The disparate alliance of far right thought – in which xenophobia, racial eugenics, and gender traditionalism are married with a critique of financial capital and cultural alienation – with increasing frequency finds another strange bedfellow. It is the ideology of gender critical feminism, and it makes Felix del Campo’s intervention the more timely. A Spectre is Haunting Europe maps a logic of far right ideology: one in which financial capital, along with a spectral version of gender, are represented as corruptions of a naturalised past.

Reversion to an ostensibly pre-capitalist mode of social organising is presented as the only alternative to crises of finance and traditional gender. In a discussion of academic far right thought, del Campo establishes a relation between the far right critique of late capitalist culture, in which social bonds have been broken and subordinated to the valorisation of capital, and the consequent political urge to return to the family and the race as primary forms of subjectification and social organisation.

Transness appears here as a “phantom,” symbolising not only the breakdown of the racialised biological family but also a broader detachment of culture and economy from what fascists construe to be natural modes of living.

In a closely related essay, ‘The Eradication of Talmudic Abstractions’, Joni Alizah Cohen observes a “fetishisation of the concrete” in Nazi thought. That is, Nazi ideology rests on an assumption that the present characteristics of commodities and bodies are intrinsic to their physical forms. There is an inability to see social relations at work in the production of goods and in the behaviours and organisation of bodies, and it carries implications for the Nazi view of race, gender, and capital.

In the far right economic critique, the capitalist organisation of productive labour is taken to be a presocial given. Financial capital, on the other hand, appears as a separable and parasitic sphere. But, as del Campo reminds us, the type of productive labour fascists fetishise is a historical product beholden to a specific set of social circumstances, in which production is organised to the benefit of a bourgeois class and performed by a working-class who sell their labour to survive.

It is in these conditions that the value form can take hold of production. Further, the capitalist production process is dependent on finance. The far right would believe that the abstract sphere of finance is detached from productive labour, and that the labour they naturalise is really autonomous, as opposed to understanding finance as a necessary offshoot of historically specific capitalist production.

In this framework, productive labour organised in a capitalist form is understood to be the correct and natural order and contrasted with finance as an unnatural abstraction. Similarly, fascism conceives of a biological sex binary with built-in social predispositions and roles and contrasts it with the unnatural abstraction of ‘gender’; the fetishised view of productive labour is, Cohen observes, homologous to the fetishisation of biological sex. On this, del Campo writes:

The far right links the operations of gender, considered an ideological mystification, to a more fundamental transformation in the relations of production. In their narrative, Transness appears as the ideological form of a deeper structural shift: the autonomisation of the sphere of circulation from that of production. In the cycle of industrial capital, circulation takes the form of money and commodity capital. What the dissolution of gender signals is the prevalence of capital as a self-reinforcing cycle of unproductive accumulation—operating, they claim, not just apart from but in opposition to productive capital. This leads us back to the producerist worldview that underpins far-right political economy.

The performance of gender roles leaves a mark on the body; it conditions the ways we schematise, perceive and interpret the body, hiding social relations inside our fetishised perception of biological sex. This is true even as gender simultaneously reveals its own arbitrariness outside of the body, its own constructedness.

The result is a body whose physical and behavioural traits, as well as role, are interpreted in a gendered way (as sex), which is to say they are interpreted in a manner based on the operations of gender. Meanwhile, gender itself, as a set of social expectations and stereotypes, can be disavowed as a construct.

Although the far right frame themselves as ‘anti-gender’, they nevertheless espouse gender roles; but they do so under the pretense of supposedly biologically determined sex roles. The operations of gender as a role-shaping construct therefore result in a worldview wherein, in Cohen’s words, “gender is understood as a social construction (an abstraction), but the naturalisation of sex is redoubled”.

The gendered expectations built into one’s perception of the body (as so-called biological sex) are able to elude interrogation, and gender is considered to be a social construct built on top of the “natural and transhistorical substratum” of biological sex.

The dichotomy of gender and sex, as well as that of finance and productive labour, is reminiscent of the place of the Jewish diaspora within Nazi mythology. Nazi ideology tied critiques of global finance to antisemitic tropes originating in turn-of-the-century German eugenics.

As Cohen describes, Jewish people – a scattered diaspora who were construed to be “without roots” in any homeland – were conflated by the racist eugenicist framework, with the abstractions of global financial capital. Nazis identified Jewish people with financial capital as “rootless” and abstract, apparently detached from the nation-state in the same way that financial speculation appears to be detached from productive labour.

Xenophobia and Financial Crisis

Jewish people, as writes Cohen, “became a perfect candidate to represent the transnational abstraction of the capitalist world-system” because they did not have a territory in a frame that understood races via territories, then perhaps it could be said that Muslim people – treated as a de facto ethnic group within European and North American countries, despite not being originally locatable in one single part of the world – hold a similar position within the ideology of contemporary fascism as a symbol of global, financial capitalism. Islam is taken both to describe an ethnic group and a far-reaching, transnational ideology. It is subsequently identified with financial capital.

In a speech given in Marbella, Spain (also cited by del Campo), the far right now Prime Minister of Italy Giorgia Meloni offers that immigration – by which it is implicitly meant the immigration of Muslim people – is done in the interests of “great economic concentrations.” The phrase reduces (it abstracts) concrete economic entities down to the fact of being concentrated, the fact of being a cluster of financial activity; the economic concentrations are framed as a faceless and nameless accumulation.

What Meloni is targeting here is not quite the wealthy firms or the wealthy class who profit from them, but the inhuman concentrations of capital itself, the process by which economic activity is organised. For Meloni, the process is identical to the process by which immigrants arrive in European countries.

Within liberal capitalism, oppression for many workers is diffuse and intangible. Negative freedom, the freedom from direct personal oppression, is accompanied by the need to sell one’s labour-power to survive. What is restrictive is often not a particular person or institution, but the economic situation – that of alienation from the means of production – that is continually reproduced in the process of capital valorisation.

In a crisis of overproduction, as described by del Campo, freedom is restricted not by any particular agent but by an impersonal force, a structural inevitability as firms are compelled by competition to overproduce and investors consequently abandon productive sectors of the economy:

The treadmill of production and the competition between capitalists compel an increase in labour productivity through a constant increase in the production of commodities. This, in turn, reduces the magnitude of surplus value realised through each commodity in exchange, pushing individual capitalists towards overproduction […]

On top of this, as profitability slackens both across manufacturing and services, an excess of capital in the form of money seeks quick valorisation turnouts through speculative channels instead.

Similarly, a crisis event like a recession can occur beyond the intentions of any economic agent. In the UK a cost of living crisis is deepened by firms which are incentivised, within a broad financial structure, to raise prices to raise and preserve their profit margins; firms which fail to raise their price are soon corrected by investor activity.¹

Corporations reroute their profits into buybacks and dividends so that they can retain shareholders, in the process reducing their liquidity and thereby making themselves more fragile and vulnerable to economic shocks; and – as one final layer of abstraction – all this is only clearly conveyed to the consumer in the form of a higher price tag at the supermarket.

Capital is a supra-personal and unaccountable machine, and crisis is experienced not as a direct personal oppression but rather as an impersonal force gripping the economy. Narratives which blame specific groups of people become particularly compelling in this context; and Meloni’s speech not only makes scapegoats out of immigrants, but does so while identifying these immigrants with an abstract economic process. It is an object lesson, then, in far right co-option of economic alienation, the redirection of awareness of capitalism’s internal contradictions into xenophobia.

Fascist Reversion

Transness, observes del Campo, is positioned in such a way that it overlaps with, and therefore exemplifies, far right critiques of cultural commodification and finance. Hence it is treated as a spectre. Transness itself is conflated with finance: fluid, spreading, and unrooted in the sense that it is supposedly separate from the sphere of which it used to be a part, that of sexual reproduction. ‘Gender ideology’ is represented as a form of commodified culture, libidinal and detached from social obligations tied up in reproduction; and for the far right, reproduction is the purpose and teleology of sexual dimorphism. Thus Cohen writes that:

For National Socialism, the primacy of sex is reinforced in opposition to the ‘Talmudic abstractions’ of multiple and fluid genders then cast as the pernicious force which seeks to dominate and even erase the sensuous, simple and concrete sexual dimorphism and the natural binary gender roles which flow from it. […]

Further, [the trans woman] represents the worst excess of the cultural degeneration of modernity and contemporary capitalism.

The products of late capitalism – transness and finance, for instance- are identified with one another, and contrasted to the purportedly natural order. This natural order is taken to stem from the intrinsic physical qualities of labour products, whose capitalist values have been fetishised, as well as the intrinsic physical qualities of the racialised and sexed body.

There is, on one hand, the fiction of pure domains of the past, unmixed and uncorrupted, each directed according to the intrinsic properties of the objects it contains: natural genders, races, and nations. On the other hand there is the blaming of later corrupting influences and mixtures, which are taken to have corrupted the essence of the domains of the fetishised past: these corrupting influences include immigration, miscegenation, transness, consumerism, commodification, and finance.

Trans Bricolage

Within far right discourse which frames itself against the phantom of ‘gender’, transness is taken to be an aesthetic and superficial (‘deceptive’, ‘delusional’) regime; this is so because the far right cannot conceive of traditional sex roles as having a socially contingent political dimension. Therefore the reconfiguration of bodily and social sexed forms in transition is taken instead to be an unmooring of signifiers, now nothing more than mere shallow aesthetics, separated off from the intransigent biologically determined norms which they are supposed to signify.

But transness does not and cannot escape or unmoor itself from normative sexual roles, for the precise reason that these roles and bodily arrangements are mutable. Transition is always in dialogue with sex as a normative social binary, drawing meaning from the latter even while labouring to carve new social modalities. Transness, writes del Campo, “bears the mark of the condition of dependency, under which transition materially and socially takes place.” One cannot will oneself out of socially existing gendered codes, either as modes of behaviour or as modes of being perceived.

There is no immediate escape from gendered interpretation, or from gendered socialisation, and there is no mode of behaviour that does not carry gendered implications. This is especially so for trans people, who are dependent on the approval and recognition of entrenched classes of gender traditionalist gatekeepers in healthcare, parliamentary politics, and law, and are therefore required to navigate traditional gender roles as a condition of survival.

Therefore transness, rather than neatly detaching itself from the sexual binary, maintains its relation to sexual norms through historically contingent group efforts in forging new behavioural, bodily, and aesthetic configurations from and within an inherited context.

Trans people, as Noah Zazanis writes in his essay ‘Social Reproduction and Social Cognition’, do not escape from gendered socialisation but rather create new group contexts in which a person’s gender can be recognised and socialised differently. A trans circle is a means of collective production of gender out of the semiotic materials close at hand. Transness is a bricolage, so to speak, working as it does with the available raw materials of gendered behaviour and signification; it is a rearrangement of, or movement through, inherited sociopolitical forms.

Citing the work of Emma Heaney, Del Campo’s article discusses cisness as an ideology, deployed in gender struggle at regular points in capitalist cycles. When, in times of crisis, for instance after periods of overproduction, capital accumulation fails to produce the commodities that people need, more unwaged reproductive labour is demanded to fill the gaps; such labour is disproportionately carried out by women. Additionally, when more people are unable to meet their needs, more people become financially dependent and exposed to violence. So gender roles are reinforced periodically within the cycle of capital accumulation, through the mechanisms of gendered financial dependence and gendered labour exploitation.

Consequently, there is an intensified struggle over gendered labour and gendered violence; it is, among other things, an ideological struggle over the roles of men and women, and the boundaries delineating the one from the other. The ideology of cisness is one way of resolving such ideological conflicts. This it achieves by reasserting the social significance of sex, where sex has “abrogated” social roles involving women’s labour.

Cisness as an ideology bridges fascism and gender critical feminism. In gender critical thought, the most explicitly harmful aspects of gender – for example, belittling and violent misogynistic stereotypes – are attributed to gender as an abstract and absurd social form to be dismantled. Meanwhile the less explicitly and directly harmful aspects of gender – for instance, the so-called complementary roles wherein a man performs waged labour and a woman performs unwaged reproductive labour – are reified in the body and naturalised as sex.²

When gender critical feminists do not naturalise social roles de jure with the idea that roles are directly biologically determined, they still naturalise social roles de facto, with the concept of unilinear and binary gendered socialisations which are schematised to correspond strictly to assigned sex at birth. It follows that gender critical feminism is united with fascism in the aim of, in Cohen’s words, “[protecting sex] from the pernicious abstractions of gender.”

Fantasy in a Desert of Thought

Cisness as an ideology, then, functions as one way to reroute people’s activity into the strict confines of production and reproduction of value. Indeed the far right critique of capital is narrow, its alternative visions hollow and meagre; fascism contains people’s resentment of liberal capitalism even as it constrains their ability to imagine a meaningfully different world. But “the possibility to change the materiality and social signification of sex,” for del Campo,

signals an autonomy afforded by the malleability of “human nature” and realised through our capacity to shape the world around us, and our social constitution.

As an alternative to capitalist anomie, the far right props up the family model belonging to an earlier period of European capitalism. It responds to capitalist production of culture by attempting to eugenically organise culture, reasserting the social field in the form of a white race participating in a battle for racial dominance. It addresses struggle over gender roles by centring its racial project in the heteronuclear family as the maintenance point of ethnic biology and culture; and it responds to financial crises of social reproduction by subordinating the economy to the interests of a racial state.

For del Campo, fascism aims to violently remove the abstractions of contemporary capitalism and return to what it imagines is a pre-capitalist way of living, consisting of several relatively self-directing natural spheres – an ethnic community, for instance, and a natural regime of biological sex – all guided by a racial state. The fascist economic project takes financial capital to be its primary target, and aims to use the state to return to an economy of productive labour, still driven by the value form; but as del Campo observes:

In doing so, it resets the conditions for the rule of money to strengthen its hold on the reproduction of life on earth.

To accept the capitalist assignment of value – or sex, or ethnicity – as objective and presocial is to limit our scope of possibility. The far right is able to gain power to the extent that genuine alternatives offered by the left are ruthlessly excluded from the domain of the possible by the capitalist state. What must be reasserted as a possibility is the collective organising of production, including cultural production, on the basis of shared humanity and claim to the fruit of labour.

The power of the left is in being able to articulate a real alternative to capitalist alienation, sexual binaries, and the ethnically organised nation-state. The contradictions within capitalism, gender, and nationhood are not to be addressed by reverting to a bygone period of differently organised dominance; they are resolved only through the collective building of new social relations.

We are apparently offered a decision between liberal alienation and fascist return. But capital and its products are neither natural nor unnatural at any stage, rather, they are historical; to say this is to insist on a world that explodes the false choice of late capitalism.

Footnotes

1. Will Dunn. 2023. The age of greedflation.
2. Abigail Shrier. 2020. Irreversible Damage, pp.192-3.

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