Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis
Verso, 2023
224 pages; ISBN: 9781839760204
Review by Paul Bowman
This is a review of Alberto Toscano’s book Late Fascism, published in 2023. On the whole I found the book an enjoyable read and there was much within it of interest to me, including material from writers I had not come across before, which is always appreciated when you’ve been reading works about fascism for more years than I care to count, at this stage.
To put my cards on the table, most of the authors that Toscano covers in this book are loosely associated with Critical Theory, which is why I haven’t generally read them, as I don’t rate that tendency as particularly useful, to be brutally honest. But it would be unreasonable to expect that such a broad range of writers and writings didn’t have at least some ideas of interest to antifascists, given the field’s historical and ongoing interest in the topic. So, regardless of your own position on the value of Critical Theory, it’s useful to have an overview and selection of “the interesting bits” from someone who’s done all the reading that most of us will never get time for.
There are seven broadly thematic chapters in the book, plus a conclusion. This review will concentrate mainly on two out of the seven chapters, one in a positive light, the other in a more critical one. And then we will round off by looking at the conclusion. But first a brief outline of the themes of the seven chapters.
The first chapter is on the question of whether fascism can be safely relegated to history or is a problem for our times, which is the ever-present opening question for anyone using “the F word.” The second chapter, “Racial Fascism,” declares its remit as a survey “of the Black radical perspective on the fascist problematic.” The third, “Fascist Freedom,” is a welcome disruption of the liberal dichotomy between liberalism and neoliberalism on one side and “totalitarian” fascism on the other. The fourth, on fascism and real abstraction, is, like the other chapters, full of interesting material, but, a remark in passing, the near-complete absence of Moishe Postone (relegated to a single footnote), even from the section entitled “Making abstraction Jewish,” is a little surprising. The fifth chapter, on fascist temporalities, includes material on everyone’s favourite hate-figure Heidegger, amongst other things. The sixth chapter is mainly on Furio Jesi’s contribution to the discourse. This was a new figure for me and will also be to most anglophone readers, I suspect. The final chapter is on fascism, sex, and gender. Another comment in passing: it’s a matter for collective self-reflection for all of us who write on this subject, that this particular topic seems to keep getting pushed to the back, almost as an add-on or afterthought.
The first chapter I’m going to look at is Chapter 6, “Ideas without Words,” which investigates the role of myth in fascist ideology by focusing on the contribution of Furio Jesi. Jesi (1941-1980) was an Italian writer on history, archaeology, mythology, literary criticism, and politics. His untimely accidental death (domestic gas leak) at an early age means that most of his published work has actually been issued posthumously and is still continuing to come out. And only three books have so far (recently) been translated into English. The book Toscano references, Cultura di destra (Right-Wing Culture), has not yet been translated, so this chapter is the only access anglophone readers have to it at the moment.
In terms of the key concepts Toscano takes from Jesi, he singles out three in the chapter’s final section, namely “the aesthetics of the useless task,” “religio mortis” (the religion of death), and the “language of ideas without words.” It’s understandable why Toscano would focus on religio mortis, given that the whole “death cult” thing is very specific to the fascist wing of the far right. But here I want to draw attention more to the elements of Jesi’s “language of ideas without words” that are more illuminating in relation to the populist far right and more widespread in our current landscape.
Jesi takes the phrase from Oswald Spengler’s introduction to one of his later works, where he writes “That which we have in our blood by inheritance—namely wordless ideas—is the only thing that gives permanence to our future.” In a 1979 interview Jesi characterised right-wing culture as a “culture in which it is declared that there are values beyond debate, indicated by capitalised words, above all Tradition and Culture, but also Justice, Freedom, Revolution.” Such a culture, Jesi continues, is one in which “the past becomes a kind of processed mush [pappa omogeneizzata, baby food] that can be modelled and readied in the most useful way possible.” Jesi connects this “mulching” of the past not to simple ignorance, but to a deliberate strategy of adopting
“the choice of a language of ideas without words, which presumes that one can truly speak—meaning speak and at the same time cloak in the secret sphere of the symbol—while doing without words, or better not worrying overmuch about symbols as modest as words, unless they are watchwords, slogans. Whence the nonchalance in the use of stereotypes, clichés, recurrent formula; it is not just a matter of cultural impoverishment, of a vocabulary objectively limited by dint of ignorance: the language which is used is, above all, that of ideas without words and it can rest content with a few terms or syntagms: what matters is the closed circulation of the ‘secret’—myths and rituals—which the speaker shares with the listeners, and which all the participants in the assembly or the collective have in common.”
Jesi compares this language of bombastic empty signifiers (Tradition, Honour, Greatness) with the language of a famous Italian romantic novelist Liala, whose romances—in Toscano’s words—”operate with a language that is efficacious to the extent that it is not rationally comprehensible but is instead emotionally grasped.” Jesi puts it like this:
“If it really were comprehensible, it would not have that magical efficacy, it would make one think, and thus toil, and it would compel one to exercise one’s capacity to understand what is happening. Liala’s language is not understood by all her readers; but it is for all her readers a fetish that serves to give pleasure, and especially the pleasure stemming from the reduction of the fatigue that comes from thinking.”
It’s almost impossible to not think of Trump’s speeches when reading this. And it suggests that liberal criticisms that his speeches don’t make any rational sense may be misunderstanding how they work on their audience. If the purpose of the exercise is to minimise cognitive load and maximise emotional content, then hunting for logical inconsistencies is missing the point entirely.
“Liberal criticisms that Trump’s speeches don’t make any rational sense may be misunderstanding how they work on their audience. If the purpose is to minimise cognitive load and maximise emotional content, then hunting for logical inconsistencies is missing the point entirely.”
In the more specific context of the study of far right ideology, Jesi’s characterisation of these capitalised but deliberately empty signifiers like “Tradition, Culture,” etc. as “words that have been so spiritualised, so distanced from materialism that they could evidently serve as appropriate vehicles for ‘ideas without words’“ is a useful counter to the current predominant framework for ideology analysis. In Michael Freeden’s “concept-centred morphological” model of ideology analysis—also used by analysts of populism such as Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser—the concepts in question are “essentially contested concepts.” Which is a way of saying that words like “Freedom” have many different, conflicting meanings and people argue over them depending on their ideological viewpoint. In Freeden’s model then ideological discourses are made of up “decontested concepts”—i.e., adherents of a particular ideology insist on one particular meaning for an essentially contested concept that’s core to their outlook. In that light, Jesi’s “spiritualised” words are an example of the opposite strategy by the far right in not only refusing to rationally “decontest” their multiple possible meanings, but elevating them to the level of sacred shibboleths, which stand for the ineffable, eternal mysteries of the “true faith.”
The other aspect is the historical one, specifically the reduction of the historical past into a “homogenised pap” or mush, onto which all the reactionary fantasies of “Tradition” can be projected. One need only to think of all the far-right “Retvrn” and “This is what they took from you” memes swilling around social media to see the relevance of this idea from the 1970s to our mid-2020s situation. Again this is a useful counterpoint to the existing models of how right-leaning and nationalist ideologies appropriate the past through the means of “time maps“ (a term and concept introduced by Eviatar Zerubavel in the book of that name). Recent years have seen many episodes of conservative reaction to threats like the 1619 Project such as traditional white supremacist time maps of American History(tm). Naturally the far right have done their best to inject themselves into this reaction. But it’s informative to see the distinction between the conservative attachment to the structured narratives of the past laid out in traditional time maps, and the far right tendency to dissolve all past narrative structures into a “Bronze Age Pervert” mush of reactionary historical costume drama.
Jesi’s work has much potential, and for reasons of space I haven’t even unpacked other aspects covered in Toscano’s chapter, for instance Jesi’s intriguing suggestion that this kind of clichéd, formulaic thinking of “ideas without words” is not restricted to the right only, but often seen within certain leftist discourses as well. Hopefully a full translation of Cultura di destra will not be too long in coming. But if I can wholeheartedly recommend taking the time to read this chapter, I now want to turn to a more problematic chapter, the one entitled “Racial Fascism.” (Toscano laid out his original thesis for this chapter in a 2020 article in the Boston Review, and Devin Zane Shaw wrote a critical response to it on the Three Way Fight website later that same year. Toscano mentions Shaw’s critique very briefly in the chapter, but does not seriously engage with it, in my opinion.)
* * *
As a way into my problems with this chapter, I want to start with a brief quote from it. While discussing Stuart Hall’s take on Thatcherism and authoritarianism, Toscano asks the rhetorical question
“But are we to remain stuck, when thinking of our present, in an alternative between two positions, both seemingly compatible with the persistence of liberal-democratic institutions, however etiolated or distorted? On the one hand fascists without fascism (the UK in the late 1970s according to Hall), on the other, fascism without fascists (which could be a way of defining the United States in the same decade, from the vantage point of its Black political prisoners).”
Obviously the situation of fascists without fascism, like the NF in 1970s Britain (although the phrase appears to be Toscano’s, not Hall’s) is unobjectionable albeit somewhat trivial, in that until fascists actually seize power, then we will always be in such a situation (except in the rare case of a temporary local absence of fascists). It’s the idea of “fascism without fascists” which is the real puzzle. The concept immediately raises the tactical question, how are we to fight such an abstract ghostly entity that has no actual real-world bodies? Toscano’s disengagement from any question of antifascist tactics is the first element in understanding his obliviousness to the fundamental impracticality of this conceit.
Toscano spends some time in this chapter looking at the correspondence of George Jackson, who joined the Black Panther Party (BPP) from inside prison, and Angela Davis, who was also imprisoned and corresponded with Jackson and other BPP militants from inside. Toscano submits “the writing and correspondence of Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson outlined the possibility of theorising fascism from the direct experience of the violent nexus between the carceral state and racial capitalism.” He approvingly quotes Jackson’s argument that fascism reflected the repressiveness of his prison situation and had nothing to do with political conditions in the wider society, as some of his ‘old guard’ BPP visitors maintained. Toscano concludes:
“In their writing and correspondence, which is marked by differences of interpretation interwoven with a profound comradeship, both Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson identified the US state apparatus as the site for a re-emergence or indeed a perfecting of certain features of (European) historical fascisms.”
He sees no fundamental issue with Jackson and Davis’s identification of the state itself as the location of American fascism. The idea of fascism as a movement of “non-state actor” counterpower is apparently not on the “late fascism” analytical horizon. If fascism is simply identified with state repression of people fighting for radical social change—a matter of societal function, with no agential specificity—then it doesn’t make any analytical difference if it’s the cops or the KKK doing it.
“Toscano’s concept of ‘racial fascism’ is a kind of standpoint theory, which defines fascism by the quality of repression suffered by the racially oppressed, rather than the agency of those enacting the repression. And the agency of the Black Panthers themselves is reduced to its most passive form—the suffering of the prisoners incarcerated in the brutal US prison industrial complex.”
What we get with Toscano’s concept of “racial fascism” is a kind of standpoint theory of fascism, defined by the quality of repression suffered by the racially oppressed, rather than the agency of who is participating in and enacting the repression itself. A related irony is that the agency of the Black Panthers themselves is reduced to its most passive form—that of the suffering of the prisoners incarcerated in the brutal US prison industrial complex. “Lived experience” is reduced to the passive form of having things done to you, rather than that gained by doing things on your own initiative. The experience of suffering rather than acting. All the praxis of the BPP, their successes and failures, their tactics and strategies, from “patrolling the pigs” to the school breakfast programmes and everything in between, disappears from the balance sheet as if it were of no account. The Panthers’ slogan “Power to the people, because the people have the power” also fails to make it past the “states-eye view” filter.
The next issue is the unproblematic acceptance of the “counter-revolutionary thesis,” i.e., that fascism is “fundamentally a counter-revolutionary form,” which is George Jackson’s position, in Toscano’s reading.
In fairness, Toscano does admit, more than once, that there is a fundamental problem with the counter-revolutionary thesis, for both the 1970s and now, namely the lack of any imminent revolutionary threat. But at no time is the possibility of an alternative causality broached. Instead we get a series of increasingly ad hoc justifications for the thesis, from Jackson’s blaming the US left for its sin of “a consciousness that was compromised,” to Poulantzas’ contorted musings, before finally settling, via Davis, on Marcuse’s speculations about “preventative counter-revolution” for a revolution that is feared and yet “has not taken place and does not stand on the agenda at the moment.”
Marcuse’s formulations of a counter-revolution for a revolution that is nowhere to be seen crosses the line into conspiracist thinking. This, in my opinion, is the end result of a certain reductionist way of looking at class composition and collective agency. In this very essentialised view, not only is the bourgeoisie never divided, but it experiences no collective action problem in any circumstances, including circumstances that have not yet even happened and are only thus far imagined. Toscano approvingly quotes Marcuse:
“I believe there is something like preventative fascism. In the last ten to twenty years we’ve experienced a preventative counter-revolution to defend us against a feared revolution, which, however, has not taken place and doesn’t stand on the agenda at the moment. In the same way preventative fascism comes about.”
Certainly, despite all its material and ideological diversity, the ruling class, even at the international level, is capable of solving the collective action problem pragmatically, in response to indisputable factual circumstances that have actually happened. For example how the G20 coordinated a response to the 2008 financial crisis. But that doesn’t make the global bourgeoisie into a kind of all-seeing, all-knowing, magically future-predicting “cabal” of conspiracist thought. For Marcuse to propose a bourgeoisie capable of the machinations of “preventative counter-revolution” is to cast them into the role of such a supernatural cabal. The suspicion has to be that the only visible reason for making that move is to contort reality to fit into the limitations of the counter-revolutionary thesis.
Another problem here is the lack of any willingness to look beyond the counter-revolution thesis or the orthodox Comintern line in general. For example the Bonapartist thesis of Thalheimer and Bauer (and even in parts of Trotsky’s writings on the subject) doesn’t get a look in. Never mind the possibility of alternatives based on the post-classical anti-reductionist strands of post-war Marxism, like operaismo, Autonomia, and Political Marxism—tendencies that Toscano is more than familiar with in other contexts, but regrettably do not get a look in in this context. I’m thinking, for example, of the concept of “class decomposition” which could be applied to the situation of the German and Italian bourgeoisies in the interwar period. My point is not to litigate the merits of alternative interpretations here, but rather to note that even the existence of such alternatives is not recognised in this text.
One final issue with “racial fascism” is the danger (especially in an anglo North American context) that the term may get flattened into the simple equation that fascism equals white supremacy, and vice versa. There would be two problems in such an equation gaining widespread currency, one theoretical and relatively minor, and one strategic and potentially harmful.
The first would be that if the KKK since the days of overturning Reconstruction in the 1870s, had already been essentially fascist, then the nazification of the Klan in the 1970s and 80s by David Duke, Louis Beam, and others was not transformative, because there was nothing to change on an essential level. This creates theoretical problems for the study of the history and evolution of the US far right, specifically, in the 20th century.
The second, more significant problem is that the white supremacist tendency of the US far right, important as it is, is not the whole story. For a settler-colonial society, the option of grounding ultra-nationalist narratives in atavistic myths of blood and soil going back to misty prehistory is foreclosed. Instead, the American far right has access to a number of possible foundations for their historical exceptionalism. White supremacism is obviously one, but so is the myth of being “Pilgrim progeny,” a uniquely Christian society with a special relation to god, granted a “manifest destiny” to settle the land (and eradicate its original inhabitants).
The third “ground” is the historically novel invention of the constitution. The strand of “Constitutional Patriot” militias, sworn to defend the constitution by, in effect, overthrowing its (allegedly corrupt) current manifestation, is by dint of that very contradiction ideologically dependent on conspiracist reasoning to a degree unusual even by far right standards. It is, however, possibly the only uniquely American strain of far right movements, given that religious identitarian far right groups, from ISIS, Al Qa’ida, India’s RSS and Hindutva, to Israel’s Dati Leumi (“national religious”) fascist formations, are widespread around the globe.
But if the particular far right form of the conspiracist constitutionalists is uniquely American, the far right strands of Christian nationalism are by far the biggest, best organised, and most powerful fascist force in the USA today. Some strands of which (like the New Apostolic Reformation, covered by Matthew Lyons elsewhere) are not essentially white supremacist, nor organise paramilitary formations, yet they do have a community organising ground game that most neo-nazis couldn’t dream of in their wildest apocalyptic fantasies. And they are absolutely intent on overthrowing the bourgeois liberal social order by strategies including networking and infiltration of the superstructure, but also building counterpower across all sectors of civil society.
In an era when an organised faction of the American Catholic far right (Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society) have captured the Supreme Court and powerful NGO institutions like the Heritage Foundation, authors of “Project 2025,” it seems strategically unwise to turn a blind eye to these sections of the American far right, based solely on the historical analogy of Europe’s mostly secular fascist movements. And further afield, it would seem impossible to analyse the rise of fascist tendencies in Brazil in a way that excluded the important role of far right evangelical Protestant groups there.
The final problem with Toscano’s discussion of “racial fascism” is that he makes no mention of antisemitism or Islamophobia. Of course antisemitism is covered elsewhere in the book, in the fourth chapter. There, while discussing the Frankfurt School’s 1941 “Research Project on Anti-Semitism” report, Toscano chastises its authors for one-sidedly focusing on antisemitism to the exclusion of anti-black racism, saying “the profound links between the racialisation of Islam, anti-Black racisms and anti-Semitism receive scant attention in the writings of the Frankfurt School.” But exactly what these “profound links” are is nowhere made clear (and there is no discussion of Islamophobia in the book that I could find). Again, in fairness to Toscano, the putative underlying unifying ideology that ties together anti-black racism and antisemitism is a bit of a “missing link” generally in the wider antifascist and antiracist literature. So he’s not entirely alone in this problem. But it does push back against the thesis that the European interwar Fascism and Nazism were a simple, unmediated development from the general colonial racisms of the era.
To draw to a conclusion, I appreciate that the second section above might leave the impression that I have an overall negative impression of the book. While it is certainly true that I think the problems with the “Racial Fascism” chapter are non-trivial, I’m not arguing that the book is worth reading for the chapter on Jesi alone. There is a lot of interesting material in the other chapters and, as I say, from authors that I would not normally look into otherwise. So for anyone who isn’t a full-time student or academic and only has limited time left over after work, family, and activism, I do think it’s a worthwhile overview of an intriguing intellectual tradition in antifascist theory and writing.