How do we understand the return of fascism today?

What is this moment we are living in? Late Fascism turns to the theories of fascism produced in the past century, testing their capacity to illuminate our moment and challenging many of the commonplaces that debate on this extremely charged term devolves into.

It can be tempting for any contemporary assessment of fascism to reach for historical analogy. Fascism is a matter of returns and repetitions, but it is not best approached in terms of steps and checklists dictated by a selective reading of Italian Fascism or National Socialism.

Rather than treating fascism as a singular event or identifying fascism with a particular configuration of European parties, regimes, and ideologies, Toscano approaches fascism as a process, one which is intimately linked to capitalism's demands for domination.

Late Fascism names a problem. Fascism, like other political phenomenon, varies according to its socioeconomic context. An unreflexive struggle against fascism runs the risk of becoming sclerotic, self-indulgent, or complicit with the very processes that brought forth reaction, the lesser evil lending a hand to the greater one. When it does not question its own theoretical frameworks, its own habits of naming, or indeed the pleasures (of innocence, heroism, righteousness) that may arise from these, anti-fascism can be its own lure.

Late Fascism allows us to rediscover some truly inspiring anti-fascist thinkers, rooted in their turn in largely anonymous collective practices of worldmaking against domination, traditions of the oppressed which remain a resource for those set on dismantling the oppressions that the partisans of Order and Tradition seek to revive and reimpose.

Alberto Toscano is Professor of Critical Theory in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Term Research Associate Professor at the School of Communications at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea, Una visión compleja. Hacía una estética de la economía, La abstracción real. Filosofia, estética y capital, co-author of Cartographies of the Absolute, and the co-editor of the 3-volume The SAGE Handbook of Marxism, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography: Essays in Liberation. He is a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism and is series editor of The Italian List for Seagull Books. He is also the translator of numerous books and essays by Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Franco Fortini, Furio Jesi and others.