“Become who you are … against fascism,” an interview with Alberto Toscano by Pablo Elorduy, appeared first in Spanish on El Salto on 24 August 2025, and was later republished on Communis. It is now presented in English translation for Communis with Alberto Toscano’s and El Salto’s authorization.

What seems politically significant to me in Europe and North America is the deep void at the heart of the extreme center’s ideologies. Every attempt to reproduce some kind of Western normalcy turns into an empty caricature. My modest proposal would be an antifascist take on Nietzsche’s idea of becoming who one is: becoming what the far right imagines you to be, realizing their imaginary enemy.

— Alberto Toscano

Alberto Toscano in conversation with Pablo Elorduy

 

In recent years, the far right 2.0 has morphed into a public opinion poll phenomenon, a mobiliser at the ballot box, both among those who vote for it and those who dread it, and a profitable publishing niche. Dozens of books have tried, with greater or lesser success, to grapple with the resurgence of trends that had seemed to vanish in the age of happy globalisation, only to return with force after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of militarised austerity. Among these works, Alberto Toscano’s (Moscow, 1977) Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso, 2024), released earlier this year by Akal in Spanish translation as Fascismo tardío. Raza, capitalismo y las políticas de crisis, stands out as one of the most compelling among all the books on offer about this new youth or second incarnation of fascism. Toscano refuses to confine fascism to the Italy and Germany of the thirties and forties of the last century. Instead, he traces fascism’s genealogy to the liberal world that preceded it, above all to the crimes of colonial conquest. He then threads that history through to the present, most urgently to the genocide now unfolding in Gaza, backed and bankrolled by leaders who may never bear the name “fascist” yet share the same longings and horizons as the contemporary far right.

 

What does Israel represent today for the idea of “late fascism”?

Let’s revisit first, however briefly, the debate over fascism taking place inside Israel itself, a debate with surprisingly deep roots, and which, like many of the issues I discuss in the book, go as far back as the 1970s. At that time, Israel’s tiny anti-Zionist left, spurred by the rise of Menachem Begin, began to ask themselves whether Israel could be described as a sui generis form of fascism. This is revealing, even symptomatic, for the Israeli case makes clear how the category of fascism can serve not only as a descriptive and analytical tool, but also as a means of concealment of certain phenomena. Within liberal Zionism, should such label still hold any meaning, which perhaps it does far less now than in the past, the very notion of Israel’s “fascistisation” also worked as a kind of justification or legitimization of Zionism in its classical form, as if fascism were merely a deviation, a moment of crisis, rather than a structural condition.

Where does this idea of equating classical Zionism with fascism come from?

One of the most interesting movements of left-wing anti-Zionist dissent, microscopic but intellectually highly productive, was a Trotskyist group in the 1970s. They strongly criticized the fact that some Israeli communists spoke of Menachem Begin’s era as a time of fascism, as if with it communists were normalizing what had happened before. You see this pattern elsewhere too: centrists, progressives, liberals, all of them tend to present fascism not as a potential outcome or dialectical development of the status quo, but as a rupture, as an exception. That discourse persists to this day. In Haaretz you’ll find countless articles, written in moments of political crisis, invoking “fascism.” The last wave came during the controversy over the Supreme Court, just before October 7, 2023, and that, too, was deeply symptomatic.

In what sense?

In interviews with liberal and progressive Zionist intellectuals at the time, you’d hear things like: “If Netanyahu’s authoritarian reform of the Supreme Court goes through, we’ll be entering a logic of fascistisation, police barging into homes at night, the army licensed to do as they please …” But without realising it, they were describing precisely what Palestinians have endured for decades in the occupied territories, and what many Palestinians who have held Israeli citizenship since 1948 also face. In that sense, today the discourse of fascism also becomes a form of self-exculpation for liberalism, for centrism; it is a way of casting as “exceptions” those very phenomena it has produced or abetted over the years.

Today we see the international far right rallying to Israel’s side.

Yes, and the real question is how and why this is happening. Why does the global far right, this late-fascist International now forming across the world, identify so strongly with Israel precisely at the moment of the most extreme colonial violence, both genocidal and exterminatory, at the hands of Israel? There are many possible readings, depending on context. But it is clear that the deep history, the prehistory of fascism, its constitutive relation to colonialism and racial capitalism, allows today’s racist and supremacist Western right to perceive Israel as the very fulfillment, almost the utopian realisation, of its own ideas: the possibility of being free to dominate the racialised other, the indigenous other, with complete impunity, within a technologically advanced neoliberal capitalist society.

There is, in effect, an absolute identification.

It is as if the colonial unconscious of the right can now express itself freely. Of course, the situation is different in India or in Latin America, but in Europe the fit is perfect. This identification with an ethnocratic State waging a war of extermination allows Europe in the meantime to immunise itself, to cleanse itself of the charge of antisemitism, of racism, of complicity with the Holocaust. That’s why I found it grotesque, and at the same time telling, that not long ago a gathering was held in Jerusalem “to defend the Jewish world,” with fascists in attendance who had antisemitic pasts and presents alike.

The fundamental reference point is the United States, where Democrats, Republicans, even Trump, treat Israel with hardly any difference telling one from another. How does that alignment work?

In the American case, the particular logic of extreme nationalist Christian Zionism also plays a decisive role. There is an open and near-unthinking identification with racial colonialism. In some ways such logic may be even more significant and damaging, albeit one able to adequately frame, for instance, the German chancellor’s remark that the Israelis are doing “our dirty work.” This encapsulates the idea that any Israeli act of war or violence is, by definition, an act conducted in self-defense; that Israel stands as the spearhead of the West, and that its acts of violence invariably obey to the need for countering an opposing and above all unwarranted violence. The same logic was evident when the German Foreign Ministry posted on X condemning Iranian aggression before Iran launched its missiles, but after Israel had already bombed Tehran.

You have already mentioned that practices intolerable as fascism within Europe were long tolerated and applauded when applied to colonised peoples. Have we forgotten that inheritance?

 That, in its classical form, is precisely the argument made by Aimé Césaire in his Discourse on Colonialism, and whose underlying logic is now often called the “boomerang effect” of colonialism. Fascism can be grasped as the moment when those colonial methods and violences, and the racial ideologies bound up with them, cross into Europe itself across its sacred borders. Of course, such methods and violences were never exceptional for the colonised or the indigenous. This was the central insight of Black radical and anticolonial thought already in the 1920s and 30s. The mid-thirties were a particularly crucial juncture with Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, followed swiftly by the Spanish Civil War of 1936.

What was at stake in those years?

By then, the Comintern and the Soviet Union had shifted strategy, away from “class against class,” total antagonism against fascism and against social democracy alike, toward the logic of the Popular Front. In 1935, within that framework, and in debates about the League of Nations, a new distinction emerged: between racist or fascist imperialism, and “democratic” imperialism, now cast as the lesser evil. It was at this very moment that radical intellectuals, communists, Marxists, many from colonial backgrounds but writing in diasporas, in Paris or London, developed a counter-current of critical thought on fascism. They insisted on putting squarely on the table the fundamental relation between fascism and colonialism. Their message was: what you call an abomination or an exception is simply our lived experience of colonialism, including the “democratic” and “liberal” colonialism of France and Britain. We find this in the writings of George Padmore, Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, and others. This was also when and why many of them broke with the Comintern and the Third International, later developing divergent Marxist and socialist dissidences. In the case of Ethiopia, they sought to build a discourse of international solidarity around the idea of workers’ sanctions, workers’ boycotts; a striking precursor to the strategies later invoked in the anti-apartheid struggle or in solidarity with Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship. These ideas circulated above all among dockers, port workers, seafarers.

A legacy not much remembered by the continental left.

It is crucial not only to recognise how a radically different political outlook was elaborated within anticapitalist and anticolonial thought, but also that it arose from a succession of strategic and practical debates. These alternative theories of fascism took shape precisely at the moment when “official” antifascism, whether in its liberal or 1930s Comintern version, treated Western liberal colonialism as a tolerable lesser evil. And I find it especially important to remember this today.

And the same debate unfolded in the United States, in the context of racial segregation, before the civil rights movement.

There the discourse takes on different inflections. One of the epigraphs of my book comes from Langston Hughes, who remarked that what Europeans experienced as something new — fascism — was already all too familiar to those who had endured slavery and Jim Crow, the apartheid system governing much of the United States.

The left has long embraced utopias, yet experience shows that utopia is, at the very least, transversal to ideologies, and often exclusionary by definition. Thomas More’s own Utopia was such. Today we see Israel, in its own way, staging a utopia with the aid of Trump, his casinos, and his gilded videos. Should the left problematise its attachment to the concept of utopia?

European radical movements had complex, often quite problematic, relations with colonialism, and those entanglements shaped the concrete utopias they advanced. A few years ago, I was working on the writings of the anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus. In the nineteenth century, especially after the defeats of 1848 and then of the Paris Commune, many revolutionaries in exile — anarchists, but also communists — sought to build islands, enclaves of utopia, but often within colonial-settler contexts. Among French anarchists there was debate over whether one could colonise, not in the sense of domination, but of “finding empty land.” The question of decolonising utopia is a complicated one. The same is evident if we look at American science fiction, haunted by its own history, it is saturated with the imaginary of settler colonialism.

The utopia of the right unfolds without such problems.

But there are also strong contradictions within the right, even the radical and extreme right, concerning utopia. One of the reasons I began to speak of “late fascism” in 2016-17 — thinking of Trump and the European far right — was precisely because the utopian charge seemed weak.

How does that differ from classical fascism?

In the 1930s, heterodox Marxists and critical theorists like Ernst Bloch and Georges Bataille argued — often in critique of official communism and socialism — that the utopian element of fascism was being underestimated. They recognised it as a perverse utopia, but a utopia nonetheless, with the capacity to channel surplus desires, fantasies, and forces within society. They warned that it would be an error for a rationalist Marxism to ignore this, or in Bataille’s more extreme version, to fail to reckon with these energies directly.

Yet you argue that the utopian impulse of today’s far right is weak. Why?

Plenty of figures on the far right draw on the more obscure fascisms, but most of these movements are deeply conservative in their lifestyles, in their outlooks, in their imaginaries. The whole notion, which was once an inverted imitation of communism, of the leftist utopias of the 1920s and 30s, that fascism carried of a “new man” or of a radically different future, of a national revolution with its aesthetics and its culture, simply isn’t central to today’s right. It doesn’t have the same weight.

Why is so?

In a way, their electoral and cultural success derives precisely from asking little of their followers. And I use that word consciously, with its echo of social media. They don’t demand you to change your life, let alone do they ask you to imagine sacrifice. There was a telling moment during the earliest stages of Trump’s tariff wars when, after one speech, people were shocked when he said, in a strangely misogynist way, that American girls should accept having three dolls rather than thirty. It was striking to see how even such a minimal call for reduced consumption was experienced as a rupture of the symbolic contract. I read this as symptomatic of their subjective, existential conservatism. Where utopian elements exist, they are trivial: petty utopias of domestic domination, of domination over migrants. They lack any vision of rupture or transformation of daily life.

Israel, by contrast, does entail a totalising utopia, with the notion of a Greater Israel championed by the Zionist far right.

That may explain why certain segments of the global far right feel such affinity and attraction in regard to Israel. In its extreme violence, in its willingness to break every geopolitical frame, to shatter international law entirely, they glimpse a utopian horizon with new spaces once unimaginable, new settlements. This is not part of the concrete imaginary of Europe’s late- or post-fascist right, which no longer harbours genuinely expansive ambitions, not even territorial ones. It is the difference between the border and the frontier. The frontier can advance infinitely, even to Mars in the case of Elon Musk, which is not the case of the border …

You mean the political border …

Indeed. Unlike the frontier, the border must remain fixed in order to keep the Other out, not to conquer. Today’s right clings to borders in this latter sense. It is a conservative imaginary, though not without tensions. Even if weak, some utopian element always seems necessary, which is why it gets projected elsewhere.

In the US, Trump keeps evangelicals close with the promise of a new Golden Age, one steeped in radical religious resonances.

In fact, the American ambassador to Israel once described Trump in quasi-messianic terms.

That transcendent vision, flirting with the apocalyptic or the anti-Christ, is absent in the European far-right parties like Fratelli d’Italia, Alternative für Deutschland, Rassemblement National, even Vox. Why?

In my view, contemporary far-right movements operate with a deeply pragmatic mindset. That is, they follow a cynical rationale that asserts: “There’s no longer a horizon for growth.” They may at times deny it vehemently, but it seems to me that the climate crisis and the awareness of finitude are woven into the imaginary that fuels and gives momentum to the right. Their politics rests on the premise that the future will be worse, that the horizon is closing, and that politics is therefore about redistributing shrinking resources antagonistically, about excluding others. This is the symbolic and psychic contract offered by parties like Fratelli d’Italia. There are elements of symbolic jouissance too in all this, both symbolic and psychological. But at its core lies a cynical realism: “We all know we are stuck in Thatcher’s world: ‘There is no alternative,’ and capitalism is what it is. But we will restrict the internal and global Others from access to resources, and we will offer you psychic compensation: the thrill of breaking taboos of political correctness, of mocking the ‘woke’; the license to vent national, racial, gendered identity; the right to insult and humiliate.” For much of today’s right, this kind of cynical, fatalistic outlook is practically out in the open. As W. E. Du Bois said, there’s a lot of psychological reward, but not much in terms of material benefits, and that’s more or less part of the deal they’re signing up for.

No alternative, except even less so for the Other.

A telling moment of this rightward turn, this nationalisation of politics, was Brexit in England, where I lived at the time. During that period, there were some curious polls in which there appeared to be a fairly significant difference between those who wanted to remain in the European Union and those who wanted to leave, where a majority of Leave voters, the Brexit voters, thought nothing would change. About 70% said, “Of course nothing will change, politicians are corrupt, sold out, but I’m affirming my identity.” On the other hand, most of those who wanted to stay in the EU expected tangible material consequences. That contrast revealed the cynicism, the fatalism that fuels the right. In the US, the situation differs, because of the evangelical factor. Polls there suggest around 40% of Americans believe the anti-Christ will appear, pointing to a very different utopian load. But in Europe, at least, the dominant drive is this antagonistic redistribution, largely symbolic, tied to identitarian politics, without a genuine horizon of change.

Another family within the US far right today is the Silicon Valley billionaires. Why have figures like Elon Musk embraced these ideologies, and others like Peter Thiel theorised them?

Silicon Valley has a long history of being deeply right-wing, as Malcolm Harris shows so well in Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (Little Brown and Co., 2023). It is a long history suffused with eugenic thinking, imaginaries of intellectual supremacy with racial overtones, going back even before computers, to the 1920s-30s at Stanford University. Add to this the astronomical levels of inequality and the emergence of a hyper-exaggerated, billionaire class self-awareness. It reminds me of a beautiful phrase from the Italian communist theorist Mario Tronti when he says that our history is that of capitalism trying to emancipate itself from the working class; what we see today is an emancipation from the Earth itself, all the way to Mars. But there is also something more concrete.

Which is …

Peter Thiel and Marc Andreesen aside, this group of big-tech capitalists long maintained a modus vivendi with centrism, with the progressive neoliberalism of the Democratic Party, which seemed to be Silicon Valley’s organic ideology. That began to change in the late 2010s, especially in the wake of the uprising after George Floyd’s murder. Significant ethical-political movements began to stir inside their companies: Tech Workers Against Apartheid, No Tech for ICE, and others. Employees, having taken their companies’ liberal-progressive branding seriously, began demanding that Google, Amazon, and others stop operating — as they in fact do — as key components of the State’s repressive infrastructure, from the military-industrial complex to border militarisation. At the end of the day, these companies are deeply embedded in the military-industrial complex, and today more crucially so, in the repression of migrants and the militarisation of borders. At both the ideological and material level, these sectors are the bread and butter of Amazon, Google, Musk. Their material interests lie in State contracts for military and repressive infrastructure, not in the toy-like consumer apps.

Meaning the technology of repression …

And alongside this is the political psychology of the “founder,” who imagines himself as a meta- or para-political figure: the genius, the sovereign capitalist who cannot tolerate his (well-paid, but rightless) employees organising ethical-political forms, unions, inside his company. It is striking, because these employers could have conceded to every demand and still retain more wealth than anyone could ever spend. But here the symbolic dimension of their power comes to the fore.

And yet there are contradictions between this billionaire cohort and the MAGA movement.

An odd alliance has taken shape, not without conflict. Steve Bannon, for example, has denounced Silicon Valley as an apartheid State. But a convergence has taken place, producing an amalgamated enemy: wokeness, the universities, the intellectual elites, imagined both as the forces that repress the founder’s ability to fully exercise their transformative inventiveness, and as those who dominate the (largely imaginary) white nationalist worker. This has forged a strange bond of negative solidarity across the far right’s different fractions and constituencies.

Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir, is one of the key nodes of the US far right. What does he represent today?

Palantir embodies the full self-consciousness of the idea that Silicon Valley must transform openly into a nationalist-civilisational project, in the face of the Chinese threat and other factors. You can see it in Alex Karp’s tedious, yet delirious and bizarre recent work The Technological Republic (Bodley Head, 2025). The argument is that we must purge the virus of liberalism, that weakness, and restore virile energies to Silicon Valley. This is something even Mark Zuckerberg has taken up. Karp insists that in the age of AI and drones, a new synthesis of technological identity and geopolitical domination must be forged, as in the heyday of the Cold War or the Manhattan Project. That is his utopia. And what is interesting is that it has become hyper-statist, no longer neoliberal, but a hyper-technological State capitalism.

With monarchical overtones.

With monarchical overtones indeed, especially in figures like Curtis Yarvin, who promotes the CEO as sovereign, as the very embodiment of anti-democracy.

Characters such as Yarvin bring me to the question of whether we ought to take this theoretical hodgepodge seriously, aside from its function as a rationalisation for domination practices. Put differently, whether these ideas are mere folklore or genuinely constitute a coherent agenda.

It is hard to tell. Sometimes these references seem ornamental. Steve Bannon, or Peter Thiel and others may enjoy reading Julius Evola or Oswald Spengler, but how central is that? As philosophers, as historians of concepts, we are predisposed to follow that trail, say under the weight of a certain professional pathology. But in reality, the organised galaxy of the Trumpist right is more Europhile than the old Republican Party — with its evangelicals, nationalists, Christians and so on— but there is also the group of those influenced by the Nouvelle Droite, all those folks who read The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail, maybe a little bit of Alain de Benois, and others, often mediated through the National Conservatism movement, which forges yet another link with Zionism.

How important is this new far-right culture for understanding its political spread over the last decade?

There is a yearning for intellectual life on the right, something I know well from the Italian far right of the 1970s, around CasaPound, always awash in magazines, colloquia, reading groups, the walls adorned with photos of Gottfried Benn, Ernst Jünger, Giovanni Gentile, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and all that. Yet within this galaxy, it is hard to find anything organic. And there is a danger of focusing too much on Bannon’s reading habits. In practice, much of the intellectual substance of Trumpism comes from a much duller, more technical production with the gray, anonymous work of think tanks. If you read Project 2025, especially the legal sections, you see a deep technical intellectuality, peculiar to the US, but saturated with political imaginaries — Christian, nationalist, identitarian, homophobic, misogynist. This is the backbone that holds together the flashier elements. The “Great Replacement” ideology of 1990s Europe, for example, resonates in the US only because it intersects with 150 years of anti-immigrant law and practice, going back to the exclusion of Chinese workers. It is already inscribed in the constitutional and legal architecture of the US. That deeper infrastructure is what enables the new elements to take hold.

And how does the US far right influence Europe’s post-fascist parties?

There is a clear influence in terms of style. This is hardly surprising in a sub-imperial continent, where American cultural and geopolitical hegemony is so strong. The idea that there are ideological brothers-in-arms in the White House has been key in opening up a sense of possibility. The figure of Bannon has been significant in this regard, especially in his attempt to build intellectual networks, and also in the mutual mimicking that has taken place. Because it’s not just about the culture wars, although many of the tactics and institutional strategies from the US are indeed adopted. There’s also been considerable imitation of the idea of fighting against progressive elites and building a new illiberalism which can take on institutional form. Viktor Orbán is a clear case. What is at stake here is a deeply felt sense of political possibility, the opening of another cycle, another horizon. To be sure, elements have been imported from American counterrevolutions, in the juridical arena of gender, sexuality and reproduction, or in Italy, even the debate over gun ownership. There is mimicry at work, though always refracted through very different legal traditions and institutional forms. It is visible in the relations of Milei with Musk, Meloni with Orbán, Orbán with Ron DeSantis. A new world of political possibilities has been opened. One might even say that, in formal terms, this is not so different from the way Europe’s radical left once looked to Ecuador, Venezuela or Brazil, less for technical-institutional models than for the atmosphere of an epoch. Moreover, these extreme rights combine identitarian provincialism with the conviction that they are part of a genuinely global movement.

Post-fascism also derives its power from a claim to freedom that classical fascism either lacked or conceived in a very different manner.

Let me disagree with that. If you look at fascism’s colonial prehistory, you already find a utopian promise of the idea of being free to dominate, free to enjoy one’s domination in certain spaces. And you see this as well in episodes of the interwar fascisms. The French historian Johann Chapoutot takes up this theme in Free to Obey. He argues that even the managerial, subjective ideology of the SS carried this notion that you were given a goal, but the way you carried it out was your domain of freedom and autonomy. For me, one of the obstacles to thinking critically about classical fascism, especially late fascism, is the Cold War common sense that equates fascism with totalitarianism, with a mechanised bureaucracy of total obedience. But this image, akin to the “Moloch State,” doesn’t match reality, nor does it capture the desires or subjectivities of today’s far right. This also helps explain the complex entanglement between extreme authoritarian violence and libertarian economic ideologies. Figures like Javier Milei are symptomatic in this regard. I think of historian Quinn Slobodian’s work on the “bastards of Hayek,” where he uncovers the racial and colonial logics woven into the genealogy of neoliberalism itself. If we assume fascism strictly as statolatry, an exorbitant statism, then it seems impossible to link it with anarcho-capitalism. Yet that is why I found it interesting that even in classical fascism, in Mussolini’s speeches and writings from the period of the March on Rome, you already find a curious identification with the liberal minimal State. In other words, fascism was conceived as a method of violence to break the back of the workers’ movement, to destroy peasant and worker autonomy, to dismantle organisations of solidarity, all in order to make less State possible. Here you can see how fascism’s very genealogy is deeply entangled with the idea of economic freedom: economic freedom, the freedom of property, and with it, the freedom to exploit and to dominate.

In the book you cite the line that anyone unwilling to talk about capitalism should remain silent about fascism. Does that mean the seed of today’s moment was already there before 2008, before Lehman and the politics of austerity?

For Karl Polanyi, you can already see it with David Ricardo. I was struck by the metaphor of the virus, a virus perhaps suspended, dormant, but still already there. Why? Because one can also think of fascism as viral, given that modern political economy is so deeply contradictory. The universalisation of political rights and of citizenship collides with capitalism. Capitalism not only has to reproduce and feed off hierarchical forms inherited from the pre-capitalist past; it also constantly produces surplus, disposable populations. I was reading the fine Akal edition of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where Marx argues that Bonapartist Caesarism in the mid-nineteenth century was the symptom of precisely this contradiction, this almost constitutive impossibility.

How so?

This, too, is the theory of the Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani, who conceives fascism as a variant of the transcendental, contradictory form assumed by politics under capitalism. Bonapartist authoritarianism figures here as the capitalist resolution to the problem of mass politics in a society organised by hierarchical exploitation that generates surplus populations. It is in this sense, not the fascism of black leather boots, that fascism appears as a violent resolution which nevertheless requires mass politics, requiring imaginaries and utopias of antagonistic equality (colonists against indigenous peoples, heterosexuals against the “abnormal” and so forth). The resolution is invariable in structure yet reappears in radically different guises.

What can we take from the study of classical fascism to face the current situation?

When I started writing the book, there was this debate in the US about whether or not it made sense to draw analogies or disanalogies with fascism. What I found useful was to read people who had lived through it directly: Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Césaire and others. They were always clear that the potential and the recurrence of fascism is constantly with us, but that it would never look the same. Marcuse, for instance, said there could well be fascism in the United States, but its outward forms wouldn’t be recognisable as such. That means we have to think, at a theoretical and conceptual level, about what exactly this process and potentiality amount to. But it’s not so mysterious when you remember that even fascism itself, which political science often treats as a stable, fixed historical object, was never stable at all. It looked radically different at different moments.

In the book you advance a kind of proposition, a small hope that it is necessary to become what the far right believes the left already is: anti-white, queer, mixed.

My modest proposition is an antifascist version of Nietzsche’s injunction to become who you are. To become what they think you are. To bring their imaginary enemy into being.

To truly awaken, to be woke, consciously.

Of course, this is a regulative ideal, and a fairly utopian one. But we are also in an extreme moment, symbolically as well as materially. Materially, because of the excesses of military violence; symbolically, because what I find politically significant in Europe and North America is the profound void at the heart of the ideologies of the extreme center. Every attempt to conjure up a so-called Western normality comes off as a hollow caricature. It is eerie, almost like a zombie incantation, to hear the mantra repeated that “Israel has the right to defend itself.” Not at the material level, because, as Ilan Pappé says, Zionism is in terminal crisis (a crisis that may drag on violently for a long time), but at the symbolic level, where there is a collapse of Western supremacism in its liberal and progressive-liberal guise, and it is a marked collapse. That collapse, for now, is the soil in which fascisms grow, their breeding ground. But how long it will last without counterweights or reactions, I don’t know. We already see massive disaffiliation in empirical terms with the fact that public support for war with Iran, or for what Israel is doing in Gaza, is minimal. Even in Germany, where official support for Israel “right or wrong” reaches delirious heights, popular opinion is not so different from Spain or Italy. So, I am not sure how long this façade, this political void, can go on unchanged.

So, the program is to bring about the destruction of Western supremacism?

Yes, that would be a good program. Think of it as the euthanasia of rentierism, the euthanasia of Western supremacism.

Featured image: Malak Mattar, No Words, 2024, oil on primed linen, 218 x 485 cm. Courtesy of the 18^th Toronto Palestine Film Festival (Sept. 24 — Oct. 3, 2025).

Translated into English from the original in Spanish by Noam Sala Budgen and Rolando Prats.

Alberto Toscano, Pablo Elorduy