Introduction

With Trump’s defeat in the presidential election in November 2020, many commentators and people all over the world drew a sigh of relief. In the final months of his presidency more and more politicians, commentators and intellectuals had been forced into asking whether Trump was in fact a fascist. In the pages of magazines such as the New York Review of Books and the New Statesman, scholars debated the pertinence of historical analogies, comparing Trump to interwar fascist leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler. The events of 2020 – the employment of paramilitary troops in Portland, the kidnapping of people protesting against police violence, Trump’s call for right-wing militias to protest against the COVID-19 lockdown and the bizarre storming of the Capitol in early January 2021, but also the racially motivated mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that hit African American, indigenous and Latinx populations in the US in particular – raised the spectre of fascism. With militias in the streets and the Border Patrol deployed against the will of governors, it seemed as if yet another feature of 1930s fascist movements could be ticked off. Trump was hitting more and more points on the fascist checklist.

This book will argue that we need to dispense with the checklist, always comparing contemporary politicians and phenomena with fascist politicians and their deeds in the 1930s. Fascism today will necessarily not be identical with the interwar ‘epoch of fascism’.¹ The checklist, in fact, prevents us from analysing and combating contemporary fascism. We need to historicize and analyse fascism beyond a narrow Eurocentric focus on interwar fascism with a view to the function of fascist tendencies in contemporary crisis-ridden capitalist society. Fascism is obviously different today. It is still violent ultra-nationalism aimed at preventing an attack on the structure of private property through exclusion of foreigners, but its forms, myths and temporality have changed and been adapted to a different historical situation – what I will call late capitalism.² As the historian of fascism Robert Paxton writes, we are confronted with ‘an updated fascism’, ‘a functional equivalent’, not an ‘exact repetition’.³ We are not dealing with the mass politics we know from Leni Riefenstahl’s films, jackboots, Sieg Heil salutes or Mussolini addressing a huge crowd in front of the cathedral in Milan. Fascism is different today, the swastika and Sieg Heil salutes have been replaced by MAGA caps, Pepe the Frog memes, boat parades or mandatory pork in public schools. We don’t have Nazi extermination camps but, instead, camps for migrants and prisons where guards kill inmates and take humiliating photos of prisoners. Unless we stop comparing contemporary developments to the period 1922–45, we will not even be able to analyse, never mind resist, contemporary fascism. As the political prisoner and black revolutionary George Jackson wrote: ‘the final definition of fascism is still open.’⁴

Trying to employ the term ‘fascism’ is risky. I use it to describe an extreme nationalist ideology intent on rebuilding an imagined organic community by excluding foreigners.⁵ Very few people use the word ‘fascist’ to describe themselves today. It was different in the interwar period. Both Mussolini and Hitler used the term, as did many other local fascist movements, for instance the Iron Guard in Romania. This is not the case nowadays. Very few political parties or groups label themselves fascist, and it has become difficult to describe political phenomena with the designator ‘fascism’. The word’s derogatory sense precedes its analytic usefulness. The interwar fascist regimes, primarily Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the Second World War and, most importantly, the Holocaust effectively transformed fascism from being a political term to being an invective. The Nazi war atrocities singularize fascism as the worst political event imaginable – something that it is inappropriate, even impossible to draw comparisons with, something ‘unrepresentable’. Hence fascism becomes something that happened once in history, in one place: something that (with a little help from Stalin’s Soviet Union) was defeated by the democracy we still live in.

But fascism did not come pre-formed in Italy in 1922, and it took time for it to be theorized. It was not in any way a coherent ideology that was subsequently implemented. Mussolini would always stress the flexible character of fascism, that it could readjust itself to new circumstances and integrate seemingly contradictory elements. Up to a certain point, both Mussolini and Hitler allowed for ideological ambiguity, playing off competing reformist and extremist factions and allying strategically with different sectors of the local capitalist classes. Mussolini’s fascism was preventive, using and mimicking the energy of the contemporaneous communist revolutionary wave, while Hitler’s regime navigated a deep economic crisis and warded off the danger of a working-class revolution. Both regimes safeguarded private property and externalized the alienation and exploitation of capitalist industrialization through the exclusion of Jews and other ‘inferior races’. Both regimes were, essentially, counter-revolutionary.⁶

Today we see something similar happening. We are living through a political rupture. The financial crisis dealt a heavy blow to global restructured capital and exposed a forty-year-long underlying economic contraction. We now have governments that seem incapable of dealing with the complex issues of a crisis-ridden capitalist