Late Fascism: An Interview with Alberto Toscano, Part 1

When we seek to analyze the present conjuncture, one word, like a specter, keeps haunting the debate: fascism. 

We think we know it when we see it, but do we? It’s a slippery concept, malleable according to time and place. The specter of fascism’s increasingly prevalent invocation since the 2016 election of Donald Trump’s has been met alternatively with panic or scolding dismissal. 

Largely missing from these debates however, is any serious theoretical work seeking to explain what exactly fascism is. Not by analogical comparison to the fascisms of the past, but through a clear look at how it operates now, in the present context. 

This is precisely the work undertaken by Alberto Toscano in his fantastic new book, Late Fascism (Verso, 2023). Toscano, Professor of Critical Theory and Co-director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths University, Term Research Associate Professor at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, and member of editorial board for the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, has, with Late Fascism, intervened in the ongoing fascism debates at exactly the right time and in exactly the right way. In this book, Toscano provides us with the language and analysis necessary to theorize our current moment, one in which the danger of fascism is as real as ever. 

In October, I spoke with Toscano over Zoom about Late Fascism. The following is the first part of a two-part interview, in which we discuss, among other things, the impetus behind the book, the fascism of the petit-bourgeois, and the idea of “petty-sovereignty,” so crucial to understanding both U.S. politics and the politics of the Israeli settler movement, along with the right-wing turn in general.  

In Part Two, which can be read here, we discuss fascism’s “religion of death,” the culture industry and the superstructural terrain of the fight against fascism, the new temporality of the climate crisis, and whether fascism’s internal dynamics mean that it will always collapse under its own contradictions.  

[Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

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Jake Romm: I was really excited by this book because, as I’m sure you’re aware, we’ve been having a very confused and unproductive discussion about fascism since 2016, and I think your book is a much needed, very clarifying intervention. So much of the conversation around fascism, especially in the United States, was spurred by Donald Trump’s election and has been focused on pointing out discrete events or pieces of rhetoric and saying, “this is fascism,” or trying to create a list of steps or indicia that would reliably let us know whether or not we are currently experiencing fascism (a lot of people have pointed to Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism, which is an excellent essay, but a poor guide). 

Your book on the other hand, very smartly, I think, eschews that approach, and instead focuses on a theoretical framework for understanding fascism in general. Why did you end up taking that approach and what was the impetus for the project?

Alberto Toscano: The initial impetus for the book came from a disquiet or irritation or frustration, as is often the case, or at least for me [laughter], that came up in a different but not entirely dissimilar context—the one in which I wrote my book Fanaticism. The deep discomfort at the particular uses of that term “fanaticism,” or here, “fascism,” as an idea in the public sphere during moments of serious ideological tumult, crisis, reorientation, and so on. So, the initial impetus was a polemical one, I suppose. 

Or, to put it differently, it was spurred by wanting to understand the desire to reach for analogies in moments of crisis and political shocks, but then very quickly realizing the weakness and actually counterproductive character of limiting the discussion to those analogies (or their repudiation). This analogical discourse is very intense and particularly prominent in the U.S. debate, and I think it’s worth keeping in mind that of course, even though I’m writing for a largely Anglo-American audience—at least for now, before the book is translated—the aim was also to expand the scope of that discussion. Debates on fascism have their own complex global history, and their own periodizations. There are a lot of debates on fascism that we, for linguistic reasons, don’t have access to or don’t pay attention to because of a kind of cultural narcissism.

So, writing the book, I worked through different approaches to theorizing fascism that didn’t require this gesture of analogy (or its repudiation) with reference to a very specific moment. Generally, this is not even the moment of Italian fascism, but that of German Nazism. And it’s not even the moment of the onset of Nazism, rather, it is Nazism in light of everything that we know took place during World War II. This is another thing the book touches on: not just the debility of the analogical frame, but also its extreme selectiveness. We’ve created these analogies with a very streamlined, smoothed-over vision of even what the intra-European forms of fascism power looked like. 

And of course, the book was also spurred by the experience of being disturbed, troubled, and struck by a global ascendancy of extremely reactionary forces in different modes and stripes, and being dismayed by the relative poverty of thought and debate about this in the sphere of theory. 

Turning to methodology, my first port of call was to revisit some of the classical writings about fascism from Marxism and critical theory—both contemporaneous to fascism’s emergence and after—but to revisit them in light of the present. The first piece I wrote, about six years ago, where I used this somewhat speculative formulation of ‘“late fascism” was really engaging with that scholarship, with the writings of Adorno, Norbert Guterman and Leo Löwenthal, Ernst Bloch, Georges Bataille. So, in a sense, looking at heretical moments within the Marxist tradition, but also looking less at those Marxist theories that treated fascism squarely in terms of the mutations in the relationship between capital and the state. 

At least at the time of Trump’s emergence and other related phenomena, it didn’t seem like one could approach this reactionary political cycle in terms of the imperative need of the capitalist classes to parry the attacks of a powerful workers’ movement or of imminent revolution, which is why some of the more superstructural elements of fascism seemed more urgent. Of course, there is still quite a lot to be said about the nexus between capital and the state, particularly if we expand our scope beyond the Euro-Atlantic, and look at, say, the articulation between Hindutva and Indian capital, or the relationship between Bolsonarismo and extractivism in Brazil for example. 

So after revisiting these classical theories of fascism, it very quickly became evident to me that if one really wanted to seriously tackle this phenomenon in the present, it was absolutely vital to attend to the way that questions of fascism had been theorized—again, from the twenties and thirties onwards—in the ambit of anti-colonial, Black radical and Third World struggles, which were of course, very much in dialogue or overlapping with those Marxist debates, but which have nevertheless been largely neglected and sidelined. 

With respect to how repetitions or reconfigurations of fascism were theorized by radical Black liberation activists, for instance in the U.S. in the 1970s, I think there’s a good claim to be made that they are necessary for thinking through our present. This tradition, which I deal with mainly in the second chapter of the book, on “racial fascism,” has two main insights that I think are really vital for the contemporary debate. 

One, which is very nicely articulated in Bill Mullen and Christopher Vials’s introduction to the U.S. Anti-Fascism Reader, is the idea of a differential experience of fascism. That within polities which might ordinarily appear to be liberal there can also exist large pockets or enclaves or social areas of control and domination that could with some legitimacy be called fascist. This is the argument that emerges from the experience of racialized state terror and imprisonment in the 1970s in the exchanges between George Jackson and Angela Davis. But we can also think of this in many other contexts, including contemporary settler-colonial ones like Israel-Palestine. 

And the other one, which is not unrelated, is to think of fascism in a much longer historical arc. To think of the ways in which the racial regimes of imperialism and settler colonialism informed the formation of European fascism, and the ways in which the realities of white supremacy and settler-colonial dispossession were not just formative of the fantasies, but even of the juridical imaginaries of European fascist regimes. One of the more interesting recent versions of this argument can be found in James Whitman’s book, Hitler’s American Model, which shows how Nazi jurists turned to the so-called Indian Laws of the U.S. in order to configure antisemitic and racist legislation in the early years of the Nazi regime in Germany. 

Romm: Do you think that the discourse on and theorization of totalitarianism—like the false but prevalent understanding of Nazi Germany as a totalitarian state—has obfuscated the contemporary understanding of fascism? I mean that precisely in the sense that you were just talking about—there are these communities that are experiencing fascist rule, but other communities simply are not. That is, liberalism and fascism can coexist not only in terms of the ways in which the economic imperatives of capitalism help breed fascism, but also liberalism itself is experienced differently, sometimes as fascistic, by different polities. 

Toscano: For sure. I think that’s one of the key theses of all sorts of critical and revisionist histories of liberalism. I’m thinking of Domenico Losurdo’s book, for instance. His kind of counter-history of liberalism sees it very much not in an accidental, but in an immanent relationship to the notion which the historian George Fredrickson put forward of a Herrenvolk democracy, of a master-race democracy. And so, the genesis of liberalism in the U.S.—and in a very different vein, also within the British empire—carries that with it. I think you’re entirely right that our discourse on fascism is still vitiated by how that Cold War framing of totalitarianism became common sense in a host of different ways.

One of them, which I deal with somewhat in the book, is how we’ve come to identify fascism with the image of an all-powerful state. We haven’t been able to recognize the sui generis forms of anti-statism that also coursed through various moments of fascism. I had some peripheral knowledge of the ways in which the relationship between fascism and liberalism in Italy, say in the late 1910s and the twenties, was rather less straightforward than has become common sense, but I was really struck reading the speeches of Mussolini by their explicit advocacy for a kind of lean-state liberalism. The state has to get out of the railways, the hospitals, higher education, and so on—it was kind of uncanny, you know? 

Of course, the idolatry of the state and the idea of nothing outside the state, nothing against the state, all of that is very much present and prominent and drummed into the ears of Italians in the thirties. But that is not how fascism, actual Italian fascism, starts.

And I think that this is significant, at least if we don’t want to limit our understanding of the phenomenon and selectively take certain moments within the history of those specific fascist movements in Europe as the only points of comparison. 

To return to the point about the selective or differential experience of fascist rule, one perspective that interestingly anticipates this was the theorization of the Nazi state itself in German-Jewish legal theorist Ernst Fraenkel’s notion of the dual state. He posited that the Nazi state had this dual form, that it was both what he called a normative state and a prerogative state. It was a normative state in the sense of having predictable legal norms or regulations, but that pertained only to the dominant or vetted population. And it was a prerogative state in the sense of the exercise of complete arbitrary power and violence by that dominant population towards the racialized, minoritized and stigmatized portion of the population. That is, I think, a much more productive framing than just the notion that liberalism is haunted by the state of exception, especially if we then combine it with an understanding of the histories of race and colonialism. Because that notion of the dual state also tells us about the possibility of this order reproducing itself over very long periods of time. After all, that’s what apartheid is! It is at least one striking and consummate form of a racialized dual state.

The Trinidadian theorist George Padmore argued that the Union of South Africa was the world’s classic fascist state. He writes this in 1938. It’s not a state that calls itself fascist, but if you think of that structure, it is, for him, in a sense the consummate version. And I think it’s important to attend to the fact that those continuities and those articulations were already very evident at the time. We’ve just been very poorly educated about those histories, and now of course, one of the things that has taken place is this policing of the boundaries of analogy. Massive institutional energies are spent on these questions of whether an analogy fits. But it’s striking how cramping it is to our political imagination and action.

Romm: This segues nicely to what I thought was one of the more important interventions in the book, one that could really do a lot to open up the debate here—your discussion of petty sovereignty and fascism as this diffuse power. Not a dictatorial power concentrated in the hands of the state, but rather, as you were saying, the prerogatives of, say, rape and murder, that diffuse down to the privileged classes. In Israel we see this very starkly with the settler movement, but in the United States, I think, it takes on something of a more subtle variation. We see it starkly with the way the police operate, but they are an arm of the state. But we also see it in the right wing turn back to the family, back to entrenching patriarchal rule. And we also see it in the power of the bosses, the petty sovereignty of the petit bourgeois over their employees. All of which is now being called into question.  

So not replacing but augmenting the classic idea of fascism as being an alliance between big business and the state, do you think that there’s something to the claim that what we’re seeing in the United States is more of an alliance between the petty bourgeois and the state as a way to shore up this this petty sovereignty?

Toscano: That’s a really interesting angle, and I’m glad you’ve underscored that part of the book because I think it’s quite essential for thinking through a lot of contemporary dynamics and also a lot of, not just the rhetoric, but the actual material and psychological attractiveness of certain forms of reactionary politics. You’re very right to see the kind of reterritorialization on the rights of parents or the rights of families, not least over the bodies and sexual lives of their children, and that punitively possessive logic, as being really key. 

But you also get these strange instances where this manifests in different contexts, like the ways in which the far right in Italy, for instance, has started to promote gun ownership, which has really never been a culturally central concern there aside from referenda about hunting or whatever. So, I think that once you think about the logic of delegation, of deputization and of petty sovereignty, then of course you have to be very attentive to what the material and juridical and class histories of these different contexts might be. 

Petty sovereignty could be the license given to latifundistas in Brazil to act with extreme violence towards indigenous people and poor farmers. It could be the arming and military cover given to settlers to dispossess and expel Palestinians from their land. Of course, it can also, going back to that whole Herrenvolk democracy tradition, weave itself through all sorts of perfectly constitutional, and in many ways, extremely democratic mechanisms. No other country aside from the U.S., at least to my knowledge, has a system to elect sheriffs. The very idea of electing members of the repressive state apparatus is kind of unthinkable in the European continental context. But of course, this also means that you have a sovereign sheriff movement that has porous relationships vis-à-vis militias and the ethnonationalist far right.

In the U.S., of course, local and also state government, rather than federal legislatures, are absolutely key here. And one of the things, at least in the U.S., that has been really remarkable is this extremely sophisticated and extremely well-funded lawfare used to consolidate this kind of American fascism in the petty sovereign mode. I’m thinking of the ways, for instance, that prior to the retraction of Roe v. Wade, you had the privatization of the prosecution of abortions in Texas. Which is basically like a kind of bounty hunter system. So, if we think of all of those mechanisms, many of which are not acts of violence or seen as illegitimate, they still manifest that logic of the petty sovereign. And I think they allow us, amongst other things—again with a kind of broader and more nuanced historical scope—to disassociate or disentangle fascist processes from that Cold War framing of the all-powerful vertically integrated Moloch state. If we take our theories of fascism as a subset of theories of totalitarianism then, definitionally, there could be no such thing as fascism in a United States context, right? And moreover, anything that is marked by neoliberal theory or practice would again be antithetical vis-à-vis fascism, right? With the consequence that what’s happening all around us becomes radically unthinkable.♦