How do we understand the return of fascism today?
What is this moment we are living in? Late Fascism turns to the
theories of fascism produced in the past century, testing their capacity
to illuminate our moment and challenging many of the commonplaces that
debate on this extremely charged term devolves into.
It can be tempting for any contemporary assessment of fascism to reach
for historical analogy. Fascism is a matter of returns and repetitions,
but it is not best approached in terms of steps and checklists dictated
by a selective reading of Italian Fascism or National Socialism.
Rather than treating fascism as a singular event or identifying fascism
with a particular configuration of European parties, regimes, and
ideologies, Toscano approaches fascism as a process, one which is
intimately linked to capitalism's demands for domination.
Late Fascism names a problem. Fascism, like other political
phenomenon, varies according to its socioeconomic context. An
unreflexive struggle against fascism runs the risk of becoming
sclerotic, self-indulgent, or complicit with the very processes that
brought forth reaction, the lesser evil lending a hand to the greater
one. When it does not question its own theoretical frameworks, its own
habits of naming, or indeed the pleasures (of innocence, heroism,
righteousness) that may arise from these, anti-fascism can be its own
lure.
Late Fascism allows us to rediscover some truly inspiring anti-fascist
thinkers, rooted in their turn in largely anonymous collective practices
of worldmaking against domination, traditions of the oppressed which
remain a resource for those set on dismantling the oppressions that the
partisans of Order and Tradition seek to revive and reimpose.
