“Vecteurs du fascisme : un entretien avec Alberto Toscano” first appeared on NOG7 Genève on 13 May 2026.  The interview was conducted on 22 April 2026 by Lucie K. Mercier and Antoine Dubiau. For its Spanish version, also on Communis, read “Vectores del fascismo: entrevista con Alberto Toscano”.

“Just as the immense violence of the American imperial State can be understood both as a function and as a symptom of its decline, the extraordinary concentration of capital and repressive power is also haunted by its own sense of precariousness. This is why someone like Elon Musk exists almost as a pure symptom: the combination of anti-trans sentiment, the Great Replacement theory, an obsession with white Afrikaner farmers, and the feeling that his political and economic power is not secure.  A starting point for an anti-fascist Left might be to ask what it would mean to embody this thing they fear, to give reality to their paranoia about expropriation, ‘social justice,’ or the ‘power’ of working people.”

— Alberto Toscano

Vectors of Fascism: An Interview with Alberto Toscano

As the term “fascism” becomes widespread, its meaning grows increasingly uncertain. Yet it retains a critical potential, essential to global anti-fascist mobilizations, such as those against the G7. Alberto Toscano has been working for several years on the contemporary mutations of fascism, the realignments of the Far Right, and the links between authoritarianism, racism, and the crisis of capitalism. He is the author, among other works, of Late Fascism (Verso, 2023). In this interview, he discusses current uses of the concept of fascism and the new forms that reactionary politics are taking today.

Lucie K. Mercier and Antoine Dubiau

Fascism is today denounced as if it were the pure and monstrous antithesis of liberal democracy, or simply an anachronistic return to historical fascist regimes. Conversely, you argue that fascism must be understood within the long history of capitalism: what does this shift toward historicity reveal that analogical reasoning tends, on the contrary, to obscure? And what role do the political imperatives of the present play in this approach?

Alberto Toscano

I may want to start with the political motivations. My reflection begins with Trump’s first election, the Brexit vote, and the rise of reactionary electoral movements around the world. At that time, the resurgence of fascist rhetoric tended to portray it as a sort of exception or aberration with respect to a liberal, capitalist, and democratic norm. When the term “fascism” was invoked, it was often to reinforce or legitimize this normative conception of liberalism.

In this context, the prevailing discourse consisted of drawing, in a highly simplified and dehistoricized manner, parallels with European fascism of the interwar period. In academic circles and the broader public sphere, debates centered on the validity (or lack thereof) of this analogy. But the very terms of the debate were already constrained by a presupposition: the idea that fascism possessed a relatively stable core that could be defined, mapped, and cataloged, and that its singular historical form was that of the interwar period. From that point on, it was simply a matter of verifying whether or not a sufficient number of its supposed characteristics were present, in a sort of checklist logic.

Sometimes, this checklist also took on a temporal dimension, based on the idea that there were stages—a sort of scale or index—where changes in press freedom, forms of repression, or the constitutional order would signal a slide toward fascism. Discourse on fascism thus became a discourse bent on prophylaxis, prevention, and anticipation. My aim is not to entirely dismiss this discourse, but rather to describe its structure.

My response to this—drawing on a broader tradition of theories of fascism and anti-fascist practices linked to communist, socialist, anarchist, anti-colonial, and anti-racist movements—was that this assumption did not hold up, and that for several reasons. A key point is that from its very emergence, fascism was identified—by both Marxist intellectuals and Black and colonized intellectuals living in imperial metropolises—as exhibiting material and structural continuities—and at times even identities—with liberal imperialism.¹

A turning point in this Black and anti-colonial theorization of fascism was Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. This event led a number of thinkers and activists to break with the Third International and Popular Front line, which insisted on maintaining a distinction between fascist imperialism and liberal or democratic imperialism. Figures such as C. L. R. James and George Padmore embodied this decisive break, not only on a theoretical level but also in terms of militant practice. It went hand in hand with a critique of the trust placed in institutions like the League of Nations, which were perceived as accomplices of liberal imperialism. Instead, they advocated for what they called “workers’ sanctions,” that is, direct forms of workers’ solidarity that bypassed international institutions and international law, which they deemed too entangled in relations of imperial domination.

All of this allows us to view fascism as a fluid product of imperialism and colonialism, rather than as something that can be historically and geographically isolated—for example, in Italy between 1922 and 1943, or in Germany between 1933 and 1945. If we consider, today, the strikes by Italian dockworkers against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, we can see continuities—even in certain organizations or activists involved—linking the 1930s to the mobilizations against the Chilean dictatorship in the 1970s, then to the anti-apartheid movement, right up to the present.

Another key step in breaking with the liberal conventional wisdom on fascism is to challenge the way in which historical European fascisms themselves are understood. In the case of Italian fascism, its relationship to liberalism—particularly economic liberalism—and, more broadly, to capitalism makes it difficult to view it as an exception or an aberration. It was supported by figures such as Winston Churchill, but also by economists and liberal thinkers, especially in its early phase. The image of fascism as an entirely top-down and planning-oriented State, controlling all aspects of the economy and society, certainly corresponds to something in the 1930s, but it does not define fascism as a political project. In the 1920s, Italian fascism emerged explicitly as a form of ultra-nationalist violence—first parastatal and then State-sanctioned—intended to defend relations of property and exploitation. It did not begin as a totalitarian system or as a planned economy.

Another problem with many of these definitions is that they implicitly conceptualize fascism through the lens of Nazism rather than Italian fascism. This is problematic, from both a historical and an analytical perspective, because the relationship between fascism and Nazism has always been a matter of debate. If we wish to use analogies—and, to a certain extent, they are unavoidable—it might be more useful to consider the present through the lens of 1920s Italian fascism, including its colonial and racial dimensions, rather than comparing contemporary phenomena to Nazism, which often leads to misleading conclusions.

In a sense, your aim is not only to challenge liberal conceptions of fascism, but also the very concept of totalitarianism and its effects. Yet in your book, you do not explicitly engage with your theoretical opponents; rather, you construct an extremely rich landscape of references.

 

I tried to write a book that was less academic—in the sense of an intra-theoretical debate—which is actually my usual tendency. In that sense, it was also an exercise in self-discipline. But the question of totalitarianism remains important, nonetheless. In a way, I had already spent enough time, in other contexts and for other reasons—notably regarding the intellectual and political history of France in the 1970s—reflecting critically on the effects produced by this category, particularly as it developed during that period.

The 1970s were a pivotal moment in this regard. The term “totalitarianism” had already been used in various contexts prior to that time—sometimes by fascists themselves, sometimes by Marxist thinkers, including occasionally by figures such as Trotsky or C. L. R. James. There were also conceptualizations that predated the Cold War. But it was during the Cold War that the concept became reified, hardened, and that it turned into an ideological tool, reaching a sort of climax in the discourse of the New Philosophers in the 1970s.

And that moment could very well have been incorporated directly into the book’s narrative. The 1970s are also significant because they represent both the last major period of rich theoretical debate within Marxism on fascism—one might think in particular of Nicos Poulantzas and all the discussions sparked by his work—and a time when the applicability of fascism to the present was debated in very different contexts. This concerned not only Latin American dictatorships but also Arab authoritarian regimes and Zionism, as well as analyses produced elsewhere—for example, by Ghassan Kanafani in the late 1960s and early 1970s, or in the debates of the Japanese New Left regarding their own historical and contemporary situation.

It was also at this time that the category of totalitarianism functioned as a sort of “vanishing mediator” for a number of left-wing and far-left intellectuals, paving the way for what would later be called neoconservatism. And, in this sense, it repeats an older pattern, already visible among anti-Stalinist intellectuals of the 1940s and 1950s who would later become the first neoconservative generation. In some cases, they are even the same people. For example, in 1972, Les Temps modernes published a special issue on the new fascisms, featuring notably an important text by André Glucksmann. Shortly thereafter, he would become a “new philosopher” and then a supporter of various imperial, neocolonial, and frankly right-wing projects. But at that time, as a member of the Gauche prolétarienne close to Jean-Paul Sartre, he was still developing an analysis of the new fascism that remains interesting. In particular, he argued that if fascist tendencies existed within the French State, they should be understood as endogenous to the State itself, rather than as something arising—as in the 1920s—from street movements, paramilitary organizations, or extra-parliamentary forces. He used the phrase “the fish rots from the head down” [le poisson pourrit par la tête] to mean that these tendencies originated within the State apparatus itself—in institutions such as the Ministry of the Interior, the police, or the army—before spreading to the rest of society.

And this perspective resonates with more recent analyses, such as those by Ilya Budraitskis on the relationship between Putinism and fascism, in which fascist movements appear secondary to authoritarian dynamics that originate within the State itself. One could say something similar about contemporary American politics: even if there are links to militias or far-right movements, the main impetus and momentum often come from the State apparatus itself.

A comparable line of analysis could already be found in Latin America in the 1970s, where Marxist theorists and dependency theorists sought to understand authoritarian regimes. One of the key points of divergence from interwar fascism was precisely that fascist methods, practices, and ideologies did not originate outside the State before being co-opted by it, but were generated from within the State itself, particularly within its repressive apparatus, especially the police.

And these questions regarding the lack of analogy were at the heart of many debates in the 1970s. This is also why, despite the fact that they are often overlooked today, these debates constitute, in my view, a far more productive starting point than the contemporary comparative approach based on checklists and analogies, which generally revolves around a fixed, iconic image of Nazism. This framework often ends up reducing the entire issue to whether current developments resemble a singular form of historical evil, or whether the very concept of fascism should be abandoned.

 

The intellectual world in which we were educated tended to treat fascism and racism as almost interchangeable phenomena. In your genealogy of fascism, you deconstruct this framework by drawing on the Black radical tradition—from analyses of colonialism by figures such as George Padmore, Aimé Césaire, and Walter Rodney, to the critiques of the prison State developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by George Jackson and Angela Davis, and more recently in the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Beyond broadening the historical or geographical scope of fascism, you also seek to challenge our assumption that political systems such as liberalism, liberal democracy, or neoliberalism constitute coherent entities, given that they are experienced very differently by the populations concerned. In what ways was Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work on these issues ahead of its time—particularly in comparison to what was happening at the same time within the European intellectual Left? And what is it about her trajectory and perspective that makes her so central to thinking about processes of fascistization?

 

From a methodological and conceptual standpoint, I find her analysis—as well as her work with Craig Gilmore, particularly regarding what she calls the “anti-State State”—extremely useful for addressing one of the most difficult questions in these debates: the relationship between what is known as neoliberalism and processes of fascistization.²

We need to look back at her work from the 1990s. For example, in the essay she wrote following the acquittal of the LAPD officers who had brutalized Rodney King—the event that sparked the 1992 Los Angeles uprising—she already identified some very significant dynamics that remain absolutely central today. In particular, she draws attention to how the practices and ideology of imperialism—always permeated by racial dimensions—are internalized and linked to political and class struggles within the country itself. Her reading of the early 1990s as a kind of prehistory of our present is truly significant. She highlights the intensification of white nationalist resentment, itself rooted in massive social inequalities and the dismantling of welfare structures, including for populations considered white. And I think that from there, we can trace continuities to phenomena such as the opioid epidemic, or to what she calls forms of “premature death” linked to racism. This was also the time of the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War. So it was a time when American hegemony became deeply uncertain. And this uncertainty manifested itself both on an emotional level and in material transformations of social classes and political forms.

A fundamental lesson is that any serious anti-fascist critique must adopt a kind of parallax perspective. Of course, the explicit mobilization of far-right ideologies and sentiments is significant. But it must be analyzed in relation to changes in the political economy of the State and its forms of differential violence. And these forms often persist from one political regime to the next, regardless of the ideological positions espoused by those in power. Gilmore’s distinction between the State and the government is particularly important here. It allows us to conceive of the continuity of a racial capitalist State beyond shifts in political leadership. This is clearly evident when we look at examples in both the United States and Europe: Frontex operations, or the way in which explicitly reactionary, even fascist-leaning, projects rely on State capacities that were often developed by liberal or social-democratic governments.

These are very revealing moments. For example, when centrist officials claim, “But we’ve deported more people, and we’ve done it ‘humanely,’” we see how liberal governance can present itself as more effective in fulfilling the functions of the racial State, whereas fascistic policies seek instead to highlight and intensify the spectacle of violence itself. In this sense, liberal discourse presents these practices as unfortunate necessities, while fascistic discourse openly asserts them as the very goal of politics. And this creates a tension: the liberal critique of the Far Right often consists of arguing that it is ineffective in performing functions that liberalism itself carries out more effectively. The Far Right’s response, essentially, is to say: we are merely making explicit what you were already doing.

To analyze this properly, we must distinguish between several relatively autonomous dimensions. It is entirely possible for States to exercise extreme forms of class violence, racialized violence, and gendered violence without possessing an ideology that explicitly endorses such violence. But in moments of hegemonic crisis—both internal and external—the option of explicit domination and coercion can become more appealing. This is where we can draw on the idea of “domination without hegemony,” associated with Ranajit Guha and Giovanni Arrighi.³  In such moments, explicit ideologies of domination—what one might call “for-its-own-sake” fascism, or self-aware fascism—gain a certain edge. And this dynamic must be situated within a broader sequence: from the end of the Cold War, through the crises surrounding globalization, the financial crisis of 2007–2008, and then the failed reforms, uprisings, and aborted revolutions of the 2010s. All of this has produced a crisis on multiple levels, affecting both national and international orders, in which centrist liberal or neoliberal positions are becoming increasingly untenable, both materially and ideologically.

This is evident not only domestically but also internationally—for example, in the contrast between the liberal rhetoric of a “rules-based order” and the far more overtly transactional, instrumental forms of domination that have taken hold in recent years. Another striking feature of the present is the diminishing role of persuasion. Reaganism was very right-wing. But repressive policies, law-and-order policies, still tried to persuade people, more or less, in the very places where they were applied. More recent developments, such as everything happening around ICE today, often do without that entirely: military-style operations occupy and brutalize large urban centers without even attempting to convince those affected that it is in their best interest. This indicates a shift away from a politics of hegemony toward a much more direct form of domination.

A question about imperialism. You just mentioned the different scales of fascism and the interconnection between several levels—international, national, and subnational. Isn’t that what’s missing in certain simplified Marxist theories of fascism which analyze the crisis of capitalism without really situating it within a territorial framework, nor taking into account the plurality of scales involved?

 

One of the striking aspects of the present is that, even though there is a very explicit return to nineteenth-century imperial visions and practices—as in Venezuela, Panama, or Greenland—this redistributive dimension is largely absent. This stands in sharp contrast to what Marxists—Lenin in particular—referred to as “social-imperialism,” according to which a portion of the working classes in imperial States could be integrated into imperial projects, either through material gains or through the ideological promise of such gains. Even in the context of contemporary extractivist economies, such as those involving rare earths, the dominant vision is one of conquest, plunder, and control. There are very few efforts to present these projects as capable of producing redistributable gains for the broader population of imperial States. And this is evident in anecdotal yet revealing statements: for example, when Donald Trump explains that rising oil prices will make “a lot of money,” where the “we” actually refers to oil companies rather than his electorate.

Conversely, earlier forms of imperialism often involved a much more explicit link between imperial expansion and domestic integration. Historically, fascist imperialism was often presented as a project of development and improvement for the national population itself. This included, for example, the idea that German workers could become settlers in Eastern Europe following the genocidal expansion, or the vision of Italian settler colonialism in North Africa. These projects invoked the image of the “national settler worker.” One might also consider the support the Vietnam War received—even quite late in the game—from certain sectors of the organized labor movement in the United States, which had been integrated into the imperial project of the Cold War. Yet this image is largely absent from contemporary American imperialism. And I think this also helps explain why these wars are relatively unpopular, and why there are so few efforts to generate widespread public support for them.

This absence is both puzzling and politically significant. As imperial projects become more openly focused on domination and extraction, with no redistributive dimension whatsoever, we are also beginning to see some possible limits to their sustainability.

 

You explain that the fascist movements of the early  twentieth century presented themselves as “preventive counterrevolutions.” But the civilizational and social threats from which contemporary fascism claims to protect us are often largely imaginary. This is particularly evident in the censorship surrounding “gender theory” or Critical Race Theory, which are treated not as theories, but as active political forces. The rise of ISIS may have marked a turning point here, both because it legitimized large-scale Islamophobia and because it lent an apparent reality to the civilizational threat. The French expression islamo-gauchisme [“Islamo-leftism”] is quite revealing in this regard: it transforms a very small fringe of the intellectual Left into a dangerous enemy, an active threat. What role do anti-feminist, homophobic, transphobic, and racist reactions play in late-stage fascism? And how does this role differ—or not—from the structuring role of anti-communism in historical fascism?

 

I believe this is an absolutely central issue for analyzing and diagnosing the contemporary Far Right. And it is useful to approach it through this lens of continuities and discontinuities.

At a structural level, one could say that a preventive counterrevolution, preventive counterviolence, or anticipatory self-defense, is indispensable to any form of fascist or fascist-leaning politics. This is part of what gives fascism its potential for —or its propensity to—exterminatory or genocidal policies. It stems from the position of a past or future victim: the subject projects themselves into a future where they will be a victim.

From a historical perspective, we can also identify strong continuities. The mobilizing and racist myth of the Great Replacement is an old one: it predates historical fascism, but it is an integral part of it. In the book, I point out that Benito Mussolini and Oswald Spengler both wrote prefaces to a book on declining birth rates, authored by a German demographer who would later draft a report on the extermination of the Jews—a report that would be used as evidence at Nuremberg. In these texts, Mussolini develops a phobic and prophetic fantasy around what the American racist Lothrop Stoddard called “the rising tide of color,” while Spengler speaks of a “world revolution of people of color.” The idea is that the position of conquerors and rulers has an expiration date, that a historical turning point is approaching. And this is also why, as Matthieu Renault notes regarding Spengler, Black and anti-colonial intellectuals might have found him worth reading: from the other side, he brought good news. The West was indeed in decline, and its supremacy would not last forever.

There is thus a strong continuity in the reaction to decolonization, in the broadest sense. This reaction is one of the key drivers of the process. It then took shape—especially in Europe starting in the 1970s, and in the United States well before that—around the figure of the migrant as a political, religious, and ideological threat, but also as a threat to the labor market. We could also mention the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the nineteenth century, which were absolutely decisive in the formation of white supremacy organized around labor and the supposed threat to labor. But there are also discontinuous elements, even if they are loosely linked to these older elements. This is particularly the case with anti-feminism and transphobia in contemporary far-right movements.

The difficulty is that if we simply dismiss them as paranoid mobilizing fantasies intended to bolster a reactionary identity politics, we miss something important. From the perspective of a politics of emancipation, we must also take seriously the fact that transformations in gender, sexuality, and social reproduction are historically significant in both material and subjective terms. This is where things get tricky: both are true. These reactions are preemptive and paranoid, and this paranoia serves to justify violence and the concentration of repressive authority within the State, or among certain State agents. But at the same time, we must ask ourselves why processes that may seem harmless, co-opted, compromised, or simply reformist to us are perceived as ethical threats to a given order and to a certain imaginary of that order.

Of course, much of this is cynical. In Trump’s case, for example, it’s hard to believe that he personally fears transgender people. But he is perfectly willing to scapegoat anyone if it serves his agenda. At the same time, his base can be mobilized and united around these phobias. This corresponds to what Adorno and his collaborators, in The Authoritarian Personality, called Gedanken in Blöcken, or “ticket thinking”: the idea that one votes by choosing an all-in-one package. Being against trans women in sports and being against renewable energy now go hand in hand, even though there is no obvious ideological or logical framework that would require linking these issues.

At a certain level, then, there is a structural necessity to identify and amplify certain forms of hostility and threat: without this, the project does not work. If one does not produce a phobic emotional framework—the idea that the country is being stolen from you, that institutions are occupied by malevolent forces, that “cultural Marxism” is at work—then the concentration of executive and repressive powers becomes much harder to legitimize. At times, this takes on openly outrageous forms: trans women in sports, or, on a more conventional note, the portrayal of very marginal forms of armed antifascism in the United States as if they were a Daesh-style super-organization, more effective than any terrorist group that has ever existed.

But we must also consider the longer-term nature of the counterrevolution. Among certain figures—not necessarily Trump, but figures like Russell Vought or Christian social conservatives—there is the idea of a long process of reclaiming ground following a long series of victories by progressive, socialist, or anti-social forces. And it would be both empirically false and strategically short-sighted not to recognize the kernel of truth in that. In some jurisdictions, children today are learning things they weren’t learning fifty years ago: that sexual orientation is a matter of free choice and equality, that colonialism is a historical evil, and so on. Perhaps I am thinking about this because my daughter is nine years old and attends a public school here in Canada, but these transformations are real, even if they remain partial, limited, or detached from a comprehensive critique of capitalism. We must also remember that tens of millions of people took to the streets during the mass anti-racist uprising of 2020 in the United States. It was not a revolutionary moment—but Angela Davis also said that of the Black Panthers, that their moment was not revolutionary, when she wrote about preventive counterrevolution.

These reactionary movements are therefore also responses to a sense of insecurity and vulnerability among people who feel they still hold onto residual privileges, as well as among those who are socially and class-wise dominant. This helps explain the alliance between revanchist nationalist projects and significant sectors of what is known as Big Tech—that is, sectors of military and surveillance capitalism as well. These increasingly centralized, despotic, and intensely anti-worker forms of capitalism also feel precarious. They find something attractive in preventive counterrevolution—or at least in preventive counter-reform—because it rules out the possibility of restriction, expropriation, taxation, and regulation.

Just as the immense violence of the American imperial State can be understood both as a function and as a symptom of its decline, the extraordinary concentration of capital and repressive power is also haunted by its own sense of precariousness. This is why someone like Elon Musk exists almost as a pure symptom: the combination of anti-trans sentiment, the Great Replacement theory, an obsession with white Afrikaner farmers, and the feeling that his political and economic power is not secure. Individuals who possess historically inconceivable levels of monetary and social power can nonetheless feel that they could lose everything tomorrow. The rise of a company like Palantir—an ideologically far-right, hyper-nationalist artificial intelligence corporation—is also linked to extreme hostility toward workers, including tech workers involved in campaigns like “No Tech for ICE” or “No Tech for Apartheid.” Part of the reactionary and counterrevolutionary dynamic stems from these experiences. It is therefore important to return to the causes of this paranoia, rather than treating it as paranoia without a cause. In reality, if it had no cause, it would be far worse. It does have a cause: there have been real political and social threats—even embryonic or partial ones—against these forms of domination. We must take this seriously: a starting point for an anti-fascist Left might be to ask what it would mean to embody this thing they fear, to give reality to their paranoia about expropriation, “social justice,” or the “power” of working people.

Notes 

1.Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism. Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, London & New York: Verso, 2023. In particular, the chapter titled “Racial Fascism,” pp. 25–47.

2. Alberto Toscano also co-edited, with Brenna Bhandar, a collection of essays by Ruth Wilson Gilmore titled Abolition Geography. Essays towards Liberation, London & New York: Verso, 2022.

3. See Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony. History and Power in Colonial India, Harvard University Press, 1997; and Giovanni Arrighi, “Hegemony Unravelling,” New Left Review 32/33, 2005.

Feature image: Luigi Russolo, La Rivolta (The Revolt), 1911. Wikimedia Commons.

Translated from the French original by Rolando Prats.

Alberto Toscano, Lucie K. Mercier, Antoine Dubiau