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Social Scientist

The Right Politics to ComeAuthor(s): Radhika DesaiReviewed work(s):Source: Social Scientist, Vol. 29, No. 5/6 (May - Jun., 2001), pp. 33-62Published by: Social ScientistStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3518297 .Accessed: 29/10/2011 09:34

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RADHIKA DESAI*

The Right Politics to Come1

A century of the greatest political confrontations in the history of capitalism has ended with the complete surrender of the left. But victory has been paradoxical for the victor: triumph has been accompanied by dissipation. No clear electoral or political dividends have come for parties of the right. This is commonly attributed to nature of the victory itself: the acceptance of the basics of neo- liberalism in all nations by parties of the centre and social democratic left, along with their new closeness to particular sections of the capitalist classes, has simply blurred the old political lines and identities making party system increasingly similar to the US model of two parties of capital (of which Julius Nyerere was known to have said, "The United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them"). In this sense almost all politics today is the politics of the right, the politics of the classes of property and older parties of the right can no longer expect any special purchase on the political situation. And all parties suffer many problems in common: Disoriented policy, corruption scandals linked to the increase in election expenses, erosion of traditional social bases, and significant sources of dissatisfaction with globalization, not least from among capitalist classes themselves.

But, this hardly means, as some have ventured to suggest, that right and left have both ceased to exist. Only the left has. As long as there is an order of property to protect, a specifically right politics will remain indispensable and distinctly identifiable, whether or not an organised opposition to it exists. And it is so today. The political polarizations of the 1970s and early 1980s have not been replaced by any centrist politics. Rather the rise of extreme right groups on the other side of the political spectrum, which have no counterpart on the left, underlines the lopsidedness of the current political situation. * Associate Professor, Political Science, University of Victoria, Canada.

Social Scientist, Vol. 29, Nos. 5 - 6, May-June 2001

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The almost total rout of the left may be recent, but the force and resolution of its opposition to the capitalist order has been in doubt since the beginning of the Cold War and the "containment" of the Soviet Union. Robert Brenner went further and argued, in the case of the centres of advanced capital, that the subordination of labour and its organizations in the course of national and international class struggles waged by capital and its representatives was the basis of the spectacular and sustained capitalist accumulation of the post-war period2. The fortunes of a compromised and bureaucratic social democracy in the centres of advanced capital, and of developmentalism in the rest of the capitalist world, remained yoked, thereafter, to the health of capitalism itself. The lack of an organised political opposition does not mean today, as its weakness did not mean before, that the political tasks of protecting and managing the process of accumulation against the obstacles presented by nature and culture, as well as coping with the dynamic imbalances of capitalist accumulation, political and economic, can be ignored or neglected. This is itself a form of class struggle, though it should not be forgotten that while it may be quite adequate to the needs of the right, any new left must take the struggle to higher political, economic and cultural levels to fulfill its own historical tasks.

The politics of the right since the French revolution has evolved through a series of distinct historical stages, singular constellations of constituencies, ideologies and strategies, in the face of changing configurations of property and the political challenges to it3. Perhaps the most radical reconstitution it executed was the one after the Second World War when the order of property it had to defend, and the domestic and international political situation in which it had to do so, had changed radically enough as to impose a thoroughgoing reconstitution of its ideologies and strategies. Even so, the reconstitution appeared more radical than it actually was. Which the resources it could muster towards it were, for the most part, hardly novel, to the political necessity of stabilising capitalism domestically and internationally in objectively new historical circumstances was added the imperative for dissimulating its real continuities with a deeply discredited past. The effectiveness of the dissimulation can still be seen in the pervasive mis-recognition of right politics as "centrist" from which the right benefits politically and which dogs the understanding of its imperatives and intentions in broad swathes of progressive circles. Nevertheless, objectively necessary changes did not just include the institutions of the welfare state demanded by a


THE RIGHT POLITICS TO COME

population mobilised for war, but a central role for the state, and the new supra-national institutions being fashioned under the supervision of the US, in the management of capital accumulation. Similarly, the present period of transition and the form the right takes at the end of it will have to answer to certain fundamental changes in the terrain on which the right must operate and the challenges, however diminished, it must face. Understanding what these are will be crucial for any emerging left if it is to be more canny this time around about the exact nature and orientation of the right in the 21st century.

Scholarship on the politics of the Right is, compared to that on the left, relatively sparse. Topicality is, after all, governed by criterion of concern: in a culture dominated by institutions favouring the order, the acceptable is unquestioned and unexamined while attention focusses on what appears troubling, namely the left, as the voluminous literature on it indicates. But while this applies to the mainstream of the academic establishment, not to mention intelligence agencies, what of leftist and liberal scholars? I think the root of the problem is that the politics of the right is fundamentally uncreative and therefore based on a correspondingly unremarkable political understanding and strategy. Of course, this is also mainly what J.S. Mill was complaining about when he said that the Conservative party of his country was the "stupid party". Left parties, by contrast, have to be creative. Their public debates over the analyses of situations, and corresponding ones over doctrines and policy, their organizational forms and innovations, the relationships with the mass base, and the creative experiments and failed promises of Left governments themselves form a huge corpus of the self-consciousness of the left and its penetration is a crucial determinant of then effectiveness of the actions on which it expends its sparse resources. Right politics has no real counterpart to this.

Indeed, the most penetrating analyses of the right have been produced precisely in the context of these Left debates and not, on the whole, in the academic study of right politics. The weakness of the left over much of the last 50 years, and its defeat today, have put the understanding of the dynamics of contemporary right politics in even more dire straits than before. Particularly after the Fall of Communism, it is being conducted, on the whole, in ignorance or evasion of the most penetrating Left analyses of the last century and a half. Just when the need for a higher level of penetration becomes more and more acute, at the moment of its pervasive triumph, just when the extreme right is also rising again, the analysis of it, and its

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connection with the wider politics and political economy of our time, has been radically impoverished.

In particular, I would like to stress one insight of Left analysis of the right hitherto: that, in addition, of course, to the political economy which underlies any given order of property, we should pay most attention to the surrounding equation or constellation of forces when understanding the problems and prospects of right politics, particularly that of the extreme right. It is this which will determine how far it can go. Marxist analyses beginning with Marx's examinations of the Revolutions of 1848 and of French politics 1848-51, have stressed again and again how much the fortunes of extreme right regimes depend on the complicity of other parties and forces of order, including cultural ones. It is this kind of Marxist, Gramscian and overall historical analysis which is crucial today.

I want to present an outline of the main parameters within which right politics must today reconstitute itself in capitalist liberal democracies. For while the right may take more extreme forms in authoritarian contexts, the new forms of the right will be more complex, subtle and arguably fuller in liberal democracies. Political parties in such contexts must elaborate ideologies which can fulfill the conflicting requirements of accumulation and legitimation. They must give the ruling politicians and the interests behind them an understanding of their purposes in power and a form of legitimation, as Gramsci would say, or ,a "politics of power" and a "politics of support" in Andrew Gamble's4 terms.

Among the capitalist liberal democracies where the dynamics of the contemporary right can be observed number not only the advanced capitalist liberal democracies such as the Western European or the North American, but also a poor countries like India. Both the capitalisms and the liberal democracies of these very different sets of countries, which have always been analysed separately according to the conventions of mainstream social and political science, have actually been rendered comparable by two important changes. First, the penetration of capitalist relations of production in the agrarian economies of much of the former third world has eliminated the determining role of pre-capitalist forms of property, in particular the peasantry, in national politics. This had once radically distinguished them from those of the regions of advanced capital. Now, however, remaining forms of pre-capitalist production are politically marginalised the world over. Second, liberal democratic politics has become established in one version or another in most of the capitalist





dr sv bhardwajHighlightfor chapter title, was thinking --- politics of power-- good title it seems to be, when dealing with legitmitation issue. remember!



nations of the world. This is less surprising than it seems and bespeaks its structural compatibility with capitalism. For liberal democracy is neither as old as is usually assumed in the West5, nor an unbreachable defense against authoritarianism (whether or not there is a parliamentary road to socialism, we do know there has been one to fascism) and nor yet, perfect in its operation there. If the poverty of its new forms in the third world can be noted, so too must its current impoverishment in the rich countries: in all countries, its denaturing differs only by forms of power which capital can wield - money and control over the media in the richer countries and petty bribery and physical intimidation, in addition to them, in the poorer ones.

Of course, the vast chasm which separates the wealth and prosperity of the countries of advanced capital and the rest is not without moment. The greater relative deprivation of the masses in poor countries (in relation, particularly, to what is now a global media- projected standard) not only necessitates greater doses of populism in them, the extent to which the neo-liberal nostrums of the right can become commonsensical among the electorate is also appreciably lower. But these are differences of degree, not quality, and a broadly comparative perspective on the right in both rich and poor liberal capitalist democracies is not only possible but also necessary for identifying its contemporary dynamics with clarity. Indeed, in large part, this paper is impelled by a problem I have experienced in my current work on the politics of Hindutva6, which is the core of the politics of the right in India today. It is that Hindutva is far too often considered in isolation, and considered a sui generis. I think, on the contrary, one can understand a lot more and better by comparing Hindutva with the politics of the Right in other capitalist liberal democracies. And intellectuals and political activists of these other countries have a lot to learn from the case of Hindutva. For it combines within itself the chief features which are germane for an understanding of the politics of capital in all nations: an adherence to neo-liberalism and globalization despite significant opposition to it from within its own ranks, a link to a well organised extreme right formation whose fascist inspiration is well known, and its espousal of a form of cultural nationalism which is the globally respectable face of extreme nationalism and authoritarianism everywhere.

The following are the main developments which determine the politics of the right in these countries today. They should be valid for all the said countries but, when considering a particular country, would have to be further specified.

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THE SOCIAL BASIS OF CONSERVATISM AS SUCH HAS DISAPPEARED. In the long historical evolution of the modern right and left new

elements and issues have emerged, old ones have been shed or have declined in relative importance as they have sought to fulfill their respective historical tasks on the basis of given historical situations and resources. On the right, the enduring challenge has been the preservation and adaptation of the order of private property and associated cultural, social and political arrangements upon which it was based. Quite apart from the successive challenges to the order of property, therefore, its own changing nature as capitalism developed has determined the politics of the right. The disappearance of the social basis of Conservatism belongs among the changes in the latter category, a change which is as fundamental as it has been unacknowledged.

Conservatism was the most prominent and important component of the shifting constellations of the politics of the right, shaping its politics at its birth and for a century and a half thereafter. It is not, as so often assumed, synonymous with right politics, but a distinct historical element of it. In its classical Burkean form it professed to advocate only so much change as was required for the maintenance of order as the development of capitalism increased the pace of historical change and the sources of instability. Of course, such decisions being contextual, it was never very easy to pin Conservatism down in any clear doctrinal fashion. But as a historical political formation of right politics it can be more clearly defined. It was originally less a defence of capitalism against workers' revolution, than it was a defence of pre-capitalist forms of (naturally) landed property, and its habitual modes of surplus extraction, against the emerging industrial capitalist form itself, though its politics also changed as landed property formed links with capitalist property and itself became increasingly capitalist.

Conservatism, with its formative association with the aristocracy and its particular cultural and political elan, has benefited from the widespread and nebulous indulgence towards aristocratic culture which is unfortunately also evident in sections of the left7. While the distinction often drawn between Conservatism and more authoritarian, reactionary and plebeian forms of right politics is frequently useful, Conservatives determined to retain political purchase on fast-changing contexts of political crisis have been known to come around to those as well, as they did everywhere in Europe with the rise of fascism8. Indeed, as Arno Mayer analysed it9,






Conservatism as an authentic political vehicle of the defenders of property reached its historical terminus in precisely that crisis, and its passengers had to board other much less sumptiously appointed trains for their further journey through history.

Conservatism's long innings in the politics of the right in Western Europe, and the countries of advanced capitalism in general, lasted until the beginning of the "Thirty Years' War of the general crisis of the twentieth century" in 1914. Its political strength until then was, according to Mayer, a fact of European history as fateful as it has been overlooked. And the role of Conservatism in causing that cataclysm has been radically underestimated. The Great War marked "the decline and fall of the old order fighting to prolong its life rather than the explosive rise of industrial capitalism bent on imposing its primacy". But a historical profession preoccupied with elements of progress, tending to "neglect and underplay and to disvalue the endurance of old forces and ideas, and their cunning genius for assimilating, delaying, neutralising and subduing capitalist modernization, even including industrialization", tended to overlook the fact that until 1914, despite the development of capitalism and the rise of a post-feudal absolutist state, the landed classes not only retained their ownership of land, but they were also assimilated into the apparatus of the new state, which became suffused with the spirit and traditions of feudal nobility. "Europe's old order was thoroughly pre-industrial and pre-bourgeois"".10

Land remained "the ruling and governing classes' principal form of wealth and revenue until 1914"11 and, even when greater concentrations of capital emerged in the later 19th century, they remained "of limited economic importance until then. Moreover, those associated with it, "magnates of industry and their associates in corporate banking and the liberal professions were more disposed to collaborate with the agrarians and the established governing classes than with the older bourgeoisie of manufacturers, merchants and bankers"12. This Schumpeterian picture was complete with post- feudal noble ruling class skilled at availing capitalist possibilities and adapting to the new economy and its political institutions, a bourgeoisie which "excelled at emulation", and a consequent "active symbiosis of the two social strata":

If the feudal elements in both political and civil society perpetuated their dominance so effectively, it was largely because they knew how to adapt and renew themselves. The public service nobilities, both civil and military, took in qualified and ambitious scions of business and

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the liberal professions, though they were careful to regulate closely this infusion of new blood and talent. Newcomers had to pass through the elite schools, ingest the corporate ethos, and demonstrate fealty to the old order as a precondition for advancement. Besides, the highest ranks of the state bureaucracy and military services continued to be reserved for men of high birth and proven assimilation."'3

Imperialism itself was never an aristocratic affair, particularly when colonial personnel are considered. But it provided another ground for this symbiosis - for bourgeois emulation. As Perry Anderson noted in the case of England: "Imperialism automatically sets a premium on a patrician style: as a system of alien domination, it always... .seeks to maximise the existential difference between the ruling and the ruled race...there can be no plebeian pro-consuls"14 Bourgeois emulation also ensured that culturally the "classical and academic idioms, conventions and symbols in the arts and letters" of the "historicist high culture" rather than any independent bourgeois modernism remained dominant1s. Ultimately based on the actual material power of their property and in many countries, the persistence of kingly and aristocratic economic, political and cultural power before 1914, this "persistence of the old regime" properly ended only in 1914. But it also reverberated through the politics of the inter-war period with former Conservatives everywhere embracing more extreme forms of right politics, including fascism, and imparting to it, at times, an unlikely elan.

Conservatism also enjoyed a strange after-life as a new, more thoroughly capitalist order emerged in Western Europe after 1945. At that juncture, old wealth was overtaken by the new wealth of which the wars, with their massive boost to industrial production, now based on new far more productive techniques which the Great Depression kept in abeyance until the Second World War, had been midwives. And this new wealth was capitalist. Since then power in the centres of advanced capitalism has generally been based on capitalist private property and the right has been required to preserve it, while also fostering its further accumulation, in this form. Logically, Conservatism could no longer be adequate to this task. With its now exclusively cash and commodity relationships and fast changing production and consumption patterns, this purer capitalist order, now neither sheltered nor burdened by the overlay of feudal nobility, could not allow nor expect the politics of continuity, pragmatism and deference.

However, for roughly a quarter century after 1945, the new




capitalist right politics, also intimately committed to the US-led anti- Communist offensive which included extensive retention of fascist personnel in the political and administrative structures of the countries of advanced capitalist development16, wore a moderate and organicist appearance which could be taken for Conservatism, particularly in the new context of welfare capitalism. Whether the right had reinvented itself, as in Britain, in the inter-war period or, as in much of fascist and occupied Europe and the US, thereafter, its leaders could still claim a social distinction and deference which had been the hallmark of Conservatism hitherto. Not only were aristocratic figures notable in the parties of the right after 1945, even more importantly, as Perry Anderson has pointed out, "the bourgeoisie as a class, in that meaning of the term in which Max Weber could remark with pride that he belonged to it....a social force with its own sense of collective identity, characteristic moral codes and cultural habitus ... a bourgeois milieu confident of the moral dignity of its own calling" still existed." "In the political realm, substantial figures like Adenauer, De Gasperi, Monnet embodied this persistence - their political relationship to Churchill or De Gaulle, grandees from a seigneurial past, as if an after-image of an original compact that socially was no longer valid"'17. Having emulated and deferred to the high culture of the aristocracy hitherto, and now bereft of any living Conservatism or aristocratic culture to follow, never having evolved its own independent culture forcefully enough, such a bourgeoisie would soon reveal itself as the historical anomaly it actually was.

As a capitalist calss, rather than a bourgeoisie, the post-Second world war ruling class sccumbed to the logics of the verycommodification, including that of culture, which it fostered as the baasis of its own prosperity. From the late 1960s, as these classes faded into the historical background, came an "encanillement of the possessing classes". Its "starlet princesses and sleazeball presidents" were the symptoms. The new right, with its miserly and punitive ideology, its open racism, social authoritarianism and cultural nationalism, the commoner social origins of its leaders, its mediatized relationship to its electorate, its rationalised organization and its undeniable reliance on shock troops of the lumpen is surely the first purely and unabashedly capitalist right emerging in all its Brechtian glory. Not surprisingly, Liberalism as a distinctively bourgeois political current was never strong, its banners appropriated by working class parties' struggle for democratic rights where the latter's universalist and egalitarian aspirations also transmuted it into various forms of

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bureaucratic and welfarist social democratic ideologies particularly in the English-speaking countries. For the rest, Liberalism in any pure form lived a politically ineffectual life in small middle-class radical groups and parties particularly on' the continent where electoral systems of proportional representations allowed them of safe and secure niche.

The forms of politics and ideology which today remain open to the right are populism, nationalism and authoritarian management of social and economic uncertainty within a neo-liberal context. The brazen class biasses of such politics make a sharp contrast to at least the appearance of organicism whether of the patronage or the welfare variety. Neo-liberalism, the crude economic "Manchesterian" wing of liberalism, was now set against the rest of liberal ideology with its politically progressive elements. Its political accompaniment was an anti-democratic, often anti-constitutional right discourse of the Hayeks and Huntingtons, the Schmitts and the Oakshotts.

Very similar changes can also be traced, with local variations, in the politics of the poorer capitalist world. In India, it is true that specifically aristocratic elites had already been politically weakened by colonialism. And in the context of nationalist politics, they lost further ground due to the collaboration of those that remained, with colonialism. Conservative parties based on them, such as the Swatantra party, could never flourish after independence, though many individual princes and princesses have, since the beginning of liberal democratic politics, demonstrated a flair for adapting to its plebian demands in many bourgeois parties. Indeed, the popular energies unleashed by the struggle for independence ensured at least that land reforms, while woefully inadequate by any comparative standard, and by the registered need, made large sections of the middle caste tenants into owners, bringing them on a par with corresponding groups in the rest of the country where they had historically been that. It was on the basis of this class that a sort of conservative politics, which combined patronage rooted in pre-capitalist structures of surplus extraction with the minimally welfarist structures of the independent Indian state, could be found in Gandhian ideology and practices. These linked more numerous and correspondingly less substantial middle-caste landed elites in every region and state to a Congress party whose national leadership was drawn from the upper echelons of the predominantly Hindu upper caste possessing and professional classes with their Brahminical and Westernized culture. The Centre-states axis of Indian politics has revolved around the



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evolving relationship between these socially distinct groups. In India too, the shift from the developmentalist, minimally

welfarist and egalitarian, and secular politics of the Congress to that of Hindutva and neo-liberalism has been based upon a transition to more completely capitalist forms of property. Both are based on the direct and indirect support of the landed elites, the leading elements of which have today become capitalist. The dispersed and localised hegemonies of the rural landed dominant caste elites had originally relied on the residues of their pre-capitalist "patriarchal-patrimonial" power, in short their dominance. These dissolved with the commercialization of agrarian relations and with the diminution of the opportunity structures*of the minimally welfarist state. This is the basis of what Jayant Lele has called the "ruralization of Hindutva" 18. This crisis of authority in the countryside has brought forth an authoritarian response. On the one hand this was due to the lack of state resources to prevent the minimal upward mobility among the lowest castes and groups from appearing to eat into the privileges of the increasingly ambitious propertied. On the other, the caste subordination and expectation of deference which the capitalism of the Indian countryside would still rely on to achieve required levels of super-exploitation is fast disappearing. The support of the middle caste provincial capitalist classes for Hindutva comes both directly, with the BJP being able to absorb them directly into the party, or more usually, indirectly, with the support for the BJP-led coalition government by regional parties based on these classes.

In sum, Conservatism's acceptability, its reputation for greater humanity than other elements of the right, was everywhere always exaggerated. Nevertheless, to the extent that it rested on a dulling of the edge of class conflict, a dulling originally based on the fanciful self-understanding of "gracious" nobility whose own fortunes were in any case being more tightly yoked to those of capitalism, it afforded a semblance of a politics of feudal patronage and later on of the welfare state. With its disappearance, then, the sole "human" face (and it was more usually a mask) of right politics has been lost, and this at a time when,

b) The primary social basis of right politics has expanded enormously in absolute terms and is more powerful in relative terms.

At one level this point is very simple. It lies at the intersection of two obvious ones. There has been an enormous increase in wealth and incomes in the course of the last 50 years and, particularly in the latter half of the period, they have been more and more unequally

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distributed. This has led to an absolute expansion of the classes of property at a global level and a massive increase in their relative power, as a collectivity, against the propertyless classes. In greater or lesser measure this phenomenon can be found in all capitalist liberal democracies, not to mention, globally.

In the advanced capitalist countries where the process of capitalist development is of much longer standing, the expansion among the classes of property as such is less marked. But its true extent is also masked. Many of the claims to the new wealth, which are mediated through new financial structures such as pension funds and mutual trusts are what Robin Blackburn has called "grey" - "not only because it refers to provision for the old, but also because the property rights of the policy holders are weak and unclear" particularly under the present regime trustee law where they are held in trust funds 19. Of course, share ownership without controlling interest was itself the basis, of longer standing, of these less clear property rights. This is the chief form in which the professional classes, particularly, hold "property" in the countries of advanced capitalism, though among them too, the phenomenon is stronger in the two economies where the fruits of growth over the last two decades of the 20'h century have been most unequally distributed, the US and the UK. Not surprisingly, for it has been one of the chief instruments through which this unequal distribution of wealth and incomes has been achieved.

There has also been a general consolidation of support for the right among professionals who are reliant on corporate sector for their incomes and such property as they have or hope to have. On the other hand, those professionals who are in the state and NGO sectors have formed the basis of the move of Social Democracy to the Right.20 The role played by privatisation, which includes the contracting out of many functions formerly performed by the state bureaucracy to private agencies, in increasing the numbers of professionals reliant on private capital is part of this expansion in the social basis of the right. Finally the casualisation of the work of many corporate and state employees, professionals and manual, also makes for the increase in personal uncertainty which expands the potential basis of a more right-wing form of politics among the working classes as well. In this regard, however, it is well to take note of Herbert Kitschelt's finding in his study of radical right wing politics in Europe that "welfare chauvinist" appeals to which these constituencies can be expected to respond actually lack a "structural location in advanced capitalism in which to entrench themselves": "short of a major economic




catastrophe, it appears unlikely that the gradual transformation of Western economies will ever threaten or actually cut free a sufficiently large section of the workforce into unemployment to provoke the rise of significant authoritarian welfare-chauvinist parties. Parties with such appeals may do well for a while in depressed industrial areas or in regional protest elections but rarely on a national scale or for an extended period of time."2' While many sections of the working class in advanced capitalist countries might not be immune to such right wing appeals, the political potential of this option is limited. Right parties, including extreme right authoritarian ones are today generally anti-statist. Of course, the support which the right has enjoyed among certain sectors of state employees, such as the police, for example, or the upper reaches of the bureaucracy is of long standing.

In poor country like India, a capitalist but still predominantly agricultural country, while many of the above processes can be observed in its relatively much smaller modern and urban capitalist economy, the picture as a whole is dominated by a single distinctive phenomenon: the transition in Indian agriculture to capitalist relations of production with all that usually means in terms of concentration of productive assets, increasing inequality and poverty and the cultural transformation of production and consumption. The result is a much clearer and larger relative increase in the numbers of the capitalist propertied, as pre-capitalist forms of property, most especially that in land, have become capitalist and the "middle classes" have expanded by laying disproportionate claim on the new wealth created under an economic policy regime which has become increasingly neo- liberal since the late 1960s. And, though originating in the countryside, this transformation of the countryside has reverberated out from there, politically, economically and culturally, to produce a far more cohesive middle class than the long held opposition of the "traditional" countryside and the "modern" city would lead one to expect.

Initially, in the 1970s, this new addition to the capitalist class took the shape of agrarian parties and non-party farmers' movements in different regions of India demanding state subsidies for inputs into capitalist farming such as fertilizer and electricity and higher state procurement prices for grain, in short, better terms of trade with the industrial sector. In this, largely intra-middle class conflict, the deployment of "urban bias" arguments in a new populism or "new agrarianism" accompanied by a romantic celebration of the authentic

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rusticity of a harmonious pristine "Bharat" pitted against the menacing might of urban and industrial "India"22 was meant, of course, to obscure the fact that the brunt of the initially adverse terms of trade have been borne by the agricultural labourers, whereas prosperous and capitalist farmers have reaped huge cost-plus surpluses on procurement prices geared to the lower productivity of medium and small farmers23. Since then, the terms of trade for a politically assertive agrarian capitalist class have actually bettered themselves now also to the detriment of urban working class, consumers.

It was the rise of regional parties which, however, which reflected the more settled reality of this "rural" bourgeoisie. By the 1990s, if not earlier, it was clear that the character and aspirations of this class were no longer exclusively rural. While the original wealth of this segment was certainly in land, a visitor to any of the hundreds of bustling mid-sized towns and cities of India can tell, their investments are not confined to agriculture:

A typical family of this ....class has a landholding in its native village, cultivated by hired labour, bataidars, tenants or farm servants and supervised by the father or one son; business of various descriptions in towns - trade, finance, hotels, cinemas and contracts managed by other sons; and perhaps a young bright child who is a doctor or engineer or maybe even a professor at one of the small town universities that have sprouted all over the country over the past two decades.24

This class was, therefore, not so much an agrarian bourgeoisie as what Balagopal rightly called a "provincial propertied class"25. The regionalisation of Indian politics, reflecting the states-focussed power base of this new segment of the bourgeoisie, which has become so settled a pattern by the 1990s, revolved as much around demands for more state support for industrial development and employment in general in the regions, as aroung greater support for agriculture. Last but not least, there were the agitations for discrimination in favour of middle castes in government education institutions and employment became such a watershed in Indian politics of the late 1980s. If such "reservation" has now become more or less a non-issue this is as much because all parties have had to bow before these demands and accept them as it has been because, like the older sections of the propertied, the newly wealthy have also learnt to disdain government educational institutions and government jobs. For the neo-liberal dispensation which was contemporaneous with these demands doubly devalued them through lack of funding and the greater size and attractiveness of the private sector for education and jobs.


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The culture and politics of this enlarged capitalist class naturally dominates in a context where the Left, still strong in its regional bases, has been effectively quarantined in them and is now under increasing political pressure. In India, the expansion of this class been the mainstay of both liberalization and globalization and of Hindutva. For although, for a brief moment under the CPM-orchestrated UF government, it appeared that the regional parties, representing a middle caste propertied interest might be opposed to the Brahmanical politics of Hindutva, this supposition overlooked several things. First, any simple rural-urban or agriculture-industry opposition had disappeared with the entry of agrarian capitalists into the urban and industrial economy. Second, while there are distinct provincial and national capitalist classes in the country, the latter form, after all, also the horizon of the ambition of the former. Finally, the cultivating, landed or tenant middle castes were never in any simple sense opposed to Brahmanism but had, throughout history competitively collaborated with it in a pact of surplus extraction as they are now doing in the NDA coalition of the ruling BJP with more than 15 of the regional parties.

This expanded class of capitalist property, whatever its internal tensions, is generally the basis of politics of the right in capitalist liberal democracies. It may be noted here in both richer and poorer capitalist countries, the significance of "family values"and the control of women, whether articulated in religious, secular or national terms in the politics of the right, can be expected to be greater in countries and in sections of society where the significance of the family as an instrument for the concentration and generational transmission of property remains high. But, with the increasing entry of women in the labour force, and with the increasing dependence of households on their incomes even in poor countries, the discourse is actually much more complex (the BJP, for example wants "modern" but not "Western" Indian women) than the atavistic stereotype would lead one to expect, spinning new webs of sexist, if not exactly patriarchal, control around income (and not just child-) bearing women.

The decline of Conservatism as such means that this larger and relatively more powerful right is also meaner. Indeed, the secular rightward shift which this expansion of what Arno Mayer has called the "cartel of anxiety"26 is a lot more intense than it could be because

c) The proneness of this "cartel of anxiety" to the extremes of right politics has been intensified by the high levels of uncertainty generated by the dynamics of capitalism today.

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This phenomenon is now part of the personal experience of individuals the world over and has been extensively analysed by critical scholars of globalization. It has to do with the centrality of the globalization of finance in what is indiscriminatingly understood as the globalization of capitalism itself. In fact it is, for the most part, a globalization of capital, one which, moreover, stands over and against the growth of production and its internationalization through trade, already far more limited than that of finance. With its basis in speculation and short-term time horizons, while it may inflate (and then, naturally, let crash) asset values here and there, has a more pervasively deflationary effect on world capitalist production.

For despite its vocation as expanding abstract value, even capitalist production must always be carried out in and rely on particular natural and cultural contexts and relations even when inter - and intra-firm relations cross borders. Only money, the ultimate real abstraction can attain the abstract context-less self-expansion which its contemporary speculative globalization represents. But precisely such selective asset inflation is the symptom of the contradiction on which it rests. On the one hand, capital's abstract expansion cannot be sustained indefinitely without a necessarily contextual productive expansion, which alone can substantiate its abstract value and on the other, qua abstraction, it undermines the very investment and productive growth which it requires for its realization. This is the contradiction which lies at the heart of the globalization of capital and makes it necessarily an unstable process. Not surprisingly, some elements of the capitalist class add their voice to the analysis of critical scholars when they too call for capital controls.

However, as Peter Gowan has recently shown so well, the process of the globalization of capital is not a secular phenomenon but one geared to maintain and increase the (financial) control and superiority of metropolitan capital over the periphery and even more importantly that of US over the capitals of other countries of advanced capitalism27. The longevity of this phase of globalization of capital will also be dictated by these considerations and not merely secular ones about the productive health of capitalism.

In the meantime, the globalization of capital is experienced by individuals and firms primarily in terms of the extent of uncertainty it wreaks. Its short term and speculative character destabilises established productive relationships and obstructs the stable construction of new ones. Even "well-informed" decisions and actions, whether of capitalists, workers or professionals, whether about

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business or personal finance, become unpredictable in their consequences even as the hedging of risk becomes a vain task in which Nobel Memorial laureates in economics squander the reputation (such as it is) of the prize itself. In such a situation even, or especially, the owners of substantial property and the holders of favourable positions within the asset structure are more uncertain of the security of their hold over it and sharpens punitive, avaricious and authoritarian tendencies among them.

One important consequence of such an architecture of the productive system is that it is also characterised by instability and uncertainty in the relations amongst property-owners. This only exacerbates the fact that, at any time in history,

d) There are divides within this "cartel of anxiety" which, it appears, can only be masked and minimally bridged by cultural nationalism.

Even, or perhaps especially, when all the forms of property are capitalist, there are competing interests among them, both economically and politically. Smaller locally based capitals, for example, have to compete with larger ones and those with multinational linkages, and productive with financial. The various capitalist firms and sectors also compete in the political sphere for state largesse and support, both domestically and in the international sphere of operation of the larger multinational capitals. Such competition has increased rather than decreased as the balance of power has shifted towards capital and away from labour and other social forces 28. Political competition among the parties of the right, which usually means all parties where the left is defeated or marginalised, now mirrors this competition between capitals. But these various sectors of capital are also hierarchically structured in relation to each other in the economic sphere through technological and financial ties of dependence, and in terms of their relative political influence. Not surprisingly then, this political competition takes place without questioning this overall hierarchy. It is about the place of different capitals, within nations and of various national capitals in the international sphere within the unquestioned hierarchy. Neither a national productive nor a national anti-imperialist project, which are usually associated with nationalism can be expected to emerge in such a set up despite the consequences of globalized finance for the productive ecoIiomies the world over and the subject position of the capitals of all countries to those of the advanced industrial countries,

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and ultimately to the capitals and state of the US. In India, until recently, a bourgeois interest against imperialism

was thought to exist. In trying to explain why it no longer manifests itself, Prabhat Patniak and others proposed that the very differences between various sections of capital precludes a coherent national capitalist economic strategy against globalization 29. They confine their argument to backward economies where, they argue, the process of the expansion of the capitalist class takes the form of a Schumpeterian "proliferation of capital", in which newer concentrations of capital necessarily constitute new and distinct sectors of capitalist production, increasing the multiplicity and potential for conflict within the capitalist class itself.

It is not self evident, however, that this applies only to backward economies. Particularly in situations of economic stagnation, such "proliferation" is inevitable in all capitalist economies as both established and emerging sections of capital seek to politically consolidate their positions. At the same time, multiple and competing interests within the capitalist class can only be seen to be the root cause of the surrender to neo-liberalism and globalization if it could be shown that a substantial portion of these fractions of capital have an objective interest in, and a viable strategy for, doing otherwise. The evidence does not support this. Given the complex web of interdependence and hierarchy within the global hierarchy of capitals, national and multinational, even in the case of the more powerful and justly famous distinctive formations of highly productive national capitalisms such as Germany or Japan, the complex hierarchical and differentiated intertwining of technological, financial and political relations between these capitals and corporations and "non-national" ones seem preclude this. The more subordinated position of Indian or third world capitals does put them in a rather different situation vis a vis international capital where the option of exit might be thought to be more appealing. But whatever the level of advancement of capitalism in any country, this option is rarely appealing unless there is political pressure from the non-possessing classes which poses a problem of legitimation which can be solved by the asserting a substantial degree of economic autonomy internationally and focussing on expanding production nationally. Without it, the ties of technological and financial dependence on larger capitalist firms and fractions both within countries and internationally are too compelling.

But politically cultural nationalism, i.e. a nationalism shorn of its civic-egalitarian and developmentalist thrust, one reduced to its

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cultural core, seems to be the only ideology capable of being a legitimising ideology. Two sets of factors converge into this necessity. First, neo-liberalism cannot perform the role since its simplicities make it harsh not just towards the lower orders but give it the potential for damaging politically important interests amongst capitalist classes themselves. Since, as a consequence, the activities of the state on their behalf necessarily exceed the Spartan limits which it sets, these can only be legitimised as "in the national interest". Second, however, the nationalism which articulates these interests is necessarily different from, but can easily (and given its function as a legitimising ideology, it must be said, performatively) mis-recognised as, nationalism as widely understood hitherto. That nationalism was one which is historically associated with the creation of equal citizenship under modern nation-states. Widespread mobilisation which usually accompanied the various national struggles seemed to require that these nationalisms seek productivity and equality at home and challenge the imperialist international order to achieve this. With the quietus of such popular and progressive forces in the politics of most nations, the cultural nationalism of today is neither committed to equality and productivity at home nor to autonomy abroad, but their contraries.

In this form, cultural nationalism does provide national ruling classes a sense of their identity and purpose as well as a form of legitimation among the lower orders. As Gramsci says these are the main functions of every ruling ideology. Cultural nationalism as the cultural core of nationalism is, in every country, usually structured around the culture of the dominant classes, with higher or lower positions accorded to other groups within the nation relative to it. These positions correspond, on the whole, to their economic positions, and as such it provides the dominant classes, and concentric circles of their allies, with a collective national identity. It also gives coherence to and legitimises the activities of the nation-state on behalf of capital or sections thereof in the international sphere. It is today the only ideology which can encompass and express the variety and competition among the interests of the propertied at the national and international levels. It masks, and to a degree resolves, the intense competition between capitals which centres around access to the state for support domestically and in the international arena - in various bilateral and multilateral for a - where it is expected to bargain for the most favoured national capitals within the global and imperial hierarchy. Except for a commitment to neo-liberal and globalizing

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policies, the economic policy content of this nationalism cannot be consistent: Within the country, and internationally, the capitalist system is volatile and the positions of the various elements of capital in the national and international hierarchies shift constantly as must the economic policy of the cultural nationalist governments. It is this volatility which also increases the need for corruption - which is just how competitive access of individual capitals to the state is today recognized.

Whatever its utility to the capitalist classes, e) Cultural nationalism can never have a settled or secure hold on

those who are marginalized or subordinated by it.

Particularly under a neo-liberal regimes, the scope for offering genuine economic gains to the people at large, however measured they might be, is small and getting narrower. This is a problem for right politics since even the broadest coalition of the propertied can never be a majority, even a viable parliamentary plurality. This is only in the nature of capitalist private property. While the left is in retreat or disarray, electoral apathy is a useful political resource but even where, as in most countries, political choices are minimal, the electorate as a whole remains volatile, making necessary very large electoral costs (the other side of corruption in politics today as the examples of the Christian Democrats in Germany or the Conservatives in Britain show), the extensive and often vain use of the media in elections and in politics generally, political compromises which may clash with the high and shrilly ambitious demands of the primary social base in the middle classes, and the instability, uncertainty and disorientation which characterised the politics of right parties in all advanced capitalist despite, nay because of, the triumph of neo- liberalism.

But cultural nationalism provides new instruments for dealing with this situation.. In all countries various degrees and varieties of inclusion in, and othering from, the dominant culture have been employed in the attempt to create viable electoral majorities. These electoral coalitions of support are structured such that the proportion of economic to merely psychological rewards decreases as one goes down the economic ladder, and from the centre to the periphery of the dominant coalition of interests. At the lower end of the economic hierarchy of "cultural" groups among the propertied themselves there is a potential for controlling - stopping or slowing - the upward trajectory of the propertied from othered groups by using their general

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cultural othering as a threat unless and until these groups prove amenable to the terms of the dominant groups. But since their own positions are necessarily, either relatively or absolutely, adversely affected by the rise of such groups, these terms may be ultimately vain, exhibiting, over time, an irrational and escalating character. This is the situation of Muslims in India today, and the recent call from the votaries of Hindutva that they "nationalise" or "Indianise" themselves (which is to say, accept, and not seek to disturb, the cultural, and therefore economic superiority of the predominantly Hindu capitalist classes) is an instance of such demands, as is the recent demands of the German Christian Democrats that immigrants accept the notion of a leitkultur - a leading culture. Among the lower sections of the dominant community too, the proportion of psychological to economic rewards must of necessity be high for they form a "majority" and their economic demands prove hard to fulfill within the current neo-liberal context. Today, with the lowering of the cultural level of the capitalist classes themselves, it is this which makes these lower echelons more prone to virulent right-wing ideological mobilization rather than any meaningful differences in the cultural habitus of the social segments of the coalition of the right as was the case with fascist mobilizations previously.

Cultural nationalism also encompasses and practices ever more finely what used to be called the ethnicized segmentation of the labour market which puts obstacles in the path of a class mobilization. The ideology of cultural nationalism, and particularly the relative positions accorded to various working class groups within the nation constitutes, as Etienne Balibar so clearly noted, a "mechanism for differential reproduction of the labour force". There is "a match between (a) skill grading; (b) proportion of- foreign [or otherwise othered] workers; (c) the various modes of work-force reproduction which allow capital to reduce training and upkeep costs on unskilled workers by bringing them from dominated ('peripheral') regions [within or outside the nation, but always from outside the dominant group] of the world economy, where non-commodity modes of production [but more to the point less commodified forms of reproduction] partly prevail and which lack those 'social rights' that the labour movement of the 'advanced' countries has been able to impose for more than a century"30. Balibar clearly saw the implications of this for the state itself, a loss of its "public" character: "The state in Europe [but not only there] is tending to disappear as a power-centralizing institution, one to which responsibility for policy can be ascribed and which

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exercises 'public' mediation (in both senses of the term) between social interests and forces. We might also express this by saying that we have entered a phase of a new-style 'privatization' of the state, but in the guise of a multiplication and superimposition of public institutions"31. We might just add that it is not only the activities of the state in relation to workers but also, as we noted above, its activities in mediating the interests among the capitalists themselves which imparts to it this new character.

Hindutva in India works, like all cultural nationalisms, by identifying the nation with the economically dominant identity within it - in this case the predominantly "Hindu" capitalist class - and formulating all problems as threats to this nation originating in more or less demonised minorities. The ethnicization of the opposition to the order also serves, as we shall see below, as a strategy of managing the potential for class conflict. Given the elite character of such a nationalism, these can include obstinate subalterns technically within the "dominant community" (say, "Hindu") as well as religious and ethnic minorities. The emphasis may shift from authoritarian and violent marginalization to offers of incorporation. The terms of such offers, despite the "culturalism" of the discourse, are primarily economic terms, of the ruling classes. Of course, the strategy towards each group is different.

The economic and social costs of this form of political economy have been borne by the lowest strata in each country and the level of social and economic distress and disorganization which have resulted mean that

f) There are sizeable constituencies, and not just of the lumpen and the discouraged who can be, and some of whom have been, organised for reaction and extreme-right politics. It would be useful to see these forces in Arno Mayer's terms as counterrevolutionary.

Mayer's work on counterrevolution is complex and insightful. It is also 30 years old now, and, on the left at least, very few of its statements would be considered particularly original. But, its systematic discussion of the politics of the extreme right in its relation to the politics of property more generally is its chief claim to our attention. Most attempts to understand the activities of contemporary extreme right groups have focussed on their similarities or otherwise to fascism and Nazism and that too, on the whole in terms of their respective internal characteristizs. These writings are useful and one would be foolish not to take the internal similarities seriously. But, in

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both respects, Mayer would say the focus is too narrow for proper understanding. What he enables us to do, by contrast, is to see these forces as part of a family of counterrevolutionary phenomenon whose practical results are, moreover, determined more by the surrounding situation than by their intrinsic characteristics. After all, fascism itself in inter-war Europe, as Hobsbawm reminds us, has been part of a larger threat to political democracy from the Right which represented "not merely a threat to constitutional and representative government, but an ideological threat to liberal civilization as such" in which while "by no means all the forces overthrowing liberal regimes were fascist", fascism "inspired other anti-liberal forces, supported them and lent the international Right a sense of historic confidence"32.

Mayer saw counterrevolutionary groups as having a mass base and a leader. Though they often cut into the base of mainstream right parties, they remained different from and, usually, independent of them, "a new but claimant political counterelite". They were tolerated and kept in existence, rather than crushed, precisely because their future utility to the established ruling groups cannot be underestimated, something which Brecht so well brought out in The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui. Commenting on the rise of the new right in the 1960s Michael Kalecki saw the "fascism of our times" in much the same terms, as "a dog on a leash; it can be unleashed at any time to achieve definite aims and even when on the leash serves to intimidate the potential opposition" 33. In our times, however, the threat of challenge from the Left as such is at present minimal. Surely it is only the very volatility of right support among the population at large, the meagreness of the economic concessions which are possible to enlarge and stabilise it, and the furious ambitions and greed of the propertied, which can explain the cultivation and toleration of these groups on the right. It is therefore the hysterical character of capital and capitalist ruling classes which is responsible for them. This is not even a case of what Mayer would call preemptive counterrevolution, rather it would be useful to add another category - hysterical counterrevolution 34.

There are a couple of important points of difference between our times and those Mayer analysed back in 1971. While in earlier times counterrevolutionary organizations often separated distinct segments of society from their allegiance to conservatism, the absence of conservative formations today, as well as the above noted "encanaillement of the possessing classes" means that their constituencies are not so readily differentiated in social terms from

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those of the mainstream right parties. The "toleration" of extreme right groups is, in this context, more akin to an active symbiosis, with parties of the mainstream right endorsing, if in apparently more moderate forms, the discourse and demands of these groups: racist rhetoric and practices are turned into a demand for controlling immigration and immigrants in Europe, for example and anti-Muslim and anti-Christian sentiments are sublimated into a demand that these minorities "nationalize" themselves. Herbert Kitschelt, in an analysis which is correctly informed by attention to the surrounding political context, has shown how the rise of extreme right parties as distinct entities has occurred particularly in those countries where parties of the mainstream right have been less extreme, closer to the centre, though this situation, he observed in 1995, is fast disappearing35. In other countries, these types of politics and often the organizations themselves, are closely linked to the politics of the mainstream right parties or are actively or tacitly tolerated and ideologically encouraged, by them.

In India, with the success of the BJP in convincing most of the capitalist class of its reliability as a political vehicle for them, the interesting thing is that most of the national "counterelite" and much of the mainstream right are in one and the same party and its fraternal organizations, in the BJP and the Sangh Parivar. There are also some notable other regional counterelite organizations, for example the Shiv Sena or the Hindu Munani. They form, collectively, an interlinked formation. Along with other respectable capitalist parties, in particular the parties of the provincial propertied, the regional parties, they form, whether in coalition government or through less formal political links, the formation of the right in the country.

But the solidity of the right is more apparent than real. With the passing of the social basis of genuine conservatism which is also the systematic disappearance of non-capitalist structures of economy, society and culture on which it was based,

g) The forms cultural nationalism, the chief ideology of the right, now takes are bound to be very unstable and volatile.

Although Arno Mayer points out that there are certain consistent themes of counterrevolution: "order, hierarchy, authority, discipline, obedience, tradition, loyalty, courage, sacrifice and nationalism" and that it has an essential ingredient of "combining the glorification of traditional attitudes and behaviour patterns with the charge that these are being corrupted, subverted and defiled by conspiratorial agents

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and influences", (p. 65) on the whole, counterrevolutionary appeals "are not derived from a pre-existent doctrine or ideology..... Counterrevolution is essentially a praxis. Its political doctrine is in the nature of a rationalization and justification of prior actions". (p. 62). This is of a piece with the view, so well articulated by Ted Honderich's Conservatism36, that right wing ideology is usually an elaborate ruse or rationalization, after the fact, of actions which have already been committed or are seen to have become necessary in order to preserve the order of property.

In this sense counterrevolution, or extreme right politics, is only a more popular, mobilising and virulent version of this shifting right ideology. It is especially relevant that many analysts of Hindutva have seen it to have had a strategy originally, when it was formed, and to have worked on the basis of a long term molecular strategy to propagate it and preserve it until it has finally got the reins of power in the country in its hands. This view misses both the actual changeability of this ideology and strategy over time, including the decades when it was more or less in the political doldrums, not to mention its volatility in the face of the imperatives of the politics of power and the politics of support in the 1990s. It also exaggerates its separateness from the dominant ideology of the surrounding society. In fact, it was always linked to the latter's conservative, authoritarian, religious, nationalist and populist currents. And it continues to appropriate more and more of society's figures, symbols and discourses to itself, even the most improbable. Hindutva's attempt to appropriate Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the leading nationalist figure who attempted to represent the cause of the Untouchables and is regarded as the father of India's secular constitution, is of this order37.

Cultural nationalism rests on the ethnic or cultural core which every nationalism has, no matter how large and weighty the civic and developmentalist aspect of that nationalism, the forward face the nationalist Janus. Cultural nationalism is its backward looking face, and has come to predominate as the civic and developmental aspect has waned with popular energies. The cultural core of nationalism has its real, material, basis in the persistence of pre- capitalist and non-commodified (but in all class and patriarchal societies, always hierarchical and potentially authoritarian) social relationships and its utility to the ruling classes lies precisely in the extent to which it culturally legitimises the ruling groups though establishing continuities, real and invented in differing degrees, with ruling groups in the past. As such cultural nationalism is not the

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ideological property of extreme right groups (where it takes its most authoritarian and virulent form) but pervades society more generally.

But even as an ideology of the right, cultural nationalism today exhibits a new changeability and volatility. Not only has the intensification of capitalist penetration, extensive as well as intensive, undermined the real basis of cultural nationalism in pre-capitalist non-commodified social relations it must now be generated more broadly in the structures of cultural production which are specifically capitalist and commoditised. The form it takes is to older eyes, inauthentic - cultural nationalist pop, rock and punk songs, videos, and other cultural commodities (rightly seen as the opposite of culture as hitherto understood). Their effect on the culture they claim to express can only be to mine and undermine what remains of it. And as commodities these cultural products are also subject to endemic ephemerality. Finally, it also offers increasing sectors of the self-same propertied class opportunities for employment and entrepreneurship. It is in this context that the wars over culture versus free trade must be seen - they are wars between different kinds of capitalists, often of the same nation. It is often also in the name of culture in a situation where culture is commoditised and the commodity (both its production and sale) is culturalised: culture it is the basis of the domination of producers, the means through which "material" commodities are marketed and itself a commodity. The climate of late capitalism also, however, makes the life of a given cultural product short and therefore this cultural nationalism moves along on shifting bases and ground, appears very changeable and probably contributes to the very anxiety which further fuels it.

Finally, the surrounding situation faced by these counterrevolutionary groups has never been confined to the domestic. But the international situation since the Break-up of the Soviet Union is that there is now, instead of a bi-polar world, a single international hierarchy of power in the world. In such a hierarchy,

h) The positions taken by elites in the more powerful countries is central and often determinant to the fate of counterrevolutionary forces in less powerful ones.

Internationally, the role of the USA in managing and controlling the international order politically is more apparent than ever despite some talk of a kind of tripolar economy 38. It is also clear that the politics of the right, even in its most extreme forms, is unlikely to result, as in the first part of the 20th century, in war among the major

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capitalist powers. The military imbalance between the US and the rest of the world, including advanced capitalist countries, is simply too great. Moreover, the control which the US exercises over the rest of the world is based not on military power alone but on a complex intermeshing of it with financial power. In this situation, instead of conflict, all countries pursue an international policy of competition and bargaining to gain a more beneficial position for the capitalist interests behind them (not necessarily "national" in the hitherto understood sense of the word) in the world hierarchy. Barring the re- emergence of inter-imperialist rivalries, whose shape in the context of the complex interconnections which now exist between the economies of the leading capitalist powers is difficult to imagine, any significant change in relative positions is now possible only in the Third world and with the explicit concurrence of US-led super imperialism. Most nations in the world are also more open to international influence - both as a possibility and as a necessity for the interfering powers, than they ever were before .

In this context, right politics in every country is also dependent on the support of the US-led "international community". And this support has not precluded support for, or at least tolerance of, extreme right groups and parties. The apparent contrast between the "international" censure of Jorg Haider and the acceptance of the BJP in India must be understood in this context. There is certainly a great deal of Eurocentrism involved in all the discourse about Haider: such a thing, it is said, is not to be tolerated in "civilised" Europe and in India the BJP is passed over in silence. However, a sober view might be that the US has judged that Haider must be tolerated, along with an appearance of censure, as extreme right groups with various degrees of access to structures of state power are in all capitalist liberal democracies. In the case of the BJP, while some of the more extreme actions of its counterrevolutionary forces against particularly Christian minorities has come in for censure, on the whole, it is borne in mind that it is after all at least partly a party of the mainstream right. The arrival of the BJP in power has confirmed that India is now willing to be the lynchpin of the US- guaranteed order in South Asia. In return it enjoys greater impunity for its actions in the region. As such the BJP not only enjoys legitimacy but is also encouraged in its forward foreign policy in the region. But elsewhere too, we have witnessed, for example, in European Italy, the smooth transition of the demagogue and Mussolini admirer, Fini into a "democratic statesman".

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NOTES

1 I would like to thank Colin Leys and Jayant Lele for their comments on an earlier draft.

2 Robert Brenner, "The Economics of Global Turbulence" New Left Review 226, May-June 1998, pp. 41-2.

3 Brian Girvin, The Right in the Twentieth Century (London, 1994) is a useful recent overview.

4 Andrew Gamble, The Conservative Nation, London, 1974. 5 See in particular Goran Therborn, "The Rise of Capital and the Rule of

Democracy" in New Left Review, 103, May-June 1977. 6 Provisionally entitiled, Sea Change: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian

Politics, 7 Any attack of such indulgence can be easily cured by (re)reading Marx's

delightful remarks on the mutual regard of the aristocrat and the capitalist in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 Edited with an introduction by Dirk J. Struik, translated by Martin Milligan, New York, 1964, pp. 122-126.

8 Martin Blinkhorn (ed.) Fascists and Conservatives: The Radical Right and the Establishment in the Twentieth Century, London, 1990.

9 ArnoMayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War, New York, 1981.

10 Ibid., pp. 3-4. See also, Perry Anderson's discussion of the power of England's aristocracy in a comparative European context in "Figures of Descent" New left Review 161 January-February 1987, and in English Questions, London, 1992.

11 Mayer, 1981, p. 9. 12 Ibid, p. 10. 13 Ibid., p. 12. 14 "Origins of the Present Crisis" in English Questions, London, 1992, p. 32. 15 Mayer, 1981, p. 14. 16 Michael Kalecki, "The Fascism of Our Times" in The Last Phase in the

Transformation of Capitalism, New York, 1972. 17 Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, London, 1998, p. 84-5. 18 See particularly his "Hindutva: The Emergence of the Right, Earthworm

Books, Madras, 1995 and "A Welfare State in Crisis: Reflections on the Indira-Rajiv Era", N.K. Choudhry and Salim Mansur (eds.) The Indira-Rajiv Years: The Indian Economy and Polity, 1966-1991, Toronto, 1994. On the decline of "dominance" see also Francine Frankel, "Conclusion: Decline of a Social Order" in Francine Frankel and M.S.A. Rao (eds)State Power and Dominance, Vol. II, New Delhi, 1992 and Oliver Mendelsshon, "The Transformation of Authority in Rural India", Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 27, no. 4, 1993

19 That these assets are now worth $10, 000 billion world-wide and that institutional investment in the US, for example, was 47% of the total market capitalization, give some indication of the relevance of this phenomenon. Robin Blackburn, "The New Collectivism: Pension Reform, Grey Capitalism and Complex Socialism", New Left Review 233, January February 1999, pp. 5-6.


20 Harold Perkin, in his The Rise of Professional Society ( London, 1989) makes this distinction between the economic basis of the two main kinds of professionals and their political proclivities. Colin Leys and Leo Panitch in their The End of Parliamentary Socialism (London, 1998) discuss the social basis of the rise of New Labour. My own Intellectuals and Socialism: "Social Demcorats and the British Labour Party (London, 1994) discusses the nature of the attachment of the older generation of professionals to Labourism and the tensions within this relationship which led to the split in the Labour party in 1981, leading to the creation of the Social Democratic Party. The course of its later splits and merger with the Liberal Party has brought this current to the present Liberal Democrats.

21 Herbert Kitschelt with Anthony McGann, The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis, Ann Arbor, 1997, p. 23

22 See R. Vidyasagar, "New Agrarianism and Challenges for the Left" in T.V. Satyamurthy (ed.) Class Formation and Political Transformation in Post- colonial India, New Delhi, 1996; and T.J. Byres, "Land Reform, Industrialization and the Marketed Surplus: An Essay on the Power of Rural Bias", David Lehmann (ed.) Agrarian Reform and Agrarian Reformism, London, 1974.

23 Prabhat Patnaik, "A Perspective on the Recent Phase of India's Economic Development", Whatever Happened to Imperialism and Other Essays, Delhi, 1995.

24 K.Balagopal,, "An Ideology for the Provincial Propertied Class", Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXII, Nos. 36 and 37, September 5-12, 1987, p. 1546-7.

25 Ibid. Formerly Marxist, Gail Omvedt and Chetana Galla's riposte ("'An Ideology for a Provincial Propertied Class?" Economic and Polittcal Weekly, Vol. XXII, no. 45, November 7 1987) making the argument that these movements reflected the interests not only of capitalist farmers, but of all engaged in agriculture, including landless labourers, reflects the depth of the political confusion caused by the rhetoric the farmers' movements

26 Arno Mayer, The Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe: 1870-1956: An Analytic Framework, New York, 1971, p. 42.

27 Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble: Washington's Faustian Bid for World Dominance, London, 1999

28 Leo Panitch, in particular, has insisted on this in, among others, "The State in a Changing World", Monthly Review, Vol. 50, no. 5, October 1998 and, more recently, in "The New Imperial State" New Left Review (n.s.) 2, March- April 2000.

29 Prabhat Patnaik, C.P. Chandrashekher and Abhijit Sen, "The Proliferation of the Bourgeoisie and Economic Policy" in T.V. Satyamurthy (ed.), Class Formation and Political Transformation in Post-Colonial India, New Delhi, 1996

30 Etienne Balibar, "Es gibt keinen Staat in Europa" in New left Review 186, March-April 1991, p. 13.

31 Ibid., p. 17. 32 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, New York, 1994, p. 112. 33 Kalecki, p. 104 34 Mayer considers the following types: pre-emptive, posterior, accessory,

disguised, anticipatory, externally licensed and externally imposed.

61

62 SOCIAL SCIENTIST

35 Kitschelt, op. cit. 36 Westview Press, Boulder, 1991 37 Jayant Lele, "Restructuring Social Relation in the Age of Predatory

Capitalism: Ambedkar's Buddhism as a Critique of Hindutva". Paper presented at the International Conference on "Recstructuring the World: Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar's Understanding of Buddhism" at the Department of Politics, University of Pune, India, (October 7-9, 1998) mimeo.

39 Michael Hudson's regrettably neglected Super Imperialism : The Economic Strategy of American Empire (New York, 1968) showed that the US government has been central to the management of the world economic system at the international level beginning with the end of the First World War and Peter Gowan ( The Global Gamble: Washington's Faustian Bid for World Dominance, London, 1999) has recently brought this story up to the present state of globalization. It is therefore not just that the role of states in the processes of globalization is central, it is also that capitalist states are organised and directed by the most powerful one among them and the degree of control any state exercises over its destiny, within what is now a single international hierarchy of capitalist states depends on its position within it.

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Issue Table of ContentsProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 105, No. 9 (Mar. 4, 2008), pp. i-viii, 3171-3658, ix-xFront MatterEditorial Note [pp. 1 - 2]The 'Modern' in Modern Indian History [pp. 3 - 32]The Right Politics to Come [pp. 33 - 62]Review ArticlesCollective Mastery in Kerala [pp. 63 - 73]Once Again on the Falling Rate of Profit [pp. 75 - 81]

TributeRemembering Ravinder Kumar [pp. 83 - 92]Pradhan Harishankar Prasad: A Personal Tribute [pp. 93 - 96]

Back Matter [pp. 74 - 82]