Race & Class

Since the election of Donald Trump, MS-13, the Salvadoran street gang, has become a national security and foreign policy concern for his administration. Due to the violence of street gangs like MS-13, El Salvador has become a country with the highest rates of homicides, alongside forced migration. Like much of the mainstream media and personal accounts of asylum seekers, the arguments about violence emerging from street gangs in El Salvador from the Trump administration are based on actual material conditions, but what is often missing are the root causes. This article argues that the production of a moral panic over MS-13 has been transnationalised between the United States and El Salvador to displace the contradictions of global capitalism in El Salvador to a local and deported relative surplus population. It argues that the spectre of MS-13 in El Salvador and throughout US cities must be placed within the limits of a Salvadoran revolution, the insertion of the Salvadoran political economy into the global capitalist system in the 1980s, the development of a neoliberal Salvadoran state, and the US sponsoring of law-and-order polices in the country as a response to regulate a relative surplus population.

Acknowledging definitional problems associated with the concept of ‘populism’, this article shifts the analytic gaze away from actors or politics that are conventionally characterised as populist, on to an analysis of the doing of populism by those who typically evade the populist label. Tracing the discursive construction of the ‘squeezed middle’ in Irish mainstream media and parliamentary debates between January 2014 and March 2019, the authors analyse how this signifier was mobilised to fuel and foment ressentiment among middle-earning taxpayers. This article analyses how the discourses of the ‘squeezed middle’ functioned ideologically, as a form of anti-welfare populism, redirecting blame for middle-class ontological and material insecurities on to unemployed welfare recipients who were depicted as immoral, lazy and insulated from hardship. This article highlights how populism operates from the so-called moderate centres of liberal democracy and not exclusively from the political margins. Irish political and media narratives of the ‘squeezed middle’ are seen as part of a larger project whereby damaging myths about the unemployed are propagated in service of ideological class warfare; legitimising neoliberal austerity and normalising unequal economic relations.

The ongoing trial of sixty-eight members of Golden Dawn, a violent neo-Nazi political party in Greece, has been called ‘one of the most important trials in contemporary Greek history’. Based on direct observation and insights from a trip to Athens in September 2019 to observe the trial, which coincided with the sixth anniversary of the murder of the anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas, this article documents the role that activists, lawyers and the families of victims of racist violence have played in bringing members of Golden Dawn to justice. The author examines the trajectory of authoritarian violence inherent in recent Greece history and the culture of police impunity and collusion in racial violence that continues today.

The concept of deschooling has been making a comeback, after having been largely written off by the mainstream education research community in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, it is not just anti-capitalist radicals who are rediscovering the appeal of deschooling, but political and economic elites as well. This article traces some of the central claims and practices of this elite-led movement – that we call ‘deschooling from above’ – in current attacks on universal higher education, projects to deschool professional and technical training and an abandonment of past commitments to universal compulsory schooling. The authors argue that all of these trends need to be situated within the broader context of the unravelling of the education fix of the previous era of global (neoliberal) capitalist restructuring.

In the light of highly politicised accusations of antisemitism against the Labour Party and its leader during the general election, the author argues for the necessity for activists to reclaim anti-racism. She shows how over a number of years the space for anti-racism has been shrinking. The professionalisation of anti-racism, especially around hate crime, has tended to shift focus from the social to the individual, from the institutional and systemic to personal hatred and bigotry, especially online. With the introduction of the government’s Prevent strategy, a multitude of movements from Right and Left are now considered extremists. Anti-racism has lost its international thrust and its cross-community depths. We should not, she argues, see the new anti-racism as just a change in narrative, but a systematic structural denial which is part and parcel of neoliberalism, witnessed in the chequered histories of those now empowered to promote equality.