The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  The Language of Balance: How the Far Right Hollows Out Democracy from Within There is a particular kind of political theatre playing out across the democratic world, and it requires a careful eye to read. Watch what the far right says, and then watch what it does. The two will rarely be the same. A movement that has spent decades organising against the very idea of pluralism now speaks fluent democracy. A movement whose foot soldiers march in the streets calling for the cleansing of the nation now legislates from cabinet rooms, draped in the vocabulary of fairness, balance, and freedom. The extremism has not gone anywhere. It has merely learned the password. This is the communicative inversion at the heart of the contemporary far-right project, and it is the secret of its success. The street-level violence of the Proud Boys, the dogwhistles of Hindutva cadres, the muttered grievances of settler colonial nostalgists in Aotearoa New Zealand — these have not been disavowed by the ...

Authoritarian capitalism, the collection of authoritarian techniques of consolidating power and control in the hands of the ruling class in order to serve the hegemonic interests of capital, is in its basic character bad for human health and wellbeing (one certainly does not need a pandemic to support this claim empirically, more on this in a later blog post). Paradoxically, authoritarian capitalism is often sold by the ruling global capitalist class as the epitome of efficient and clean governance. Transnational media, driven by the ideology of profiteering and owned by the transnational capitalists heavily invested in the ongoing expansion of the reach of global capital, hold up authoritarian capital as the mecca of good governance. Transnational organizations such as the various arms of the United Nations (UN, from World Bank to World Health Organization), having been thoroughly co-opted into the infrastructures of global capital over the last three decades, prop up exemplars of au...