activism
Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis – review
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: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. Alberto Toscano. Verso. 2023.
Observing the leftwing populism that emerged after the 2007 financial crash, a perceptive critical theorist may have predicted that this hope-inspiring movement would quickly be reintegrated into the neoliberal order. They might further have predicted that a counter-revolution would arise in the vacuum left by the failed leftist movement and as a reaction to continuing economic difficulties. Indeed, in the last decade the rise of the populist right has been both steady and near universal.
[Toscano] sets out to explain why the spectre of the extreme right is not merely haunting us, but gaining political purchase across the globe
In Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano, who has been instrumental in the resurgence of Marxist and materialist sociocultural analysis over the past twenty years, offers an important theory of fascism for our current historical juncture. He sets out to explain why the spectre of the extreme right is not merely haunting us, but gaining political purchase across the globe. The measured, lapidary style of Toscano’s argument, which draws on the 20th century’s “rich archives” of antifascist thought (155), most of it Marxist or marxisant, treats the deep, structural aspects of the political often ignored by other analyses. He does this by leaning on a style of literary-philosophical excavation and elucidation more often found in classical critical theory like that of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.
One of the marks of fascism is to amalgamate seemingly incompatible positions. Indeed, it is a complex phenomenon, “scavenging the ideological terrain for usable materials”, including many currents on the left (155). Toscano does not follow mainstream political theory in conflating fascism with totalitarianism, command economies, and brute force. He argues that late fascism is “disanalogous” with historical fascisms. Instead, he focuses on the implicit forms of violence and repression – colonial, racial, sexual, and gender-based – that inform late fascism. This kind of hidden violence becomes especially noticeable, and acute, when capitalism faces financial and other crises.
As well as developing the idea that reactionary ideologies emerge out of capitalist crisis, notably as the co-option of working-class movements by the right as soon as the opportunity arises, Toscano notes the role capitalist exchange relations play in the epistemological foundation of fascist-adjacent ideologies. Yet the most original thesis in the book is that the touted freedoms of liberalism and free-market capitalism are also appropriated by late fascism. In fact, late fascism is only nominally attached to liberal ideals such as “individual action” and “free speech”. Its claim to be on the side of the individual and their political agency is clearly false, its objective really being to reproduce prior forms of subjection and create new forms of subjugation. Jessica Whyte has also suggested a similar dissimulation in the neoliberal support for human rights.
The rapid rise of this ideology may also be tied to online culture, although Toscano avoids elaborating on the political ramifications of this development. Instead, he gives a historical outline of classical Marxist arguments against reactionary thought and movements. As the subtitle of his book indicates, understanding the ideology of the far right must include a theory of the systemic reproduction of colonialism, racism and sexism. Toscano writes, “Whoever is not willing to talk about anti-capitalism should also keep quiet about anti-fascism” (158). Yet understanding fascism as a tendency within capitalism that merely continues what critical theory calls “identity thinking” is part of a critical venture “inseparable from the collective forging of ways of living that can undo lethal romances of identity, hierarchy and domination that capitalist crisis throws up with grim regularity” (158).
Understanding the ideology of the far right must include a theory of the systemic reproduction of colonialism, racism and sexism
Four key ideas explain late fascism. Firstly, it “cannot be understood without the “fascisms before fascism” that accompanied the imperialist consolidation of a capitalist world-system”, namely, the political and economic domination of the world by Europe, peaking in the 18th and 19th centuries, made possible by the material exploitation of its various colonial strongholds. Secondly, it can only be understood “across axes of race, gender and sexuality”. Thirdly, it includes the “desire for ethnonational rebirth or revanche stoked by the imminence of a threat projected as civilizational, demographic and existential”. Lastly, it involves “the production of identifications and subjectivities, desires and forms of life, which do not simply demand obedience to despotic power but draw on a sui generis idea of freedom” (156-57). These four aspects of late fascism are developed in some detail with a breadth that will satisfy anyone interested in the history of antifascist thought and resistance.
Each chapter provides a different window onto the ideology of fascism and explains why understanding it is imperative. The first chapter looks at the temporally destabilising aspects of fascist ideology, with its archaisms, anachronisms, and wrong-headed projections of majestic, uncorrupted futures. The second focuses on the dynamics of capitalism and race, mainly how the Black liberation struggles of the 1960s provide a template for understanding the racial nature of capitalism, with its continuing repression of minorities and punitive carceral system. The third chapter provides an overview of how the populist right appropriates the classical liberal understanding of individual freedom and toleration for its own purposes. It inverts such individualism, supporting the dominant narrative of equality; namely, the freedom to accumulate property and social power (the latter being skewed along racial and sexual lines, ie, white, male or heteronormative).
The fourth chapter, the most difficult, looks at the political subterfuge manifested by the “real abstractions” within a totalised exchange society. The references to Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Henri Lefevbre are especially illuminating. These latter two authors argue that capitalist ideology views everyday social relations upside down, as first pointed out by Marx in his theory of commodity fetishism and alienation. The central point is that the ends of capital and profit are prioritised over labour, the labourer being merely a commodity on the market, and ensuring capital accumulation.
Toscano demonstrates how the ‘scavenger ideology’ of fascism, which draws on Romanticism, political decisionism, a fascination with technology, and even socialism, is a pressing danger.
The fifth chapter deals again with temporality but this time through the philosophical understanding of “repetition”. Toscano singles out and censures Martin Heiddeger’s fundamental ontology”, which is concerned with “being” and the naturalised historical subject, as leading to a reactionary, “counter-revolutionary” politics. Toscano demonstrates how the “scavenger ideology” of fascism, which draws on Romanticism, political decisionism, a fascination with technology, and even socialism, is a pressing danger. This danger is magnified by its ability “to weaponise a kind of structured incoherence in its political and temporal imaginaries, modulating them to enlist and energise different class fractions, thereby capturing, diverting and corrupting popular aspirations” (110).
Based on a reading of the writings of the Italian Germanist and mythologist Furio Jesi, the sixth chapter deals with the far right’s version of the philosophy of religio mortis, a fascination with myth, sacrifice, and death, but updated for a technological (and now digital) era. Drawing on the idea of a “micropolitical antifascist struggle”, as found in the works of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, the last chapter deals with the ambivalent erotics of fascist ideology, arguing that the libidinal introjection of violence reinforces various forms of social power. Here, Toscano also draws on the feminism of Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, claiming that the Nazi “antipolitical politicization of women” (148) resonates with current modalities of “fascist feminism” that seek “to violently secure and affirm a normative, if not necessarily heteropatriarchal, figure of woman, and which invests desire and libido in its narratives about the imminent threat of the erasure of women and even feminism by ‘gender ideology’ and ‘transness’” (150).
Toscano’s archaeology of 20th-century antifascist theory is an essential springboard for understanding the current political moment. It is a boon for those thinkers and activists interested in human emancipation and the struggle for real, rather than merely abstract, freedom. It alerts them to the threat posed to such projects by that deeply prejudicial ideology that arises alongside capitalism in crisis – late fascism.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Alexandros Michailidis on Shutterstock.
The Man Who Was Too Strong
One of the first rallies I covered as a journalist was the "voters' strike" in January 2018 in Saint Petersburg. Navalny declared the strike when he was barred from participating in the presidential elections due to his criminal record. Navalny's work and his courage often inspired me to continue my journalistic work in a high-risk environment....
Elite Capture and Racial Capital, from the University to Palestine
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and author of Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else), joined Cresa Pugh and Julie Beth Napolin at The New School in December 2023, for a conversation on racial capital in university life, the New School strike, protesting for justice in Palestine, and the possibility of political organizing across identity differences....
Bridge and Tunnel Crowd
For a few hours on the morning of January 8, Gaza was everybody’s problem.
Global Language Justice – review
In Global Language Justice, Lydia H. Liu and Anupama Rao bring together contributions at the intersection of language, justice and technology, exploring topics including ecolinguistics, colonial legacies and the threat digitisation poses to marginalised languages. Featuring multilingual poetry and theoretically rich essays, the collection provides fresh humanities perspectives on the value of preserving linguistic diversity, writes Andrew Shorten.
Global Language Justice. Lydia H. Liu and Anupama Rao (Eds.)with Charlotte A. Silverman. Columbia University Press. 2023.
Find this book: 
Recently, scholars have been paying closer attention to the relationships between language and justice, leading to two separate but related strands of academic research. On one side, applied linguists are increasingly preoccupied with issues connected to social justice, race and gender. An example of this is Ingrid Pillar’s influential book Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice (Oxford, 2016), which explores how language hierarchies, ideologies and expectations affect people’s access to meaningful work and social participation. On the other side, political theorists are incorporating language into discussions about democracy and distributive justice, exploring how political communities should handle multilingualism and questioning whether people have justice-related claims or duties tied to the languages they use. A well-known example of this is Philippe Van Parijs’s book Linguistic Justice for Europe and the World (Oxford, 2011), which provocatively argues that native English speakers have a duty to compensate non-native English speakers since the latter group’s efforts contribute to a tremendously beneficial public good.
Political theorists are incorporating language into discussions about democracy and distributive justice, exploring how political communities should handle multilingualism
Bringing together linguists with scholars from across the humanities, Global Language Justice throws new light on these and other, related, topics. Emphasising the relationships between language, environment and technology, and featuring both poetry and academic essays, this edited collection brings a fresh perspective on the emerging “ecolinguistics” research agenda, which explores the entanglements amongst struggles to protect biological, linguistic and cultural diversity. The book succeeds in bringing new issues to the fore, especially regarding the challenges of digitisation for language justice and the connections between coloniality and language justice. Another laudable feature of this book is that, far more than is typical for an edited collection of this type, it has the feel of a genuinely collaborative project, with frequent cross-referencing across the different chapters, most of which were first presented at a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar, hosted by Columbia University.
The book succeeds in bringing new issues to the fore, especially regarding the challenges of digitisation for language justice and the connections between coloniality and language justice.
Many of the chapters centre the predicament of Indigenous languages and the experiences of Indigenous language activists. This marks a contrast with both strands of research mentioned earlier, which tend to focus on the claims of sub-state national minorities and, to a lesser extent, immigrants. Careful engagement with Indigenous scholars, activists and communities should prompt a reconsideration of some dominant linguistic and political categories. For instance, Wesley Leonard’s insightful contribution demonstrates how creative attempts to revitalise the once dormant myaamia language, led by Miami people themselves, destabilise assumptions about linguistic purism, language extinction, and the connection between language and identity. Furthermore, situating issues of language justice within a broader context of Indigenous politics and experiences can foreground phenomena often neglected by linguists and language rights scholars. For instance, Daniel Kaufman and Ross Perlin’s chapter reveals how bureaucratic and academic practices can render Indigenous languages invisible in urban metropolises like New York. They argue that this erasure can have material as well as recognitional costs, threatening the health and human rights of Indigenous people.
Whilst the importance of literacy for personal wellbeing, economic growth and gender equality are now well understood, the importance of mother-tongue education for developing literacy in the first place is less widely appreciated.
A second theme that emerges is the importance of language for sustainable development. Suzanne Romaine’s powerful chapter points out that although the most linguistically diverse places are inhabited by some of the world’s poorest people, development policies and practices generally neglect language. For instance, whilst the importance of literacy for personal wellbeing, economic growth and gender equality are now well understood, the importance of mother-tongue education for developing literacy in the first place is less widely appreciated. As a result, schools, states and international agencies still often prioritise the teaching of official and colonial languages, which results in low literacy rates and can have devastating effects for both individuals and society. Particularly striking are the facts that, globally, 40 per cent of people lack access to education in their own language, a proportion that rises to 87 per cent in Africa, where 90 per cent of people also cannot understand the official language(s) of their state.
Some lesser-used languages are virtually impossible to use online because their writing systems are not supported in Unicode, the international standard that ensures text can be reliably transmitted across devices and programmes.
A third theme explored relates to the presence and visibility of minoritised languages online. Isabelle A. Zaugg’s chapter discusses some of the ways in which digital technologies discourage the use of lesser-used languages online and thereby reinforce sociolinguistic inequalities. Part of the explanation for this is that only languages spoken in wealthy countries enjoy a full suite of digital supports, such as tailor-made fonts and keyboards, as well as tools like spellcheck, predictive typing and voice recognition. By contrast, as Deborah Anderson explains in her clear and useful chapter, some lesser-used languages are virtually impossible to use online because their writing systems are not supported in Unicode, the international standard that ensures text can be reliably transmitted across devices and programmes. In the future, encoding the scripts used by minority languages will become ever more essential for language maintenance and vitality, since Unicode underpins a myriad of important practices, from word processing and searching the internet to emailing and posting on social media. However, this process is both technically challenging and resource hungry, raising questions of justice for minority language speakers.
Though it is surely true that language justice requires thinking carefully about other political concepts […] we should be reluctant about abandoning rights-talk altogether.
Finally, a fourth theme of the book is a broad scepticism about language rights, primarily because of the ways in which rights are thought to be bound up with liberal individualism. This is suggested in a few contributions and defended most fulsomely in the chapter by L. Maria Bo. Though rights scepticism has a respectable tradition in political theory, this was one of the less convincing aspects of the collection, not least because the linguistic human rights approach, championed elsewhere by Robert Phillipson and the late Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, was never given a serious run for its money. Though it is surely true that language justice requires thinking carefully about other political concepts (such as democracy, as Madeline Dobie argues in her enlightening chapter on language politics in Algeria), we should be reluctant about abandoning rights-talk altogether. For one thing it is often favoured by language activists themselves, such as Gluaiseacht Cearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta (The Gaeltacht Civil Rights Movement) active in Ireland in the 1960s and 70s. Furthermore, as Tommaso Manfredini demonstrates in his moving contribution about shortcomings in translation services for asylum seekers in Italy, rights and especially human rights cannot be ignored, since they provide the context and means with which language injustices can be most effectively challenged today.
Liu and Rao’s Global Language Justice is a stimulating addition to the burgeoning academic field of linguistic justice. It offers a fresh perspective from the humanities that will be especially welcome for scholars already immersed in the literatures in applied linguistics or normative political theory. Meanwhile, other readers will find much in its theoretically rich reflections on the predicament of minority languages, and their users, in the twenty-first century.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
Image Credit: Alexandre Laprise on Shutterstock.
Mothers
The thing about becoming a transsexual is that most of us can’t draw on much of a transsexual culture. We have to sort out ways to be by cutting and pasting from the cultural materials that are around us. Which is not what we were supposed to make of those things. We’re not who we were expected to become....
The Moral Failure of My Left
If it was incumbent on the left to condemn attacks on civilians by Israel, it was equally so to condemn attacks on Israeli civilians. ...
Cinelogue Is Decolonizing the Film Canon
Cinelogue hosts a library of films that have been carefully selected by international filmmakers and curators from diverse regional foci....
Where In the World Is Merze Tate?
In this episode of "Why Now?," Claire Potter and Barbara D. Savage discuss the life of trailblazing Black academic Vernie Merze Tate....
Extinction Rebellion Co-Founder Slams Legal System After Suspended Sentence for HS2 Protest
Newsletter offer
Subscribe to our newsletter for exclusive editorial emails from the Byline Times Team.
The co-founder of Extinction Rebellion has been given a suspended prison sentence of one year and three months for breaking the window of a government department in a protest against the environmental impacts of HS2.
Gail Bradbrook, 51, was sentenced today at Isleworth Crown Court following a two-day trial in November in which a jury found her guilty of criminal damage. She was also ordered to do 150 hours of community service.
She was prosecuted after smashing a window at the Department for Transport building in London on 15 October 2019, causing £27,660 worth of damage.
Bradbrook said her prosecution showed the law was “increasingly set against effective forms of protest”.
It was the second trial in this case. The first, in July, was suspended after Bradbrook defied judge Martin Edmunds order to stop speaking about her motivations. Bradbrook had prepared a lengthy speech for her second trial but was not allowed to read it in full.
Don't miss a story
Sign up to the Behind the Headlines newsletter (and get a free copy of Byline Times in the post)
“The fact that she had a conscientious motive is a given,” said the judge before sentencing Bradbrook. But he said it was not his job to evaluate or comment on the validity of those causes.
Representing herself, Bradbrook retorted that she was not simply acting on a “cause” but was motivated by objective evidence on human-caused climate breakdown, which shows a threat to the life of her two children. “This is not fiction or exaggeration. It is what science tells us will result from our current energy policies.”
Addressing the court, she criticised the Government’s action to cut greenhouse gas emissions and accused it of lying to the public about the impact of its climate policies. She also spoke about the historic role of civil disobedience in pushing for social change.
Judge Edmunds said he took into account Bradbrook’s conscientious motives, her character references and the fact that she was a law-abiding citizen apart from her protest activities when sentencing her. But he said these were tempered by the high value of the damage she had caused and her lack of remorse.
He said Bradbrook had intended to commit a crime, having gone to the Department for Transport equipped with tools and posters, and having informed a member of the press. “This prosecution was one you actively sought,” he told Bradbrook.
He suspended Bradbrook’s jail sentence for 15 months, warning her that she could be imprisoned if she commits a further offence during that time.
The Crown Prosecution Service tried to argue that Bradbrook should be banned from taking part in climate protests – a bail condition that has recently been given to a number of climate activists – but the judge declined to do so.
In court, Bradbrook compared her trial to those of other climate protestors charged with very similar crimes, where judges allowed defendants to make specific legal defences and put fewer restrictions on what could be said.
EXCLUSIVE
Dr Gail Bradbrook had been threatened with contempt of court for giving her motivations for direct action. She carried on through over a dozen interruptions.
Josiah Mortimer
In November, for example, nine protestors who smashed the windows of HSBC’s London headquarters to draw attention to the bank’s fossil fuel lending policies were all acquitted at Southwark Crown Court. They argued that they believed HSBC’s shareholders would have agreed to their actions if they had known the scale of the climate crisis and the bank’s contribution to it.
It is not the only case where juries have been sympathetic to climate protestors, even if they have no defence in law.
In October, five people were acquitted of conspiracy to commit criminal damage for spraying fake blood over the Treasury building from a decommissioned fire engine. A sixth case was dropped after the judge said it would not be in the public interest to proceed.
In other cases, judges have dismissed charges against activists, finding no evidence of ‘significant disruption’ or ruling that their actions were proportional under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Bradbrook told the court that, as someone who believes in democracy and the right to a fair trial, “I was denied the opportunity to present myself properly to the jury as others have been able to do”.
However, other UK climate activists are also getting weighty sentences.
Morgan Trowland was released from Highpoint prison in Suffolk last week after serving 14 months for causing a public nuisance by climbing the Dartford Crossing to protest against the UK’s approval of new oil and gas licences. It was, to date, the longest prison stay for non-violent climate protest.
A growing number of these charges are brought under the Public Order Act – a law passed earlier this year that has heavily been criticised for the way it clamps down on protest rights.
Last week, for example, 57-year-old Stephen Gingell was sentenced to six months in prison for marching in the road with other members of Just Stop Oil after he pleaded guilty to breaching section 7 of the Public Order Act. This prohibits interference with the use or operation of key national infrastructure.
Judge Edmunds is due to sentence another Extinction Rebellion co-founder in February.
Roger Hallam, who also founded Just Stop Oil; and Dr Larch Maxey, a sustainability researcher at Swansea University were found guilty last week of conspiracy to cause public nuisance for planning to fly drones in the prohibited zone of Heathrow airport in September 2019. A third person involved in the planning, former London mayoral candidate Valerie Brown, was acquitted of the same offence.
The markedly different approaches of judges to handling protest cases in recent years have led to criticisms from activists of a 'legal lottery'.
Big Oil Billions and The Real Cancel Culture Threatening Brits With Prison for Telling the Truth
How the legal system is silencing climate activists fighting for their right to speak up about the crisis
Josiah Mortimer
Bradbrook maintained throughout her trial and sentencing that she was not a criminal, and said that the UK’s court system was on trial.
Outside court, surrounded by women dressed as suffragettes, she said: “I did what was right to do and the law in this country is unable to recognise this. We should take seriously the many times throughout the trial that the judge and prosecutors were saying that they’re only doing what they’re compelled to do by the arrangements of the current law. And this current law is increasingly set against effective forms of protest.”
She urged climate activists to continue with acts of resistance and to do everything they can to defend the jury system.
Game of Thrones star Jerome Flynn told supporters gathered outside the court: “I believe that anyone who is awake to these times will feel in their bones that a mother, scientist and concerned citizen like Gail Bradbrook shouldn’t be punished for taking actions to protect her children and the children of all of life.”
Further criminal trials of climate protestors are due to take place next year, with charges including criminal damage and conspiracy to cause public nuisance.
Following her sentencing, Bradbrook immediately released a 75-page dossier of arguments she says her jury was stopped from hearing. “Our so called justice system is a lottery for climate defenders and not fit for purpose when it comes to tackling the climate and nature crisis,” she added.
Do you have a story that needs highlighting? Get in touch by emailing tips@bylinetimes.com