“A Conversation with Alberto Toscano” appeared in print on the issue 48 (Pseudo) of trans magazin in its German & English edition (gta Verlag, 1 March 2026), pp. 44-48. It is reproduced on Communis in its English original and in Spanish translation with permission from Alberto Toscano and trans.

“We must find ways of linking enclaves, prisons and walls with the occupation of swathes of the Earth for purely speculative pursuits such as data centres for Bitcoin mining. A form of political critique that includes architectural critique, critical urbanism, and critical geography, is vital to understanding both the material basis and the material instruments for these forms of fascism. These phenomena—energetic and logistical projects—are not at all secondary but are indeed defining pieces of the dynamics of imperialism and extraction.”

—Alberto Toscano

Handwritten notes spread over three books; sorted thoughts and recollections that emerged during discussions over several months. All of this sits with us at our desks in Zurich and Brussels, when we connect via call to catch Alberto Toscano as he starts his day in Vancouver.

 

Trans Team

In your 2023 book Late Fascism[1] you argue that what is generally understood as fascism, namely the Italian and German regimes between the 1920s and 1940s, was a direct outcome of centuries of settler colonialism. Furthermore, you describe how fascism did not disappear in 1945 and kept living in the post-war liberal democracies as a consistent companion of the capitalist order. You quote scholar Cedric Robinson’s observation that “Fascism was and is a modern social discipline which much like its genetic predecessors, Christianity, imperialism, nationalism, sexism, and racism, provided the means for the ascent to and preservation of power for elitists.”[2] For those who have not yet read the book, how can an analysis of historical writings on fascism enable a better understanding of today’s political discourse?

Alberto Toscano

Over the past few years, with the resurgence of authoritarian and far-right movements, the topic of fascism has entered mainstream debate, especially in the United States. However, when I began working on the book in 2016, the discourse on fascism was stuck in a sterile loop around questions of analogy and difference, so my aim was to move beyond that fixation. Beyond tracing the origins of European fascism to the histories and methods of imperialism and racial capitalism, my aim was also to explore its connection with the political regimes that have accompanied the postwar capitalist or liberal order.

Already in the 1920s and 1930s, diasporic, Black and colonised intellectuals made very explicit and politically consequential links between fascism, the contemporary imperialist reality, and histories of colonialism and slavery. In the following decades, works by Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi warned of fascism’s possible return in a very different and often non-recognisable guise. By identifying some of the intellectual and conceptual tools that allow us to think about fascism as a process, a potential, or a tendency, I wanted to conceptualise it as something mutable and not simply frozen. In the guise it took in the 1930s, it was of course linked to a particular moment of capitalist crisis and to the experience of World War I: a colossal trauma but also the site where many had learned how to engage in violence.

Certainly, in Italy and Germany, it was often veterans and their bitterness about the aftermath of the war, that made this political momentum possible.

TT       It is at times of crisis, whether a migratory, economic, climate, or social one, that fascist politics carry promises of change—today as much as in the early 20th century. Yet you argue that fascism is only a travesty of social change, ora pseudo-class discourse brought forward by a movement that considers itself anti-systemic, yet is ultimately conservative.

AT       “Pseudo” can offer us a very interesting and fruitful framework to look at fascism, which Italian anarchist thinker Luigi Fabbri first termed a “preventive counter-revolution” in 1922[3]. After World War I, there was a parasitical borrowing of a whole number of themes from the revolutionary socialist tradition, with both Italian fascism and German Nazism presenting themselves as nationalist revolutions. Yet, already from the start, the Marxist and anarchist Left was very keen on trying to expose these “preventive counter-revolutions” as simulacra and simulations.

Yet this mimetic relationship of fascism to the Left was very different compared to today, as interwar fascism emerged after the defeat of the Italian factory occupations and presented itself as a pre-emptive antidote against a Bolshevik revolution. While today, there is no active revolutionary political mass whose energies the far right is trying to divert; its approach is largely repressive. Of course, it still has to portray as subversive things that are not: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion initiatives might be disruptive but are not exactly revolutionary and, while the George Floyd uprising had an anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian dimension, antifascist groups now labelled as terrorists cannot be compared—as the Trump administration has repeatedly done—with sophisticated networks such as Al-Qaeda.

It is not then so much a pseudo revolutionary energy as a form of extreme nostalgic conservatism that is front and centre in late fascism. Even in the United States, there has been a shift from streamlined white-supremacist visions of Fordism, with Cold War suburban workers, and nuclear families with two cars—which were central to the visual rhetoric of the first Trump administration—toward the current social media production of the Department of Homeland Security, celebrating ongoing violence and feeding nostalgia for 19th-century frontier colonialism. Yet, figures such as JD Vance and Steve Bannon do have elements of a pseudo-class discourse, cynically referring to a forgotten white working class of the American Midwest—not because of its electoral significance, which is marginal, but for its symbolic power.

In this sense, what we are witnessing is an increasingly cruder form of revanchism and xenophobia that does not even try to articulate itself as a pseudo-class discourse and rather embraces the interests of the billionaire class. It becomes a celebration of crypto wealth, of Al deregulation, and the facilitation of incomprehensibly large media monopolies, all the way to neocolonial dystopias, such as the so-called reconstruction of Gaza. These are techno-logistical and architectural imaginaries that take their most perfect form in the so-called «miracle cities of the Middle East», to borrow Trump’s words, paving the way for a more explicit and forthright embrace of fully authoritarian, hyper-capitalist politics.

TT       While discussions on the definition of fascism have taken centre stage globally, in Switzerland we can instead observe a slow erosion and rise of criticism of one of the central constructs for the Swiss model—neutrality. What does neutrality mean for a country entangled with global extractive enterprises, especially in times of ongoing genocides?

AT       To the extent that so much of our current politics embrace a kind of «Machtpolitik»— politics of power, but also of impunity—it nullifies the liberal hypocrisy of paying lip service to notions of international law or human rights. The undoing of this symbolic framework in favour of crude truths about capitalist power and geopolitics, is interlinked with the genocide in Gaza, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Trump’s abduction of Maduro and seizure of Venezuelan oil. As the whole system that enabled concepts such as neutrality involved a particular balance with the symbolic and the juridical, it only functions if there is some sort of juridically legitimated international order.

Within that order, of course, neutrality can be used as a cover for political and financial manoeuvres. In the long run, there is an enormous risk in simply embracing impunity and power without the hypocrisy of acting for some vaguely universal good to access broader legitimation. But now, European politics finds itself as a completely residual formation, mired in increasingly absurd hypocritical stances, say if we look at the case of Israel or at France’s neocolonial efforts in Africa. What we are witnessing is what subaltern studies historian and theorist Ranajit Guha termed “dominance without hegemony”[4], commenting on the relevance of Antonio Gramsci to the study of colonial forms of power[5].

Ultimately, a politics of sheer domination does not seek to build alliances and is supported by disillusionment in residual centre-left policies of social equality that amount to empty promises, even to people who are not necessarily enamoured of far-right leaders, We would make a mistake to think that elections are won because everybody is enthusiastic about fascism. There is a level of disaffection, disaffiliation, and ultimately despair, underlying a lot of this. Cynicism means following those who promise a larger size of a shrinking pie in a zero-sum game, in keeping with a social Darwinist scenario of scarcity, haunted by climate catastrophe and endless economic stagnation. This kind of politics is deeply disruptive because it is not trying to build any reproducible form of hegemony.

TT       Speaking of social Darwinism and contemporary cities while continuing our reflection on fascism as a promise, we wanted to discuss with you the role of the modern movement as a promise. In your 2015 book Cartographies of the Absolute, you reflect on the emergence of the progressive neoliberal city in the 1970s, focusing on New York City and Detroit, and include a diagram showing how rent is extracted from the Black working-class downtown to rich white suburbs[6]. In architecture, the modern movement is the materialisation of the hypocrisy you just mentioned, building upon the materiality of glass and failed pledges of transparency, accountability, and accessibility. What are the roots of the neoliberal turn in urban planning, and what is the promise of the neoliberal city today—or at least, what remains of it?

AT       This question makes me think of the debate that took place between urban theorist Mike Davis and philosopher Fredric Jameson over the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, designed by post-modern architect John Portman. While developing his notion of cognitive mapping, Jameson described the experience of spatial disorientation elicited by this hotel and viewed it as an allegorical bodily experience dictated by the impossibility of understanding one’s place in the social totality under capitalism. This whole thematic of cognitive mapping was refunctioned from Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City[7]. In 1985, Mike Davis wrote an article in the New Left Review titled “Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism”,[8] in which he criticised Jameson’s shortcomings in analysing why the Hotel took a fortress-like form and hid its entrance. He noted how such buildings are constructed against a multiracial working class which was presented as a threat to financial accumulation and the spectacle of wealth.

The hotel becomes a glass monument in a City of Quartz[9], where it serves as a site of a spatial and architectural conflict between a migrant working class and a financial elite at the time of Reaganomics. Through this history, contradictions and pathologies of urban and architectural design in California can be understood as a racialised class war. This is also related to the accounts on repressive design of public schools in L.A. and on the prison-industrial complex discussed by Mike Davis himself, Ruth Wilson Gillmore, and Peter Linebaugh in the documentary “Safety Orange”. Beyond Reaganomics, the 1980s is a decade that bears many echoes to the present day: from the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to the U.S. invasion of both Grenada and Panama, events that directly prefigure the discourse we are seeing today regarding Venezuela.

TT       If we consider the prison a “zone of internal exclusion”[10], what other “zones” can you think of and how are they experienced differently across the axes of gender, class, and race?

AT       Walls are, of course, an obsession of the contemporary far right, but so are enclaves, gated communities and other forms of fortress-making, racial exclusion, exit, or micro-sovereignty. If we look at the far edges of the contemporary neoliberal landscape, we can see charter cities, network states—spatial imaginaries and constructions whose histories are profoundly linked to settler colonialism. It is not by accident then that so much of the relevant architectural critique in the past few decades has emerged from analyses of the apartheid regime in Israel and Palestine, from Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land[11] to the work of Alessandro Petti and Sari Hanafi.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the distinctive traits of contemporary fascistic politics is this explicit celebration and spectacle of material structures of repression that were already part of the liberal capitalist state: detention and asylum centres, holding pens in airports, cages at the border, and electronic surveillance. All these elements were treated as unfortunate necessities or dirty secrets to be minimised under liberal rule and are now explicit objects of celebration and spectacle. Governmental and social media have become a visual pornography of repression: chains, cages, Alligator Alcatraz, and the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Even the CECOT maximum security prison in El Salvador hosts visitors, is documented online, and presents itself as an architecture of unbridled domination. Even though the dynamics that make these spaces possible are the ones that we are familiar with, from the state of exception to various forms of dictatorship, all of this is now explicitly monetised and inserted in investors’ brochures. Therefore, it is no coincidence that President Bukele is both the figure behind this extreme carceral regime and a crypto entrepreneur.

I guess this, along with the renderings for the reconstruction of Gaza, are part of a logic familiar to architecture: that of the perpetual making and unmaking worlds, even when it is not clear how much concrete interest there is in bringing these spatial developments to fruition. By managing these imaginaries, there is an orientation towards a certain future—and a closure of other futures. In this sense, speaking of pseudo, there is something both symptomatic and sinister about how these neo-colonial imaginaries of hypercapitalist space are invariably accompanied by Al slop simulations. People who are used to having a critical eye on the political aesthetics of architectural and urban futures have an important role to play today, because they are familiar with the causes and consequences of this visual language, which is being used for increasingly repressive purposes.

TT       So, in all of this, what is the role of architecture today? We can see it as way of making and unmaking worlds, beyond their actual materialisation—for example, the NEOM project in Saudi Arabia, falling through despite 21,000 workers’ deaths on site and a myriad of rendered projects that everyone knows will not be realised. At the end of the day, it is a matter of projecting. But in Cartographies of the Absolute, you also describe how capitalism turns people and landscapes into commodities to further cement its dominance. Lewis Baltz’s images of the industrial parks in Irvine, California, document the saturation of a landscape through anonymous boxes where labour and flows are rendered invisible[12]. A landscape destroyed by speculation and rife with inequality is made to appear smooth. Is that then the role of architecture? To make and unmake, but also to smoothen and oil this entire machine?

AT       A few months ago, I was  watching a bizarre press conference that Trump gave with the CEOs of OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank, where he presented himself as the president leading an Al post-industrial revolution that would secure America’s supremacy. What was particularly striking for me, was that they made a big song and dance about the actual data centres. Of course, Trump has a real estate developer’s view and is genuinely obsessed with redevelopment and interior decoration, especially if it features marble, so his angle was not really about the artificial intelligence, but about the fact of building itself. Speaking about the square footage and how many football fields it amounted to, he carried the residual thought process that equates buildings with workers and labour, and therefore with the health of the economy. But then, of course, the number of people employed by a data centre is relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things. While watching, I was thinking of a line by Lewis Baltz about those business parks, where, if you look at those anonymous boxes, “you don’t know whether they’re manufacturing pantyhose or megadeath”.

One of the things that we did not adequately deal with in the book is the whole ecological and energetic dimension of these projects, something extremely critical to current discourses about artificial intelligence and to “fossil fascism”, to borrow a terminology from Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective[13]. We must find ways of linking enclaves, prisons and walls with the occupation of swathes of the Earth for purely speculative pursuits such as data centres for Bitcoin mining.

A form of political critique that includes architectural critique, critical urbanism, and critical geography, is vital to understanding both the material basis and the material instruments for these forms of fascism. These phenomena—energetic and logistical projects—are not at all secondary but are indeed defining pieces of the dynamics of imperialism and extraction.

TT       If we go back to Late Fascism, in the concluding chapter, you note how reactionary norms play out on the intimate domestic sphere, where notions of “Lebensraum” blend with household dynamics at a time of gender panic and online white supremacist groups.

AT       If we consider the current far right use of moral panic, around migration and crime, there are a lot of points of contact with post-war racism, which in Great Britain, for instance, manifested itself in the Notting Hill riots. We can say there actually was a shift away from workplace racism, such as the 1920s so-called race riots, toward housing. The question of housing insecurity, in particular, is a motivator leveraged for politics of expulsion and exclusion and so on. The thematic of scarcity, of a finite pie, is mobilised to remove others who may claim material or social resources, usually through narratives of invasion.

In terms of the gendered domesticity, we can also observe intense levels of pastiche and, dare I say, postmodernity. What is there more comically postmodern than the tradwife or other spectacularly simulated constructs? This is also the reason why Trumpism and its global counterparts are so effective: they embrace the logic of simulation. Donald Trump is a figure of reality TV, wrestling, real estate, and casinos. The pseudo, in all its violent seriousness, is his element. For Christian evangelical conservative backers, Trump is seen as the imperfect vessel for their mission: whether he is a crook and sexual harasser, he is seen as the only vehicle for a return to proper conservatism.

It is frightening, as this simulation or pastiche is no less violent, something which Adorno also notes when talking about Hitlerism by using a specific formulation, that of «phony fanaticism». And this to such an extent that Adorno goes on to claim that “[i]t is probably the suspicion of this fictitiousness of their own ‘group psychology’ which makes fascist crowds so merciless and unapproachable. If they would stop for a second, the whole performance would go to pieces, and they would be left to panic”[14]. In fact, those who are simulating their semi-religious enthusiasm will react even more viciously when criticised or when confronted with their simulation—which to my mind is a very relevant insight for the present.

Notes

[1] Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism, London 2023.

[2] Cedric J. Robinson, On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance, London 2019, p. 125.

[3] Luigi Fabbri, La controrivoluzione preventiva. Riflessioni sul fascismo, Bologna, 1922.

[4] Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Cambridge 1988.

[5] Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg, trans. Antonio Callari, New York 2007.

[6] Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute, Alresford 2015.

[7] Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Boston 1960.

[8] Mike Davis, “Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism”, New Left Review 151 (1985), pp. 105-106.

[9] Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London 1990.

[10] Nikhil Singh, “The Afterlife of Fascism”, South Atlantic Quarterly 105, no. 1 (2006), pp. 71-93, here p. 79.

[11] Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, London 2007.

[12] Lewis Baltz, The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California, New York 2004.

[13] Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, London 2021.

[14] “The category of ‘phoniness’ applies to the leaders as well as to the act of identification on the part of the masses and their supposed frenzy and hysteria. Just as little as people believe in the depths of their hearts that the Jews are the devil, do they completely believe in their leader. They do not really identify themselves with him but act this identification, perform their own enthusiasm, and thus participate in the leader’s performance. It is through this performance that they strike a balance between their continuously mobilized instinctual urges and the historical stage of enlightenment they have reached, and which cannot be revoked arbitrarily. It is probably the suspicion of this fictitiousness of their own ‘group psychology’ which makes fascist crowds so merciless and unapproachable. If they would stop for a second, the whole performance would go to pieces, and they would be left to panic.» Theodor W. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”, in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, New York 1982, pp. 118-137, here p. 136.

Featured image: The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California. Photograph by Lewis Baltz. Courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

Alberto Toscano