A Social Ecology Publication
Number 26 January 1992
From Left to Right:
New Right Ideology as a Problem Facing Leftism Today
ise.rootmedia.org
Excerpt:
[...] But let us return to the original problem. The New Right falsely portrays the Left as racist because it sees all people as "equal" and denies the existence of any differences among various ethnic cultures. This is obviously a straw man. The leftist demand for "equality" is based on the continued existence of inequality. Nor does the Left demand "integration" or "accommodation" with the system. Rather, for the Left "equality" means equal treatment for all people, of people having equal rights in a given situation and enjoying equality of opportunity in a given society. Again, what we advocate is equal individual rights for everyone.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the basic contradiction between Left and Right is the contradiction between the centrality of the individual and the centrality of the community. (It is not surprising, then, that the Marxist Left has often had problems determining what is "left" and what is not.) The demand for equal treatment is a demand for pluralism in present-day society, a society that has long consisted of minorities. If this society is to function, it must also acknowledge its own diversity (and not, in fact, the actual equality) of its members--and take people seriously as individuals. But it is precisely this point that the New Right ideologists oppose. "Freedom of opinion," writes Benoist, "ceases where it contradicts the common good."
Like many of the New Right's concepts, its concept of "common good" is vague, but it is essentially a pale paraphrase of voelkisch [folk] totalitarianism. Today it includes "organic popular democracy"--a concept filched from ecologists who have long written of "organic growth." It has still another ideological kinship with spiritualism. Among the new myths that the Right is creating is the myth that for two thousand years the "Volk-concept" has been distorted by concepts of "equality, rationalism, and an elevation of the unaffiliated individual." But judging from the Right's own contradictory notions, a real Volk venerates hierarchy, antirationalism, and an organic community. Accordingly, it is expressly fascist. The antirationalism of the New Right and of countless spiritualistic movements requires a clear leftist interpretation of the Enlightenment.
But polite society still frowns upon the word "fascist," so in the New Right's lexicon, "aristocratic" is used in its place. The New Right's methodology becomes clearer in such passages as this: "The aristocracy creates its own law out of itself," writes Benoist. "It creates order because [the aristocracy] is order. Yes, might makes right. . . Aristocracy, when it intervenes as a political class, creates . . . not only an administrative apparatus but also a cultural, bourgeois apparatus (Gramsci). . . . In the long run an aristocracy must be capable of giving meaning to words."
The New Right, in effect, wants above all to redefine social norms, so that rational doubt is regarded as decadent and eliminated, and new "natural" norms are established. In the conceptual framework of "natural" and "organic" societies, each person is assigned a fixed role in the community, and out of this community bond the governed and the governing alike are to achieve an unmediated identification with the whole. The notion of a "harmonious" state looms large on the horizon of New Right ideology. And it would seem only logical for the Right to imagine that such an identification of the governed and governing strata would be impossible when minorities are among the governed. The New Right's concept of nationalism is wholly reconcilable with a United Europe, and indeed it is redefining itself as a form of "Europeanism." In this bizarre ideological world, "Europeanism" becomes the cement that will presumably hold everything together and gloss over any contradictions.
Other ethnic groups may then simply revert to a cultural Stone Age: "We want to substitute faith for law," writes Benoist, "mythos for logos, duties toward the Creation for the innocence of becoming, humility for the struggle for power; . . . [to substitute] will for pure reason, the image for the concept, and home for exile." One of the principal sources of this mishmash--and anarchists should finally become fully aware of this--is none other than Georges Sorel, who has been quoted by fascists no less than by syndicalists. Sorel is a theorist of the Counter-Enlightenment par excellence, of mythos against reason. "One must consider myth as a means to effect the present," he wrote in Reflections on Violence. "Only the wholeness of mythos is meaningful."
Sorel, in fact, tried to apply mythos to build the ideal of a syndicalist general strike. He sought on the one hand to arouse the workers' fantasies, but on the other hand to avoid the weightier question of the dubious viability of myths. "A myth cannot be refuted," he wrote, "because it is fundamentally identical with the outlook of the group and as a result it is an expression of a movement's convictions." Not surprisingly, Italian fascists were among the most eager practitioners of Sorel's theory, nor is it surprising that the syndicalist Sorel is now being eagerly picked up by the present-day New Right.
Given these views, it is not natural law but new myths that are to determine social consciousness. It is the dream, not the reality, that is to shape society. Whoever generates images in the world has power. But when images cease to be subjected to scrutiny--and for the New Right, one of the failings of reason is that it participates in critical scrutiny--and when the individual no longer counts for anything, when society embraces images--when finally this occurs, then the thousand-year Reich becomes once again imaginable. That myths can have serious social consequences was shown in the recent elections in Bremen, where the Christian Democrats "successfully" used the imagery of a "flood of asylum-seekers" or of "Bremen as Paradise for asylum-seekers," thereby exploiting public hostility toward immigrants and to win votes. With this appeal to the basest of feelings, they were able to induce the citizenry to forget even such a concrete problem as increased taxes. We find a strong emphasis on myth over reason in countless spiritualist, Green, and (eco-)feminist groups.
We Have a Problem with Fascists, Not with Asylum-Seekers!
If we recall what has been said up to now, it becomes clear that the events in Hoyerswerda and the arson attacks everywhere in the new Federal Republic are not reducible only to the issue of "rootless youth" or the "blind rage of frustrated youth with no future prospects," as conventional politicians and opinion-makers would have us believe. We have no problem with asylum-seekers, as the conservatives glibly claim. We have a very real problem with fascists. As an electoral tactic, politicians of all the democratic parties take their point of departure from a false issue, thereby showing how little consciousness they have of the present situation. They tend to grasp politics only in terms of momentary victories over their rivals. But what makes their behavior so grim is that they play over the long run into the hands of the Right. The fascists, for their part, are beginning to gain their first electoral successes, a fact that will clearly foster the growth of their movement in the future.
The media, of course, turn up their noses at the openly visible hatred of foreigners and at the violence exhibited by the fascists. But the way in which they do so contributes significantly toward turning these outrageous incidents into a widespread conflagration. When an eager reporter pushes a microphone under the nose of a seventeen-year-old in Hoyerswerda, who, without even being challenged, proceeds to speak of his plans to attack foreigners again--this in itself becomes an event and adds new meaning to the process of fascisization.
Neither the media and politicians, nor many others, have done any serious thinking about the new fascism. As always, they look for "rational" explanations for people's completely irrational behavior, and their explanations are blatantly superficial. They single out the refugees and the old Communist regime in the east, despite the fact that the number of arson attacks in the western region of North Rhine-Westphalia is certainly comparable to number of the attacks in the east.
But what if the new fascism has no conscious goal? Certainly, that it has no rational arguments is something we have already seen. What the New Right is shrewdly doing, however is to disengage the concept of fascism from its deadly past. Here too the Left, or at least the anarchists, are being used as a prototype for the Right. For in response to the question of how we define anarchism, we have over the years replied that anarchism is a lifestyle, indeed a life-feeling. All too often, today's New Rightists also define fascism as a "style" rather than as a political phenomenon. Hanspeter Siegfried incisively concludes that "the [fascist] style manifests itself in a love of danger, boldness, and speed, a glorification of war, and a 'tension between youth and death.' For the 'fascists' war is a battle for its own sake, not a means for reaching a goal. . . . Fascism becomes a cultural phenomenon, with which a positive identification once again becomes possible."
That the fascist life-style is quite capable of becoming a distinctly fascistic identity is revealed by the apparent ease with which it turns to violence. Violence as a test of courage, violence conceived as an expression of a fascist life-feeling--it is against this background that "aimless" skinheads and fascists attack foreigners in subways, in residences, and on the open street. Given this way of thinking, the New Right and present-day fascism must be seen in a radically new light.
This article was originally published in German in Schwarzer Faden: Vierteljahreschrift fuer Lust und Freiheit (Grafenau). The article title comes from a comment made by Burkhard Hirsch during a discussion on immigrants in September 1991. Translated by Janet Biehl. |
