of the emergence of more radical opposition against neoliberal globalization and the capitalism–nation state nexus.9 Fascism blocks the genuine anti-capitalist front we can see in embryonic form in the many protests, riots, multitudes and assemblies that keep taking place in a stop-and-go pattern across the planet.10
The classical Marxist analyses of fascism tend to underestimate its cultural and ideological dimensions, describing it as a plot to save capitalism, as if fascism is the armed wing of capital. But political structure and ideology cannot simply be deduced from the economic system. Ideology plays an important role in the ascension of fascism, the way it is capable of mobilizing and governing, and in order to analyse fascism it is important to look closely at both the ideological crisis that prepares the ground for the emergence of fascist tendencies and the specific character fascism acquires today. Both as a movement and as a regime, fascism has a certain autonomy from the direct control of capitalist interests.11 It is a particular form of reaction, and its aggressive nationalism is related to different, historically specific national economic and political structures, ‘national’ contexts, within a crisis-ridden capitalist economy. That being said, fascism remains incomprehensible unless we analyse the crisis tendencies of late capitalism and its political and cultural ‘effects’.12 Capitalism is a crisis-driven system, and I’ll argue that fascism is the disastrous consequence of the political contradictions of late capitalism. To analyse fascism, we have to start from an understanding of the economic, political and ideological conditions of late capitalism. The analysis has two intertwined dimensions: I will examine both the conditions that make the ascension of fascism possible in the present historical context, scrutinizing late capitalism and the ideological breakdown of neoliberalism, and the contemporary forms of fascism, what fascists are saying and doing today. To arrive at a workable definition of late capitalist fascism I thus combine the analysis of the political-economic conditions of fascism with an investigation of how it travels into the political mainstream today.
This book turns on the concept of late capitalist fascism of which Trump is probably the most obvious expression. But late capitalist fascism is a much broader phenomenon that manifests itself not just in right-wing nationalist politicians but also, and especially, in the field of culture, everyday life and online. It is necessary to distance oneself from the fascist checklist and an understanding of fascism that is too narrowly political. If we understand fascism only as a question of politics and politicians, we will forget that it did not really magically disappear after the defeat of the European fascist regimes in the Second World War but actually lived on in the form of the fascist zones to which the black revolutionary prison activist George Jackson pointed in his analysis of prisons in the US.13 Fascism never really went away but continued in the margins of the national democratic societies, in prisons, in ghettoes and, later, in migrant camps, and of course continued full-scale in the former colonies. We can think of it as a kind of slow violence, a violence that is out of view or not deemed to be of central importance to an analysis of a political situation or an era.14 Anti-colonialists such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon and revolutionary prisoners such as Jackson knew well that fascism never went away and is constitutive for the ‘post-colonial’ world.15 Excessive violence is used not merely as a last resort but as a normalized, even mundane facet of the reproduction of the social hierarchy, of capitalist accumulation. Fascism is a ghost in the machine, the machine being capitalism. As Jackson wrote: ‘We will never have a complete definition of fascism, because it is in constant motion, showing a new face to fit any particular set of problems that arise to threaten the predominance of the traditionalist, capitalist ruling class.’16
Let’s be clear: there is not a radical break between fascism and democratic states. We know that not only is the state founded on its exception from the law, it actively employs extra-legal measures whenever there’s a crisis.17 In a situation of crisis the state goes outside the law it has itself created and upholds; it imposes a state of exception in order to re-create order. The War on Terror was an example of such a crisis situation: the sovereign, George W. Bush, introduced a series of ‘anti-terror’ decrees that curtailed public and private freedoms, procedure took precedence over law and exception became the rule. The Patriot Act and the Military Order made it possible for the US army to detain people who were suspected of terrorist activity for an unspecified period of time, completely revoking these persons’ legal status.
Trump inherited a gigantic imperial war machine, a carceral infrastructure of enormous proportions and a racist police force armed with military equipment. He heightened the repressive and exclusionary politics that are integral to the US empire abroad and at home. But he did not in any way misuse his executive powers. He was just using them in the way they were actually supposed to be used. Trump trespassing on democracy and the constitutional state is just Trump doing what he is supposed to do as sovereign and US president. It was telling that, when Trump in 2020, against the expressed wish of local governors, decided to employ his own storm troopers, it was a combination of neo-Nazi militias and the Border Patrol, which he had flown in. And the Border Patrol was merely doing what it has in fact been doing for more than a century at the border and what the US army has been doing all over the world since the Tagalog Insurgency in the Philippines in the early twentieth century.18
A Biden presidency will not be a departure from this. Obama increased the number of deportations and launched ten times more drone strikes than Bush. It will be a relief to be rid of Trump and his rambling tweets that explicitly gestured to fascist militias. But Biden will no doubt do his part to expand the mass incarceration and imperialism that is the core of the US state. One or two stimulus packages will not change that.
This book is not only about the extreme right and fascism but also about a crisis-ridden capitalist society that tends towards adopting more and more authoritarian solutions that will inevitably bring more chaos. The decomposition of the national democratic political system has opened the door to the new fascism, which is not only visible in outrageously fear-mongering xenophobic political leaders like Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, Salvini and Le Pen. It is also becoming a permanent marker of the ‘extreme centre’ that is trying to keep up with the fascist parties and their ability to address the economic crisis directly, although displacing the cause by scapegoating migrants, Muslims, communists, Jews – in short, the dangerous other. Because fascism today is not isolated in specific fascist parties but is spread out in everyday culture and has become an almost obligatory part of the functioning of the nation state, any attempt to oppose this formation has to combine anti-fascism with anti-capitalism and a critique of the nation state. Critiquing fascism means attacking the authoritarian and racist turn of late capitalism with a possible view to superseding the money economy and the state form. Anti-fascism has to be radical in the sense of going to the roots of the problem: true anti-fascism implies a radical critique of the present order of things.
For a brief period in the second half of the twentieth century the ruling class in the West was able to persuade a large part of the local working class to let go of any revolutionary pretensions, all the while intervening in former colonies, brutally destroying the decolonial movement. Sweet talking the local working class through jobs, culture and commodities and killing revolutionaries in the former colonies went hand in hand. It is this geography of welfare in ‘the North’ and violence in ‘the South’ that is being remade. The two worlds were obviously intimately connected all the way through. But, for a brief period, it seemed as if the violence of the capitalist state was waning or was being replaced by something different, something more subtle. Deleuze’s control society was an analysis of this shift where power was internalized and the institutions of disciplinary society dissolved.19 Deleuze of course knew this was not the case: the brutal crackdown on the 77 movement in Italy and the fate of the black revolutionaries in the US had shown that the ‘anarchic’ violence of the state had not gone away. It is important not to isolate the post-Second World War era in the North but to see how it has been part of a brutal fascist geography of violence and counter-insurgency. When the economic foundations of the Fordist class compromise disappeared, fascism returned to the North. For a period in the second part of the twentieth century the fascist zone was reserved for the most rebellious subjects, and most people could dissent and protest as they saw fit. This is no
