The following interview with Alberto Toscano was conducted by Patrick Samzun. Its French translation will appear on the French anarchist journal Réfractions. It is now published on Communis in its original form as part of Alberto Toscano’s column Extrema ratio.

“The resistance that is visible at present is occupied by necessary defensive and legal struggles, we haven’t yet seen in the US the emergence of capacious forms of transformative resistance. If and when they do, they will require what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls ‘creative aggression.’ In her words: ‘It’s difficult to fight an adversary that keeps changing shape. The narrative momentum of horror movies depends on the terror of scary surprises to keep audiences riveted to the improbable by presenting it as inescapable—at least until some resourceful protagonists, frequently with their backs against the wall, outsmart the monster using creative aggression.’”

— Alberto Toscano

Fighting the Far Right: Creative aggression against anti-politics

 

Patrick SamzunWhat are the sources of the “Dark Enlightenment” that inspired American neo-reaction? What role have played in it figures such as the accelerationist Nick Land and the libertarian Peter Thiel? Or books such as Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual (1997), whose anarchist genealogy is omitted by Slobodian, like any discussion of the gap between anarchism and libertarianism?

Alberto ToscanoThough a Curtis Yarvin today is the object of titillated profiles in The New York Times, and is a court “philosopher” or anorganic intellectual for a tech far-Right that has its key impresario in Peter Thiel, I would be wary of overestimating the ultimate political import of this phenomenon, which is neither strategically guiding our current authoritarian acceleration nor producing any thinking worthy of the name—Yarvin or Land’s writings are largely a tired cyberpunk pastiche of the hallowed repertoire of reactionary thought, from eugenics to Caesarism, and only impress people, largely men, who combine a large reservoir of ressentiment, a sense of menaced privilege, a dangerous overvaluation of their own intellectual capacities and very shallow humanistic culture. Many critical theorists of fascism understandably gravitate toward textual production rather than to the budgets and strategic plans of Christian conservative or anti-immigration foundations, but the latter have an incomparably greater influence than this rather pathetic intellectual “movement.” Slobodian’s decision to omit a systematic exploration of the anarchist genealogy here probably derives, if I can hazard a guess, from a sense that “anarcho-capitalism” bears an extremely tenuous relationship to anarchism—even of the individualist, Stirnerian variant.

PS: Does this political trend merely create a cultural “metapolitics”? Does it not find a “material basis” in both the subprime crisis and the ecological crisis, as obstacles to capitalist accumulation?

AT: The Nouvelle droite gambit of a reactionary “Gramscianism” is rather far removed from what we’re witnessing today. This is not the creation of a “worldview” or an antagonistic culture out of the structured amalgam of varied intellectual influences. Sure, there’s many online magazines and scenes on the far Right that have ambitions in this direction — and which reproduce themselves through the “Conservative welfare State” of wealthy sponsors and foundations — but the far Right in power’s relationship to the cultural and the intellectual is opportunistic, ornamental and ultimately oppositional—it’s a war against the “Marxist ‘woke’ Left’s” infiltration of institutions far more than it is a coherent project for its replacement. It is more an anti-intellectual anti-politics than it is a metapolitics, properly speaking. In a general sense, I think that the far Right’s cultural politics of permanent counter-revolution does gain much of its momentum both from unresolved crises in the economy — the epoch of stagnation following the financial crisis of the 2000s — and the “catastrophe in permanence” that is the climate crisis.

PS: What is “the pulsing void at the heart of the mythological machine” of Trump-Musk’s neo-fascism? What are their “wordless ideas”? Is it race and whiteness, as in Spengler? Male privilege? Fossil-fueled male whiteness?

AT: I suppose that the void whereof Jesi spoke in his Right-Wing Culture is one that by its very nature is never exhaustively named. Indeed, it is necessary that it not be exclusively and exhaustively identified (lest the path, for instance, to a multi-racial far Right, or one able to capture female activists and voters, be blocked). One particularly pervasive and powerful name of the void is “the West.” This over- and under-determined term functions as the protean nexus of whiteness, masculinism, technological power, the settler-colonial frontier, and the demand for a freedom to dominate. It pervades the discourses of the European far Right (Vox, Meloni, Orbán, RN, etc.) but is also at the core of Peter Thiel’s plea for technological nationalism and militarism resurgent (for a symptomatic summary of this position, from a self-described “progressive,” see Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s manifesto-cum-company-brochure The Technological Republic). And it is central to what Andreas Malm has called Israel’s US-backed “technogenocide” in Gaza.

PS: The misogynist Gadda saw a feminine fascination in Mussolini’s power on the masses. After the women’s marches in 2016, the new trends of LGBT feminism among the youth, women’s larger vote for Harris, Trump’s misogyny and attacks on reproductive rights, is not a feminist resistance possible?

AT: Feminism, in an expansive sense that foregrounds queer and trans struggles — against the far Right’s desire to reterritorialize gender and sex on a patriarchal phantasm of “tradition” — is an absolutely critical dimension of contemporary anti-fascism. The Ni Una Menos movement against gender-based violence across Latin America and Spain, for example, is a vital example of how to struggle against the far Right. We also need to be very sensitive to the ways in which the far Right has been able to capture and reproduce certain forms of female subjectivity, with their own quotient of “empowerment,” against feminism, often on axes of racial identification (while there was a sizeable gender gap in the 2024 US election, for instance, white women continued a pattern of voting majority Republican).

PS: In what ways does cyberspace constitute a privileged terrain for the expression of the far right, while the Internet has been described as the playground of libertarian hippies? Have there been tipping points, such as the subprime crisis (Petet Thiel) or Covid-19 (Elon Musk)?

AT: As a space for the circulation, consolidation and crystallization of negative affects and sad passions — as well as conspiratorial, persecutory, sadistic or catastrophist narratives —cyberspace has certainly served to boost the far Right (as well as to exacerbate some of the fissiparous or sectarian tendencies on the Left). Some of this involves a kind of elective affinity between the business model of the internet and social media in particular — monetizing rage (or disgust or fear), capitalizing on resentment — some of it is studied and deliberate (Musk or Zuckerberg’s political campaigns against “content moderation”). No doubt the pandemic fostered and accelerated some of the more pathological dimensions of these phenomena, as everyday life became both objectively paranoia-inducing and structured by passivizing digital enclosure.

PS: Is some kind of cyber resistance and/or cyber exodus outside the realms of Musk and Zuckerberg imaginable? Could websites like The Intercept, Drop Site News or Democracy Now represent emerging forces of resistance?

AT: All of those sources of alternative or antagonistic content and analysis are vital—and we should not forget the truly heroic work of journalists in Gaza documenting a genocide in which they’ve been systematically targeted. But a cyber-exodus that moved beyond resistance would require some measure of control over the means of communication themselves — from the data centers to the algorithms — a control and power not just over the “content” but over the institutional and material (or political-economic) form. All of our digital communication today is in one way or another on our enemy’s territory and much of it on their terms. I recently read Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition and was struck by noting that its one concluding political proposal (in 1979!) was “give the public free access to the memory and data banks.”

PS: In what way can we label the white nationalist reaction as “archeofuturism”? How does technological futurism (AI, Mars, transhumanism, etc.) combine with moral conservatism?

AT: The term rightly points to that unstable temporal alchemy that occupies much far Right theory and practice (and thus bears a family resemblance with other formulas like “revolutionary conservatism” or “reactionary modernism”). Some of the far Right is keen on rushing forward into the past. Conversely, there is a marked tendency in what we could see as the tech wing of national conservatism of moving “back to the future” (to use one of Peter Thiel’s favourite slogans). A nostalgia for the futuristic imaginaries of the Cold War, combining State-backed military and technological innovation with masculinist-patriarchal models of racialized familism, is pretty crucial here. The 1950s, but with drone swarms and AI (and enough elite tolerance for Thiel’s homosexuality).

PS: If we attempt an analysis of the mass psychology of neo-fascism, is it today grounded in the exultation of “fascist joy” à la Brasillach (Musk’s exalted Nazi salute) or the bitter triumph of negrophobic and Islamophobic, anti-woke and climate-skeptic resentment?

AT: Both. We would be mistaken to think that late fascism requires a homogeneous affective register—any more than it needs a stable class referent, or entirely coherent articulations of race and gender. It is in the ability to stitch together incompatibilities and to play on an ample register of mass feelings and individual sentiments that lies much of its strength. Among its key operations we could identify the one that involves giving sovereign license to enjoy one’s hatreds and fears. Late fascist joy is less in the vein of Brasillach, still writing in the wake of trench warfare and the exaltations of “total war” and more along the lines of the infamous statement made by a banker to the Financial Times in the wake of Trump’s election: “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … It’s a new dawn.”

PS: How have the American “masses,” but also partly European (RN, AfD, Reform Uk, Fratelli d’Italia …) come to desire the seizure of power by unattainable multi-billionaires who dream only of privatizing the State, not create a protective national-social State? Why more precisely is the old senile Trump popular (44%) and not the young and muscled Musk?

AT: Musk is neither that muscled nor that young! That said, his pre-existing appeal (as a hyper-successful engineer-entrepreneur) couldn’t really survive his mutant turn as an anti-bureaucrat bureaucrat potentially crashing institutions tasked with key aspects of social reproduction, including for Trump voters. At a psychological level, while he might be “admired” by a certain sub-section of the population he does not allow for the same identificatory and mimetic pleasures as Trump (who, we shouldn’t forget, has been inhabiting the screens and consciousnesses of Americans for many decades, and who synthesizes in his person crucial aspects of American ideology, from TV celebrity to real estate speculation, passing through world wrestling and casual racism).

PS: What is today’s and especially US neofascist’s decentralized power (while his psychological salary seems obvious)? Is the Cybertech power not too much centralized?

AT: I think that the combination of Trump’s harkening back to the expansionist imperialism of presidents McKinley or Polk (with talk of annexing Greenland, Panama, Canada, etc.) and Thiel’s or Musk’s nostalgia for the military-industrial complex of the 1950s tell us that, notwithstanding the abiding and influential presence of cyberlibertarian and “crack-up capitalism” strains, this is a moment in which centralisation and Caesarism loom large — of course, they continue to circulate through decentralising legal, economic and ideological dynamics, but the dominant note is more dictatorial than delegatory. No doubt, this has concrete conjunctural reasons too — not least a resurgent economic nationalism on the background of a stagnation in productivity and geopolitical competition with China. Trump’s expansionism is both farcically capricious and grounded in the fraying of a global order in which zero-sum struggles over resources, territories and supremacy gain increasing urgency. But centralizing and decentralizing, centripetal and centrifugal aspects of late fascism don’t cancel each other out—just think of all the license that has been given over the past few weeks to the State’s functionaries of repression (ICE, DHS, etc.) when it comes to the politicised abduction and deportation programme, which hinges on exorbitant claims to sovereign prerogative but which also relies on thousands of petty despots to operate.

PS: What is the role of the State in the neo-fascist transition, when libertarians detest it? Is it, as the Leninists see it, the preliminary stage to its demise (DOGE and the purge of civil servants)? Or, at the same time, its repressive extension (defense, police and techno-surveillance budgets, federal investment in AI …)? How can we think of the State as an agent of privatization and militarization? Is there such thing as an “anti-State State” (or a Leninist non-State State)?

AT: I think the “libertarians” of the far Right, with their cramped understanding of freedom as a very partial kind of economic freedom (let’s not forget that the likes of Thiel explicitly disparage competition and praise monopolies) and a freedom to dominate, don’t really detest the State as such—they might hate “government,” “administration,” “regulation,” etc., but they’re smart enough to know that without the concentration of symbolic, economic and repressive power in some sovereign form their own dreams of emancipation from democracy, from the working classes, from the wretched of the earth, will never come to fruition. And, as Slobodian traces it in his Crack-Up Capitalism, this instrumental accommodation (let’s occupy the State to break it up within) can very easily turn, as it has in someone like Thiel, into a recognition that maybe a hostile takeover of the Leviathan is a far better strategy than its full fragmentation and privatization.

PS: How can we destroy the dreams and world of Trump and Musk? After the ferocious repression of Black Lives Matter, what is the fighting potential of the Black radical Tradition between the pitfalls of a disillusioned Afro-pessimism (Wilderson), aesthetic optimism (Moten/Harney) and “fragmentary” pan-Africanism? What kind of combative resistance alongside the black abolitionist tradition, that of anti-slavery, anti-fascism (George Jackson), anti-carceral feminism (Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore), as well as federative and communist pan-Africanism?

AT: The scale, scope, and duration of the kind of struggles required to dismantle the late fascist present and future is daunting today the least. Whether the next few years will see a new mass crystallization of Black and multiracial struggles against the racial police State as we saw in the George Floyd Rebellion is impossible to say—though I think those struggles are only very partially and perhaps improperly registered in the more academic or theoretical registers you mention. Maybe we need to find ways of attending to the political thought that is produced closer to or from antagonistic and abolitionist movements themselves—I think a very important example of this kind of approach, in a historical register, can be found in Orisanmi Burton’s remarkable book Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. The resistance that is visible at present is occupied by necessary defensive and legal struggles—again, I’m thinking of efforts to counter the deportation machine and its targeting of racialized political activists for Palestine solidarity, we haven’t yet seen in the US the emergence of capacious forms of transformative resistance. If and when they do, they will require what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “creative aggression.” In her words: “It’s difficult to fight an adversary that keeps changing shape. The narrative momentum of horror movies depends on the terror of scary surprises to keep audiences riveted to the improbable by presenting it as inescapable—at least until some resourceful protagonists, frequently with their backs against the wall, outsmart the monster using creative aggression.”

Featured image: Shadows of signs held by supporters are seen as they listen to then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speak during a campaign event at Devos Place in Grand Rapids, MI on Monday November 07, 2016. (Photo: by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images). Courtesy of Common Dreams.

Alberto Toscano