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In my recent article in Contemporary Political Theory, I demonstrate that the convergence of fascistic and neoliberal politics is not a novel contemporary phenomenon as is widely presumed, but rather has historical roots in the political context of the 1930s and 1940s. I examine a group of political actors and thinkers who were active in both neoliberal and fascist movements, and unpack the logics that led these figures to believe the fascist politics of the 1930s were compatible with the nascent neoliberal movement in which they all also participated.
The post Neoliberal Fascism? Historical precedents and contemporary convergences appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Why has the far right returned, after Holocaust and war? Chaos unnerves the vulnerable, sugaring fascism's hollow promises.

Repression and censorship: The Law against Fascism is Maduro's new card to continue consolidating his authoritarian model in a country that is waiting and yearning for democratic presidential elections.

In Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, Alberto Toscano unpacks the rise of contemporary far-right movements that have emerged amid capitalist crises and appropriated liberal freedoms while perpetuating systemic forms of violence. According to Dimitri Vouros, Toscano’s penetrating, theoretically grounded analysis is an essential resource for understanding and confronting the resurgence of reactionary ideologies. Late Fascism: … Continued

 The Best Joke in Barbie Years ago I remember encountering Félix Guattari's little essay, "Everybody Wants to be a Fascist." At the time its title seemed more clever than prescient. (Although it is worth remembering how much fascism, and the encounter with fascism was integral to Deleuze and Guattari's theorizing, well beyond the reference to Reich). Now that we are living in a different relation to fascism the problem posed by Guattari (and Deleuze) of desire seems all the more pertinent and pressing. One of the problems of using the word fascism today, especially in the US, is that it is hard to reconcile our image as a politics, a politics of state control of everything, and the current politics of outrage aimed at M&Ms, Barbie, and Taylor Swift. How can fascism be so trivial and so petty? This could be understood as the Trump problem, although it is ultimately not limited to Trump. There are a whole bunch of pundits and people getting incredibly angry about the casting of movies and how many times football games cut away to Taylor Swift celebrating in the expensive seats. The Fox News Expanded Universe is all about finding villains everywhere in every library or diverse band of superheroes. It is difficult to reconcile the petty concerns of the pundit class with the formation of an authoritarian state. I have argued before that understanding Trump, or Trumpism, means rethinking the relationship between the particular and universal, imaginary and real. Or, as Angela Mitropoulis argues, the question of fascism now should be what does it look like in contemporary captitalism, one oriented less around the post-fordist assembly line than the franchise. Or as she puts it, "What would the combination of nationalist myth and the affective labour processes of the entertainment industry mean for the politics and techniques of fascism?"It is for this reason (among others) that Alberto Toscano's Late Fascism is such an important book. As he argues in that book fascism (as well as in an interview on Hotel Bar Sessions) fascism has to be understood as kind of license, a justification of violence and anger, and a pleasure in that justification. We have to give up the cartoon image of fascism as centralized and universal domination and see it as not only incomplete persecution, unevenly applied, but persecution of some coupled with the license to persecute for others. Fascism is liberation for the racist, sexist, and homophobe, who finally gets to say and act on their desires. As Toscano argues, "...what we need to dwell on to discern the fascist potentials in the anti-state state are those subjective investments in the naturalizations of violent mastery that go together with the promotion of possessive and racialized conceptions of freedom. Here we need to reflect not just on the fact neoliberalism operates through a racial state, or that, as commentators have begun to recognize and detail, it is shaped by a racist and civilizational imaginary that delimits who is capable of market freedoms (Toscano is not referring to Tosel, but that is an important part of Tosel's work) We must also attend to the fact that the anti-state state could become an object of popular attachment or better, populist investment, only through the mediation of race." Toscano's emphasis is on race in this passage, but it could be argued to apply to sexism, homophobia, etc., to the enforcement and maintenance of any of the old hierarchies. As Toscano cites Maria Antonietta Macciochhi later in the book, "You can't talk abut fascism unless you are also prepared to discuss patriarchy." Possessive includes the family as the first and most vital possession. At this point fascism does not sound too different from classical conservatism, especially if you take the definition of the latter to be the following: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."  However, what Toscano emphasizes is the libidinal pleasure that comes with this, it is not just a matter of who is in and who is not, who is protected and who is not, but in the pleasure that one gets from such exclusion, a pleasure that is extended and almost deputized to the masses. While conservative hierarchies and asymmetries passed through the hallowed institutions of the state and the courts, the fascist deputies take to the streets and the virtual street fights of social media. As Toscano argues, pitting Foucault's remarks about the sexual politics of fascism in the seventies against Guattari's analysis,"For Foucault, to the extent that there is an eroticization of power under Nazism, it is conditioned by a logic of delegation, deputizing and decentralization of what remains in form and content a vertical, exclusionary, and murderous kind of power. Fascism is not just the apotheosis of the leader above the sheeplike masses of his followers; it is also, in a less spectacular but perhaps more consequential manner the reinvention of the settle logic of petty sovereignty, a highly conditional but very real 'liberalising' and 'privatising' of the monopoly of violence...Foucault's insight into the 'erotic' of a power based on the deputizing of violence is a more fecund frame, I would argue, for the analysis of both classical and late fascisms than Guattari's hyperbolic claim that "the masses invested a fantastic collective death instinct in...the fascist machine' --which misses out on the materiality of that 'transfer of power' to a 'specific fringe of the masses' that Foucault diagnosed as critical to fascism's desirability."I think that Toscano's analysis picks up an important thread that runs from discussions of fascism from Benjamin to Foucault (and beyond). As Benjamin writes in the Work of Art essay "The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life."Today we could say that the right of expression includes a deputization of power and the pleasure in exercising it. In a capitalist society, in which the material conditions of existence must belong to the capitalist class, the only thing that can be extended to the masses is the power and pleasure to dominate others. Real wages keep on declining, but fascism offers the wages of whiteness, maleness, cisness, and so on, extending not the material control over one's existence but libidinal investment in the perks of one's identity.All of which brings me to Taylor Swift. I have watched with amusement and some horror as the fringes of the Fox News Expanded Universe have freaked out about Taylor Swift attending football games and, occasionally, being seen on television watching and enjoying the games. It is hard to spend even a moment thinking about something which has all of the subtlety of the "He-Man Woman Hater's Club," but I think that it is an interesting example of the kind of micro-fascism that sustains and makes possible the tendency towards macro-fascism. Three things are worth noting about this, first most of the conspiracy theories about Swift are not predicated on things that she has actually done, but what she might do, endorse Biden, campaign for Biden, etc., I think that this has to be seen as a mutation of conspiracy thinking from the actual effects of an action or event, Covid undermining Trump's presidency, to an imagined possible effect. One of the asymmetries of contemporary power is treating the fantasies or paranoid fears of one group as more valid than the actual conditions and dominations of another group. Second, and to be a little more dialectical, the fear of Swift on the right recognizes to what extent politics have been entirely subsumed by the spectacle fan form. (Hotel Bar Sessions did a show about this too) Trump's real opponent for hearts and minds, not to mention huge rallies, is not Biden but Swift. Lastly, and this really deserves its own post, some of the anger about Swift being at the game brings to mind Kate Manne's theory of misogyny, which at its core is about keeping women in their place. I would imagine that many of the men who object to seeing Swift at their games do not object to the cutaway shots of cheerleaders during the same game. It is not seeing women during the game that draws ire, but seeing one out of her place--someone who is enjoying being there and not there for their enjoyment.I used to be follow a fairly vulgar materialist line when it came to fascism. Give people, which is to say workers, actual control over their work, their lives, and their conditions and the appeal of the spectacle of fascist power would dissipate. It was a simple matter of real power versus its appearance. It increasingly seems that such an opposition overlooks the pleasures that today's mass media fascism make possible and extend to so many. It is hard to imagine a politics that could counter this that would not be a politics of affect, of the imagination, and of desires. Libidinal economy and micro-politics of desire seem less like some relic from the days of high theory and more and more like necessary conditions for thinking through the intertwining webs of desire and resentment that make up the intersection of culture, media, and politics. I think one of the pressing issues of the moment is the recognizing that all of these junk politics of grievances of popular culture should be taken seriously as the affective antechamber of fascism while at the same time not accepting them on their terms; there is nothing really to be gained by rallying to defend corporations and billionaires. 

Hayek lived long enough to see the rise and fall of fascism, national socialism, and Soviet communism.

Donald Trump's fine in the New York fraud case "is a form of Navalny, it is a form of communism or fascism."

The Liberal Fascism author and co-founder of The Dispatch talks candidly about the weird state of the contemporary political right.

Amid rising threats to civil liberties worldwide, the rise of fascism, and over 100 armed conflicts currently underway, what should hold our gaze and precipitate deep reflection this International Women's Day? What does peace really mean?

The search by ordinary people for certainty in increasingly exclusionary groups with radical agendas is tearing at the fabric of modern America. Where once the distinctions between fascism and libertarianism was clear, this is no longer the case.

"Fascism a World Movement" – so lautet die Eingangspassage in Karl Loewensteins Text zur wehrhaften Demokratie. 1937 unter dem Titel "Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights" in zwei Teilen im American Political Science Review erschienen, arbeitet Loewenstein hier die Bedrohung des rechtsextremen "Kriegs gegen die Demokratie" heraus und fordert die Demokratinnen und Demokraten aller Länder dazu auf, "den Erfordernissen der Stunde gerecht zu werden und alles dafür zu tun, um die Demokratie zu retten". Wie aktuell diese Diagnose, wie groß die Gefahr durch die rechtsextreme Weltbewegung ist, zeigen nicht nur die Entwicklungen im US-amerikanischen Vorwahlkampf und im polnischen Nachwahlkampf, sondern auch im deutschen Dauerwahlkampf.

Michael Tracey

Our guest for this week's episode is Michael Tracey, of The Young Turks — Tracey by his own account is a man of the left, but you wouldn't necessarily know that, to read some of the commentaries that have been written about him online. He's known primarily known for his iconoclastic views on what he calls "the Russia derangement," something we addressed on this show all the way back in Episode One, with Tara McCormack.

I encountered Tracey in Chicago last weekend, at the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Convention. We set this interview up with a view primarily to talking about the Convention, and the state of the American left. In this episode, we do address those topics, including the controversy surrounding the election of Danny Fetonte to the DSA's National Political Committee, or NPC. But with the tragic news of rightwing violence in Charlottesville, VA this morning (the interview was recorded early afternoon, on Sunday, August 13), it seemed proper to address the rise of fascism in the United States, too. In true form, Tracey has some views on that subject which might not be popular among left comrades — including a defence of the ACLU's decision stand up for freedom of speech for Alt. Right activists. As you'll hear in the show, however, he gives a good account of himself, and leaves us with much to think about.

Please enjoy the show. As ever, if you have any feedback, you can reach us on Twitter @occupyirtheory. You can follow Michael Tracey on Twitter @mtracey.

Views of the Israel-Palestine conflict are polarized worldwide between those who have experienced the past few centuries as an East-West conflict and those who have experienced it as a North-South conflict.For the first group, the storyline of the past few centuries begins with the American and French revolutions: The former established the first constitutional democracy. The latter overthrew an absolute monarchy in the name of the people, emancipated the Jews, and spread its doctrine of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité throughout Europe. The progress of freedom culminated in the victorious struggles of democracies against first Nazism and fascism and then communism in the twentieth century. President Biden's foreign-policy theme of a global struggle of democracy against autocracy is the product of that narrative. Atrocities of fascism and communism included both the Holocaust, in which six million Jews and an almost equal number of non-Jews were murdered, and Soviet repression, in which up to 20 million perished in the gulag, the purges, and man-made famines. From this East-West perspective the establishment of the state of Israel from the ashes of the Holocaust and the struggle of the Arab and Muslim worlds against it are extensions of the victory of the Allies and Hitler's genocidal program. For many of this narrative's believers, the October 7 massacre perpetrated by Hamas reinforced this view of the Israel-Palestine conflict. For the second group, the main story of the last five centuries has been the subjugation of Asia, Africa, and Latin America by European colonialism, and the consequent anti-colonial struggles. The trans-Atlantic slave trade took two to four million lives. The genocide of the native American peoples led to the deaths of 90 percent of the population. Between 1885 and 1908, the atrocities in the Belgian-ruled Congo Free State produced death tolls estimated at from three to ten million. British policies in India set off the 1943 Bengal famine that killed three million people in eight months. For those who see history through this North-South lens, the 1922 League of Nations mandate to establish "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine without the consent of that land's inhabitants; the 1948 violent expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians call the Nakba or catastrophe; the annexation and occupation by Israel of lands conquered in 1967; and Israel's evolution into an undeclared nuclear power armed and supported by the U.S. amount to the extension of colonialism into the 20th and 21st centuries. Israel's current war against Gaza and the uncritical support it receives from the U.S. confirm this view.In 1905 Negib Azoury, a Lebanese Christian former deputy governor of Ottoman Jerusalem, alerted the world to "two important phenomena, of a common nature, but opposed to each other, the awakening of the Arab nation and the effort of the Jews to reconstitute the ancient Kingdom of Israel on a large scale. The fate of the whole world," he wrote, "will depend on the result of the struggle between these two peoples representing two opposing principles." Azoury argued that regardless — or because — of their similarities, the only possible outcome would be for one side to defeat the other. Azoury was right about the common origin of the two movements — the resistance to different forms of oppression that have driven some to become Zionists and others to become Arab nationalists or Islamists differ less in their nature than in the positions into which their proponents are born.The degradation of the outlook of some on both sides into dehumanizing hatred is an inevitable result of the consequent century or more of violence. But must one ultimately defeat the other? Both narratives derive from genuine experience and pain. Is it beyond our power to acknowledge that no single narrative recounts the whole of history's polymorphous cruelty? The "fate of the whole world" may now depend on our ability to recognize that tragedy and prove Azoury wrong.

 I looked back at my post three years ago, the day after Jan 6th.  With so many people revising their views, hey, it was not an insurrection, just a rambunctious group of FBI-led rioters, I thought I would see where I stand now after investigations, trials, and finally the application of the 14th amendment to he who can't be held accountable.Before getting into this, one key difference between learning and bad faith is that while both can cause someone to take a difference stance three years later, the former is about learning new information and revising beliefs, and the latter is about taking whatever is a convenient stance no matter the previous one.  A bit of a subtweet in all of that.Anyhow, looking back, I was the most wrong about the capitol cops.  They were far from complicit, as many paid a huge cost, including the ultimate price, for doing their jobs.  Not much shirking that day.  What we saw initially where cops cleverly misdirecting the insurrectionists away from the vulnerable Senators and Congresspeople.  I am less certain of my second stance--people referred to this as a manifestation of fascism.  I pushed back because I didn't think and I still don't think Trump has a coherent ideology.  Not all racist autocrats are fascists, with fascism having broader implications for how to organize society.  There are enough people around Trump and enough forces in the US who are not just pushing for autocracy and for white supremacy but also reordering institutions to support, yes, the master race and master religion, that it is close enough to count.  To be clear, to me, Trump is still not thinking about putting the nation over individual interests, but rather himself over everything.  The ultimate expression and empowering of narcissism does not make Trump a Nazi.  But he is changing permission structures to allow Nazis to flourish.  So, there is a fascist movement complete, yes, with swatiskas and Nazi flags.  When they tell us who they are, we probably should be believe them (applies to occupiers of Ottawa as well).The third stance got the most heat--that it was not a coup.  Folks were upset because it seemed like I was not taking the event seriously... as if a coup is far more serious than an insurrection.   But I also underestimated how much of a role Trump and his team played in inciting the insurrection--that it was part of a sustained effort, a conspiracy out in the public eye for the most part, to keep Trump in power despite losing the election.  Which made it an autogolpe.  Which, yes, is a kind of a coup--a self-coup--an effort by those in power to usurp the powers of other institutions so they can perpetuate their reign, their regime.  All of the investigations, all of the incriminating stuff Trump has said, has made it clear that he caused the insurrection--it would not have happened without his sustained efforts.  I am sure we will learn more once the trial starts.  But, yes, I will resist using "coup" without modifications because of two key parts of general definition: coups are usually focused on changing who is in power--hence the need for autogolpe or self-coup--and they involve some component of the security services.  In this case, the military was not involved.  It is still not entirely clear whether we dodged literal bullets by not bringing the National Guard in earlier.  But the point remains--the danger, the threat, the violence, the effort to prevent the transfer of power were not coming from the uniformed armed folks.  A significant number of veterans involved in the insurrection is disturbing but do not make it a coup.Folks have and will accuse me of pedantry on this.  I tend to speak loosely and am not a definitions-enforcer, but on this hill, I (along with many folks who study civil-military relations) remain.  Again, it shifts attention in the wrong direction, and it does not mean the event itself was not serious.My post also called for accountability--that folks had to go to trial and to lose their jobs.  We have had a fair amount of that, but the wheels of justice has been grinding too slowly when it comes to Trump and his minions.  There is very much a deadline.... especially as the GOP seeks to game the institutions governing the next election.We should remain outraged--that something unprecedented happened and it was caused by a sore loser who should never have become president in the first place.  But those seeking power didn't care about personal responsibility or values, so they supported a candidate who was so very disqualified then and then proved it through how he governed and then again with his refusal to accept losing.  So, yes, the 14th amendment should be applied to Trump, but will it stick?  Damned if I know.

This episode is coming to you on Wednesday, November 11, 2020, just a few days after the media called the 2020 US presidential election for Joe Biden. Its an unusual episode for this show, insofar as it doesn't feature an interview (we have a great interview coming very soon, with Vanesa Bilancetti, on Foucault and Marx). Instead, its just going to be me, offering a few remarks on the election results, and what they mean for American academia. In the below, I'm going to focus on two key aspects of the discussion. The first is the strange prevalence of the so-called K-Hive, in American academia. The second concerns the role of racial essentialism in early academic analysis of the election.



Just a caveat here. I want to make it clear from the outset that I think on balance its probably a good thing that Donald Trump is no longer going to the president. The problem is that I'm not sure how much better the Biden presidency will be. Now I agree, I think, that there are probably real and important positives to a Biden administration, such as the likelihood that Biden will put more labor-friendly appointees on the National Labor Relations Board. Equally, Biden will probably do a better job with the coronavirus. Yet, as many good faith leftists will point out, the Biden administration will likely do very little to address the core rot at the heart of the pandemic-stricken neoliberal hellscape that is America today. Similarly, these good faith critics will point out, there are real and extremely worrying indications that, from a foreign policy perspective, the Biden administration will be loaded with neoconservative ghouls left over from the Bush "W" administration. As Derek Davison and Daniel Bessner discussed on Monday's paywall episode of Chapo Trap House yesterday, Trump didn't do much to challenge the national security blob. But neither was he a competent whip for US empire. Biden, on the other hand, looks set to present a far more vicious and bloodthirsty face of the American war machine to the world.



In the end, the fact remains that Trump is an insufferable narcissist and, while perhaps he is too dumb to ever deserve the accusation of fascism often thrown at him by academics and the liberal left, its probably just better on balance not to have a shameless used car salesman in the White House. As Matt Taibbi put it in a recent Substack post:




Donald Trump is so unlike most people, and so especially unlike anyone raised under a conventional moral framework, that he's perpetually misdiagnosed. The words we see slapped on him most often, like "fascist" and "authoritarian," nowhere near describe what he really is, and I don't mean that as a compliment. It's been proven across four years that Trump lacks the attention span or ambition required to implement a true dictatorial regime. He might not have a moral problem with the idea, but two minutes into the plan he'd leave the room, phone in hand, to throw on a robe and watch himself on Fox and Friends over a cheeseburger.
The elite misread of Trump is egregious because he's an easily familiar type to the rest of America. We're a sales culture and Trump is a salesman. Moreover he's not just any salesman; he might be the greatest salesman ever, considering the quality of the product, i.e. himself. He's up to his eyes in balls, and the parts of the brain that hold most people back from selling schlock online degrees or tchotchkes door-to-door are absent. He has no shame, will say anything, and experiences morality the way the rest of us deal with indigestion.




So, good riddance to the used car salesman! Even if the evidence is flimsy, its certainly hard to dismiss the argument that a Biden White House will be at least marginally better. Yet, in a way, that's precisely the point. It will be only a marginally improvement. Certainly nowhere near a major improvement, and certainly nowhere near the sort of level of improvement as would warrant the totally faw...