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Theory Redux series Series editor: Laurent de Sutter
Mark Alizart, Cryptocommunism
Armen Avanessian, Future Metaphysics
Franco Berardi, The Second Coming
Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld
Laurent de Sutter, Narcocapitalism
Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things
Graham Harman, Immaterialism
Helen Hester, Xenofeminism
Srećko Horvat, The Radicality of Love
Lorenzo Marsili, Planetary Politics
Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction
Eloy Fernández Porta, Nomography
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism
Late Capitalist Fascism
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen
polity
Copyright © Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen 2022
The right of Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4745-6
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938608
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to J. M. Bernstein, James Day, Carsten Juhl, Esther Leslie, Gene Ray, Dominique Routhier, Katarina Stenbeck and Marcello Tarì. Plus Laurent de Sutter and John Thompson.
The simple fact of being without reply has given to the false an entirely new quality. At a stroke it is truth which has almost everywhere ceased to exist or, at best, has been reduced to the status of pure hypothesis that can never be demonstrated.
Guy Debord
The ultimate aim of fascism is the complete destruction of all revolutionary consciousness.
George Jackson
Introduction
With Trump’s defeat in the presidential election in November 2020, many commentators and people all over the world drew a sigh of relief. In the final months of his presidency more and more politicians, commentators and intellectuals had been forced into asking whether Trump was in fact a fascist. In the pages of magazines such as the New York Review of Books and the New Statesman, scholars debated the pertinence of historical analogies, comparing Trump to interwar fascist leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler. The events of 2020 – the employment of paramilitary troops in Portland, the kidnapping of people protesting against police violence, Trump’s call for right-wing militias to protest against the COVID-19 lockdown and the bizarre storming of the Capitol in early January 2021, but also the racially motivated mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that hit African American, indigenous and Latinx populations in the US in particular – raised the spectre of fascism. With militias in the streets and the Border Patrol deployed against the will of governors, it seemed as if yet another feature of 1930s fascist movements could be ticked off. Trump was hitting more and more points
