the public, and the collective—alongside the attenuation of the central state and the elevation of the local—works decisively to the advantage of big capital.

Why?

Because of this:

Under liberalism, the state does not regulate the market; rather, the market regulates, directs, and subdues both the state and society. In a liberal order, the state is expected to act on behalf of capital and in favor of the market—intervening in politics, society, and the law, and enacting statutory frameworks strictly to this end. The state is tasked with engineering legal and institutional arrangements for the market’s account and benefit. Society is reduced to a market-society, wherein the citizen is reimagined as a consumer, a client, and an entrepreneur. Since competition is elevated as the supreme imperative, citizens themselves must become entrepreneurial and competitive—a posture the state actively promotes and incentivizes.

According to liberals, the state bears no obligation to shield its citizens from the pitiless mechanics of the market or the ferocity of unchecked capitalism. On the contrary, the state demands and encourages that citizens establish themselves as entrepreneurial actors within the market arena. Consequently, the state aligns itself with capital, operating at its beck and call. Hence, liberalism harbors an innate preference for unorganized, non-unionized, cheap labor. Wages are suppressed; agricultural subsidies are gutted to a minimum; and strikes are banned on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Because liberalism insists that the state be sculpted, organized, and driven according to market demands—allowing the market to command and direct the state—the liberal vision of the nexus between politics and economics, as well as politics and law, is deeply fractured. In their worldview, law must operate exclusively to the advantage of capital, acting as the vigilant sentinel for the inviolability of property rights. It must dismantle every obstacle standing in the way of free trade, unbridled competition, and the free market, while swiftly and severely penalizing any force that dares to impede them. To conform to the expectations and demands of capital: this is the primary imperative required of the law.

In sum, through its championing of identity politics, its reduction of the citizen to a mere client, and its liquidation of the state’s social character in order to place public power at the disposal of capital, liberalism stands fundamentally opposed to the social, the public, and the national. This is a truth that must be firmly impressed upon left-liberals, nationalist-liberals, and conservative-liberals alike.