New Fascisms and the Reconfiguration of the Global Counterrevolution

Other languages: Español

The spirit of revolt is spreading, in an underground way, across different parts of the world: Serbia, Turkey, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, and Argentina have each seen massive protests lasting for varying lengths of time.¹ The United States has been no exception, with protests against Trump's administration in April followed by an uprising against ICE in June. In Europe, there was a brief reaction to European rearmament and the attempt to drag all NATO countries into active conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. But we are not here to discuss whether we are facing a new period of revolt, as it is still too early to say, nor to make a definitive assessment of these protests, their motivations and slogans — which, incidentally, can be highly varied. 

Rather, we wish to look more closely at the generalization of a global counterrevolutionary process to which these pockets of protest are responding. This process finds its main expression in the proliferation of expansionist policies and the establishment of war — whether against populations, between nation-states, or otherwise. The race to control new technologies, “natural resources,” rare earths, and strategic regions is directly related to the contemporary mutations of what are considered by many to be new forms of fascism. The Nazi-fascist salutes of Donald Trump's supporters and the global far right signal a return to aesthetic and symbolic forms of yesteryear's fascism. However, this process is not limited to acts of “right-wing rebellion.” Rather, it is global, in the sense that it renews the repressive mechanisms already in use to control, exterminate, and expel surplus populations, thereby spreading them to other regions of the planet. From Gaza to Los Angeles, from Wallmapu to Europe, the world is traversed by a wide range of repressive forms that make up the current post-neoliberal management of the capitalist crisis. The localized nature of each reactionary movement, and the political-strategic differences between them, do not necessarily negate the global reach, but rather represent the variety of forms that the counterrevolution can assume, in each case depending on the national and international context.

The present text represents an admittedly partial attempt to grasp the reactionary phenomenon in its global form, beyond the mere classification or rejection of any specific conceptual category. While it is true that the general aspects of this movement may at times be reminiscent of classical fascism, we contend that the form we are dealing with today is historically specific to the objective conditions created by the crisis of capitalist civilization and ecological degradation. In other words, the type of fascism that has provoked multiple local resistances in recent months is something new. Although we are still uncertain about the scope and duration of these currents of resistance, they suggest the possibility of overcoming the limitations of previous insurgent movements, particularly given the presence of a tension between preserving organizational forms from the past and rejecting them.

The first part of this article will focus on the mutations of the current reactionary movement. Here we focus primarily on the United States, given its particular characteristics and its outsized influence on the rest of the continent. We then identify the particularities of these apparent new forms of fascism, which differ markedly from those of 20th century fascism.

The United States and the perfection of fascism

I don’t believe that a charismatic leader is a necessary part of fascism today. As with every other movement, every other form of oppression, fascism is also dependent upon the overall tendencies of this or that society. American fascism will look different than German fascism, and, to be sure, to the extent that American society is different from German society of 1933. A charismatic leader is no longer necessary. I remind you of an excellent formulation by William Shirer who, God knows, is no socialist: this man said recently that American fascism will probably be the first which comes to power by democratic means and with democratic support. —Herbert Marcuse²

The discussion of fascism in the United States has gained strength since Donald Trump's first presidency. Of course, it is not a discussion that is limited to this century; it has been a topic for radical intellectuals since before the postwar period. Rather than contenting ourselves with describing the current government as fascist or not, a study of the fascist character of the world's greatest military power can provide us with important conceptual tools to identify and comprehend the renewed forms of fascism around the world. If, after the movement of 1968, France — and, in particular, the Nouvelle Droite — became the main exporter of theories of “new fascisms,” the American neo-reactionary movement today forms the apex of counterrevolution in the West.

An American fascism need not bear a likeness to Italian fascism or German National Socialism. Rather, its potential is “deeply enmeshed in histories of enslavement and extermination, dispossession, and domination that continue to shape the US present, materially and ideologically.”³ In a 2023 article, Alberto Toscano takes up the work of black radical thinkers to analyze the fascist potential of the American body politic and its governing institutions. As Toscano reminds us, “Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson identified the US state apparatus as a site of the reemergence or indeed a perfecting of certain features of (European) historical fascisms.”⁴ Of particular interest in Davis’ and Jackson's analysis is that, by developing it from the collective experiences of people racially excluded from the entitlement system of liberal democracy, they no longer use the term fascism to refer only to a specific political movement or form of dictatorial rule, but understand it as a mechanism of power intrinsic to capitalism, which had its breeding ground in colonial processes three centuries earlier. Fascism no longer needs to be embodied in a specific party-militia but is now assimilated into the political mechanisms and institutions that make up Western liberal democracies, a central feature of which is the “generalization of racialized prison terror in society at large.”⁵ This approach to “democratic forms of fascism” is shared by Theodor W. Adorno, who stated in a 1959 lecture that, “In my opinion, the survival of National Socialism in democracy is potentially much more threatening than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.”⁶

There is some truth in the way the black proletariat and the anti-Vietnam war movement began to use the term fascist as an insult to white police. As Bill Mullen and Christopher Vials write, “The racialized experience of the denial of civil rights in a liberal democracy can make the distinction between it and fascism murky at the level of lived experience.”⁷ Following the 2020 riots over the murder of George Floyd, and the more recent migrant rebellion against ICE, the American population has increasingly begun to identify repressive and aesthetic forms that echo the Nazi-fascism of the past. Then and now, police officers are recognized to racialized and sub-proletarian populations as fascist pigs. But, if fascism endures within democracy and its institutions as a mechanism inherent in its functioning, does this mean that political fascism, understood as a mass movement analogous to that of the 20th century, is no longer necessary in the present?

Before answering, we should reach even further back. Three decades before Davis and Jackson developed their analysis of American fascism, and a few years prior to the outbreak of World War II, council communist writer Paul Mattick was reflecting on the worldwide spread of fascism, in particular on the possibility that the Roosevelt administration might develop into a dictatorial fascist regime. Writing in 1934, Mattick explained the emergence of fascism in Europe as follows: 

The old democratic methods are no longer satisfactory; they must be exchanged for snappier and more direct methods. A government is no longer sufficient; what is needed is a dictatorship. The ferment and social unrest in the last stage of capitalism must be suppressed and controlled, that the system may survive.⁸

Mattick develops theoretical preconditions for the emergence of fascism in a country like the United States, starting from his understanding of fascism as the product of a crisis of capital, and its escape from this crisis through militaristic expansionism and the modernization of the state apparatus. For the ruling classes to be determined to promote fascist tendencies within a country, a generalized impoverishment of the middle classes is necessary. Fascism is nourished from their dissatisfaction, which it redirects not against capitalism or its agents but against the proletariat. The threat of revolution is a precondition for the usage of fascism to ensure the survival of the system.

The belief that the United States could drift into a fascist dictatorship during the New Deal era was prevalent among many radical thinkers and communist militants of those years. Yet Mattick ruled out that it could happen anytime soon, since fascism, while being a response to the crisis of capitalism, is not necessarily its only response. Further, the development of the class struggle had not yet generated the conditions for the necessity of fascism. However, Mattick warns that this possibility is latent within the old organizations of the middle class and the working aristocracy: 

[W]hen the middle classes become more pauperized than at present, the fascist movement will grow faster in the United States than anywhere else; in fact, as the situation stands now in America, fascism has more chance to develop than the revolutionary movement of the workers.⁹

Mattick was able to understand the pessimistic scenario that awaited us; ever since, the confirmation of fascism has remained far more probable than the prospect of revolution. Still, if we apply his analysis as it is to the present, one of his preconditions for the emergence of fascism is glaringly absent. The impoverishment of the middle classes and their mobilization around populist policies, such as the expulsion of migrants and the formation of shock groups like the boogaloo movement, has been going on for some years. The generalized impoverishment of the working class has not led to its radicalization, nor to its self-organization; on the contrary, it has encouraged an individualistic race for survival through an exaltation of one’s subjectivity and a search for success constructed around capitalist narratives.

If the current reactionary wave of libertarians, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists is indeed the manifestation of a specifically North American strand of fascism, it was not reactively awakened by some revolutionary threat to a capitalism in crisis. At least, not if this threat must be represented by an organized and relatively unified workers' movement.¹⁰ Such a requirement, however, becomes paradoxical in a period of capitalism characterized by the “decomposition of the proletariat as a revolutionary agent.”¹¹ That is to say, the fragmentation of the class and, along with it, its internal confrontation, exemplified above all — but not exclusively —  by the tension between the growth of surplus populations in relation to the needs of capital and the struggles of workers to preserve the conditions of wage-earning life, threatened by capitalist development.¹² This should not be interpreted as a dismissal of revolution in the present but rather as a condition that determines the way in which revolution would be possible at this moment.

Should we discard Mattick’s thesis, i.e. that the politically organized expression of new fascisms emerges as the answer to revolution, simply because of the absence of one of its defining characteristics? It’s not so simple; in fact, contemporary neo-reactionary movements do maintain another of the main characteristics of fascism, namely, that its main role is to serve as a defense of the existing order, in the context of a generalized crisis of capitalism.

When one conceives of the possibility of fascism in the present only as a replication of its historical forms during the 20th century, two possible conclusions result. Either we decide that fascism is a product of its time, and, now that the material conditions that spawned it no longer exist, our use of the term should be judiciously restricted; or, alternatively, we attempt to shoehorn all the various nationalist and conservative movements of our day into the classical category of fascism, without questioning their differences. Both conclusions must be rejected. The reality is that fascism is a historical product conditioned by the development of capitalism, and it obtains its characteristics from the context and epoch where it emerges; however, this precisely makes possible a variety of forms that share a basic feature: to protect a capitalism in crisis.

It would be a misunderstanding to conclude from the above that politically organized fascism is either not possible today owing to the absence of one of its preconditions (Mattick), or is not necessary now that its repressive mechanisms have been assimilated and perfected by liberal democracies (Davis and Jackson). Rather than inferring the unfeasibility of political fascism, the latter must be grasped as the simultaneity of both forms (macro and micro-politics): it is precisely the political-legal structures that allow the manifestation of a different strand of fascism in the present.

Fascisms in the era of capital’s total domination

If 20th century fascism assumed the form of a nationalist and statist mass movement, one marked by a distinct mode of biological racism aiming at the destruction of all dissident sectors of the proletariat, this is because it emerged in a particular phase of the development of capitalism that conditioned such features by its needs: the transition from formal to real domination. This transition refers to the overcoming of precapitalist forms of production that had remained intact until then — only formally becoming the possessions of capital — through the establishment of new, specifically capitalist modes of production. On some readings, the emergence of this new regime of accumulation associated with the real domination of labor under capital announces a break in the periodization of capital occurring during the decades of the World Wars, after which point we witness a progressive and unfinished transformation of the social totality into the image and likeness of capital.¹³ The development and deepening of capital’s domination brings about the decomposition of the proletariat and the decentralization of labor, which is closely linked to the slowdown of capitalist accumulation on a global scale, as well as the deindustrialization of many of the world's major economies, the generalization of the ecological crisis, and so on.

If we are to reflect on the terms by which capitalism expresses itself in its current phase, a theoretical new fascism would not necessarily be developmentalist, since the processes of late modernization that fascism and state socialism enacted have already taken place in most of the world. The emigration from the countryside to the city that drove the last great wave of industrialization (1950-1973) by providing an important and constant source of cheap labor cannot be repeated, since the decrease in the mass and value of labor through the expulsion of unemployed workers from the cities during the decline of national industry did not translate into a return to the countryside but rather into a tendential increase and stagnation of a marginal population now become superfluous. It was this same wave of industrialization that erased the place of agricultural labor in capitalist society, still prominent globally during the first half of the last century.

The technical-productive development of capitalism during its phase of real domination entailed the progressive dismantling of the national industries of the already industrialized countries and their relocation to countries of the Global South — so-called “deindustrialization” — as well as the reduction of the total mass of workers and their replacement by machines as a result of technical advances in various areas of the productive process. Meanwhile, in the case of non-relocatable and necessary industries, cheaper labor was supplied by mass migration. All this irreversibly altered the “organic composition of capital,” i.e., the ratio between constant capital and variable capital. With nowhere to move out of the cities, the mass of workers displaced from industry joined the surplus population of capital, chronically unemployed and underemployed workers who barely earn enough through wages to survive. The decline of domestic industry resulted in the growth of the low-wage service sector, while productive-technical upgrading increased the mass of commodities globally to the detriment of the amount of labor power needed for their production: “The overall result is that the accumulation of wealth occurs alongside an accumulation of poverty.”¹⁴ 

In contrast to the golden years of capitalism that followed World War II, which were characterized by a high rate of employment, significant public spending and an accelerated process of industrialization, facilitating a “democratic conquest” of high wages and labor benefits, the central characteristic of capitalist development today lies in the process of deindustrialization. This process has, as one of its derivative phenomena, the loss of the historical hegemony of factory workers’ struggles, as a section of the proletariat and, with it, the crisis of the positive affirmation of labor. 

As deindustrialization set in, decreased interest is shown by the powers that be in strengthening research in the fields such as mechanics and industry, areas linked to specific institutions or groups such as the so-called “vectorialist class” described by MacKenzie Wark.¹⁵ This “disinterest” in the industrializing agenda has had consequences — for example, through the rise of the service and “care” sector (after its recent privatization) compared to the agricultural and industrial sector. On the one hand, fast food, shipping, and transport companies benefit from labor instability and the decline of domestic industry, reducing the mass and value of living labor to a sufficient minimum, while on the other hand, the mass of migrant and racialized women workers now respond to the growing demand for socially reproductive labor, taking over cleaning services, care of children, the elderly and the sick, plus sex work, in an effort to replace the “native woman” integrated into productive work.¹⁶ 

Meanwhile, the development of economic liberalization policies, first employed in the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and later extended to a large part of the world, facilitated the reduction of national industry and state spending in Europe and the United States since the mid-1970s. This allowed the relocation of factories in specific industries, such as microelectronics, to countries with cheap labor (in comparison with industrialized countries) in which a small number of factories employ a large mass of workers to take care of the global consumption of such technologies. 

Although they led to the rapid growth of Asian countries like China in the final decades of the 20th century, these same processes have also accelerated the automation of labor, which has now matched the scope of the post-industrialized countries in the West. Consequently, the rise of economically precarious surplus populations has now been generalized across the world, along with reductions of “state aid,” increases in commodity prices, and labor instability, instilling a general crisis of social reproduction:

Since then, the major capitalist countries have seen an unprecedented decline in their levels of industrial employment. Over the past three decades, manufacturing employment fell fifty percent as a percentage of total employment in these countries. Even newly “industrializing” countries like South Korea and Taiwan saw their relative levels of industrial employment decline in the past two decades. At the same time, the numbers of both low-paid service-workers and slum-dwellers working in the informal sector have expanded as the only remaining options for those who have become superfluous to the needs of shrinking industries.¹⁷ 

But by far the main change generated by the expansion of the total domination of the capitalist machine is at the psychological and anthropological level. There is a radical change in human beings, in their conception as such, their place in the world, and their relationship to their environments, both human and at the ecosystemic or biospheric level. The saturation of informational stimuli and the accelerated rhythms of life prevent us from processing reality, to the point of its becoming incomprehensible. Capitalist crisis overruns the psyche, configuring a pathological collapse of the psychosocial organism and its civilization more generally.¹⁸ 

This collapse has produced a nostalgic subject: one who longs not only for the aesthetics, values, and traditions of the past, but who desires to regain control over his own life, his capacity to react, his psychic production and social reproduction. The constant “psychotic” state in which he is involved results in a deep disorientation and detachment from the present, from what all that happens to him. From this comes the most notorious difference between the original fascism and the new fascisms. The youthful zeal of Italian fascism, which believed itself capable of dominating everything through war, has been replaced by a senile and impotent subject submerged in a panicked crisis owing to the profound decadence of his society about which he, as an individual, is incapable of doing anything. War, and the processes of selective extermination, are deployed as a “kick in the teeth”: a desperate attempt to get out of the capitalist and psychosocial crisis of humanity whereby the subject delegates his decisions to select individuals who embody the stereotypical form of the financially successful man capable of everything, someone who embodies his discomfort, who mobilizes him towards a way out. But the exit is false; the only way out they will be given is further psychosis, an act of collective suicide-homicide that we all seem to be awaiting. Capitalism cannot reverse its development. The only thing left is to accelerate, or make futile attempts to delay its course:

The youthful energy once enjoyed is suppressed by semiotic hyperstimulation: unable to process the informational flows of the network, the organic body finds itself tired and depressed, submissive to the accelerated pace of the infosphere and financial automatisms, resulting in a political-sexual impotence to act on their own lives and the areas that shape it.¹⁹

This characterization of the new reactionary movement (which on previous occasions we have inscribed within a “necrophilic” subject) as “nostalgic” is crucial in order to understand its functioning, and the logic (or lack thereof) behind its actions. It is from this central aspect of the reactionary psyche that we can explain the distorted reappearance of typical forms of classical or even pre-capitalist fascism²⁰ in the present. It is not that they have returned per se, nor are they only their imitation. At issue is a sort of oxymoron, a mixture between the reified past and the novelty of technical sophistication that now generates something else. The fascist salutes, the Ku Klux Klan costumes at anti-immigrant marches, the contempt for women, the cult of Pinochet, are a distorted replica of the reactionary forms of the past, of the civilized white man's nostalgic longing to enjoy an unrepressed hypermasculinity, to return to “unusual eras of sexual license, of orgiastic scenes, of unpunished rape, of unrepressed incest.”²¹ 

That things simply “take their course” is the catastrophe

It is in this sense that subjects like Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu almost perfectly personify the suicidal logic of capital, the objective tendency in its current historical phase to create the conditions for its self-destruction. The global reactionary movement is the politically organized expression of the impotence and self-destructive psychosis of a large segment of the population. In other words, what we call a reactionary movement of a new type is nothing more than the mobilization and politicization of the passions of destructiveness that are lodged in the unconscious and inherent character of society, nourished by disappointment with the present and, above all, by the failure of projects for the radical reconfiguration of the world. They are the by-product of decades of school massacres, conspiracy mongering, drug epidemics, job insecurity, and demographic decline of the Western white “race.”²² As Franco “Bifo” Berardi would say: “Deceived expectations and frustrated individualism are not leading to the resurfacing of solidarity, but only to a desperate longing and a raging death wish.”²³ For the same reason, the racial policies of “demographic engineering” (or “hyper-racism,” in the terms of the NRx²⁴), territorial expansion, the restitution of the hetero-patriarchal order, and military rearmament are embraced with enthusiasm by increasingly large sectors of the population, those whose subjectivities have been so bombarded by the self-flagellating excitement of the fascist alternative to the crisis that they constitute a materialization of the strategies that the capitalist machine requires and imposes.

These policies are not an arbitrary outburst. There is a rationale behind them: crisis, and the need simultaneously to respond to it without recognizing it. Netanyahu's military expansionism and the murder-suicide spiral that has spread throughout the Middle East, Trump's annexationist pretensions, and the dispute between Russia and NATO over Ukraine can all be understood as moments of imperialist competition over natural resources and strategic territories. The numerous resources that will become available as a result of the thaw are an opportunity for the major world powers to solve the energy crisis and to finance technical-productive development, at least for a while. The domination of the regions of Siberia, Greenland and the Arctic are a national security necessity — as Donald Trump himself said. The same holds true for the Middle East, the Gulf of Mexico, the Panama Canal, Ukraine and across the Global South: capitalism plans to survive the ecological crisis through the intensification of the destruction of nature, the multiplication and intensification of wars, and the selective impossibility of reproducing life.

The recent U.S. intervention in the Middle East situation almost two years after the genocide in Gaza began exemplifies very well the characteristics of this epoch. In the meeting between Trump and his Israeli counterpart, the plan for the total displacement of the Palestinian population in Gaza was announced, and justified as a sort of humanitarian gesture. After all, who would want to live in a “demolition area,” Trump declared. In its place, the U.S. would build what appears to be a huge resort, which Trump dubbed the “Riviera of the Middle East.” 

No other recent event so accurately portrays the absurd behavior of capitalism in the face of its own structural crisis. Capital's inability to absorb living labor into production  — a situation generated by itself and its contradictory development —  has led it to provoke major processes of devalorization, from wars to natural catastrophes and genocides, in an attempt to restore the conditions for the production of value. In this particular case, the bombing and forced displacement of the Palestinian population will be followed by massive reconstruction, which in Trump's words would generate economic development in the region and provide “an unlimited number of jobs.” In reality, such attempts to subvert the crisis are futile, since the crisis does not originate from a lack of jobs. Rather, the development of capitalism today makes it impossible to continue with the social centrality of labor as it did before.

There have been many attempts to separate capitalism from war, genocide, and fascism, as if these existed independently of the prevailing model of production, or as if it were impossible for them to take place again, since they were overcome by the development of capitalism. The fiction of a capitalism that, at the end of history, is finally pacified, cleansed of wars and antagonisms, was proposed some time ago. The same Francis Fukuyama who defended the narrative in the mid-nineties has since retracted any suggestion that we are in a stage of permanent peace.²⁵

The most perverse aspect of the genocide in Gaza is that it severs any attempt to separate capitalism from the enormous number of corpses on which it rests. By ignoring that world catastrophes are the result of the contradictions of the social metabolism of capital and that these lead to its own self-destruction...Palestine unveils capitalism as it is. In two years of genocide, the law of value was never interrupted: the sale of overpriced food (at Christmas 2024 a chicken reached forty euros), the continuation of the sex trade and informal labor, all teach us a crude truth: capitalism is capable of functioning until the end of days. Not even apocalyptic fantasies offer a refuge from the necrotic advance of the capitalist machine.

Fascist reactions to capital crisis

Fascism enters the game owing to the recurrent failure of bureaucrats and technocrats to regulate and reverse the intensification of the capitalist structural crisis. But, this alternative to the crisis is fictitious, since the preferred fascist solution lies precisely in the acceleration of the (self-)destructive tendencies of capital. Rather than averting or, at the very least, managing the fall through a “soft landing,” it embraces crisis and accelerates it dramatically. If the crisis cannot be resolved, it will have to be deepened; that is the suicidal-homicidal logic of fascism.

The survival of the system means the death of an important segment of the human population (and non-human, since it includes different forms of life of the biosphere that are subordinated under the anthropocentric and anthropogenic regime), while for the remaining population it means the precarization of their current conditions of survival. But, this does not matter in the eyes of the reactionary subject. Self-destructive violence is preferable to depressive fatalism due to the crisis:

It is a question of reorganizing bourgeois domination, which is under threat, by means of the old method of turning social rage against society into rage within society, transforming social war into inter-bourgeois war, proletarian anger into delegations and negotiations within the state, the questioning of the whole society into the questioning of a particular form of domination, and the struggle against capitalism into a struggle against one bourgeois faction in favor of another.²⁶

The threat of the other is crucial for the construction of this fiction. Indeed, the strategic, subjective construction and installation of an other, as a tool inherited from colonialism, is vital to instilling the urgency for private property, security, order and for a homogeneous self that stands in opposition to this other, now an enemy, exacerbating the state of hostility and zero-sum. An other is needed to bear the responsibility for the capitalist crisis and its various expressions (economic, ecological, and heteronormative, among others), an enemy who, if exterminated, or at least displaced, will restore social order.

In the current case, that other is the surplus population of capitalism, a segment that is relatively or totally excluded from the official productive circuits and survives on state “aid” and the “informal” economy.²⁷ This growing surplus population is mainly composed of immigrants, refugees, the chronically unemployed, precarious workers, sex workers, and other segments which, due to the criminalization of their existence and practices, are rejected in their identity as “dignified workers,” that is, the lumpenproletariat as “the dark reverse of the affirmation of the working class.”²⁸

It is not surprising that the rise of reactionary movements is closely linked to the proliferation of Malthusian discourses that advocate for the reduction of the world’s population based on racial and class filters. The same is true of the exploitation of feminist and gender issues by reactionary segments (on both the left and right of the spectrum) in Islamophobic and anti-immigrant campaigns. The very existence of this racialized and surplus population and, above all, its increase resulting from forced migration, is identified as a danger to women and gender dissidents and, in particular, to political and legal progress in gender matters.

The demonization of racialized men is twofold: on the one hand, they are responsible for taking jobs away from national workers, and on the other, they represent a misogynist and inferior culture. Regardless of its specificities, this narrative or, rather, this myth originating from crisis — which designates those responsible in concrete identity terms — serves as an ideological and even legal justification for the persecution, repression, and selective extermination of certain segments of society, as it did for fascism in the past. Meanwhile, the ecological dimension of the capitalist crisis and the proliferation of war in all territories are provoking a huge increase in human displacement, which will only deepen and multiply the surplus population of capital and its precarization. Racial policies to deal with this migration in Europe, the United States, and parts of South America aim at replicating the Trumpist strategy of closing borders, opening prisons for undocumented migrants, and mass expulsions of migrants to other territories.

In relation to the ecological crisis, neo-Malthusian discourses are taken to extremes, linking the degradation of the natural environment, the scarcity of resources, and the destruction of the “national community” with the overpopulation of the planet and the mass migration that results from it. They blame this on a specific non-white sector of the world’s population, coming from undeveloped countries in Central America, South America, and the Middle East. They also blame them for intentionally provoking the mega-fires that have affected many parts of the world (Brazil, Greece, and Chile), as part of an international conspiracy by a progressive and globalist elite. In the process, they suppress any structural criticism of capitalism and its predatory logic. The Greek radical group Antithesi recently underscored the relationship between the rise of so-called post-fascism and the ecological crisis, and identifies the existence of a contemporary eco-fascism or “green fascism”: “This type of environmentalism does not attack the capitalist exploitation of nature but displaces the issue into the defense of the ‘native soil’ and landscape, and the ‘traditional’ national culture and way of life.”²⁹

Given the structural character of the capitalist crisis and its deepening depredation of nature, we can identify a reactionary alternative to the techno-optimistic acceleration of the crisis of capital, and which instead proposes a techno-economic deceleration of capitalism and demographic increase. This decelerating expression of the crisis can be linked to the adoption of isolationist policies, the closure of borders, and a relative or total rejection of technology (or certain types of technology), in order to embrace self-management, the revival of rural life, the recovery of pre-capitalist forms of organization, the purity of the natural environment, and the racially homogeneous composition of the national community. A “sophisticated” form of a reactionary, decelerationist, and self-management project for the capitalist crisis can be illustrated by a hybridization between a fascist and nationalist inversion of degrowth [decrentistas] theories and the formation of an authoritarian and corporatist state, thereby allowing for the systematic implementation of demographic engineering to reduce and expel the non-white population in favor of “the violent restoration of the unity of the circuit of reproduction of national social capital.”³⁰

In light of all that has been explained, we consider the real absence of a threat to capitalism to be debatable, to say the least. Even if there is no new revolutionary subject or period in the making, capitalism remains under threat. Only now that threat comes solely from within itself; capitalism, as Marx rightly believed, is destroying the very presuppositions of its own existence. We can mention two interrelated processes derived from capital’s tendency toward its own uninterrupted and unlimited expansion as self-valorizing value: the crisis of labor as a form of social mediation and the planetary ecological crisis. 

Following the Schumpeterian formula for capitalist reinvention, destruction has not been followed by its creativity, there is no new great reconfiguration of capitalism that will enable it to overcome its crisis, but rather — as we have already mentioned —  only different forms of management or acceleration of its collapse. And it is here that the new fascisms find their place. Thinking fascism from the perspective of the terminal crisis of capital —  and especially the specific moment in which we find ourselves — allows us to contemplate two possible forms or moments of fascism: one “decelerating” and the other accelerationist, to make a momentary distinction.

Global civil war and neoliberal fascism

In Capital Hates Everyone, Maurizio Lazzarato contextualizes Mussolini's fascism within the era of total industrial wars, in which fascism was one of the organizational modalities of global counterrevolution. He differentiates it from the new fascisms which, instead, are contextualized and thus determined by the period of global civil wars — the form of war specific to contemporary capitalism. The latter is an undeclared war, without any outside and operating above any recognizable political frontier, which has a continuous expression in varying degrees of intensity and forms throughout the world. Lazzarato's conception has a lot of truth in it, but it overlooks certain essentials that we will attempt to address here.

To phrase it in our own terms, what is at issue is the integration of the military, psychological, and economic apparatuses of advanced capitalism into a single form of war against the population that simultaneously encompasses both direct forms of confrontation  — whether temporary or permanent —  as well as diffuse forms of mute violence, of apparent absence of confrontation, that is, the existence of a false social order. In reality, the latter only conceals the impersonal coercion of the social body by the capitalist machine, such as the diffuse experience of violence that accompanies the abrasive structure of cities or, of course, the incessant routine of wage-earning existence that endures for as long as life lasts.

During moments of confrontation, global civil war assumes the form of a “preventive counterrevolution”³¹, a violent reorganization of class society through which unprofitable, unproductive forms-of-life that exist as waste are suppressed. In other words, racialized and subaltern populations, without ever needing to pose a formal and unified threat to capital, undergo “the subjugation of humans and non-humans to the production of value.”³² As a confrontation, this provides an answer to the problem of the management of the surplus population produced by the inherent tendency of capital. This response translates into imprisonment, marginalization in ghettos, police discipline and, ultimately the extermination of this population, which has been rendered superfluous through openly genocidal processes due to its redundant existence, as we see happening today in Palestine.

The concept of the internal and external enemy belonging to classical forms of warfare proves useless to describe a war in which there is no outside, just as there is no outside of capital. Even in its forms of direct confrontation, it cannot be reduced to a contest between armies from specific territories or States. This civil war, which has become global, continues even where it is believed to be absent or temporarily contained.³³ It continues wherever social order reigns over the corpses of insurrection. It is war insofar as it presupposes the impossibility of reconciliation, of coexistence; capital understands only one form of existence, and that is its own. And it is global insofar as its condition of possibility lies in the universalizing form of capitalism in its phase of total domination.

As we have already suggested, capitalist development entails the refinement and readaptation of the mechanisms of war inherent in capitalism. What was once expressed specifically as industrial warfare between nation-states, is now Global Civil War, which constitutes the other face of the process of market globalization in contemporary capitalism. The Global Civil War and the cosmopolitan project of neoliberalism are an indissoluble unity, since each makes the other possible.

The alleged imminence of a new World War provides an ideal context for the emergence of these new types of fascism. Such a statement cannot be reduced to an exaggeration when war is spreading across all territories of the planet. The major powers of Europe are reducing funds for “foreign aid” — through Official Development Assistance (ODA) — and increasing military spending, while Zelensky, followed by Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, propose European rearmament, and the European Union begins to recommend that citizens be prepared for any eventuality, advising them to have a survival kit on hand.³⁴

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Israel is fighting a war on all its borders while continuing to bomb Gaza, and its conflict with Iran is tempting the allied powers of both countries to intervene. This warmongering mood was largely spread by the Trump administration, which initiated a tariff war within weeks against the entire world — including an island inhabited only by penguins — in what appeared to be an attempt to drag the markets into collapse.

However, the proliferation of the forms of Global Civil War does not mean the absence of wars between nation-states, but rather the simultaneity of different forms of warfare that are understood as a single unit: the great war machine of globalized capitalism. Global Civil War completes the hybridization of the different regions of human knowledge. Scientists, journalists, workers, and engineers labor for the invention and development of the war machine in its various forms, through the refinement and application of the modes of productive cooperation developed during the Total Wars and the Cold War, which intermingle the home with the laboratory and the factory.

What is unique about historical form of war today is the increasingly important role of the private sector vis-à-vis the State, where the state’s “monopoly” on violence is being dispersed among different agents: paramilitary organizations, mafias, private security agencies, and mercenary groups. Thus, if there is a new world war, as has so often been predicted, its chief novelty will be that the organizational form of the nation-state, characterized by a clearly delimited territory and an effective government, will officially take a back seat and be replaced by the corporate administration of the state, whose territorial boundaries are not closed but expansive, and whose government is the property of multinational monopolies. The symbolic equivalence between Donald Trump and Elon Musk in every public appearance responds to this phenomenon which, as others have already pointed out, seems to be “an intrinsic tendency of technological acceleration in the framework of the crisis of late capitalism.”³⁵

As a specific form of contemporary warfare, Global Civil War must be understood as a form of “permanent counterrevolution” — a reversal of the Trotskyist theory of revolution. It is in this same vein that Nick Land, NRx theorist and co-founder of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), described fascism in 2016 as

…a normalization of war-powers in a modern state, that is: sustained social mobilization under central direction. Consequently, it involves, beside the centralization of political authority in a permanent war council, a tribal hystericization of social identity, and a considerable measure of economic pragmatism.³⁶

Global Civil War is the lesson that was taken from the Second World War and historical fascism. It was with the appearance of fascism that the warlike modality from which the contemporary form of war would derive, as global civil war, was expressed for the first time. Over a century ago, the anarchist Luigi Fabbri lucidly described fascism as a continuation of the First World War, a relocation and reorganization by the national ruling classes of the war machine within their respective borders, against an enemy they detested more than the neighboring nations: the proletariat.³⁷ 

Meanwhile, today the justification for fascist policies depends on the permanence of that state of war, which therefore requires a war that never ends.

The Cold War looked like one, but wasn’t quite. The War on Terror is a better bet. In regards to their interminability, if not their moral intensity, “wars” on poverty, drugs, and other resilient social conditions are more attractive still. Waging modern wars, and their metaphorical side-products, is what the fascist state is for. Winning them on occasion, and by accident, is only ever a misfortune. That lesson seems to have been thoroughly learned.³⁸

The global wave of right-wing politics and the foreshadowing of the postmodern counterrevolution

Maurizio Lazzarato's analysis of the metamorphosis of historical fascism leads him to characterize these new fascisms as neoliberal or national-liberal, a postulate shared by other authors such as Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott and Rodrigo Karmy. New fascist movements “find in neoliberalism its economic-gestational form”³⁹, affirming its central categories: private property, the market, competition, individual freedoms (to consume, sell, and buy), etc. In the absence of an organized revolutionary movement, the repressive and persecutory role of these new fascisms targets dissident subjectivities of the hetero-patriarchal order and existences that put the racially homogeneous composition of the nation at “risk”  — see Islamophobia and the massive expulsion of migrants.

These fascisms do not deny liberalism, much less assume themselves as a third-positionist alternative. They contain no “anti-capitalist” critique — even if only at the discursive level — and lack the revolutionary-conservative character typical of historical fascisms and their post-war continuations, such as, for example, the nouvelle droite. Rather, they embrace the violent and counterrevolutionary origins through which neoliberalism was originally implanted in the global South, through civil-military dictatorships financed, planned, and endorsed by the West and the United States, primarily. What also differentiates them from the average neoliberal is that they formally reject this violent origin. The proliferation of neoliberal fascist management in the world is a product of the crisis of neoliberalism itself, a kind of auto-reply that emerges from a reactionary subjectivity built on forty years of neoliberal policies of atomizing individualism. “The micro-politics of credit created the conditions for a fascist micropolitics.”⁴⁰ Neoliberal fascism is capable of promoting, whether formally or not, the consolidation of a “liberal dictatorship” that, in order to ensure the functioning of markets, the acceleration of technological development, and the defense of private property, dismantles the democratic and progressive legal structures that impede such capitalist acceleration.

Starting from Lazzarato and other authors who refer to fascism in the present, it is possible to recognize a direct inheritance in the current radical rightists of Europe, Russia, the United States, South America, and the different forms through which the counterrevolution expressed itself during the first half of the 20th century, particularly in the form of fascism. Regardless of the nuances among the various right-wing movements in the West, we can identify a radical line with growing support in the last two decades that has been able to adapt the policies that characterized the fascist movements, but in a more efficient way within democracies, and without losing the use of political violence and public disorder as a demonstration of power and pressure upon political opponents. Even without necessarily sharing the use of the term “neoliberal fascism,” there is a truth behind it, which is that the relationship of the current radical right with the heritage of historical fascism lies in sharing the same historical function: the defense of the capitalist order and its essential categories, such as the family and the nation, through the subjugation of the subaltern classes.

One of the oft-repeated arguments for denying the identification of these new radical rightists as fascists is their abandonment of the party-militia as a form of organization, their participation in democracy, their self-definition as something different from fascism⁴¹ and, above all, the degree of political violence employed, which must, it seems, be comparable to that of Nazi Germany to be fascism, for some. These take as their basis the whimsical separation between fascism and democracy, as well as the identification of fascism as the “supreme evil,” the caricature of an anti-democratic, authoritarian, and dictatorial monster that carried out crimes never seen before in history. What this criticism hides is the inability of certain groups to assimilate the historically changing character of fascism and its origins in the Colonial States, since to do so would be to accept the unfeasibility of their political project, itself based on the defense of democracy and the State, the framework within which new fascisms persist, as well as global civil war as the political paradigm of the current phase of capitalism.

It is on the basis of the forms of the Global Civil War that we can understand some aspects of the current form of state management, and the proliferation of these new radical right wing groups, which, although not organized in a large national militia party, do incite and finance sectors related to the informal and illegal economy, as well as shock groups (sometimes armed), whose role is to act outside the democratic order following the interests of the parties to which they are linked. The storming of the capitol by Trump supporters in 2021 and the presence of paramilitary organizations and the boogaloo movement in the repression of the George Floyd uprising in 2020, are the most commonly cited examples.

Meanwhile, in Chile, the clearest example was the declaration of war against the population by the recently “canonized” Sebastián Piñera in October 2019.⁴² Piñera’s declaration was taken literally by reactionary segments that collaborated with state repression: far-right shock groups linked to “Rechazo” [Rejection]⁴³, dressed in military uniforms, bullet-proof vests, Pinochet symbols, and armed with firearms, iron bars, and improvised shields in clear imitation of groups of similar ideology in the United States. But the cases continued as the uprising quelled with the assistance of the “left,” that would later go on to govern. In 2022, during student and worker protests in March and May, law enforcement repression was aided by armed groups apparently linked to mafias and street vendors, resulting in the murder of journalist Francisca Sandoval, who was shot in the head during a march on International Workers' Day. In 2024, in the context of the fateful fifty-first anniversary of the military coup, a counter-march protected by carabineros stabbed Alonso Verdejo, leaving him dead. That same day the government of Gabriel Boric boasted that the repressive measures “were effective”. And, to conclude this critical overview of the Chilean case, it is worth mentioning that the updating of repressive laws has taken place in the context of a democracy which, precisely, reinforces our argument that in liberal fascism persecutory practices have managed to crystallize institutionally within the discourse of progressivism.

Beyond defining the global wave of radical right-wing and far-right movements as fascist, the possibility of new forms of fascism emerging and continuing within the democratic framework  — whether through their assimilation by the current right wing and/or by the state apparatus and its institutions, regardless of who is in power⁴⁴ —  paves the way to overcoming the false dichotomy between liberalism and fascism, as well as dictatorship and democracy, and, with it, denying the pacified understanding of capitalism, which consciously ignores the role of war and fascism as “political and economic forces necessary for the conversion of capital accumulation.”⁴⁵ Through authors such as Lazzarato, Villalobos-Ruminott, and Karmy it is possible to understand the current advance of the radical right led by Trump, Milei, and Meloni as part of this mutation of historical fascism towards a neoliberal authoritarianism with warmongering features. But at the same time, this perspective is self-limiting: by narrowing itself to neoliberalism, it fails to understand that the phenomenon of the new fascisms is more varied and ideologically confused than they claim. For the same reason, these new fascisms cannot be described in their entirety as the continuation of neoliberal management and their participation within representative democracy, but rather as the advancement of post-neoliberal expressions that have not yet been fully discovered.

Capitalist acceleration and the NRx

The trend toward capitalist acceleration seems to point definitively toward a divorce from liberal democracy, and the specific form that will result from this suicidal acceleration will undoubtedly exceed those of neoliberal state management. The neoreactionary movements leading this blind advance of capital — like a self-fulfilling prophecy — have been arguing for several years that representative democracy is deficient in safeguarding private property, accompanied by a critique of the humanitarian ideals of the Enlightenment (egalitarianism, rational thought, and freedom). This is the case with parts of libertarianism (or “anarcho-capitalism”), particularly authors such as Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. The latter is the more “radical” — not to say reactionary — of the two, considering a return to Western monarchies — which he considers a lesser evil — as preferable to democracies, which he blames for social decadence. Hoppe differentiates democracy from monarchy in that the former is a form of government owned by the public, promoted by social democracy and universalized after the First World War, while the latter is a form of government owned by private individuals (the monarchy), where the king is the legitimate owner of a territory (his kingdom). Hoppe’s main argument for why privately held governments are more efficient in defending property and the free market is the continuity of ownership through inheritance, which encourages kings to think long term and thus maintain lower fiscal spending. Ultimately, he is nothing more than a promoter of modern Hobbesian contractualism.

Hoppe’s ridiculous pro-monarchy arguments and belief in private ownership of the government find some continuity in the work of other leading figures in the contemporary reactionary movement, specifically in the “Dark Enlightenment.” Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, and, above all, Michael Anissimov — whose ideas have found a place in the current Trump administration — share Hoppe’s critique of egalitarianism and democracy, but take it to the extreme.

Compared to libertarianism, the Dark Enlightenment (also called NRx) is a much more difficult movement to classify and yet, even from this margin of mystery, has managed to infiltrate certain sectors of the diffuse far-left, which, unable to recognize the danger of its positions, fail to see the threat in its charming philosophical stances. Although they share central elements with counterrevolutionary ideology, their influences can be traced to figures from a variety of tendencies and periods (post-structuralism, science fiction, conspiracy theories, reactionary thought, and libertarianism). On the one hand, it embraces criticism of the Enlightenment and affirms a neo-Hobbesian understanding of human nature, positions that not only give the movement its name but are also a fundamental part of the first phase of its political project: the promotion of an authoritarian figure to manage the population and ensure capitalist acceleration. The anti-Enlightenment line followed by Land and company appears to harken back to the roots of reactionary thought in the work of its first great theorist, Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821).

But what really sets NRx apart from other expressions of counterrevolution is its accelerationist origins in cyberpunk counterculture and the rave scene championed by Nick Land. The neo-reactionary current successfully captures the dreams of the techno-optimistic counterculture of the early 1990s, as well as its dystopian inversion. NRx is configured within the tension between the initial optimism regarding the “infinite potential” of networks and new technologies, and its critical response in capitalist techno-dystopias, affirming the materialization of the latter as its end. In Land's most sophisticated version, this end can be described as “a vision of capital planetary artificial intelligence: a vast, supple, endlessly fissile system which renders human will obsolete.”⁴⁶

In Neoreaction, the negation of Enlightenment values does not aim to preserve the status quo, but rather proposes a reconfiguration that allows for a more efficient and extreme defense of the capitalist order, overcoming the status quo in the process through a reactionary critique that is fundamentally opposite to that of the revolution. Therefore, there is no complete assimilation of the characteristic elements of older tendencies, such as pro-monarchism and anti-egalitarianism, but rather a utilitarian transformation of these elements in the service of its techno-dystopian political project. For example, the conservative preference for a classical monarchy gives way to the Landian understanding that the trend of capitalist acceleration leads to the adoption of a sort of corporate techno-monarchy as a more efficient form of management for capital. For NRx theorists, the state would be managed like a joint-stock company (JSC), with the private ownership of the government vested in a chief executive officer (CEO⁴⁷) who would own the territory and its resources, while the aristocracy would serve as shareholders in this JSC.

For this system to work, Yarvin proposes that these corporation-states should be small, more like city-states. This is where one of the most ambitious projects of NRx comes in: marine colonization (or seasteading) — the construction of permanent dwellings on maritime platforms outside the jurisdiction of any existing nation. This project is primarily promoted by Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman and founder of the Seasteading Institute. As you can see, it is not so far-fetched given the current mutation of the nation-state and its increasing assimilation into the world’s major corporations. Or that, in the search for new ways to manage the demands of technological warfare, China is planning to build a maritime data center thirty five meters underwater to alleviate the large amount of square footage required to build a database, as well as water needed to maintain suitable temperatures. The maritime area, far from being the realm of science fiction, is a plausible scenario, and is already happening.

That the Trump administration is the closest example of this neo-corporatist form of state administration is no accident. “Incoming State Department official Michael Anton has spoken with Curtis Yarvin about how an ‘American Caesar’ could be installed in power,” alluding to the leader of NRx's theoretical capitalist techno-monarchy. On the other hand, J.D. Vance, current Vice President of the United States, and Steve Bannon, former presidential advisor and chief strategist for Donald Trump's team during his previous administration, have each acknowledged their interest in Yarvin's work.

Regardless of how successful or not the prefigurative exercises of theory-fiction in NRx are — what Land refers to as a “hyperstition,” a fiction that creates the future it predicts — what is certain is that the acceleration of the capitalist machine during its current phase of civilizational decadence reveals that the resulting capitalist form transcends the preceding ones. For this reason, we should not understand current reactionary phenomena such as those led by figures like Trump or Milei as finished products, but as parts of a process that is still in progress, continually unfolding, following its course. To affirm or deny their classification as “fascists” is less relevant than the recognition that the current reconfiguration of the reactionary movement they are witnessing is a material expression of the structural crisis of capital. The practical nature of studying the reactionary is to provide input for the construction of the abolition of the capitalist social relations that give rise to them — that is, the violent confrontation with capital and its fundamental categories.

Capitalism, for the accelerationist, rushes upon us like an accelerating liquid monstrosity, capable of absorbing us — and, for Land, we must welcome it. The history of slave labor and the literally monstrous class struggle is obscured in the accelerationist invocation of the Lovecraftian monster, Shoggoth, as liquid, accelerating dynamism. Horror implies an oblivion of class struggle (even in dubious fictional form) and the abolition of friction in the name of immersion.⁴⁹

Fascism and democracy

It is undeniable that the narrative of the advent of fascism has a particular utility, and its revival during each electoral period is unsurprising. The process is simple: respond to the fascist threat with the unity of the whole of civil society in a single Front, which translates into votes at the ballot box and, on occasion, street clashes and protests. The goal is always the same: to protect democracy from the dictatorial threat of fascism. Or, in other words, the defense of a moderate capitalism.

Fascism is the adulation of the statist monster, while anti-fascism is its more subtle apology. The fight for a democratic state is inevitably a fight to consolidate the state, and far from crippling totalitarianism, such a fight increases totalitarianism’s stranglehold on society.⁵⁰

Based on the situated analysis of racial fascism by Angela Davis and George Jackson that we discussed at the beginning, we come to understand the particular way in which fascism survives within democracies, making it entirely possible to speak today of democratic fascisms. This suggests that antifascist practice in defense of democracy — understood as the lesser evil and opposed to fascism — is useless and, consequently, fails (and will continue to fail) in every case. However, this conclusion is not exclusive to radical Black authors. As early as 1921, during the Second Congress of the Communist International, Amadeo Bordiga warned about the true nature of democracy:

Bourgeois democracy acts among the masses as a means of indirect defense, while the executive apparatus of the State remains ready to use violent and direct means as soon as the last attempts to attract the proletariat to the democratic terrain have failed.⁵¹

Similarly, in his denunciation of fascism two years later, he did not portray as an imminent break with bourgeois democracy, since it had its origins in it: “Fascism incorporates the counterrevolutionary struggle of all allied bourgeois forces, and for this reason is not necessarily bound to destroy democratic institutions.”⁵² Despite this, criticism of democracy did not accompany criticism of fascism, so that the belief in the total opposition between democracy and fascism became common sense.

However, Davis and Jackson's analysis of racial and democratic fascism is at least four decades away from the fascism denounced by Bordiga. Was the possibility of a democratic fascism already inscribed in the original form of fascism in the first half of the twentieth century? 

In his 2002 work State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben reminds us of something fundamental about fascism, namely, that neither Hitler nor Mussolini came to power by means of a coup d'état:

Mussolini was the head of the government, legally invested with this office by the king, just as Hitler was chancellor of the Reich, named by the legitimate president of the Reich. As is well known, what characterizes both the Fascist and Nazi regimes is that they allowed the existing constitutions (the Albertine Statute and the Weimar Constitution, respectively) to subsist, and —  according to a paradigm that has been acutely defined as “dual state” — they placed beside the legal constitution a second structure, often not legally formalized, that could exist alongside the other because of the state of exception. From a juridical standpoint, the term dictatorship is entirely unsuitable for describing such regimes, just as, moreover, the clean opposition of democracy and dictatorship is misleading for any analysis of the governmental paradigms dominant today.⁵³

While the implementation of a state of exception by these fascist regimes did not invent anything new, neither was it unique to fascism. The state of exception had its origins in revolutionary France, and its application in accordance with the law can be traced throughout the century that followed the French Revolution — above all, we see it during the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871. Later, in the course of the First World War, it spread as a general policy to all the belligerent countries, which, after a brief interruption, continued in most of the liberal democracies that were struggling with the effects of the War and later the Great Depression — as we saw above with the case of Roosevelt in the United States —  as well as to deal with workers' insurrections.

Once fascism and National Socialism came to power, they took full advantage of the preexisting legal framework, and its remodeling (especially in the German case) only continued the lines drawn by the social democratic governments. The very constitutional political apparatus of the European liberal democracies, which ironically included the legal suspension of the constitution and fundamental rights (either partially or completely, depending on the case) through the principle of the state of exception, served as a transition for the establishment of the fascist and Nazi war machines in their most complete forms during World War II.

The difference, in this aspect, of the new fascisms and those of the past does not lie in the possibility of fascism within the democratic framework, which was already present. Rather, it lies in how democracies were able to perfect fascist policies and allow them to be deployed even within the democratic framework, to the point that they have been able to build an industry around crime and insecurity as justifications for the establishment of these policies. Consider, for example, the almost uninterrupted policy of the constitutional state of exception in Chile since 2019, which assumed the form of a state of catastrophe during the pandemic and states of emergency both in the “southern macrozone,” with the militarization of the Araucania, and in the north due to the migratory crisis. These policies also serve as the principal tool for the management of the surplus population of capital. The marginalization of this population to the point of poverty and the promotion of the informal economy as the “only” form of survival (the means by which the processes of value production continue) go hand in hand with systematic state repression and increased funding for the police and armed forces.⁵⁴

In the last three decades of neoliberal hegemony, it has become common to invoke the defense of democracy and order, so that the state continuously deploys policies of persecution, repression, and imprisonment against “subversive” and “antisocial” groups, sometimes labeled as terrorists, which in reality means precarious workers, seniors with miserable pensions, and women tired of sexual violence. Strikes, street demonstrations, and street blockades are repressed in the name of the right to work, the defense of property of all kinds, and the right to free movement.

Historical fascism was a central part of the process of the reconfiguration of the contemporary state, a process that can be summarized as having assimilated and perfected the forms that characterized the fascist counterrevolution during the 20th century, in order to freely dispose of them without the need for a fascist organization in government. The incorporation of “fascism” can be understood through a set of repressive strategies and tactics, as well as a legal framework and particular use of the bureaucratic apparatus, directed expressly at “racialized and subaltern populations whose very existence and sociality are perceived as a threat — hence the porous borders between the ‘criminal’ and the ‘political prisoner.’”⁵⁵

The expansion of “the racialized experience of civil rights denial” to the rest of the population is one of the main characteristics of the current functioning of the state repressive apparatus and its expansive criminalization. “Enemy criminal law” [Feindstrafrecht], as Günther Jakobs argued, is applied towards an ever broader category of “enemy.” The current Trump administration arrests Americans who demonstrate against the genocide in Gaza, while immigrants (most of them college students and academics) have their visas and/or green cards revoked for deportation.⁵⁶ No sector of the population is exempt from being potentially labeled an enemy. 

However, the persecution of such a large number of people requires the active and passive collaboration of the civilian population, which is currently organized through the apparatus of citizenship. Rewards for snitching on demonstrators and people linked to direct actions have become commonplace, as they were during the dictatorships in South America. In Argentina, in the context of the pensioners' demonstrations, Patricia Bullrich, Minister of Security of Javier Milei's government, assured that large rewards would be paid to those who report those who “disturb public order.” Likewise, the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and graduate student, was possible thanks to “an act of snitching by anonymous colleagues from Columbia itself, who since the days of the encampment had already documented his participation in student networks in solidarity with Palestine.”⁵⁷ And in December of last year, during the investigation of the killing of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthCare (the largest health insurance company in the USA), the alleged culprit, Luigi Mangione, was caught after being reported by an employee at a fast food chain. The legal line that separates those considered “criminals” or “anti-social” from being a citizen is reduced to whether or not the latter collaborates in the repression of the former.

On the pretext of antiterrorism and fighting “organized criminality,” what has taken shape from year to year is the constitution of two distinct laws: a law for “citizens” and a “penal law of the enemy.” It was a German jurist, appreciated by the South American dictatorships in their time, who theorized it. His name is Gunther Jacobs. Concerning the riffraff, the radical opponents, the “thugs,” the “terrorists,” the “anarchists,” in short: all those who don’t have enough respect for the democratic order in force and pose a “danger” to “the normative structure of society,” Gunther Jacobs notes that, more and more, a special treatment is reserved for them that is in derogation of normal criminal law, to the point of no longer respecting their constitutional rights. Is it not logical, in a sense, to treat as enemies those who behave as “enemies of society”? Aren’t they in the business of “excluding themselves from the law”?⁵⁸

Postscript:  Not everything is fascism⁵⁹

If the text has been complex and, at times, seemed to lose its initial thread, it is because the phenomenon of fascism and its theoretical and practical developments are cumbersome but necessary to understand. The historiography of the concept of fascism and its different expressions is something that often loses track, and we get bogged down in that mud. We need to move away from the stereotype that we are accused of, that of “calling everything fascism.” No, not everything is fascism, but there are many contemporary phenomena that do not correspond to historical fascism, and yet they are part of its new tendencies. Above all, those we call accelerationists, which, in their most common form through multinational mega-companies related to new technologies and technical-productive research, have as their project to generate the obsolescence of most of humanity. That is, to finally replace human labor in a process of global automation of capital, thereby exploding its prerequisites for existence and value production. These delusions, very much in the style of Nick Land, are not nonsense, but part of a common capitalist project. Tesla, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Aldebaran, Meka Robotics, among others, are some of the companies promoting the research and development of a technological entity that will displace humanity in the reproductive spheres of capital. Neither the speculative delusions of Land nor the neo-luddite technophobia escape the catastrophic reality of the present. A real alternative to reactionary proposals is urgently needed and must serve as the basis of any revolutionary project.

Meanwhile, from other reactionary, rather than accelerationist, quarters, a deceleration of the capitalist machine is proposed, one that is neither possible nor even desirable from a revolutionary standpoint. It is not possible to slow down a machine so that it continues in its necrophilic movement, but at a lower intensity. Understanding this, deceleration translates into a local defense of the unequal effects of capital’s destructive tendency. Yes, the different forms of reactionary thought have in common the persistence of an archaic spirit, nostalgic for old forms of organization and existence, but what distinguishes them is the absence of a revolutionary component. Deceleration is purely conservative, which in practical terms means adopting a strategy of selective defense, aimed at preserving and/or recovering certain particular forms of existence within a specific territory.

The ease with which the population adheres to their discourses, based on practices that seem as common and innocent as the defense of the natural environment and the rejection of capitalist individuality, but understood through the defense of property and the patriotic exaltation of the “national community,” creates a great danger. It is not difficult to see today how xenophobic discourses have spread — not necessarily xenophobia, but precisely a response to fascism’s need to establish this “other enemy,” who evokes strangeness, unfamiliarity, and therefore resentment, and against whom the urgency to defend oneself and demand public and security policies arises.

Progressive sectors of society are not immune to the reactionary variants of the crisis; rather, they intermingle with them and even promote them. We could cite countless examples from the past, but in recent days in Chile, the artisanal fishing sector began mobilizing and protesting the delay in the approval of the law on the division of fishing quotas. This has affected the local economy and benefited companies such as Marfood, Orizon, and Blumar. Coincidentally, within this context of unrest, an artisanal fishing boat called “Bruma” “disappeared,” with seven people aboard. 

A few days ago, it was revealed that the boat did not sink or disappear by magic, but rather by the hand of capital and its accomplices. It was rammed by Cobra, an industrial fishing boat owned by the Blumar company. It was rammed by Cobra, an industrial fishing boat belonging to Blumar. Why do we associate this event with the reactionary turn of the progressive sectors? Because social networks and the media are full of responses accusing the fishing guild of aligning with the rechazo [rejection] side during the drafting of the New Constitution and, therefore, they should “enjoy what they voted for.” In other words, from these progressive “left” sectors, it is entirely consistent that a sector of the exploited class, not having been part of a specific slogan or moment, deserves its death at the hands of the current security forces — who are complicit with the State, its repressive agents, and the corporations in criminalizing protest. Here, we clearly see the nostalgic and irrational character of reactionary movements: the “other” is established as the enemy (those who voted to “reject” the constitution) whose eradication will restore stability, and who lose their status as human, instead being seen as little more than an impediment to an end: a new feminist, ecological — and so many other adjectives — constitution for Chile. In practice, rather than altering the local expression of the capitalist economic model, it legitimized it during a period of revolt that had called capitalist logic into question.

This discourse is no longer just moralistic, but creates an imaginary dividing line between the oppressed classes, while at the same time becoming a disposition in favor of the implementation of necropolitics to target those who are already recognized as the other, who loses their status as human and therefore legitimately threatened with death within the neo-reactionary fascist discourses of the present.

We won’t repeat the mistake of declaring everything to be fascism, because doing so renders it homogeneous and, at the same time, means nothing is fascism anymore. However, in everyday life, we can recognize countless actions that contain the latent seeds of fascism and that run the risk of germinating some of its expressions, with the danger of reproducing the atrocities that have occurred in the past and could occur in the present, in an era of armament in which nuclear power has become the permanent exception.

Translated from the Spanish by Amapola Fuentes and Diego Lizana from the Colapso y Desvio Collective.

Images: Christian Tagliavini