Stuck in American exile in 1941, Karl Korsch surveyed the success of the Blitzkrieg on Greece and tried, heroically, to offer a socialist interpretation. The German offensive, he wrote in a letter to Bertolt Brecht, expressed ‘frustrated left-wing energy’ and a displaced desire for workers’ control. Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt summarized Korsch’s position as follows:

. . . in their civilian life, the majority of the tank crews of the German divisions were car mechanics or engineers (that is, industrial workers with practical experience). Many of them came from the German provinces that had experienced bloody massacres at the hands of the authorities in the Peasant Wars (1524-1526). According to Korsch, they had good reason to avoid direct contact with their superiors. Almost all of them could also vividly remember the positional warfare of 1916, again a result of the actions of their superiors, in whom they had little faith thereafter . . . According to Korsch, it thereby became possible for the troops to invent for themselves the Blitzkrieg spontaneously, out of historical motives at hand.

It is tempting – and consoling – to view the recent riots in Britain through this lens. In regions that were once hotbeds of Luddite agitation and labourite self-organization, the old demand for workers’ control now seems to have been perverted into xenophobic violence, a longing to overthrow the bourgeois regime replaced by an attempt to smash its weakest subjects. One wants to believe, with Korsch, that behind the mask of reaction there is still some potentially emancipatory profile.

In his recent Sidecar article, Richard Seymour ably circumvents this economism. He insists that the unrest should not be understood in terms of wrongly sublimated left-wing libido, but as an expression of late-capitalist rot. Not an insurgency to be redirected, but an impulse to be quashed. The essentials of his diagnosis are inarguable: that the class composition of the rioters was not homogenously proletarian, that they were not responding to events representing any real ‘immigrant threat’, that their actions were incited by both the political class and digital ‘lumpencommentariat’, and that the concatenation owes more to feverish misinformation than to the authentic grievances of the dispossessed.

Seymour is also correct to note the contemporary character of the riots – flash mobs of a newly networked far right, rather than a return to Freikorps militancy. Hitler and Mussolini promised to forge colonial empires of the kind their French and British competitors had acquired long ago. Their ambition was to break down borders, not to reinforce them. Today’s far right, by contrast, seeks to shield the Old World from the rest of the globe, conceding that the continent will no longer be a protagonist in the twenty-first century, and that the best it can hope for is protection from the postcolonial hordes.

Seymour’s account is easier to fault for what it does not say than for what it does. Granted, the riots are no twisted expression of ‘material interests’. But this should not lead us into a form of superstructuralism that represses the economic roots of the current crisis. The word ‘austerity’ does not appear in Seymour’s piece; ‘region’ features only once, even though practically all the riots took place in areas hit hard by Cameron’s cutbacks, many of them counted among the poorest in Northen Europe. If a Korschian outlook can lapse into lazy apologism, there is also a species of anti-economism which risks obscuring the social terrain and thereby relinquishing the prospect of changing it. To understand the flammable situation at which the pyromaniac far right has taken aim, we need less mass psychology and more political economy.

In focussing on the ‘perplexing passions elicited by race and ethnicity’, for instance, Seymour neglects how economic factors underpin the peculiarly schizoid status of immigration in British public life. Powellism, as Tom Nairn once noted, was an elite reaction to an industrial strategy that relied on workers from the former empire. (The ‘rivers of blood’ speech was mainly a response to the Wilson government’s attempt to halt discrimination in public-service provision.) This supply of labour remained essential in the wake of deindustrialization, as demographic expansion became necessary to sustain the rising service sector. Despite all its rhetorical bombast, the Conservative Party has done nothing to change this fragile growth model. It did not reduce immigration figures over the last decade, nor articulate even the mildest English equivalent of Bidenist ‘reshoring’.

Popular dissatisfaction has meanwhile been rising since at least the late 2000s, with a creeping sense at the lower end of the labour market that although immigration does not cause low wages, it remains an indispensable part of the low-wage regime to which the policy elite is committed. What we have witnessed in recent weeks is the explosion of that discontent in the ‘hyperpolitical’ form that dominates the 2020s: agitation without durable organization, short-lived spontaneism without institutional fortress-building. That the UK’s majoritarian electoral system cannot process the rise of these far-right forces might be another subterranean driver of the street violence: if they cannot achieve stable parliamentary representation, as elsewhere in Europe, then extra-parliamentary activity becomes fatally attractive.

Today’s neo-Powellism is an attempt to rhetorically manage and contain this contradiction at the heart of British financialization: an economy dependent on cheap labour for its meagre growth rates, unable to deliver meaningful productivity, with a population that increasingly wants the state to mount some kind of systemic intervention. Added to that economic backdrop are other, more twenty-first-century factors: the falling price of cocaine, which is no longer merely consumed in law firms and nightclubs but also at sports matches and in pubs; the suppression of British football hooliganism, which has siloed more young men into the milieu of the far right – a world that mainly exists online, but in which nocturnal terror squads provide at least a fleeting sense of social collectivity.

There is also the international dimension. Is it surprising that a nation which styles itself as an attack dog for a declining imperial hegemon, and unconditionally supports genocide in the Middle East, would see such belligerence ricochet on the domestic front? The UK, having normalized the ongoing attempt to exterminate a surplus population in Israel and solve the Palästinenserfrage once and for all, has given a strong impetus to those wishing to enact anti-Muslim violence here at home.

Unlike the dominant varieties of antisemitism, anti-Islamic sentiment does not usually engage in projections of global omnipotence. Instead, it casts the Muslim as a dangerously ambiguous figure. In the zero-sum world of late capitalism, their ability to retain a minimum of communal cohesion is seen to have better equipped them for labour market competition. Rather than a fear of the other, anti-Muslim feeling is a fear of the same: someone in a position of equal dependence on the market, yet who is thought to be more effective in shielding themselves against its onslaught. Simultaneously, the Muslim is also seen as a subaltern agent of the abstraction which finance has inflicted on world of post-war stability: someone who is out of place, who is causing ‘borders and boundaries to erode’, as Seymour puts it.

In 1913, Lenin controversially claimed that behind the Black Hundreds – the reactionary monarchist force which gave the world the notion of ‘pogromism’ – one could detect an ‘ignorant peasant democracy, democracy of the crudest type but also extremely deep-seated’. In his view, Russian landowners had tried to ‘appeal to the most deep-rooted prejudices of the most backward peasant’ and ‘play on his ignorance’. Yet ‘such a game cannot be played without risk’, he qualified, and ‘now and again the voice of the real peasant life, peasant democracy, breaks through all the Black-Hundred mustiness and cliché’.

There is no repressed emancipatory core to the riots, no ‘energy’ which can be recuperated. In this sense, the kind of desperate hope that Korsch read into the Blitzkrieg must be abjured. But beneath British pogromism still lies a universe of misery which it is the left’s historic task to negate. Successful strategies for doing so are in short supply. A-to-B marches, of the type which now take place in London every month, can be a useful way to assert a political line. They remain a minimum requirement of socialist politics. But they are inadequate to occupy the void that is now being colonized by the neo-Powellite right. In Seymour’s depiction, this world often falls by the wayside. The left must make sure it stays in focus.

Read on: Tom Nairn, ‘Enoch Powell: The New Right’, NLR I/61.