“Preventive Counterrevolution: Late Fascism Three Years Later,” an interview with Alberto Toscano by Emerson Rhodes—a NYC-based writer whose work has appeared in House House Magazine, Ethics Magazine, and The College Hill Independent—, is a Communis original feature.

“One of the salient elements of contemporary authoritarianism is that it is not simply conservative because it doesn’t really have very much to conserve that is viable, or even attractive, for most folks. The tempo of the conflict, the confrontation, and the dismantling needs to be maintained, because that keeps the coalition together. The moment that it decelerates, the moment that you don’t have another executive order, or some kind of manufactured crisis, the contradictions bubble up to the surface, and all the much more prosaic promises, not just to the base but to the country—about inflation, jobs, etc.—will prove themselves to be entirely fatuous, unable and indeed unwilling and uninterested as the current administration is in providing results around the quality of life and of social reproduction for the vast majority of the US voting public.”

—Alberto Toscano

Emerson Rhodes

In your book Late Fascism, you develop a theory of fascism that’s less about defining fascism and more about interrogating our interest in using fascism as a term. You published the book in October 2023. How do you feel that your thesis has changed or developed in the time since its publication?

Alberto Toscano

To begin with, it’s worth noting that the use of the terminology of fascism, certainly when it comes to public political discourse in the United States and elsewhere, seems only to have increased in the intervening period since the book’s publication. In the US, this has obviously taken place as a response to a further entrenchment and intensification of the authoritarian and repressive dimensions that were already present in the first Trump administration.

That being said, if I were to take this opportunity to engage in a kind of self-criticism, I think that the economic and geopolitical dimensions of what I term “late fascism” are more prominent now and demand more engagement and explanation than I accorded them. I would therefore at least qualify some of the arguments advanced in Late Fascism that stressed the extent to which this recent authoritarian turn appears in some respects to be surplus to capitalist requirements. When I started working on the book, the contemporary reactionary political cycle appeared to be marked by the preeminence of ideological, fantastical, libidinal, and superstructural elements; more so than dynamics grounded in material interests or class politics. Obviously, the psychological and even the more delirious dimensions of the contemporary far Right have not abated in any way, especially in the critical domains of big tech and fossil capital, or in the rhetoric and practice of US administration.

I don’t think we can just repeat the explanations for how and why capitalists or the bourgeoisie rallied to fascism in the interwar period and project those into the present. But I think it remains vital to contend with that dimension, especially as the turbulence and implosion of a certain legal, economic, and even ideological world order is very much on the agenda of global politics. Think of how geopolitical imaginaries manifest in authoritarian and fascistic politics today, whether in the reinvention of the Monroe Doctrine, the support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, the ongoing war on Iran, or the insistent prospect of conflict with China. The geopolitical and the geoeconomic, as domains of crisis and horizons of domination, are critical determinants in contemporary far-Right ideology.

I don’t think this necessarily marks a drastic break with the dynamics that I was responding to in Late Fascism, but I think it is a shift that demands incorporating other frameworks of explanation. The other notable phenomenon that has come to the fore since the book’s publication takes place at the discursive or ideological level: we find ourselves in a situation where anti-fascism itself has become an object of juridical proscription and executive orders in the United States, and intensified repression elsewhere. There’s a greater intensity of conflict and contestation over the language of fascism itself, to the point that some scholars of fascism have left the US because they felt that it wasn’t a safe place to do their research. Whether by invoking “antifa” or seeking to quash Palestine solidarity and anti-genocide activism, the US State (but also many of its allies, most prominently Germany) is engaging in persecution of multiple forms of academic and scholarly and activist discourse.

ER: I’m glad you brought up fascism’s capitalist mechanism, because in your other recent book, Terms of Disorder, you talk about how systems of capital are reaching this tipping point ecologically, but also in the social and political world. And as you touched on your answer, fascism springs out of capital. I’m interested in how you are reckoning with the way in which capitalism reaches a point of decay but also how that relates to the current preeminence of fascism.

AT: One angle from which one can approach this question is to think about the temporality of fascisms, as it relates both to their political imaginary and their strategic practice, as well as how this connects to the broader temporality of crisis. To my mind, a very useful and timely way of thinking about the political processes that result in fascism is an idea that was revived in the late 1960s by Angela Davis, that of “preventive counterrevolution,” first coined, I believe, by an Italian antifascist anarchist, Luigi Fabbri, in the early 20s. The idea is that fascism, contrary to a certain commonsensical historical narrative, does not emerge in order directly to confront a revolutionary challenge to the capitalist order of domination and exploitation. In its actual chronology, it often arises after the defeat or decay of revolutionary movements, as happened in Germany and Italy. That’s also the context in which fascism gains much of its momentum and its legitimacy, as well as its attraction for different groups and classes—whether it’s the downwardly mobile petty bourgeoisie or capitalists who see their bottom lines at risk. These groups regard fascism as a necessary antidote or prophylactic against the imminent or future threat of revolutionary disorder and social chaos. To this day, that discourse, which cries out “the country is on the brink of collapse!,” is operative everywhere. It declares that the nation, the State, the people must be rescued by some more or less violent project of rebirth. It’s a discourse that is still very much with us, albeit in mutated forms, and its temporality intersects in significant and symptomatic ways with the temporality of capitalist crisis. Of course, interwar European fascism also presented itself—among several things, which included the promotion of imperial and colonial projects, the fight against feminism, etc.—as a kind of fix to the effects of economic crisis, and as the neutralization of the possibility that those economic crises would serve as an opportunity and staging ground for revolutionary communist or socialist or indeed anti-colonial movements.

Now, I think that in the present we are dealing with a different temporality that weaves together political economy and lived experience. One thing that’s interesting and important to keep in mind, is that this wave of reactionary politics—not just in the US, but in Argentina, Brazil, India, as well as much of western Europe and beyond—comes on the back of the financial crisis of 2007/8 and all of its consequences, consequences that still persist in myriad ways. It also comes in the wake of a series not of defeated revolutions in the full sense of the term but of defeated movements for social transformation, shall we say, like Occupy, the “Arab Spring”, the various indignados movements in southern Europe, or more recently the estallido social of 2019 in Chile. So, there’s a way in which the far Right has a pattern of coming after defeated or thwarted radical and progressive movements, while also being shadowed by economic crises.

But what I think is quite significant is that these contemporary movements of the far Right are also operating in a novel and volatile conjuncture. Here is where I also think the question of climate is critical to understanding fascism today, which is emerging in a context where there is a widespread sense not just of diminishing opportunities and precarity for large swathes of the population—which is, in fact, already a legacy of 2007/8 and of the longer period of stagnation that we’re living in—, but also the anxious feeling that those forms of scarcity and precarity are only going to intensify in the context of various forms of climate crisis, emergency and breakdown. That’s why I think it’s useful to observe that while a lot of the far Right might be, in its discourse, climate denialist, in its politics, in a dark and disturbing way, it is climate realist.

This was the point that the Colombian President Gustavo Petro made at the COP conference in Dubai. In responding to the genocide in Gaza, he linked it to the fact that, as he put it, many in the middle classes of the global North were rallying to far-Right politics. In his telling, it was as if Hitler were knocking at their door and they were letting him in because they already envisioned the prospect of mass migrations and further so-called refugee crises on the back of a climate emergency that is already at work. Hence the suggestion that we need to think about what is happening in Gaza—with the collusion, complicity, and participation of the US, Europe and their allies—as a kind of “rehearsal for the future.” This is a future of mass disposability, where many populations will be treated, as they are already, as a kind of surplus. What links the politics of fascism to this justification for making groups and people disposable is a form of fortress politics in which the border is crucial.

To return to the question of preventive counterrevolution, the ongoing economic stagnation and precarity is always accompanied by this horizon of emergency, which is in turn joined to the prospect that social movements might arise out of these interlocking crises and put certain forms of privilege and profit at risk. This is the context in which we see the formation of reactionary alliances or blocs that have very different, even divergent, constituents. Everyone from religious conservatives to tech billionaires to people who are deluded into thinking that MAGA is a movement to bring back jobs and reindustrialize the United States. But I think that to get a sense of how those dynamics bring different groups together into this volatile alliance, it’s important to keep in mind the social and political temporality that they’re reacting to. I find it striking in the US context—though this is also true elsewhere—how this involves constantly needing to stress a kind of epic, civilizational threat posed by a whole array of enemies who exist at all sorts of scales and take all kinds of guises: devious philanthropic elites, “criminal” migrants, trans women, the supposed Marxists who apparently run all the US universities and may have even infiltrated West Point, and so on and so forth. Such rhetoric is very symptomatic of the forms of appeal that the far Right can enjoy by presenting itself as a fix to crises, whether present or forthcoming. It exploits a lot of ambient social anxiety, malaise, instability, and multiple forms of present harm and suffering. This idea of resolving a situation that is one of turbulence but also of diminishing returns is very compelling to a lot the broadly middle-class (or petty bourgeois) people in the global North.

ER: I want to probe more about what you’ve said on the rise of authoritarian or fascist talking points among the middle class in the global North. You talk about its political and economic dimensions, but do you have any thoughts on the cultural dimension of these appeals? For example, I’m thinking of the rise of fascist talking points among young people, which may be seen as historically uncharacteristic of a youth demographic, as well as how the Internet has led to the proliferation of many of these phenomena, as well as of discordant ideologies. You can go on Twitter and see someone with a trans flag and a swastika, and I’m interested in your thoughts about how these ideas have been shaped through the internet and culturally.

AT: In the book, I quote this article that Benito Mussolini wrote in 1921, the year before he first took power, called “Fascism and Relativism.” I often think that to reflect on the fascistic tendencies of the present, early Italian fascism is more instructive than full-blown National Socialism. Fascism was informed by having as its leader someone who was immersed in the kind of ideological incoherence we’re discussing (this was also true of many of its cadres). Mussolini came from the radical left of the Socialist Party and morphed himself into not just an ultra-right nationalist dictator, but somebody who would promote imperial ventures and antisemitic laws, making use of the most extreme forms of racialist ideology. In any case, the weaponization of incoherence that one finds to be a disarming trait of certain kinds of far-Right politics today has a long history. In that rather weird 1921 piece, Mussolini says something to the effect of We’re proletarian and anti-proletarian, aristocratic and anti-aristocratic, etc. Ultimately, he concludes,  the only thing fascists believe in is a principle of violent action and self-affirmation. You could say that there’s a belief in the aesthetics of domination and everything else is just fodder, a pretext, an instrument.

This obviously doesn’t fit something like German Nazism, which is not separable in any way, shape, or form, from its racial ideology, but I think that the “relativist” element in early Italian fascism is telling, especially insofar as it relates to political cynicism and to the use of an irony that’s wrapped up in cruelty, humiliation, domination, and so on. Fascism in this regard has a kind of elective affinity with certain broader dimensions of everyday culture, and today with their manifestation in internet or social media scenarios.

There’s a long history of the use of fascist symbols even after the demise of the actual fascist movements in Europe in the post war period. We can think back to how Nazi iconography was rather widespread during punk, notwithstanding the fact that a lot of punk groups were on the Left or anti-racist. There are examples like Sid Vicious from the Sex Pistols wearing a swastika, same with Siouxsie and the Banshees, even David Bowie has his own weird flirtations with the fascist aesthetic. At least in Euro-American culture, there’s a percolating thing about playing with Nazism and fascism as a seemingly a- or antipolitical form of social provocation.

Now, I think one of the things that’s been very salient is how the far Right has been able to adopt and immerse itself into these massively online cultures of cruelty, provocation, irony, or (to use the broad catch-all term) trolling as a kind of political practice. This trolling has frankly become a bit disorienting, even bewildering, now that it is taking place at the highest echelons of the US federal State. Even the accounts of official agencies and departments seem to be run by proto-Nazi shitposters and are brimming over with the most “triggering” iconography and very knowing ways of using Nazi slogans, white supremacist songs or what have you. Incidentally, I think that there has also been a distinct phase shift between the first and second Trump administrations. You have a Vice President who relishes “owning the libs” as part of his job. Recall how after the assassination of Charlie Kirk where you had Vance hosting a far-Right podcast place from the White House.

At the level of media ecology there have been striking changes, mirrored in politics more broadly. I’m thinking of the extreme embrace and fusing of the culture of online provocation with hyper-authoritarian politics by Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, for instance. He runs a dictatorial, hyper-carceral State, but at the same time, does it under the guise of a Bitcoin aficionado and social media personality. The far Right in its current physiognomy seems much more capable of drawing its energies from these forms and styles of online discourse than the Left (which tells us something about that discourse too—let’s be wary of the fatuous idea that socialism needs better influencers). On top of which, we should not forget that the richest man in the world and recent “dismantler” of much of the US federal government owns one of the main platforms on which these phenomena are taking place and has also tweaked “X” in various ways, including in the algorithmically training and shaping of its artificial intelligence component, Grok, to engineer the circulation and intensification of extreme far-Right discourse. This is all manifesting in grotesque forms, like Trump’s desire to foreground the plight of White Afrikaans so-called refugees. Suddenly Grok was introducing the topic of “white genocide” when asked questions having nothing to do with South Africa or race.

So much of this isn’t just a kind of natural affinity between far-Right politics and internet culture, it’s the result of the convergence and intensification of a deeply labored, engineered and, indeed, profitable set of strategies. This takes us full circle back to that political economy element we mentioned earlier, especially when it comes to media that involve (especially now with AI) such vast outlays of finances and resources. AI is literally fixed capital, most obviously in data centers that demand and occasion huge accumulations of value. It’s not that the ideology is a separate thing which then justifies certain forms of economic and political practice, it’s that the two things are fused together. This is arguably a significant shift. Historical fascisms never made fascistic discourse directly monetizable. Fascist ideology was, at least initially and contradictorily, presented as supporting or defending certain kinds of capitalist interests and projects. But it wasn’t itself directly commodifiable. While I think there’s a lot that is problematic about the discourse of and on the postmodern, I do think that if we go back to its more materialist versions, namely in the work of Fredric Jameson’s, the idea of de-differentiation of separate spheres—where you have a deliberate fusion of the cultural, the economic, and the technological—is useful for understanding contemporary fascist formations. Of course, it’s interesting too that the far Right’s modes of communication and address often echo ideas of pastiche that were also parts of those discussions of postmodernity.

ER: You touched on this idea that the political Right is very successful at picking up and monetizing the internet and its rhetoric to pull people to their base. Earlier, you talked about how, on the Left, there’s an anti-fascist, authoritarian sensibility. I’m interested in whether you wanted to elaborate on this idea of why the Right has been so successful where the Left has not been. I’m thinking in particular about how people are mobilized people via the internet, and then the larger ideological question of what you think the current politics of an anti-fascist Left are.

AT: The question of success is a very tricky one. Inasmuch as the playing field in many ways belongs to the Right, including the material infrastructure, as well as the fixed capital and technology, the idea that one should fight for control of that terrain often presupposes that the terrain is either neutral or, at the very least, open to being occupied. I think there are serious problems in the present—media, technological, and material-economic problems—about thinking of discursive struggles in the domain of communication as something that the Left or progressive forces somehow need to address because they’re being surpassed or defeated by the Right. There isn’t a symmetry, and therefore there isn’t necessarily a left-wing version of what the other side is doing.

This bears some analogy to debates that took place in the interwar period, when there was a lot of intense discussion as to whether Left and anti-fascist forces should fight fascism on the terrain of the mass, ecstatic, and semi-religious mobilizing of people. Or should the Left just remain within the ambit of rational, collective, emancipatory politics?  We could think of similar conundrums today.

I think that the issue about measuring success, about what counts as a victory or what counts as strength, is interesting and important. One thing that is different, certainly in the US—if less so in other places where the far Right has a more seriously organized street and civil society presence—is that when it comes to actually mobilizing people to engage in various forms of collective action, especially oppositional or even insurgent collective action, it seems fairly evident that leftist and anti-fascist forces still have superior capacities. Take the recent case of resistance to ICE in Minneapolis and beyond, but also, of course, the 20 or more million people that hit the streets after the murder of George Floyd and of so many others. (That doesn’t mean that these forces are stronger, of course, because they don’t have the State or the repressive apparatus or indeed the media on their side.)

 

What strikes me in this moment is that we’re confronted with a very asymmetrical situation, where that asymmetry is not necessarily a sign of weakness. Think of how little, if any, actual and consequential opposition there was from the judiciary or other agents of the State, federal or otherwise, against the ICE occupation of Minneapolis and everything that ensued, and how feeble the opposition of the Democratic party is, by and large, on this and so many other issues. It’s therefore pretty remarkable that they still had to retreat on the back of mass popular opposition. That is a serious strength to build on, and in many ways an interesting tactical and perhaps strategic miscalculation on the part of a far Right that holds the levers of the federal State. They can do (and have done) enormous amounts of social harm, but they have also helped to catalyze, despite themselves, transformations in US society. The far Right’s weakness is that they need spectacular humiliation, they need visibly to crush their adversaries. Actually, if they weren’t so into that, if they were more satisfied with the piecemeal process of gaining control—which, of course, they’re also doing—or gradually taking over various institutions, they wouldn’t show their hand so easily and make these gross miscalculations. I think that regardless of everything that they’re able to do with a captive Supreme Court and the ridiculous superpower of the US executive, there’s still a real social depth of opposition that they don’t quite know how to handle.

This is why I find it useful to refer to a concept that originated first in anti-colonial readings of Gramsci—namely by Ranajit Guha—and was then adopted by the political economist Giovanni Arrighi in his writing about geopolitics in the wake of the Iraq war, namely that of dominance without hegemony. In some way, whether in the US or abroad, the Trump administration, as well as many of its allied authoritarian movements and regimes, have given up on the idea that they’re actually going to grow beyond a certain ceiling. These formations often have very strong bases or core support, and then a sizable amount of people who are conservative or will vote for the Right regardless. But I thought what was really striking in terms of the various ICE occupations of Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Memphis, etc., was the fact that there wasn’t even a sense of really trying to persuade anyone in these major US cities that any of this was in their interest or benefit. They are just treating large swathes—or one could numerically argue, the majority of the country—as enemies.

This is a phenomenon that goes back a while. On the Right, it used to be centered on forecasts of a demographic shift. Remember some years ago, when the discussion around the Republican Party was along the line of: We must act now and transform ourselves, because, given these trends, what are now perceived as ethnic minorities who generally vote more Democrat than Republican, will become the majority in the country. (Remember G. W. Bush speaking Spanish?) The middle-class suburban Whites that are the core of the Republican voting block will be in the minority, hence the urgency. Even now, I think there is that sense of haste, but it takes a more belligerent and far less “reformist” guise. It’s the sense of a narrowing window of opportunity to break the opposition and remake the country. And then even if you lose support, the terrain will be yours. (Disenfranchisement and gerrymandering electoral districts on racial lines is the tried-and-true political technology to this end, but it can take multiple forms.)

There’s a combination of enormous power over the levers and instruments of the State and a much more strategic and concerted design than in the first Trump administration aimed at really transforming key aspects of the State. This includes its relationship to public and higher education, as well as the complete upending of medical and scientific research on bases that are fairly bewildering—even by standards of most traditional authoritarian movements. Interestingly, for a lot of far Right or even dictatorial regimes, that’s the bit that they just treat as kind of neutral: vaccination, medical research, etc. It’s not necessarily an object of the ideological work that happens in all sorts of other places within the social whole. That’s also the sense of the “Move Fast and Break Things” mentality of this variant of late fascism: just dismantle the administrative State and then create a situation where, even if you lose, they’re playing on your turf, and it’ll take your enemies forever to even change any of this back.

My sense is that we’re faced with a very peculiar form of both demagogic but also minoritarian politics that knows itself not to be moving towards mass consensus. I think that explains a lot of these tactics. Otherwise, you would have thought there would have been a much more concerted effort to convince or persuade at least some of the more affluent inhabitants of the cities to buy into this repressive onslaught, rather than just treating all US urban centers as hostile and occupied territory. Frankly, I find it pretty bizarre. Trumpism has reached a kind of ceiling, it doesn’t treat itself as a hegemonic project, but instead as a project to achieve durable dominance with a mass base that’s not a majority.

ER: That very cleanly brings me to my final question. You’ve discussed this idea of haste, of breaking shit so that even if they lose the ideological war, all this stuff is broken, and one can’t get it back. Do you think this is just motivated by desire for capital, or by what? What’s the point of destabilizing these systems?

AT: I think there are different vectors and different styles that overlap in the broader coalition behind Trump. I don’t think this is entirely unique to the US, but you can see how the dismantling of State capacities plays into different projects that are currently allied with one another. There was a piece in The New York Review of Books by Quinn Slobodian, published in the context of the Musk-DOGE moment. He talked about the fact that there was this convergence between three visions of the State. The first is what he called the corporate “sleek State”. This is the idea of a State that is basically designed to intensify and accelerate capital accumulation, namely with unlimited freedom of investment and development for specific industries. You can see this at work with fossil capital and artificial intelligence, but especially with the symbiotic meshing of capital and State around surveillance and defense—with Palantir as the most emblematic case.

Then there’s what Slobodian calls a “shackled State,” whose aim is obviously to neutralize or stop everything in the State that is now categorized as “woke” or “welfarist” or “social democratic” or “Marxist” or whatever. All of that is perceived and fought against as an incursion into the patriarchal capitalist preserve of the nuclear family, and the religious or Christian ethos that is connoted by it—this is the purview of Russell Vought and the Project 2025 blueprint.

Then there is a more extreme kind of anarcho-capitalist accelerationism, manifest in what Slobodian called the “shattered State”, promoted by people who literally just want to break shit up, to fragment the modern State into multiple shards of profit, privilege and domination (they call it “freedom”). This is one way, a compelling one, to capture the unstable coalition, both practically and ideologically, within the far Right. There are moments when some of these contradictions come to the fore more emphatically. For instance, we briefly witnessed a very open—though in the end fairly inconsequential—public spat between Musk and Steve Bannon over H1B visas for tech workers where a kind of ethno-nationalist, American jobs for American workers sentiment went up against a hybrid of the sleek and the shattered State.

One can imagine different conflicts in this vein (and we are now seeing some play out in a geopolitical register over the US-Israeli assault on Iran). I do wonder to what extent you might start to have more explicit contrasts or confrontations between different factions of US capital and their political surrogates or helpmeets. For example, I would imagine that there are dimensions of what’s happening at the level of the National Institute of Health or at the level of scientific research more broadly under RFK Jr.’s anti-vax “MAHA” agenda which are going to hamper the material interests of some medical and pharmaceutical corporations.

This incoherence or fissile potential of the reactionary coalition currently governing the US is also one way to account for the turbo-driven magnification, stigmatization, and humiliation of enemies, and the way in which foes are fashioned so that they can function as the enemies of all these groups—if perhaps for different reasons. The far Right’s enemies are fused together into what Musk so helpfully calls a “woke mind virus.” This works to provide a focus that papers over the contradictions between these different modalities of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore terms “the anti-State State.” As long as these different components of the governing reactionary coalition can be represented and see themselves as converging on common enemies, and as long as this production of enemies provides sufficient material lucre and political-ideological gain for elements of this broad coalition, then there will also be a need to keep up the tempo of social and political antagonism in a kind of restless flight forward.

I think that one of the salient elements of contemporary authoritarianism is that it is not simply conservative because it doesn’t really have very much to conserve that is viable, or even attractive, for most folks. The tempo of the conflict, confrontation, and dismantling needs to be maintained, because that keeps the coalition together. The moment that it decelerates, the moment that you don’t have another executive order, or some kind of manufactured crisis, the contradictions bubble up to the surface (while sometimes the acceleration itself, as in the war on Iran, can also sharpen the shearing pressures). Some of those contradictions aren’t always between divergent material interests. They can take the form of ruptures in MAGA created by participation in foreign wars or the corrupt handling of the Epstein files. Somehow you need to keep things frenetically moving along, because if things settle, all the much more prosaic promises, not just to the base but to the country—about inflation, jobs, etc.—will prove themselves to be entirely fatuous, and you’re faced with a serious problem. I think that’s obviously what they’re trying to avert, because they’re entirely unable, indeed unwilling and uninterested, in providing results around the quality of life and of social reproduction for the vast majority of the US voting public.

There’s a deep incentive structure to promote and feed a permanent crisis, not just because of the haste that we discussed, but also because crisis serves as a kind of centrifuge. If you keep up the rhythm of reaction, you can keep things in this state of seeming cohesion, whereas the moment it decelerates everything just collapses and rots.

Featured image: Salvador Dalí’s The Chemist of Ampurden in Search of Absolutely Nothing, 1936 (oil on panel). Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany. Courtesy of Wiki Art.

Alberto Toscano, Emerson Rhodes