Pablo Stefanoni in Lavapiés, Madrid, on January 30. Jaime Villanueva
Is conservatism the new punk?
This is what some of the interested parties affirm, and this anti-system stance, in the face of a left identified (according to the same interested parties) with the
establishment
, is paying off in that political space.
Pablo Stefanoni (Buenos Aires, 52 years old) investigated the matter in his book
Did the rebellion turn right?
(21st Century / Intellectual Key, 2021).
He studied Economics, but never practiced it.
He then earned a doctorate in History and lived for seven years, since 2003, a “moment of revolutionary epic,” in Bolivia, where he directed
Le Monde diplomatique
and was a correspondent for Argentine media such as
Página 2
or
Clarín
.
His doctoral thesis dealt with the 1930s in that country and the regime of “military socialism,” which was imposed after the Chaco War;
a type of military nationalism that introduced the social question and was ambiguous with respect to European fascism.
More information
The new extreme right wants to be very punk (and it is not doing badly)
He is currently editor-in-chief of the magazine
Nueva Sociedad
, a magazine dedicated to thinking about Latin America.
His areas of interest have been, in addition to the new right, Latin American politics and the left, as shown in part of his work, such as
The Revolution of Evo Morales
,
from coca to the palace
(Capital Intelectual, 2006, written with Hervé Do Alto ).
Stefanoni had a relationship with Trotskyism, a relationship that he passed on, but that served as training.
Today he identifies with democratic socialism, he says after speaking at the Ateneo de Madrid in a conference on extreme right and democracy.
Ask.
In other words, you are a social democrat.
Answer.
Well, that term lacks edge, it seems that anyone can say they are a social democrat.
With the current right, perhaps a little less, but a few years ago... There is a democratic socialist tradition that has been lost, more committed to social change, with the idea that reforms can lead to something different from the current capitalism.
Q.
Something like the left wing of the American Democratic Party, with Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
A.
The United States is, perhaps, the only country where there is some enthusiasm for this democratic socialism: the European-style welfare state does not exist there and the right believes that public health is the prelude to communism.
So what could happen in Europe as a social democrat, in the United States, where there has been no socialism, is something fresher, youthful, revolutionary.
A certain anti-system position that no longer exists in the Old Continent.
Q.
Are the Thirty Glorious Years of post-war social democracy the best that a democratic left can aspire to?
A.
Wanting to return to something that already was can make us fall into nostalgia, a common illness today.
The situation has changed: the economy was not delocalized then, the working class was strong;
Now the capital-labor pact with national roots is difficult.
And that nostalgia can lead us to reactionary drifts, even red-brown ones.
It is no longer a class of white male workers, the working class is now more heterogeneous and precarious.
But I think that an agenda on the public has returned that does have potential: health, education, housing, the right to the city against gentrification and touristification.
The fight against inequalities.
Q.
At that time, however, May 1968, revolutionary terrorism, happened...
A.
That shows the ideological shift that has taken place to the right.
At that time, the welfare state seemed insufficient to a good part of the left.
Now the precariousness, the lack of perspective, means that the leftist options beyond socialism demand that, or even less.
Today not even the radical left proposes nationalizations.
It is difficult to think of alternatives, especially in economics.
Q.
And yet, they call it communism.
A.
Calling anything communism is a discursive strategy that has no anchor in reality.
He recovers certain ideas from the Austrian school of Hayek and Mises that said that between social democracy and communism there were only differences of degree.
We live in a parody of the Cold War: we are fighting against a communism that is a zombie.
The expectation is totally pessimistic: nobody believes that the future will be better.
Dystopias are in fashion, and they are very convincing today
Q.
Why do new forms of the right emerge?
A.
One reason is the cancellation of the future.
The expectation is totally pessimistic: nobody believes that the future will be better.
Dystopias are in fashion, today they are very convincing.
Socialism and liberalism are projects for the future.
Since this future does not exist, these new rights emerge.
Q.
What are they like?
R.
Some bizarre leaderships are appearing that at another time would not have had roots.
All countries believe they are exceptions to this right, until they fall into it.
A paradox arises: the left is immersed in its melancholy of loss and, at the same time, the right says that it is the left that dominates the world.
It is a moment that does not satisfy anyone.
Q.
Why?
A.
I think we live in a capitalism that has become very autonomous, and it is contradictory, because culturally it accepts what is called
woke
.
Large companies and international organizations are more or less progressive in the cultural sense, but economically it is a very unequal and precarious capitalism, where a material basis for a decent life is not guaranteed.
So no one likes it, except a small cosmopolitan and liberal minority.
All the right have taken the idea of the dictatorship of political correctness and the appropriation of the system by the left
Q.
The extreme right denounces the triumphant “cultural Marxism.”
A.
Yes, it is the idea that the left lost the economic battle, but knew how to accommodate and win the cultural battle.
There is some truth, but what is said has a conspiratorial dimension, as if the Frankfurt school had been infiltrating the system.
The neoreactionaries of Silicon Valley talk about the cathedral, theorized by far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, which would be the sum of the big media, Hollywood, the Government, the Ivy League universities... They believe that it is like a progressive Matrix, which It generates a totalitarianism that people are not aware of.
The right would offer the red pill to see the Matrix from the outside.
Q.
Are they conspiracy ideas?
A.
Yes, but beyond Yarvin, all the right have taken something from this idea of the dictatorship of political correctness and the appropriation of the system by the left.
But everything is mixed, because the institutions that denounce are not very leftist.
In reality, it is another type of logic that makes a large oil company hire anti-racist activists or Disney adopt pro-LGBT positions... It has more to do with current capitalism than with the left.
Q.
What capitalism is that?
A.
A late capitalism that has been destroying certain more bourgeois or conservative forms of traditional capitalism.
The breakdown of the family, the loss of religiosity or multiculturalism has to do with that.
But on the right they think that the elites are left-wing and that the right represents the common people who rebel.
That's efficient.
The rights are very different from each other, but they share that idea.
I was interested in studying in my book why young people adopt that ideology, why it is 'cool', it is cool, to be right-wing.
Q.
Indeed, in the protests that took place on Ferraz Street, in front of the PSOE headquarters, there was notable diversity on the right.
Some prayed the rosary, others showed neo-Nazi symbols.
United in rebellion.
R.
The right is a sum of many things, even that strange folklore that you point out, that is why I was interested in studying in my book why young people adopt that ideology, why it is
cool
, it is cool, to be right-wing.
All of this was enhanced in the protests during the pandemic or with the assault on the Capitol and that man dressed as a bison, the QAnon conspiracy, the anti-vaccines...
Q.
At the beginning, the Internet seemed like the breeding ground for leftist utopia.
It remained something else.
A.
In
The Rebellion of the Public
, Martin Gurri suggests that there is a confrontation in slow motion between the hierarchies of the industrial world that we knew and the public.
And that is basically expressed on the internet.
Probably no one will win that battle for now, so we see a constant confrontation while many things in that industrial world are weakening, such as political parties, newspapers or companies as we knew them.
Part of that public that rebels is channeled by the right.
And it benefits from trolling techniques, which permeate the public conversation, which becomes polarized.
Q.
It seems that many non-politicized people are assuming the theses of the right as the common sense of the time.
A.
Yes, but I believe that the left also offers resistance.
In recent years, feminism, LGBT and anti-racism have greatly transformed reality and, however, we tend to exaggerate the successes of the right, just as the right exaggerates those of the left.
But it is true that the right is capturing a certain mood of social nonconformity, as fascism captured in the 1930s.
That Disney adopts pro-LGTB positions... It has more to do with current capitalism than with the left
Q.
Why does the right seem more rebellious than the left?
A.
Right now the left's offer of anti-system rebellion is a bit poor and its revolutionary traditions have disappeared.
We don't even read the classical theorists, now is the centenary of Lenin's death, but who reads Lenin seriously today?
Q.
Right-wing guru Steve Bannon reads Lenin, some extreme right reads Gramsci...
A.
It is true, Bannon admires Lenin for that idea of radical change.
Yarvin said you need a Lenin or a Napoleon.
Gramsci is read from the French New Right, because of the cultural battle, to argue with the left at the level of culture.
I don't know if they are going to win it, but there they are, doing their daily trolling, introducing noise, changing the axes of the debate.
Q.
You are Argentine.
Javier Milei is part of these phenomena.
A.
The Milei case, unforeseen, enters into this context of emerging figures who a few years ago would not have a chance.
Milei was not even the figure that big businessmen were waiting for, that was Patricia Bullrich.
She is not a rich businessman like Trump or Berlusconi, but a middle-class economist.
Not all right-wingers fit into rebellion: Orbán doesn't fit in, Vox only sometimes fits in, but Milei fits in very well, with his rocker style and his anarcho-capitalist discourse, which is utopian even for really existing capitalism.
Businessmen do not want to abolish the State, they want in any case to control and use it.
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