book will argue that we need to dispense with the checklist, always comparing contemporary politicians and phenomena with fascist politicians and their deeds in the 1930s. Fascism today will necessarily not be identical with the interwar ‘epoch of fascism’.1 The checklist, in fact, prevents us from analysing and combating contemporary fascism. We need to historicize and analyse fascism beyond a narrow Eurocentric focus on interwar fascism with a view to the function of fascist tendencies in contemporary crisis-ridden capitalist society. Fascism is obviously different today. It is still violent ultra-nationalism aimed at preventing an attack on the structure of private property through exclusion of foreigners, but its forms, myths and temporality have changed and been adapted to a different historical situation – what I will call late capitalism.2 As the historian of fascism Robert Paxton writes, we are confronted with ‘an updated fascism’, ‘a functional equivalent’, not an ‘exact repetition’.3 We are not dealing with the mass politics we know from Leni Riefenstahl’s films, jackboots, Sieg Heil salutes or Mussolini addressing a huge crowd in front of the cathedral in Milan. Fascism is different today, the swastika and Sieg Heil salutes have been replaced by MAGA caps, Pepe the Frog memes, boat parades or mandatory pork in public schools. We don’t have Nazi extermination camps but, instead, camps for migrants and prisons where guards kill inmates and take humiliating photos of prisoners. Unless we stop comparing contemporary developments to the period 1922–45, we will not even be able to analyse, never mind resist, contemporary fascism. As the political prisoner and black revolutionary George Jackson wrote: ‘the final definition of fascism is still open.’4
Trying to employ the term ‘fascism’ is risky. I use it to describe an extreme nationalist ideology intent on rebuilding an imagined organic community by excluding foreigners.5 Very few people use the word ‘fascist’ to describe themselves today. It was different in the interwar period. Both Mussolini and Hitler used the term, as did many other local fascist movements, for instance the Iron Guard in Romania. This is not the case nowadays. Very few political parties or groups label themselves fascist, and it has become difficult to describe political phenomena with the designator ‘fascism’. The word’s derogatory sense precedes its analytic usefulness. The interwar fascist regimes, primarily Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the Second World War and, most importantly, the Holocaust effectively transformed fascism from being a political term to being an invective. The Nazi war atrocities singularize fascism as the worst political event imaginable – something that it is inappropriate, even impossible to draw comparisons with, something ‘unrepresentable’. Hence fascism becomes something that happened once in history, in one place: something that (with a little help from Stalin’s Soviet Union) was defeated by the democracy we still live in.
But fascism did not come pre-formed in Italy in 1922, and it took time for it to be theorized. It was not in any way a coherent ideology that was subsequently implemented. Mussolini would always stress the flexible character of fascism, that it could readjust itself to new circumstances and integrate seemingly contradictory elements. Up to a certain point, both Mussolini and Hitler allowed for ideological ambiguity, playing off competing reformist and extremist factions and allying strategically with different sectors of the local capitalist classes. Mussolini’s fascism was preventive, using and mimicking the energy of the contemporaneous communist revolutionary wave, while Hitler’s regime navigated a deep economic crisis and warded off the danger of a working-class revolution. Both regimes safeguarded private property and externalized the alienation and exploitation of capitalist industrialization through the exclusion of Jews and other ‘inferior races’. Both regimes were, essentially, counter-revolutionary.6
Today we see something similar happening. We are living through a political rupture. The financial crisis dealt a heavy blow to global restructured capital and exposed a forty-year-long underlying economic contraction. We now have governments that seem incapable of dealing with the complex issues of a crisis-ridden capitalist society. That the pandemic did not cause a total collapse was the result not of the world’s states but of the mobilization of the creative collective capacities of populations. The mechanisms for social mobilization and political representation are in ruins. Political decision making has fused with finance capital. It is therefore difficult to be accountable to populations. Ultra-nationalist parties have emerged protesting against a political system that is in crisis and seems unable to get the national economies going. These parties protest against the system by gesturing towards an idea of an ‘original’ ethno-national community that can be remade by targeting people labelled as migrants, Muslims and leftists. These are all enemies of the national community that needs protecting. Class conflicts are translated into (more imagined than real) protests against the political system through racism. Late capitalist fascism is national-liberal rather than national-socialist7 – ‘law and order’ combined with market economy.
After forty years of neoliberal global capitalism, the market and individual initiative rule supreme but, confronted with escalating conflicts and a never-ending crisis, need a strong state capable of repressing the racialized elements of the dangerous classes, migrants, Muslims, Mexicans, Jews, etc. The COVID-19 pandemic is only further aggravating things, damaging the economy and rendering more people unemployed. In order to prevent a real shift in perspective, where people turn away from ‘the stabilized animal society’ – that is, the apparatuses and ways of life that mould our species into an animal that can reproduce only through wage labour and capital – fascism emerges, mobilizing the social forces of a fragmented mass society through aggressive nationalism.8
The new fascist parties are not anti-democratic; they function perfectly within the framework of national democracy addressing the ‘real’ population, animating a hollowed-out political system by hitting out at people not deemed to belong to the national community. This is not a fascist aberration; this is merely fascist parties highlighting a contradiction immanent in national democracies. Contemporary fascism wishes to return to a simpler time, most often the post-war era, and it does not have the swagger of interwar fascism; it is less about colonial expansion than about returning to an imagined previous order.
There are other books that discuss the re-emergence of fascism today, typically in political terms. This book, however, takes a slightly different approach by contextualizing fascism within the political economic history of the last fifty years and by expanding and reworking the notion of fascism, freeing it of the narrowly political focus with which it is primarily used today. This is a Marxist reading of fascism: I stress the relationship between fascism and capitalist accumulation, a crisis-ridden capitalist accumulation.
We have had a prolonged economic crisis for the last forty or fifty years. For a long period, this crisis was masked under enormous amounts of credit and the local modernization of South East Asia. But in 2007–8 the crisis became visible for everybody to see, and since then it has been the ‘new normal’. What started as a financial crisis, but was in fact a longer economic crisis, quickly became both a political and social crisis as governments were unable to readjust their policies and just continued with more of the same – that is, an unstable mix of printing money (to the banks) and implementing austerity. The result has been a further hollowing out of a national democratic system that seems to benefit primarily the interests of business and a small elite. The last ten years have been characterized by the return of a global discontinuous protest movement and the tremendous surge of racist agendas and fascist parties that are capable of breathing new life into electoral procedures. The new fascist parties have stepped in and are upholding the national democratic systems they are allegedly protesting against. Fascism is a protest, a protest against the long slow neoliberal dismantling of the post-Second World War social state, or a certain idea of the world of that time. The fascist leaders conjure an image of that time, a better time, before unemployment, globalization and the emergence of new political subjects that threaten the naturalness of the patriarchal order. Migrants, people of colour, Muslims, Jews, women, sexual minorities and communists are perceived as the causes of a historical and moral decline that the fascist leaders promise to reverse engineer by excluding such unwanted subjects and restoring the original community.
But fascism is also a protest against the protests: as the opening epigraph by George Jackson argues,
