was hugely inspired by George Jackson, who was very clear about the connection between a local US fascism that locked up or simply shot blacks and the imperialist US military abroad in places such as Vietnam. They were two aspects of the same state that allowed protests and a certain level of freedom to white people in the US but killed militant African Americans and rebellious Vietnamese. There’s no way to separate the two; it was the same capitalist state which gave local (white) workers jobs and killed the revolutionaries in the ghettos and in the jungle.
This book has two parts. Chapter 1 outlines the various crises that have laid the groundwork for the growth of fascism. It attempts to historicize and contextualize the re-emergence of fascism as an outcome of a longer political economic development characterized by a shrinking economy and a hollowing out of the political system. The financial crisis dealt a heavy blow to an already credit-inflated economy, and the subsequent political mishandling accelerated what was by then a quite advanced delegitimation of politics as we know it. The political hegemony of neoliberal global capitalism is in tatters and the bourgeoisie has a hard time agreeing on a new course. Because racism and ultra-nationalism have proved themselves to be the only means with which it is possible to uphold electoral politics, fascist parties are gaining ground everywhere. Together this constitutes what the historian of fascism Geoff Eley calls a ‘fascism-producing crisis’.20
Chapter 2 is an analysis of late capitalist fascism. I argue that fascism is not merely a question of political parties and fascist leaders but also something broader – a lived reality and an unfolding process. My analysis therefore takes the contradictory realm of everyday life into account in trying to dissect the ‘intensely superstructural’ character of late capitalist fascism.21 Late capitalist fascism is a violent yearning for the return of everything and everyone to their proper, ‘natural’ place, the denunciation and removal of migrants, Muslims and communists who threaten the ‘natural order’. There exists an ‘original’ community. And that community is in danger and needs protecting. The leader has to step up and impose order. This is still the fascist myth. But today this myth circulates through online communities in an infantilized public sphere where politics and entertainment are indistinguishable. In the society of the spectacle, incoherent fantasies of decline and dangerous conspiracies flourish, uniting political leaders and high-school killers and a scared networked population.
I consider late capitalist fascism as an index of the myriad ways that economics, politics and ideology become intertwined at the ‘cultural’ level. I refuse the mechanistic Marxist scheme of interpretation that seeks ‘first’ causes in the economic realm. When people shout racist insults or spit on refugees from highway bridges (as occurred in Denmark in 2015, during the so-called European Migration Crisis when Syrian refugees walked on highways, trying to reach Sweden), they are not simply acting out their distressed economic situation. The white workers’ ideology that all too easily feeds into late capitalist fascism is not merely a reflection of false consciousness. The challenge is to analyse late capitalist fascism as the complex cultural phenomenon it is and try to understand how it produces forms of subjectivity adequate to itself.
An effective anti-fascism has to take the form of radical social change. Only insofar as anti-fascism is embedded in a radical anti-capitalist stance will it be possible to engage in the necessary critique of national democracy’s immanent politics of exclusion. The only anti-fascism capable of confronting contemporary networked fascism is an offensive one that highlights the contradictory function of fascism in a crisis-ridden capitalist society.
Notes
1 1. Ernst Nolte: Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche. Munich: Piper, 1963; Eng. trans. as The Three Faces of Fascism. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965.
2 2. Taking the concept of late capitalism from Ernest Mandel, Theodor W. Adorno and Fredric Jameson. Ernest Mandel: Late Capitalism. London: New Left Books, 1975; Theodor W. Adorno: ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?’, in Meja Misgeld and Nico Stehr (eds), Modern German Sociology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, pp. 232–47; Fredric Jameson: Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.
3 3. Robert Paxton: The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2004, p. 175.
4 4. Jackson continues: ‘We have already discussed the defects of trying to analyze a movement outside of its process and its sequential relationships. You gain only a discolored glimpse of a dead past.’ George Jackson: Blood in My Eye. New York: Random House, 1972, p. 135.
5 5. I thus follow Roger Griffin’s definition of fascism as palingenetic ultra-nationalism. Griffin argues that the rebirth myth was ‘the key definitional component of fascism . . . that in the extreme conditions of interwar Europe endow some variants of nationalism and racism with extraordinary affective and destructive powers, Roger Griffin: Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007, p. 2. Griffin first developed his definition of generic fascism in The Nature of Fascism. London: Routledge, 1996.
6 6. I stress the counter-revolutionary dimension of fascism following Western Marxists such as Karl Korsch and Walter Benjamin. Fascism blocks and diverts the energies of socio-political revolution, filling the void of an absent or failed revolutionary event. As Benjamin wrote: ‘The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged.’ ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 41.
7 7. Jean-François Bayart has coined the term national liberalism to describe how liberalism and nationalism go together in the present political-economic order. Globalization and national sovereignty constitute an unstable ideology. Liberalism for the rich and nationalism for the poor. L’impasse national-libérale: globalisation et repli identitaire. Paris: La Découverte, 2017.
8 8. The notion of ‘stabilized animal society’ is developed by Giorgio Cesarano: Manuale di sopravvivenza. Bari: Dedalo, 1974, p. 66. And later put to use by Tiqqun: The Cybernetic Hypothesis. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2020, p. 48.
9 9. Jackson: Blood in My Eye, p. 137.
10 10. The best balance sheets of this new phase of class struggle are the books by the Invisible Committee: The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009; To Our Friends. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015; Now. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2017.
11 11. Unorthodox Marxists such as Walter Benjamin understood this quite early on, but it is largely the work of scholars such as George Mosse who have shown the importance of the cultural dimension of fascism. Mosse: Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich. New York: Schocken Books, 1966.
12 12. Enzo Traverso’s very useful The New Faces of Fascism tends to skip the cultural dimension of the new fascism. The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right. London: Verso, 2019.
13 13. ‘We are being repressed now. Courts that dispense no justice and concentration camps are already in existence. There are more secret police in this country than in all others combined – so many that they constitute a whole new class that has attached itself to the power complex. Repression is here.’ Jackson: Blood in My Eye, pp. 45–6.
14 14. Slow violence is Rob Nixon’s term. He uses it to describe the violence of climate change and other environmental catastrophes. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
15 15. As Aimé Césaire wrote:And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect:
