 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. We have with us Professor Ajaz Ahmed and we'll discuss the emergence of the new right and the possibilities of the new left in the world. Ajaz, good to have you back with us. Coming back to the issue of the new right versus the new left, we have seen the emergence of the new right clearly. How do you analyze this new right? This new right is clearly, it has been growing for a while. It has to do with a great many issues. We are talking in the far right in the sense that we have seen first the defeat of communism alongside that we saw a crisis and eventual collapse of social democracy. Now I think and then we saw really a disappearance of liberalism in any classical sense. So new liberalism was already very far out. You know when you say this is emerging, this is emerging, Trump might do this, Trump might do that. You have to see what Obama has done. Obama has deported 2 million people from the United States. So when Trump says he's going to deport, how many more is he going to deport? So new liberalism was already very far out. I mean very much in the right. So a lot of disturbance it has created and it is being opposed both from the far right and from the left. The left, the far right is not classically fascist. Again there is a whole spectrum. There are groups let's say in Greece which are openly fascist or in Ukraine. They actually are descendants of fascists and they are fascists. Then you have the situation in France, a major European country where it used to be a fascist movement, kept moving on and on. And now the Le Pen is positioning herself quite away from that fascist legacy and has adopted a whole republican rhetoric that we inherit the republic which is being betrayed by these people who have sold France over to EU and so on and so forth. We stand for European culture. We have no problems with immigrants if they accept European culture. And it is because we have not been able to absorb even the ones that we have that we say that there should be greater restrictions and so on. We are seeing the emergence of a new kind of politics in which the institutional structures of liberalisms will be maintained unlike in the case of the old fascism. Those very institutions shall be used for the emergence for the capture of political power by the far right which has political positions very similar to the old fascists minus the class radicalism of the Nazis. These are people who don't have any class radicalism. Trump tried to, Trump posed to have, but the son of the working class, you know, will take care of the working class. Democrats have sold them away, sold them down. I coming from the far right, I will take care of the working class and so on, but this is not genuine. Now, the other side of it is that if the right gains 10, 15%, it becomes very dramatic in countries like Denmark or, you know, wherever. The left also, you know, in different countries, left. What we are not seeing is the emergence of a Marxist left, of a communist left, but within the political spectrum of politics now prevails. Corbyn is as leftist as you can get and Corbyn's emergence is again the same sort of thing that from the right Trump is. Who before two years before he took over the Labour Party, who could have imagined that this kind of a leftist of a very old stamp, a Labour Party leftist of a very old stamp would not only win the leadership once, but be challenged by the entire Labour Party leadership. He prevailed again. So you have this. Likewise, Syriza is bigger than Golden Dawn. Still is much bigger than Golden Dawn. Padamos is a major figure. Now, they have great many problems. Some of them may be irresolvable at the moment. They have a view that you have to save the EU because if the EU collapses, forces of the far right will be rampaging all over Europe. I think they are wrong, but they make a fairly sophisticated argument. Now, with that argument, very interestingly, Cyprus and Varoufakis came to completely different conclusions as to how to, although they agree on that. So, within the left, there is a kind of crisis developing, but there is also I think a left emerging. When it will gain quantity, we don't know. That's an interesting proposition that essentially what we are seeing is the collapse of the old forms, whether from the right or from the left, and emergence of new forms in which the right has an advantage because they don't want to really upset what is there and just mold it more on a white nationalist platform and so on. But left is a much bigger task of rediscovering the political project of the left. And in Western Europe, that and as well as the United States. There is plenty of left. It's splintered, scattered, doesn't have a project on which it can work. Meanwhile, the world situation is so historically unprecedented. You have, on the one hand, a terminal crisis of Western capitalism, deep crisis. And all of these things that we are talking about have to do primarily with that crisis. At the same time, you know, for the first time, the center of gravity of capitalist power has shifted to Asia. They want to do a cold war with China. Soviet Union was one-fourth the size of American economy when they bankrupted the Soviet Union through the arms race. And arms race with China will bankrupt them. You know, the Chinese economy is larger than theirs. And ultimately, that economy, that economy will determine. It will be ultimately determining. Likewise, all these messages they're trying to send to Europe, the economic attraction of China and so on. So I think that is part of the crisis of Europe that European left. That it doesn't understand the world. It is inhabiting. It will have to understand that the ground from under their feet is slipping. The whole dominance of the West economically is changing. And that environment which is changing is something the Eurocentric forces don't seem to understand. That there's a strategic shift taking place. And this decline will not, you know, I mean, 500 years of history cannot be reversed in 5, 10, 20, 30 years. So the accumulations are very great. That's my point. Even in the times of deep crisis, there are patterns of life in a different order. You know, so, but that reversal has started. What is interesting to me also in terms of what we are discussing is that India is making its transition from the liberal to the right. With all the trappings of the liberal institutions. China is not making a political transition to political difference. It may be liberalizing its economy. And because it is still a purposeful national state, it will not liberalize its economy to the extent to which others have. So you don't have a liberal economy there either. Liberal politics there either. But it's a non-liberal politics of a completely different order. Thank you, Ajaz. We'll come back to you further on developments in different parts of the world, particularly with respect to what's happening to Latin America, China and Asia next time. This time we focused really on the United States and what's happening in Europe, but we need to come back and discuss what's happening elsewhere as well. Thank you very much for being with us and hope to see you soon again.