Late Fascism: An Interview with Alberto Toscano, Part 2

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 second part of a two-part interview, in which we discuss, among other things, 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.

In Part One, which can be read here, we discussed 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.  

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

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Jake Romm: Now is a good time to switch over to the subjective element, the psychical element of your book. You elaborate on the religion of death as articulated by Furio Jesi as an element of fascism, but one thing that we’ve been seeing (and I think this true of the West generally, but it’s definitely true of the United States in a very intense form as well), is that in addition to this celebration of death and these fantasies of violent battle—which and in the US often takes the form of home invasion defense—is the appearance of this kind of cult of longevity. 

You know, people taking “brain pills,” things of that nature, trying to optimize their bodies. And I think there’s a sense that this “purification” or “optimization” of the body is tied up in the fear and hatred of gender non-confirming people as well. But I was wondering if you could venture an explanation of the ways in which it’s possibly related (or not related) to the religion of death. 

Alberto Toscano: I suppose that out of methodological caution, I would be wary of the effort to delineate a character or personality or libidinal core to the fascist phenomenon. That’s always been a kind of stumbling block for theories of fascism, which rightly identified psychic life as a key concern, but have then sometimes been tempted to treat that psychological or psychoanalytic or libidinal structure as an ultimately unified thing. It’s kind of like looking for some sort of psychic minimum.

Romm: Like Adorno’s “authoritarian personality.”

Toscano: Exactly—I was just teaching that last week, so it comes to mind. Of course, even many of those accounts have their caveats. And one of them was the realization that, to the extent that fascism is capable both of attaining power and, in the electoral sphere, of rallying all sorts of very disparate constituencies, then a fortiori, it must not map onto one psychic formation any more than it maps onto one class, though it might have dominant or prominent ones.

Even the European fascisms of the twenties and thirties emerged into a context made up of all sorts of very disparate and also at times very weird body politics. This nurtured all kinds of cultural politics of the body and of health—everything from nudist movements to dietary fads to occultism, much of which don’t necessarily have any elective affinity with fascism per se but form part of its context. One can now note, as people have, the bizarre ways in which far-right agitation has grafted itself onto various kinds of aggressively commodified wellness hucksterism, and ask why it is that people are selling you fascistic conspiracy theories, but also actual products at the same time.

That was one of the odd effects of teaching some of the work that the Institute for Social Research produced in the forties in the United States just last week. Seeing how things that could be taken as theoretically insightful metaphors, like passages in Adorno saying things such as: Hitler sells Nazism like a marketing expert sells soap—well, of course, now it’s literally true. The marketing is actual marketing, it’s not just an analogy.

Though in that chapter of Late Fascism that you mention I wanted to foreground the writings of Furio Jesi—because I think he’s an extremely brilliant theorist of the whole mythological and occultist dimension of fascism, especially around what he calls the religion of death—I wouldn’t want to overestimate the sway of Thanatos and the necropolitical over contemporary fascism. That’s where we could enter into a fallacy of sorts. This is a little bit like if you were to read all of fascism through Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies—which remains a fascinating read. You would conclude that it’s all a sexualized cult of death. And that doesn’t go very far in explaining the fortunes of far-right politics, which are often deeply conservative, deeply invested in normalcy, as indeed Nazism was. 

That’s the other thing. You can selectively think that, at its core, Nazism was the psychic formation of, say, the SS militant. But then you might also want to ask yourself, why was everybody watching comedy musicals in the cinemas, right? That kind of vision, of fascism as a religion of death, is understandable and important. But I think this is where thinking through all of the gradations of fascism is key—and, going back to a really crucial Marxist contribution from the seventies, thinking of something that was articulated by Nicos Poulantzas in a piece on the popular impact of fascism, where he, quite rightly, underscores that the strength of fascism always lay in its capacity to speak differently to different people, and in what we might call its strategic incoherence or inconsistency. And I think we ignore that at our peril. In some ways, yes, you can say that something like a psychological or libidinal disposition is necessary, but then I think you would be compelled to posit the existence of a whole set of not necessarily convergent or coherent authoritarian personalities, rather than just one. And I think that’s true of a lot of the cultural phenomena that get entangled with different far-right formations across the world.

Romm: Let’s take a step back here into subject formation rather than the manifestations of a fascist subjectivity. As you point out, now, much more so than in what I guess we could call fascism’s classical period, so much of the battle is waged on the superstructural terrain. And I think that part of the reason for that is that the base seems untouchable from every side at this point. There are no threatening anti-capitalist revolutionary movements in the West. As you point out, fascism is now a preemptive action, rather than a purely reactive action. And then you also talk about the correlated importance of then killing the fascist in your head. 

But I wonder if—taking various insights from Adorno about the culture industry and the idea of the ‘stereopath’ into account—as long as capitalism seems in a certain sense total and as long as we are at the “end of history,” (which even if not true in the historical sense may be true phenomenologically) whether killing the fascist in your head is a losing proposition. In light of this superstructural battle that leaves the base untouched—being crude here about that relation—is that psychic battle not in a sense always on the back foot or maybe even always lost insofar as subject formation is deeply tied to the context of the economic arrangement in which it’s occurring?

Toscano: To start with the point about the untouchable base, I think it’s quite crucial. It in many ways explains something which is also at the root of historical European fascisms and was noted by all sorts of theorists—I’m thinking for example of Daniel Guérin’s Fascism and Big Business—the ability to accumulate, channel and divert social antagonisms away from any challenge to the underlying structures of power and exploitation. The grotesque spectacles of contemporary “culture war” across the planet—this is a thing that I find just astounding. I mean, you can come across speeches by, say, Bashar al-Assad, attacking trans rights. This is the world we live in, where there’s this kind of metastasis of the superstructure taking place everywhere. And I think it’s staggering how, as economic wages stagnate or decline, the psychological wages and the libidinal dividends become an object of massive investment, because of course there’s no ceiling to the inflation of the psychological wage. 

I’m not saying that this is necessarily a winning strategy—I actually think that in the mid to long-term it is not a winning strategy at all. Certainly, in the United States, it’s led by a very peculiarly organized electoral system in which playing to your base, at least for the far right of the Republican party, is the way to go. And so, there’s a kind of logic of intensification around those discourses. So that’s one side of it. 

Obviously, some of it is “genuine” in the sense that it’s a way in which social malaise is experienced through the domain of culture and everyday life rather than through economic relationships. And that’s where the pseudo-economic character of far-right discourse is really telling because it seems to need to transit through all these invocations of economic exploitation, which are then immediately translated into a purely ideological exploitation. It’s the working class versus the elites, but what the working classes need to fight against is not their exploitation and immiseration, et cetera, but the fact that these supposed elites want to interfere with their children’s gender or whatever. It’s such an explicit move.

What is striking though, and I think not insignificant, is that the pseudo-economic, or the pseudo anti-capitalist or at least anti-elite rhetoric (with all its antisemitic and related tropes) remains key to this formation. The fact that all these movements and the think tanks and foundations associated with them are entirely acting for the sake of and in the pocket of the most corrupt and disinhibited forms of capital accumulation is all too obvious. So I think there’s definitely a pretty severe limit to what that self-reflexive or ethical or even therapeutic moment of getting rid your inner fascist can do. Because it risks overestimating how much these social dynamics require the interpellation and enlistment of subjects. 

And this takes us back all the way to where we started, to the continuities or the embedding of these fascist dynamics within histories of liberal ideology and government. The vast (quantitatively speaking) institutions of oppressive and discriminatory social violence that pervade our societies are not the product of fascist or even far-right projects. Whether we’re talking about borders and deportations, the prison industrial complex, the massive levels of military spending and investment, or the structures of surveillance that pervade our workplaces and everyday life—all of that was implemented by impeccably liberal governments, often ones that even presented themselves as progressive. I don’t think that can at all be minimized. And, you know, in many ways, I have sympathy—though it’s not the position that I would take—with people who take a critical position within these debates over fascism and object to the use of this term on the grounds that it can obfuscate the violence of liberal or capitalist normality. 

To some extent I agree—I see the ways in which the political obscenity of Trumpism has somehow whitewashed the far greater crimes of the Bush era (or, if we’re talking incarceration, Clinton). I mean, they’re incomparable. In light of the crassness of Trump, Bush now goes around like some sort of enlightened leader from a time that some people are nostalgic for, despite the untold scale of his crimes and indeed responsibility for the state of our present, from the climate crisis to the carnage in the Middle East to everything else. Trump is really nothing compared to Bush in terms of the consequences of his rule.

This is not to minimize what Trump has made possible socially and ideologically, but I think it is really significant to keep this in mind. But I also think those two moments (or three: liberal, neoconservative and proto-fascist) can be linked. Because in a sense, what we’re experiencing in this reactionary political moment and its intensification from Brazil and Argentina to the US and Israel, and so on, are movements and discourses and figures who are virulently affirming, celebrating, and wishing to further those very structures that liberals (or conservatives) both practice and disavow. 

I recently wrote a piece about the debates on fascism in Israel—to the extent that I can follow them through the English-language Israeli press and secondary sources. And there was one interview with a particularly extreme far right politician where he says something like, “nobody here was actually ever interested in giving the Palestinians a state, I’m just the one saying it.” And there’s a kind of truth there. There’s a doubling down or redoubling of this structure also in the context of a planetary situation of crisis. That’s the other element that we can’t ignore. 

There is a quotidian lived experience of decline, stagnation, and a sense of imminent catastrophe or disaster which makes a politics of retrenchment, of pushing people off the proverbial lifeboat earth, really attractive or capable of mobilizing people. It’s that kind of step that I think is really significant and very frightening—that realities which have been entrenched and reproduced by those who ruled over our wretched normality according to liberal or even social democratic or mildly conservative standards have also at their most violent just become objects of enjoyment and affirmation. Even if we think of invocations of the ‘thin blue line’ or ‘blue lives matter’—it’s not like the militarization and quotidian racism of the police is the result of far-right politics. You could say it’s the result of the deeply embedded cultures of racial capitalism and white supremacy in the United States that make the affirmative open and self-conscious fascism very much possible at certain moments—that feed it, seed it, and nourish it.

We have to think through this dynamic, and that’s where there are really important resources for reflecting on our present in a more capacious archive of theories of fascism. And I think we can’t ignore the intensity, the expanse and the scope of this intensification of far-right authoritarian and fascist politics in the present. But I think—and again, this is where I have sympathy towards the critical stances in this so-called fascism debate—we cannot do that by treating what’s happening now either as an exception to an otherwise liberal, progressive norm, or as disconnected from the deepest structures of the societies that we’ve been living in. Because to ignore this becomes the most politically distorting and debilitating position, which is that of the nostalgic apologia for an imaginary liberalism, and the desire to create these pseudo-popular and ultimately very unpopular fronts, like the right-wing of the US Democratic Party. That kind of vision is completely bankrupt. 

Romm: There’s also a sense that even that kind of imagined liberalism, extrapolated onto the global scale, always entailed a fascism for the global South, tying back to what we were talking about with respect to different polities experiencing fascism within liberal regimes. 

Toscano: Just think of the backing and funding—just to take one case amongst a myriad—of some of the cruelest and most abject forms of right-wing dictatorship in Latin America by bona fide liberals, right? I think one is cured of those illusions very quickly if one reads important works like Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop. Then you also get the nuance and the contradictions of the Kennedy administration, for instance, trying to compel these Latin American governments grounded in their latifundios to push for agrarian reform to prevent communism whilst simultaneously massively arming paramilitaries or military forces whose raison d’être was to repress any kind of agrarian reform.  Or even going into the US context, I’m thinking of Naomi Murakawa’s brilliant book The First Civil Right, on the role that the liberal penal reform movement, from the sixties onwards, played in making the prison industrial complex and mass incarceration possible.

This is not to propose some kind of super-sectarian identification between liberals and fascism, but I think one must address those entanglements and those relationships. And also the responsibilities of certain liberal frameworks that are unable to recognize, and certainly unable to undo or dismantle, these deep-seated structures of violence, both slow and explicit, which they’ve made possible.

Romm: Switching gears to the idea of different temporalities, which plays a large role in your book, you write that, with respect to “the time for fascism,” i.e., the fascism-producing crises, we’ve kind of moved past some of the classical ones like social revolution, or at least they’ve been dormant for some time. Military defeat, another one you identify, is still pertinent at least in the United States with the experience in Afghanistan, but not on the level of the Treaty of Versailles or anything like that. But one thing that I think adds a new element in terms of a crisis, but also a new temporality, is the climate crisis.

On the one hand, it is a crisis that engenders mass refugee flows and awakens all of the worries about “great replacement,” and retreads of the “Black birth rate” panics of the thirties, but it also introduces a new time horizon. Fascism generally imagines a kind of apocalyptic struggle, but now we’re staring down the barrel of a very real apocalypse. I’m wondering how you think this kind of the new temporality introduced by climate change has been taken up by fascism and how it maybe changes its structure going forward.

Toscano: That’s a tricky question. It’s tricky because on one level, historically speaking, one of the tasks of those fascist ideologies was to translate and synthesize different temporalities of crisis, real or perceived. One of the things which we should reflect on is the extent to which fascism in Europe in the twenties and thirties was part of a broader ideological family of pessimisms. They emerged in conjunction with and were nourished by a certain critique of progress. We can find this in all sorts of different authors from Nietzsche to Sorel—not to claim that they’re godfathers of fascism or anything like that, but that’s the atmosphere at that time. This is also the atmosphere in which some of the greatest anti-fascist thinkers advocate for the abandonment of ideologies of progress by the left. Like Walter Benjamin and his Theses on the Concept of History. 

But that pessimist philosophy which was one of fascism’s breeding-grounds is one that’s based on cyclical or epic ethical theories of decline and degradation, some more biologically or anthropologically inclined, some more civilizationally inflected. It’s an attack on rationalist enlightenment conceptions of progress, and it counters them with the idea of cycles of decline. Even the triumphs are ultimately headed for a decline.

So just as a symptom, there’s the bizarre fact of Albert Speer designing the plans for Germania, the supposed future capital of Nazi Germany, in view of what its ruins would look like. The ruin value of architecture is a sign of this sense of decline and decay that’s built even into the thousand-year Reich. So, in some way, you could say that there are at least strands within the thinking of the far right and of fascism that are perhaps more primed for bleaker visions of temporality. The end of progress or development is not necessarily the psychic or existential trauma that it might be for “progressives.” I’m talking about the more speculative, cosmic visions of the far right. 

There is also something about the temporality of climate crisis, emergency, collapse, et cetera, which is unthinkable and unrepresentable, and has all sorts of effects. For instance, whether explicit or otherwise, and alas it’s often explicit, the virulence of the xenophobia and the anti-migrant racism in the promotion of the great replacement theory is definitely haunted by this. And, of course, the far right is largely climate denialist, at least when it’s not eco-fascist. I think in some ways it is capitalizing on this kind of seething apocalyptic structure of feeling – at times both spatially and temporally doubling down and celebrating the fortress, celebrating that sense of pulling up the drawbridge. It has a sense of temporality imagined through various deliriums of national or racial or other forms of supremacy.

The temporalities of rebirth and renaissance of palingenesis, to use the term theorized by Roger Griffin, are everywhere in the contemporary far right, in their slogans at least. One might argue that much like Adorno talked about Nazi rallies as redolent of what he called a phony fanaticism—populated by crowds who don’t really believe but without making them any less fanatical—I don’t think anyone really believes America is going to be great again, whatever “great” was. In fact, I think part of the success of the Trump brand has to do with exactly that, with combining the revanchist slogan with the felt experience that of course this return is not what’s on the horizon.

That’s important, but also extremely disruptive, right? We live in societies that combine the now multi-decade experience of stagnation with the incalculable, but also very concrete and lived—in terms of temperatures and fires and air pollution—temporality of climate crisis and collapse. And I think translating that into the saddest of passions and the most violent of affects is very easy. And the opposite work, the work of what Walter Benjamin (quoting Pierre Naville) called “organizing pessimism” is a much more difficult pursuit. Both at the organizational level, but also at the kind of psychic level, because it involves not deflecting and displacing and sublimating this anxiety-inducing temporality. Not allowing yourself the psychic or literal walls is a high demand to put on the imagination.

Romm: I’m really glad that you used the word “fortress” because it’s a good segue to my last question. There’s a book by Paul Virilio, Bunker Archeology, in which he writes about “fortress Europe” and the Nazis’ Atlantic wall, and he locates in the building of the Atlantic wall the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. The idea is that fascism’s internal dynamics, much like capitalism, requires a constant expansion. Going back to Greg Grandin, this idea is somewhat related to the thesis of the End of the Myth and the need for ever new frontiers. 

So let’s say that fascism is triumphant, it wins. Is there a sense that because of this dynamic, because it needs to always be rushing headlong into the future as I think you say in the book, that it will ultimately always collapse under its own weight in the same way that capitalism is supposed to destroy itself through its own contradictions? Or is that wishful thinking?

Toscano: One of the reasons for the title of the book was that part of the lateness of fascism lies in its inability to produce even the simulacrum or appearance of a systemic fix to the multiple crises that beset us. I think that’s also very evident in some of the things we’ve already talked about, like the cultural war hyperbole: the harmful and despicable but also grotesque obsession with public bathrooms and children’s books, and then all sorts of bizarre conspiracies around 15-minute cities or what have you. That’s symptomatic of a complete and utter inability or unwillingness to make even a dent in these structural causes of stagnation and social crisis, even to do so in fascism’s own repugnant ethnonational terms. Ultimately, all these far-right governments are, if anything, just accelerating or giving license to the very dynamics that, on another level, they allegedly respond to or decry. So, there’s a fundamental weakness. 

These are not the infantile but the senile phenomena of our late capitalism, which are also taking place—and this is not insignificant—mostly at the electoral level. They’re parasitic on systems of political representation that people have in many ways disaffiliated from, with very low participation. 

Often, the organizations of the far right do not take the form of mass movements. Of course, this varies drastically. So, it’s a very different phenomenon, I think, if we take the deep embeddedness of Hindutva and the RSS in the structures of Indian society as opposed to how the GOP works in the U.S. It looks extremely different across the world. So, I think this gives us cause for a very cautious hope, I suppose. Or if not hope, which I think is an overused term, then at least it provides at least the possibility of a strategic opening. That is, we’re not seeing political projects for ruling capitalism differently. In a sense this is the significant difference between fascisms of the past and those of the present. Ruling fascisms in the past were reproducing structures of property and privilege and exploitation, but they were doing so through fairly radical transformations in both the state and political economy. 

That’s not what we’re witnessing now. In fact, we’re seeing movements and political parties and leading figures who might be very capable of consolidating electoral support, of pervading media spheres, of putting their personnel into all sorts of consequential sectors of the state, and indeed of doing massive levels of damage in the process to everything from the lives of minoritized and racialized people, to the wellbeing of migrants and indeed to anything even resembling a response to the climate crisis, but who don’t have any real projects in a substantive sense. Movements that are extremely timid and conservative in terms of any structural changes to the grounding relationships of social and economic life and which compensate for that with toxic and harmful bluster and become ever more ludicrous but no less pernicious for that. 

This is also significant for thinking about what an anti-fascist politics might involve. One has to maybe disjoin the work of countering the damage done by this far-right ascendancy from the very different work of building movements and political projects that address the underlying structure and causes that have led to their prominence, but which are not about them. 

I think one of the potentially very damaging effects of this reactionary political cycle is that it draws all the attention away from that work. There’s a level at which these movements fulfill an extremely effective role for the reproduction of the status quo by busying everybody with their vile cultural work and legislative agenda whilst never allowing the time to address deeper causes or dynamics or to build something that’s radically other. And I think that that’s been present in the U.S. as elsewhere. 

The other aspect of qualified, not optimism by any means, but non-despair, let’s say, is that in many ways the virulence of that culture war focus also has to do with the fact that decades of organizing and activism have really changed a lot of the common sense, especially for many younger people in a lot of different countries, even if they haven’t necessarily broken through to enact lasting anti-systemic transformations. 

But the fact that what we’re dealing with is not a counter-revolutionary far right, but a counter-reformist far right, is itself worth thinking about. I think a minimal criterion for any left worth being a part of would be to live up to what they think you are: this extremely organized and pervasive and disciplined collective project to abolish prisons, the army and the military, to radically change the structure of the family, to undo the basics of private property, et cetera, et cetera. The fact that the far right across the world basically thinks that milquetoast and complicit liberals are raving communists has in some sense removed any need to censor oneself or remain in the domain of political politeness.

So one should draw some consequences from that. I think we’re not in times where one is any longer bound by the need for compromise or mediation that defined the autophagia of liberal democracy over the past thirty or forty years. ♦