The entry of Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party into a coalition government in Austria has been greeted with expressions of horror from the entire spectrum of the ‘legitimate’ democratic political bloc in the Western world. From the social democratic Third Way to the Christian conservatives, from Chirac to Clinton—not to mention, of course, the Israeli regime—all voiced ‘dismay’ and announced a diplomatic quarantine of Austria until the plague should disappear. Establishment commentators naturally hailed this demonstrative reaction as evidence that the anti-fascist consensus of post-war European democracy holds firm. But are things really so unequivocal?

Plain to see, in fact, is the structural role of the populist Right in the legitimation of current liberal-democratic hegemony. For what this Right—Buchanan, Le Pen, Haider—supplies is the negative common denominator of the entire established political spectrum. These are the excluded ones who, by this very exclusion (their ‘unacceptability’ for governmental office), furnish the proof of the benevolence of the official system. Their existence displaces the focus of political struggle—whose true object is the stifling of any radical alternative from the Left—to the ‘solidarity’ of the entire ‘democratic’ bloc against the Rightist danger. The Neue Mitte manipulates the Rightist scare the better to hegemonize the ‘democratic’ field, i.e. to define the terrain and discipline its real adversary, the radical Left. Therein resides the ultimate rationale of the Third Way: that is, a social democracy purged of its minimal subversive sting, extinguishing even the faintest memory of anti-capitalism and class struggle.

The result is what one would expect. The populist Right moves to occupy the terrain evacuated by the Left, as the only ‘serious’ political force that still employs an anti-capitalist rhetoric—if thickly coated with a nationalist/racist/religious veneer (international corporations are ‘betraying’ the decent working people of our nation). At the congress of the Front National a couple of years ago, Jean-Marie Le Pen brought on stage an Algerian, an African and a Jew, embraced them all and told his audience: ‘They are no less French than I am—it is the representatives of big multinational capital, ignoring their duty to France, who are the true danger to our identity!’ In New York, Pat Buchanan and Black activist Leonora Fulani can proclaim a common hostility to unrestricted free trade, and both (pretend to) speak on behalf of the legendary desaparecidos of our time, the proverbially vanished proletariat. While multicultural tolerance becomes the motto of the new and privileged ‘symbolic’ classes, the far Right seeks to address and to mobilize whatever remains of the mainstream ‘working class’ in our Western societies.

The consensual form of politics in our time is a bi-polar system that offers the appearance of a choice where essentially there is none, since today poles converge on a single economic stance—the ‘tight fiscal policy’ that Clinton and Blair declare to be the key tenet of the modern Left, that sustains economic growth, that allows us to improve social security, education and health. In this uniform spectrum, political differences are more and more reduced to merely cultural attitudes: multicultural/sexual (etc.) ‘openness’ versus traditional/natural (etc.) ‘family values’. This choice—between Social Democrat or Christian Democrat in Germany, Democrat or Republican in the States—recalls nothing so much as the predicament of someone who wants an artificial sweetener in an American cafeteria, where the omnipresent alternatives are Nutra-Sweet Equal and High&Low, small bags of red and blue, and most consumers have a habitual preference (avoid the red ones, they contain cancerous substances, or vice versa) whose ridiculous persistence merely highlights the meaninglessness of the options themselves.

Does the same not go for late-night talk shows, where ‘freedom of channels’ comes down to a choice between Jay Leno and David Letterman? Or for the soda drinks: Coke or Pepsi? It is a well-known fact that the Close the Door button in most elevators is a totally inoperative placebo, placed there just to give people the impression they are somehow contributing to the speed of the elevator journey—whereas in fact, when we push this button, the door closes in exactly the same time as when we simply pressed the floor button. This extreme case of fake participation is an appropriate metaphor for the role accorded citizens in our ‘postmodern’ political process. Postmoderns, of course, will calmly reply that antagonisms are radical only so long as society is still—anachronistically—perceived as a totality. After all, did not Adorno admit that contradiction is difference under the aspect of identity? So today, as society loses any identity, no antagonism can any longer cut through the social body.

Postmodern politics thus logically accepts the claim that ‘the working-class has disappeared’ and its corollary, the growing irrelevance of class antagonisms tout court. As its proponents like to put it, class antagonisms should not be ‘essentialized’ into an ultimate point of hermeneutic reference to whose ‘expression’ all other antagonisms can be reduced. Today we witness a thriving of new multiple political subjectivities (class, ethnic, gay, ecological, feminist, religious), alliances between whom are the outcome of open, thoroughly contingent struggles for hegemony. However, as thinkers as different as Alain Badiou and Fredric Jameson have pointed out, today’s multiculturalist celebration of the diversity of lifestyles and thriving of differences relies on an underlying One—that is, a radical obliteration of Difference, of the antagonistic gap. (The same, of course, goes for the standard postmodern critique of sexual difference as a ‘binary opposition’ to be deconstructed: ‘there are not two sexes but a multitude of sexes and sexual identities’. The truth of these multiple sexes is Unisex, the erasing of Difference in a boringly repetitive, perverse Sameness that is the container of this multitude.) In all these cases, the moment we introduce the ‘thriving multitude’ what we effectively assert is its exact opposite, an underlying all-pervasive Sameness—a non-antagonistic society in which there is room for all manner of cultural communities, lifestyles, religions, sexual orientations. The reply of a materialist theory is to show that this very One already relies on certain exclusions: the common field in which plural identities sport is from the start sustained by an invisible antagonistic split.

Of course, even to mention terms like ‘class’ or ‘labour’ is enough to invite the reproach of ‘economic essentialism’ from the postmodernists of the Third Way. My first reaction to the charge is: why not? If we look around the world today, we soon see how handy a dose of this out-of-date way of thinking can be. The lands of former ‘socialism’, which the ideology of the moment still finds so hard to assign to their place in its scheme of things, offer particularly rich examples. How else should we conceive the connexion between the two mega-powers, the United States and China, for example? They relate to each other more and more as Capital and Labour. The US is turning into a country of managerial planning, banking, servicing etc., while its ‘disappearing working class’ (except for migrant Chicanos and others who mainly toil in the service economy) is reappearing in China, where a large proportion of American goods, from toys to electronic hardware, are manufactured in ideal conditions for capitalist exploitation: no strikes, little safety, tied labour, miserable wages. Far from being merely antagonistic, the relationship of China and US is actually also symbiotic. The irony of history is that China is coming to deserve the title of a ‘working class state’: it is turning into the state of the working class for American capital.