If the contemporary European far right were to rewrite The Communist Manifesto, they would likely begin their account of contemporary “globalist” ills with that very statement. For the far right, transmisogyny expresses a form of righteous violence against a world where things have gone out of joint. In 2022, at the height of alt-right culture wars, Nick Adams—a self-proclaimed “alpha male,” endorsed by Trump and one of the manosphere’s many internet trolls—tweeted: “It starts with Fortnite and boneless wings. It ends with gender pronouns and communism.” The statement is as absurd as it is tragic, and, I regret to say, it synthesises perfectly how the contemporary far-right maps the operations of the spectre of gender onto society.
Similar utterances populate the more serious speeches of far-right political leaders and have turned into state ideology. That same year, Giorgia Meloni—soon to become Italy’s far-right Prime Minister—spoke at an event in support of Santiago Abascal and Macarena Olona, president and regional candidate of the Spanish far-right party Vox respectively[1]. Meloni began by denouncing “globalisation without rules and the triumph of the financial economy above the real economy”, which she identified as the principal forms of contemporary social domination. She went on to attack Greta Thunberg’s “ecological ideology,” claiming it would subordinate Europe’s socio-economic future to the imperialist interests of China and Russia.
Only the far right’s anti-globalist programme, she argued, was capable of defending labour by protecting indigenous entrepreneurs—the supposed source of European vitality and wealth. Promptly, she turned to “gender ideology,” denouncing it as part of the “dominant ideology” promoted by hidden forces. As she put it, it was “the attempt to give a high motivation to sinister interests, to destroy identity, the centrality of the person, the achievements of our civilisation, in order to fatten the big multinationals of the undifferentiated, of the synthesised, of the wealth that a few have in the skin of the many.”
Meloni’s utterance is powerful in how it entangles the full spectrum of the far-right critique of globalisation with a critique of gender ideology. The turning of bodies into wealth—“wealth in the skin of the many”—illustrates how, in a move common across contemporary far-right discourse, she reframes feminist, queer, decolonial, and anti-racist struggles as vectors of neoliberal domination. In Meloni’s account, gender ideology threatens to dissolve “woman” as defined by “motherhood,” contributing to the rise of an “undifferentiated individual”—one she quickly identifies as “masculine.” This is her rendering of a politics rooted in the recuperation of a gender polarity through maternalism, a stance historically consistent with far-right ideologies and now perversely racialised as a response to Italy’s declining birth rate.
For Meloni, defending women means protecting them from migrants—welcomed, she claims, by the left—who not only threaten “our women” but also our jobs. This, she argues, creates a new “slavery” at the hands of “big economic concentrations,” to which Europe’s indigenous labour is subjected. Only Brothers of Italy and Vox, she concludes, can “defend the freedom of people, the rights of workers, and the wealth that businesses create when they are allowed to operate and hire.”
The “fears” awakened by the spectre of gender, which Meloni so eloquently weaves into her party’s worldview, are particularly capacious. They serve to link disparate contemporary phenomena into a single overarching explanatory cause. Judith Butler has appropriately referred to the operation of Gender as a “phantom”, and ideological field capable of giving form to a “multitude of modern panics”[2]. Thus, Butler states, one finds “that gender steals identities, that it is fakery, that it is a form of colonisation, that it invades the public sphere like unwanted migrants, that it represents the rise of totalitarian powers, or that it marks the extremes of hyper-capitalism.”
For the far right, the empty, thirsty, dangerous abstraction called “Gender”—and the social transformations it is said to bring—becomes the salient feature of a society colonised by neoliberal financial global elites. In this account, the “spectre of gender” expresses the dark underside of a global liberal order consolidated under U.S. imperialist strategies after World War II, further eroding Europe’s geopolitical position as a global actor. But how does the spectre of gender ideologically articulate these claims?
Three Autonomisations, Bad Abstractions and Capitalist Inversions
To understand how online videogames and highly processed meat come to report both the dissolution of gender and the spectre of communism, we need to examine how far-right transphobia links the alleged subsumption of both cultural (videogames) and natural (chicken) orders under capitalism’s “bad abstractions.” These abstractions, in the far-right’s account, erode what should otherwise appear as autonomous political and economic orders.
In the ideological apparatus of the contemporary far right, Transness—the end-point of the operations of Gender—is conceived as the result of the autonomisation of the process of sexual reproduction (that is, the biological reproduction of human bodies) from the process of sexual differentiation (the organisation of social difference according to a binary male/female rooted in “sex”). This delinking “frees” sexual differentiation to be colonised by the abstraction of Gender. Gender, now appearing as pure ideology, folds back onto sex, transforming and distorting its apparent concreteness. “Sex” is here understood as a bundle of reproductive organs, hormonal compositions, and genetic attributes organised along the male/female binary.
For the far right, this represents an inversion of natural determinations. Once, the material concreteness of male/female sexual difference determined the abstract order of masculine/feminine gender roles. Now, ideological forms—what Kathleen Stock, the infamous Sussex professor turned transphobe, calls the “trans-delusion”—determine nature itself. According to a wide range of far-right discourses, this process is enabled by two interconnected dynamics typical of late capitalist societies: the commodification of culture and the commodification of nature. First comes the cultural industry, which subordinates symbolic order to the imperatives of capitalist accumulation. Exacerbated by social media and online forums, endless identities are shaped and enabled by an endless production of cultural commodities—commodities that appear detached from any substantive or concrete social value.
Yet this process depends on a deeper transformation: the commodification of nature. For the far-right, this means nothing but the idea that capital made into a commodity any bit of matter available at its disposal. This total subsumption under capital is, for the far-right, reflected by transness, for, above all, “sex” was the last frontier now colonised by a global market driven by the thirst for profit. The contemporary far right often links this transformation to the post-World War II New Deal reconstruction of Europe under U.S. influence. What began with the penetration of the household by consumer commodities—washing machines, for example—has reached the most intimate layers of the body, exemplified by the widespread availability of contraceptives like the pill. Contraceptives, as many far-right influencers believe, suspend the relationship between sex as something we do and sex as something we have, and have perversely “free” women only to be abused by men who will seek sexual gratification without commitment and fail to develop the appropriate ethics of responsibility. In this distorted world of post-sexual liberation politics, the far-right believes, sex becomes a commodity: you exchange it for money like you buy popcorn.
But 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.
For the far right, this represents another inversion of a natural order. Where once production—directly engaging fixed capital and labour—determined the function of money and the value of commodities, now finance and merchant capitalists expand globally, detached from labour’s productive role. Their fluidity allows them to skip a moment in the reproduction of capital and subordinate production to their own speculative ends. In this context, the proliferation of gender pronouns is seen as a symptom of a state of generalised dependence. They are read as personifications of commodity capital, as agents of merchant capitalists solely concerned with advancing a profit by pushing their products in every market across the world: fleeting, unrooted, multiplying endlessly. We live, in this worldview, in the liquidity of a consumer society—one that erodes the rootedness of productive labour and the entrepreneurial personality.
As Meloni puts it, behind gender as an ideology lies the aim of making us “slaves and simple consumers at the mercy of financial speculators.”[3] The feedback loop is complete: Money, through global corporations, imposes its interests worldwide by flooding the globe with a useless sea of commodities—produced not to meet needs but to absorb speculative capital. Among the most profitable of these new markets is sex.
But what does this have to do with communism? To understand how contemporary European far-right narratives reframe the apparent success of neoliberalism as the realisation of communism, we must go back to the debates taking place in France at the end of the 1970s, particularly among the members of the Nouvelle Droite.
The Totalitarian Economy
In 1979, the Nouvelle Droite’s intellectual journal éléments published an issue titled L’Économie Totalitaire. The editorial—signed by Alain de Benoist under the pseudonym Robert de Herte—offered a decisive judgment: the 1970s marked the consolidation of the era of homo œconomicus. For de Benoist, this figure represented the endpoint of a socio-political logic in which the economic sphere had become the sole legitimate measure of human value, happiness, and progress. For the French far-right intellectual, this meant that “the ‘laws of the market’—that is to say, the law of merchants—[had] taken precedence over the imperatives of national sovereignty, of preserving and transmitting heritage, of rooting cultures.”
These themes were later developed most consistently by Guillaume Faye throughout the 1980s[4]. In his 80s trilogy, Faye established the foundations for GRECE’s critique of “the American-Western Civilization” as a new form of imperialism, which he disentangled from European heritage and older forms of empire. For Faye, the defining feature of the post-industrial societies mushrooming across the globe was their incipient ideology of “economism”: what he described as a reduction of the individual to an economic imperative alone, and the consolidation of a “Market Society” where consumers, dependents, insured subjects, and bureaucrats had replaced the entrepreneurs, producers, and citizens as the political basis of the nation.
For Faye, the new consumer society emerging in a de-industrialising Europe signified a deeper penetration of market values, homogenisation, and massification when compared to the Fordist era. While the mass society of the 1950s and 60s focused on the standardised production of the same commodity, the new consumer society was characterised by the incorporation of post-’68 politics: radical individualism, affirmative identity, and anti-capitalist hedonism that sought to break the moulds of the authoritarian personality inherent in the Fordist model.
While the time of industrial strategies had faded away, Faye argued that a more encompassing form of economism dominated society—now hidden from view yet acting as its dominant valuating logic. This decentralising and occluded logic of material and ideological homogenisation is what he called “the West”: a system spatially unmoored, operating as a “non-place” with its epicentre in the United States.
According to Faye, this market society does not signal civilisational advancement but a regression into “primitive society.” He called it a form of neo-feudalism, governed by transnational corporations and enabled by the dissolution of “intermediary bodies”—cultural anchors such as the traditional family and ethnically organised communities. The primitivism of neoliberal societies is accompanied by an old trope: feminisation. This idea points to the expansion of material dependency, a too-close proximity to an existence governed by the fluctuating desires of the body—unable to distinguish between needs and wants, and thus excluded from historical agency. This “feminisation” stands in stark contrast to a cultural order that represses some forms of desire in favour of the sovereignty of the subject underpinning the autonomy of a political community.
This trope, perhaps unintentionally, was re-articulated in psychoanalytical terms and popularised by Christopher Lasch’s work through the 1960s and 1970s, culminating with his book The Culture of Narcissism, published in 1979. The book was very influential for a whole generation of thinkers left and right which sought to grasps the sociological transformations brought by the newly consolidated US hegemony as the Cold War intensified, including Faye’s own characterisation of “the West”. Faye’s notion of the western primitivism links to Larch’s diagnosis of the persistence of the “narcissist complex”, an idea the French far-right intellectual radicalised.
According to Faye’s reinterpretation, the “primitivism” of the market society was produced by the progressive dissolution of the traditional family, “preventing” the “oedipal” process of repression that guarantees the consolidation of civilisation. While the oedipal phase would enable the internalisation of self-control and respect for authority, this market society reified the limitless desires of a primitive, “narcissist” personality, whose psychological outlook was marked by lack of self-control and an endless projection of the ego onto the world.
In such a social order, the “autonomy” of the political, necessary for the consolidation of a “sovereign state” capable of dictating the historical destiny of its people, was replaced by an enabling, “primitive” and dependent state—what Faye and de Benoist, in other writings, called the Providential State. The Providential State, the term these pair used to refer to the emerging post-industrial neoliberal state, was a “feminised” state for a “feminised society”, merging both the realm of material dependency and political authority and, as a consequence, articulating a totalitarian social structure of bottomless self-gratification and total dependency reduced to a purely economic existence.
This is communism realised through neoliberalism: in such a context, the state is “captured” by factional economic powers. From above, the non-productive factions of “financiers” and merchant capitalists. From below, the factional interests of “anti-racist”, “queer” and “trans lobbies”. Together, they give rise to the two sides of a new US imperialism. Faye’s account thus qualifies Hayek’s infamous “sea of knowledge” as, in fact, a generalised “oceanic feeling” of omnipotence and undifferentiated existence, a vestige of the “primitive ego-feeling” related to the feminised “mother”.
This whole process maps onto a third autonomisation and inversion: the autonomisation of the state from its concrete ethnocultural political basis and its subsumption under the universal community of the “world market”. What obtains here is an inversion of political and economic orders. Once, the far-right claims, the political state engaged in the consolidation of a national or regional productive community and determined the operations of “the economy” according to the concrete needs of its people, which were cultural (and ethnic) in essence. Now, global financial interests, acting as an oligarchy of big finance, impose themselves upon the state, which reports the dissolution of the otherwise necessary separation between political and economic orders.
From the commodification of nature and culture to the erosion of state sovereignty, what the far-right “unveils” in the project of sexual liberation culminated by the assertion that trans people exist is a condition of generalised social domination. In this inverted world, trans and queer people are both the personification and the agent of domination, working in tandem with globalist political elites, multinational corporations and cultural Marxists hidden behind, pulling the strings.
The three autonomisations traced above which, I argued, articulate far-right transmisogyny as an anti-systemic critique of new forms of “Western Imperialism”, tend to overlap with well-established left-wing critiques of late capitalism. This apparent refusal to subordinate to the imperatives of a capitalist global order has drawn many to their camps, entertaining the idea that perhaps the far-right is engaging in something true about a present world where global financial markets seem to impose their interests ruthlessly at the expense of the needs of the many. But perhaps the truth transmisogyny expresses lies elsewhere.
Crisis of Capital, Crisis of Gender
Transmisogyny is ideological, but conceals within itself practical truths, however mystified the form in which it represents these truths. As a matter of fact, the phenomenological attributes of such wrong order of things correspond with the form of appearance of the inner contradictions of the capitalist mode of social reproduction and its crisis tendencies.
The tendency to crisis of the capitalist mode of social reproduction derives from the asymmetry and contradiction between the production of social needs as commodities and the production of surplus value resulting from the incorporation of the labour process into the valorisation process[5]. 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, towards penetrating markets afar, towards creating new markets, as well as towards investment in labour-saving technologies when wage costs are high that shed labour from production.
Furthermore, when the imperative to realise a profit or perish is felt more strongly, the production process becomes structurally skewed towards the abandonment of certain markets for which the extraction of surplus value is inversely proportional to the investment in variable capital or where apparently absolute natural limits tend to condition surplus extraction—such is the case with many personal services we call care, as well as agricultural production. 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. Finance capital appears as increasingly detached from its productive valorisation, while realising quicker and quicker profit returns through increasingly risky investments and speculation.
This whole process, scattered across a multiplicity of “national economies”, sustains itself in and against the global community of the world market, involving the national states and supranational organisations in a contradictory set of political and economic policies that may protect internal markets and open them to investment from abroad. While the crisis tendencies push capitalists to overproduction, it further undermines the relationship between credit and exploitation, threatening to render money meaningless as a form of abstract wealth by loosening its grip from its source: labour-power employed productively, but increasingly expelled from the labour process.
Under such conditions, capitalist states struggle with each other through sub-imperialist and intra-imperialist strategies while they attempt to secure favourable conditions of exploitation at home and abroad, so that capitalist accumulation is integrated back with the social reproduction process at the national level. As the political node of class relations of exploitation, the capital state becomes a necessary moment of the consolidation and reproduction of the global market, while appearing as subordinated to the abstract, decentralised power of Money.
This is the paradoxical and contradictory character of capitalism as a mode of social reproduction, where a tendency to disassociate monetary accumulation from productive accumulation simultaneously imposes a downward pressure on production and an increased pressure on the future productivity of labour, resolved through the increase in production of commodities and speculative investments that exacerbates the conditions of crisis and starts the above cycle again. In the world as it is, capital’s crisis tendencies manifest as an increasing number of individuals expelled from a shrinking wage or existing in a precarious relation to it as surplus population. Idle people appear next to an ocean of apparently “useless” and surplus commodities saturating old and creating new markets; “idle” surplus money floods the pockets of fewer and fewer investors, while surplus state measures appear as increasingly mingling with private affairs on behalf of economic interests—all this while further increasing the number of abject needs either completely expelled from the cycle of capitalist accumulation or produced in such a condition that they remain too expensive to access for most.
The intensification of capitalist crises engulfs more and more people in what Emma Heaney characterises as a double materialist process of sexual differentiation[6]. By expanding the realm of abject needs to be organised outside a market that fails to provide them, a wider range of individuals are necessarily engaged in unwaged reproductive activities. By extending the number of people disposed of the means of production and trapped within class relations but without a wage—or with a wage well below the minimum to cover their needs—more individuals remain exposed to an arbitrary violence of others they become dependent, or co-dependent on, increasingly marking their existence under the symbolic order of penetrability. What this conjoined materialist process of feminisation exposes is the paradigmatic situation of incomplete dependency and incomplete separation through which our lives subsists when we become a moment of capital’s narrow conditions of reproduction. It also expresses the form of the capital-labour relation underneath the logic of accumulation.
This results in an increased politicisation of the capitalist mode of social reproduction, where the intensification of class struggle manifests as individuals and collectives negotiate the re-organisation of their needs in and against capital, redefining the contours of political, economic, and ideological forms. Heaney argues that it’s the intertwinement of these two processes that ontologises sexual differentiation without the ideology of cisness. The ideology of cisness comes post-festum, as one amongst other possibilities for the temporary accommodation of the class antagonisms unleashed in this constant reshaping of the social reproduction process. By abrogating to a pre-social biological fact what belongs to human history, the ideology of cisness obscures the material basis of the process of sexual differentiation internalising it as the fate of only some, perhaps doomed by nature.
The possibility that human labour, in whatever form, may enter into a metabolic relation with the outside world in a manner other than its “useful” productive employment—that is, as a moment of the valorisation process—and that this relation would change what we conceive as “natural” in us, is what far-right transphobia fears. The abstractions denounced by far-right transmisogyny and onto which transness is mapped are not the manifestation of a capitalist order that thrives in its endless commodification of all life on earth. Rather, they belong to the manifestation of the contradiction between the expansive and almost infinite forms wealth can take historically as it enriches human life and the very narrow conditions under which value makes it count. The non-coincidence between these two forms of wealth makes it so that, as the gap between the two widens, a wider repertoire of social and ideological forms appears in its attempt to close or supersede it. Thus, transness paradoxically unveils the double bind of modern emancipation perpetually suspended under late capitalist conditions. The possibility to change the materiality and social signification of sex 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. However, this autonomy, or moment of apparent separation from a naturally endowed order, bears the mark of the condition of dependency, under which transition materially and socially takes place. The refusal to break this tension between dependency and separation is what fascists despise, for it reveals a shared fate, however mystified. Capital’s moving contradiction, wherein a relation of mutual dependency between capital and labour is only sustained through the apparent tendential autonomisation of capital from labour on the condition that labour’s dependency on capital becomes generalised, appears thus as the moving autonomisation spelt out above.
Far-right transmisogyny resolves this tension twofold: by collapsing it into one scene of total material dependency first, by eliminating its subjects second. Thus, far-right transmisogyny retranslates the crisis tendencies inscribed in the capitalist mode of accumulation into a crisis of gender orders. It also translates the violence of such crisis, which Marx and Engels called moments of “momentary barbarism”, as anti-trans violence in defence of nature. The far-right “anti-globalist” alternative to the liberal global order in crisis passes through a series of political and violent inversions of this “wrong” world. One, by linking sexual reproduction to sexual differentiation, sex to gender, the far right seeks to politically stabilise the antagonistic and expanding sphere of abject needs through the ideological naturalisation of complementary gender roles outside yet complementary to social reproduction through the market. This is accomplished, they argue, by pushing the market “outside” its unproductive and unnatural business. The ideological valorisation of so-called “productive” labour that this preferred order of things will bring renders an indigenous workforce available for exploitation through its productive employment, “linking circulation to production”, restoring consumption to work and closing the social reproduction process.
This process would complete the violent and naked integration of social reproduction within these two spheres of social activity. First sex, then labour, last the Nation. The state is freed. These two ideological inversions link the state back to a “people”, restoring the apparent autonomy of political and economic orders so dear to the neoliberal state and necessary for creating the conditions of future productive investment. The far-right holy trinity now lands with all its might into the conflict-ridden and contradictory world of capital, to smooth it. But in doing so, it resets the conditions for the rule of Money to strengthen its hold on the reproduction of life on earth. This is the delusional mania Adorno wrote about, one that becomes “the substitute for the dream that humanity would organize the world humanely, a dream the actual world of humanity is resolutely eradicating”.[7]
[1] Meloni G (2022). Una grande Giorgia Meloni interviene a Marbella, in Spagna, insieme ad Abascal
e agli amici di Vox. 14 June. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sJ_4UNhocU
(Accessed: 11 July 2023)
[2] Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender.
[3]Meloni at the International Organisation of the Family (2022). Full speech of Giorgia Meloni at WCF Verona 2019. November 2022. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wqovctNVrg
[4] In lesser-known works such as Contre L’Économisme. Principes L’Économie Politique (1983), La Nouvelle Société de Consommation (1984), and L’Occident Comme Déclin (1984) Faye developed the key point that are fleshed out below. Alongside Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Giorgio Locchi, Maurice Rollet, Pierre Vial, and Jean-Claude Valla, Faye joined the movement in 1970 and became a central figure in its development of ethnopluralist thought. He remained influential until 2000, when he was expelled for his increasing nativist and ethnically essentialist positions, which rejected de Benoist’s more “metapolitical” trajectory. This schism coincided with the rise of the European Identitarian Movement, where Faye’s ethnocultural critique of a “Westernised” and “globalised” Europe remains central for the articulation of narrative of inverse colonisation now visiting Europe.
[5] Clarke, Marx’s Theory of Crisis.
[6] Heaney, Feminism against Cisness.
[7] Adorno, ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’, 97.
