The following interview with Alberto Toscano by Pascual Serrano from Ediciones AKAL first appeared in Spanish translation by Communis today 10 June 2025 on “No cierres los ojos”, the blog of Ediciones AKAL. Alberto Toscano’s Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso, 2023) recently appeared in Spanish translation by AKAL. Communis is pleased to release the English original of the said interview with the kind permission of Alberto Toscano.
“Self-criticism is imperative, but on condition that we draw a line between the democratic parties of what Tariq Ali has dubbed the ‘extreme centre’ (which includes the bulk of European so-called socialist, social-democratic and labour parties) and a critical left, whether parliamentary or otherwise. In their collusion with imperialism, their framing of immigration as a ‘problem’, and their dogged promotion of neoliberal austerity, liberal or centre-left parties bear massive responsibility for our late fascist condition.”
— Alberto Toscano
Ediciones AKAL: You point out that the term fascism is used too loosely today. On the other hand, you argue that the definition of fascism should not be reduced to what fascism was at a particular moment in history. So where should we stand when it comes to classifying contemporary forms of fascism?
Alberto Toscano: The situation is somewhat paradoxical: especially among US establishment liberals contending with the rise of Trump, there has been an inflation in the polemical use of the language of fascism; on the other hand, understandings of fascism that elucidate its essential links to capitalism and its crises – which is also to say to colonialism, racism, patriarchy and imperialist war – remain largely marginal. I think the issue of naming (say, are Trump or Vox fascists?) is less significant than that of whether an analysis of fascism as a structure, phenomenon and potential that persists, in mutable forms, throughout the history of modern capitalist societies can help us to grasp and resist our increasingly catastrophic political present. Today, those who speak loosely of fascism – namely, liberals and ‘centre-left’ politicians who refuse to confront its intimate links not only to capitalism, but to actually-existing liberal-democratic regimes – are often those who stand in the way of us thinking it. W.E.B. Du Bois spoke of the racial fascism that germinated in the wake of the US civil war as a counter-revolution of property and I think that remains a pithy way to orient ourselves towards fascism, as long as we reflect on the changing strategies of counter-revolution that shadow the shifting forms of property, which is to say of capitalist power.
EA: Isn’t there a possibility that accusations of fascism could be abused? If everything is fascism, then nothing is fascism. Fascism may even accuse others of being fascists.
AT: This danger exists and has long existed. The contemporary far Right, Trump included, has thrown the accusation of fascism at the Left (though I don’t imagine they’re consciously echoing Habermas’ unfortunate polemics against left fascism, Linksfaschismus). And, as I already noted, liberals have often made inappropriate or ineffectual uses of fascism as a term of political opprobrium. The critical issue is whether the naming of a politics as fascist is grounded in analysis and theory (as well as an anti-fascist strategy). It may even turn out that while a theory of fascism is critical to understanding contemporary political processes of ‘fascization,’ the name or accusation of fascism may not have such traction in the everyday language of persuasion, campaigning, and so on. It is much preferable to think seriously through fascism and leave the tactical question of its naming open, than to call it out while not really thinking through what it means – the latter being ‘anti-fascist’ liberalism or centrism’s default option.
EA: According to you, it is a matter of perceiving fascism in a dynamic that precedes the moment when fascism is named. What elements could warn us of this dynamic that precedes fascism?
AT: I draw the idea of a fascism-before-fascism principally from those Black radical thinkers who, first, saw the practical and ideological premises of fascism at work in racial capitalist violence (plantation slavery, colonial dispossession, social regimes of apartheid) and, second, identified post-war and post-Civil Rights fascisms as taking the form of ‘incipient’ or ‘preventive’ fascism, trying to block the path of the liberation of Black people and other minoritized groups. What these thinkers were particularly attuned to was the fact that a self-conscious and assertive fascism was a recombination and intensification of patterns of domination already at work in the capitalist societies from whose bosom it emerged: the violent assertion of class power through the repressive apparatuses of the state, the racialized and gendered modalities of exploitation, a ‘freedom to dominate’ accorded to certain subjects over others, the dynamics of imperialism, and so on. We can trace these fascist transitions, so to speak, both at the level of structures and of personnel, asking questions like: Which aspects of the existing juridical system are open to fascist uses (think of immigration law in the contemporary USA)? Is a colonial army already a fascist army in nuce? Or, alternatively, what is the role of the ‘specialists in violence’ within liberal-democratic states – cops, soldiers, prison wardens – in making fascism possible? Or, at a more ‘superstructural’ level, in what ways do the legitimations of hierarchical violence, of the differential worth or value of certain lives over others (their grievability, disposability, ability) already at work ‘before’ fascism provide it with a breeding ground, a language, a lever?
EA: At one point, you suggest that the collective experience of psychic fantasies is part and parcel of a breeding ground for fascism. Could these times of fake news and conspiracy theories be part of that breeding ground?
AT: For sure. Especially to the extent that individuals today are much less prone to epistemic obedience to a ‘system’ of ideas or political doctrine, the unfinished, participatory, massively parallel and fragmentary narrative form of the viral conspiracy is far more attuned with the times than some kind of rigid dogma or credo. While often serving as a vehicle for strategically meticulous and complex designs (like ‘Project 2025’) late fascism does not manifest as programmatic but operates through a communicative form best captured in Trump’s infamous verbal tic ‘Many people are saying’. Of course, this indefinite and aggressively irresponsible mode of half-affirmed and out-sourced belief can have terribly harmful consequences (‘Many people are saying… that Haitian migrants are eating your pets… that George Soros is the puppet-master behind the Great Replacement… that Afrikaners are being genocided in South Africa’) but it evades our stereotypical understanding of the language and practice of totalitarianism. Conversely, we could also say that, in their very open-endedness, contemporary fake news and conspiracies, with their highly-distributed and participatory ‘build your own adventure’ formats, provide a much richer and more plastic terrain for the inconsistent multiplicity of our fantasies (or our ‘phantasms’, as Judith Butler has incisively discussed in their book Who’s Afraid of Gender?) than an inflexible program that would demand our fealty.
EA: Fascism seems to involve the triumph of anger over reason, but today we are also seeing a movement on the left that appears to be based more on emotion and feelings than on reason. Do you agree?
AT: Not really. I think that the framework of a reasonable politics versus an emotional and irrational one doesn’t get us very far. To invoke the title of an important book by Albert Hirschman, across the political spectrum we have to do with different articulations of passions and interests. Fascism is unthinkable without the mass mobilisation of hatred and ressentiment, but it would also be dead in the water without a lot of cold self-interested calculation (not least by its bourgeois backers). Conversely, an emancipatory left evidently cannot abandon self-reflexive critical analysis, planning, and persuasion but it is also toothless, whether for reformist or revolutionary ends, if it is unable to generate its own oppositional passions, or even to draw on energies we may link to the religious languages of spirituality or messianism. As the late Marxist historian Mike Davis observed: ‘Socialism … requires non-utilitarian actors, whose ultimate motivations and values arise from structures of feeling that others would deem spiritual.’
EA: For a long time, it was believed that the mainstream media could be used by fascism, but we have witnessed precisely the opposite. Traditional media claim to combat extreme and radical ideologies, yet it is on social media where fascism, or at least the far right, is growing the most. How should democracy respond to this situation?
AT: I think that globally, including in countries with a professional media ideology that is perceived as liberal, the far Right continues to make very capable use of the ‘mainstream,’ even as it denounces it as conspiring to marginalise radical conservative voices. Mainstream media – including public broadcasters or major ‘legacy’ outlets – remain by and large far more welcoming to the far Right than to the anti-capitalist Left. Just think of the recent sympathetic profile of a racist anti-democratic provocateur like Curtis Yarvin in The New York Times, or how dominant media outlets have served as conduits for genocide denialism with regard to Israel’s war against the Palestinian people. Or consider the complicity of the mainstream European media establishment in fostering those moral panics about immigration that have been the key driver of the far Right’s popularity. It is certainly true that social media have provided an indispensable and formidable petri dish for multiple strains of the far Right, but I think it is more helpful to look at the interaction of these different media spheres than to think of them as alternative. The question of media strategies for a radically democratic left is a very difficult one to address, and exceeds my own expertise, though I think it’s worth noting that if we think again of the war on Gaza, it is social media that has largely provided an outlet for the circulation of information about the genocide and arguments for Palestinian solidarity and resistance that have been by and large shut out of mainstream media (with the added irony that it is on Musk’s ‘X’, with its open fostering of reactionary content, that much anti-systemic communication on Palestine has taken place, and not on its supposedly liberal and less commodified platforms, like BlueSky).
EA: It is said that in politics there are no empty spaces, that the causes or demands left behind by one ideology are taken up by another. You also point out that fascism knows how to identify the problems and needs of large sections of society in order to exploit them and offer easy and misguided solutions, but ones that fascism can use effectively. Which may take us to the conclusion that the left, or democratic parties, must be doing something wrong or failing to address certain demands, and that this is being exploited by fascism. Should we engage in some self-criticism?
AT: Self-criticism is imperative, but on condition that we draw a line between the democratic parties of what Tariq Ali has dubbed the ‘extreme centre’ (which includes the bulk of European so-called socialist, social-democratic and labour parties) and a critical left, whether parliamentary or otherwise. In their collusion with imperialism, their framing of immigration as a ‘problem’, and their dogged promotion of neoliberal austerity, liberal or centre-left parties bear massive responsibility for our late fascist condition – not least for almost invariably treating adversaries to their left much more ruthlessly than their competitors on the Right or the far Right. After forty years of tailing the Right on myriad issues, while reproducing social precarity, it’s no surprise that many people turn to ‘the real thing,’ especially when the latter couches itself in an irreverent, pseudo-insurgent and ‘populist’ appeal.
Featured image: Illustration by Ariel Davis for The New Yorker. Photo courtesy of The New Yorker.
