From Class Solidarity to Cultural Solidarity: Immigration, Crises, and the Populist Right

chapter 12 From Class Solidarity to Cultural Solidarity: Immigration, Crises, and the Populist Right

Ferruh Yılmaz

A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Islam and Muslim immi- grants. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Social Democrats, Liberal Democrats, Conserva- tives, Socialists, right-wing Populists, Feminists, all types of progressives and radicals, social workers and the [previous] Pope. Where is the opposition party that has not been decried as “soft on immigration” by its rivals in power? Where is the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of “misunderstood tolerance,” against the more ad- vanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? Paraphrased from marx & engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848 ∵

Introduction

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto (1948, 9). Although class is not an originally and exclusively Marxist term, its contem- porary use has its origins in Marxism. Working class denotes those who share common economic interests vis-à-vis the capitalist class that exploits the workers. In Marxist theory, people’s class positions are determined by their positions in the relations of production: those who own the means of production belong to the capitalist class; and those who sell their labour to the capital- ists form the working class. Then there is the petty bourgeoisie which owns or rents small-scale businesses with a few or no employees. Marxists have been grappling with the difficult task of placing people who do not fit within the class structure of capitalism. According to Marx and Engels, the development of the manufacturing system and opening up new markets produced the modern capitalist society on

From Class Solidarity to Cultural Solidarity 199 the ruins of feudal society but the new society has not done away with class antagonisms: on the contrary, it has brought into existence the modern working class which has the historical task of doing away with the antagonism. Marxist theory teaches us that the common interests of the working class are determined by their exploited position within the capitalist relations of production and they can only be free when they take over the means of production and collectively own them. This will get rid of the capitalist class and the end point will be a classless society. On the other hand, we know that many working class members support po- litical parties that represent the interests of the capitalist system. Especially during the last few decades in Europe, the ‘working class’ abandoned the social democratic parties and shifted their allegiance to the populist far right parties that have become the ‘real’ working class parties of the new millennium. Trump, too, received a substantial support from the American ‘working class’ people even though he is a representative of the antagonistic class and his economic policies clearly clash with ‘working class’ interests (e.g. tax breaks for the wealthy or further deregulation of the corporations and environmental protections). Can we merely explain it as ‘false consciousness’?1 This chapter offers an al- ternative view of belonging that may explain why so many ‘working class’ people support the populist far-right parties in Europe, Trump in the us, Islamist populists in Turkey and Malaysia, or populist Hindu nationalists in India, although they all have an economic agenda that is supposed to conflict with their own interests. The main argument is that how people conceive their interests and thus sense of belonging in a particular historical conjuncture is not neces- sarily determined by their economic position (i.e. class position) but by whom they come to see as the main adversary. The nature of the antagonism between a social group and the adversary will also determine how the common interests of the group are imagined. The antagonistic force may be seen as a threat

1 ‘False consciousness’ is a term that attempts to explain why the working class does not revolt against the conditions of oppression. It means that members of a subordinate class do not re- alise what their real class interests are as the ideologies produced by the dominant class that owns the means of cultural production conceal and obscure the realities of oppression and exploitation. Marx himself did not use the phrase but his writings, especially in The German Ideology (1970), lay the ground for the concept of false consciousness. According to Marx, one’s ideology is dependent on the material conditions under which a person lives. Since a person’s social class is determined by his or her position within the system of production relations, it must be a false consciousness that prevents the working class from seeing their real interests and overthrowing the system of their oppression.