'Anti-Capitalism' and the Political Economy of the Far-Right

Far-right forms of politics have made significant political advances in recent years and have been the primary beneficiary of the rolling and interconnected ‘poly-crisis’ that has defined world politics since the early 2000s. Such advances are connected to their self-identity as radical and ‘anti-system’ parties that challenge the political and economic status quo and especially the way in which trade, migration and globalization are part of the governing consensus. Indeed, far-right parties have been at the forefront of challenging ‘neoliberal hegemony’. However, this paper argues that while the far-right has been a beneficiary of the symptoms of economic crisis, marginalization and decline, its political response does not actually rest on a distinct and coherent political economy of anti-capitalism, understood as something that poses a fundamental challenge to the structure and workings of the globalized capitalist economy. Such limits to its self-proclaimed radical, ‘anti-system’ and ‘anti-elite’ qualities is evident in two ways. First, the ideas that inform the far-right’s political economy tend to borrow from and/or align with other – socio-economically dominant – articulations of political economy that reproduce economic outcomes that far-right ideology claims to be opposed to. Secondly, the ideology of the far-right is based on an anti-materialism and anti-economism that fails to recognize the ‘socio-economic’ sphere – and the hierarchies and social relations that underpin it – as a distinct social realm. And, further, where the understanding of socio-economic relations and causality is not derived from those socio-economic structures or relations but, instead, from the ‘inherent’ properties of race and space. Consequently, not only is the ‘political economy’ of the far-right really something else, it is also not a serious form of ‘anti-capitalism’.