Tag Archives: illiberalism

Don Nonini and Ida Susser: Introduction: Fascism, Then and Now

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol_2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol_DSC09268-2_(50820738198).jpg
Image 1: The United States Capitol Building stormed by Trump supporters on 6 January 2021, photo by Tyler Merbler

On November 14, 2023, at the University of Toronto, we, the conveners of the Political Economy Discussion Group, an informal transnational group of anthropologists working in political economy, brought together an in-person group of more than 25 colleagues to discuss the question of the status of contemporary fascism. As part of this process, we invited five of us to sketch out their own ideas in short “position papers” on fascism which were pre-circulated. These papers, only slightly revised, now appear as a feature on fascism on FocaalBlog. We hope these will generate and encourage research among anthropologists on contemporary extreme right-wing formations, whether these are called fascism, proto-fascism, “authoritarian populism,” (Hall 1988), “authoritarian statism” (Poulantzas (2014 [1978]), “authoritarian neoliberalism” (Bruff 2014), “illiberalism” (Rosenblatt 2021), or by some other term. Certainly no one will argue that this topic is not timely or in urgent need of discussion today.

Fascism is fundamentally anti-democratic and violent. It attacks the rights of people to criticize its governance regime or to realize their different realms of freedom and relative autonomy in everyday life. Here we wish to think about contingency and alliances as this is where people agree that they are fighting for the right to exist and exercise realms of autonomy in their lives. We are far from sure that we are confronting the same fascisms as in the past, and we believe we need to generate new tools and new analyses as we face our current disasters. In order to contribute to such a discussion, we see it necessary to draw on a wide range of theoretical analyses from both Marxist and other sources. The effort is to illuminate the present and to prepare for what we expect may be coming in whatever way seems most constructive and strategically valuable.

We begin by considering Marxist analyses of fascism, alerted by the warning posed by Alberto Toscano in his brilliant Late Fascism (2023) that drawing historical analogies between the fascisms of the past (notably in Italy and Germany) and the fascism-candidates of the present is at best unrewarding, and at its worst, given the acceleration of the global rise of the ultra-right and the imperative to respond, a waste of time. But we also need to parse out, given the many Marxist theorizations and numerous Marxist theorists of and organizers against past fascisms – who were among fascism’s first victims! – what was most rewarding from those analyses and what needs to be left behind.

The Inter-war struggles by communist and socialist parties, both before and after fascist movements took state power, provoked insightful inter-war critical Marxist theorizations of the causes of the rise of fascism by Gramsci (1971), Trotsky (1971), Clara Zetkin (1923) and others over and against the conservative and liberal formulations that marked conventional scholarship in the West. These analyses were rich in their sense of contingency and their openness to the social contradiction arising from the economic crises brought on by the uneven and combined development of capitalism.

Among Marxists not all interwar theorizations of fascism were the same. Most held that capitalists were crucial to fascist movements in attaining state power and that, once these movements came to power, the fascist state worked to the benefit of capitalists, even if they did not directly lead it, while it consistently showed extraordinary violence against the organized working class and its supporters on the left. However, here agreement among Marxist conceptualizations ended.

Marxist theorizations that were politically dominant within the Comintern saw the growth of fascist movements and the fascist state as no more than a teleological outcome of hypertrophied capitalism at an inevitable stage of its development, with which these other classes came to be inexorably aligned (Renton 2020 [1999]: 79-84). These approaches, when put into practice, had catastrophic effects. To put not too fine a point to it, these interwar Marxist analyses of the German and Italian cases of fascism (i.e., those coming out of the Comintern after 1928 with the ascent of Stalin) were grossly flawed because they defaulted to an economistic and rigid evolutionist account of capitalism. They failed to offer adequate theoretical accounts of German and Italian fascism’s mobilization of their bases through racism, antisemitism, ethno-nationalism, anti-Leftism, and patriarchy associated with their past bourgeois-imperial and colonial histories. These after all were histories of repression, genocide (viz. Germany’s extermination of Hereros), and ethnic cleansing whose effects continue into the present.

We suggest following Toscano (2023) that instead of assuming that liberal capitalist states, including neoliberal states, provide universal safeguards against fascism, that the practices and ideologies of fascism are far from incompatible with liberalism and the liberal state – and in fact lie within them. After all Western liberalism had indulged in colonialism, slavery, and genocide for centuries before Central European fascists began creating their violently vengeful empires. The latter did so with explicit envy and admiration for the earlier white Atlantic expansionism. This means that instead of regarding fascist movements and even the emergence of fascist states as sudden and unpredictable eruptions of political violence incidentally associated with the economic crises of capitalism, we must go beyond the economistic analyses of fascism to explore the “fascist potential” (Toscano 2023) of what appear unexceptional, even “ordinary” features of contemporary liberal capitalist states (e.g., incarceration, police violence toward Blacks in the U.S.) if we wish to more critically explore the possibilities of fascism today.

We start by pointing out that like the prehistories of German and Italian fascism, the histories of other Euro-American political formations (U.S., Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands) are characterized by the racialized violence of colonization, enslavement, exterminism, and accumulation by violent dispossession of the non-European peoples they came to dominate politically. This has its theoretical corollary. Instead of only undertaking economic analyses of capitalism, there is the imperative of exploring the possibility that late neoliberal states already, like liberal democratic states before them, for historical reasons contain within them fascist potentials. We think, for example of the totalitarian treatment of huge numbers of incarcerated poor and racially marked populations in the United States, or the new state and popular violence against the Roma in central Europe or against North African, Turkish, and other immigrants in western Europe.

Marxist analyses of fascist potentials today must thus take into account the continuities and legacies of racialization, antisemitism, misogyny, and xenophobia that are associated with capitalism as a historical social order but are never merely reducible to its economic logics, in exploring the potential of new fascist emergences as these are occurring globally today. We must instead examine the racialized and gendered violence and ideologies encysted in neoliberal states today and think more of economic crises as the impetus and context for their emergence, instead of being their ‘cause’. In this regard, we could start by drawing on the concepts of racial capitalism, imperialist racism, and abolitionism within the Black radical intellectual tradition of Cedric Robinson, Aimé Césaire, W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter Rodney, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and numerous others (Toscano 2023: 25-48).

This might lead us, for example, to see fascist potential in the nostalgic imaginary by the Republican base (many of whom are not economically working class) of a golden age centered on a male “white working class” privileged by industrial employment and U.S. Cold War hegemony in the 1960s and 1970s (Toscano 2023: 8-9). Believers in this white supremacist imaginary, emboldened by Trump’s January 6, 2021 insurrection, form this base that he and the Republican Freedom Party elite now pander to with their MAGA cult of “popular” grievances — that the U.S. is being “invaded” by immigrant “rapists and murderers,” and that “the election was stolen” by “illegal” Black voting in Detroit and Atlanta as well as the age old theme of “the Jews will not replace us.” Above all, Trump and his elite have successfully incited violence against people of color, Jews, women, and trans people – those shut out of the golden age.

Going forward, while continuing to benefit from the classic analyses by Trotsky, Gramsci, Zetkin, et al. of capitalist crises, historical blocs and fascist formations while going beyond them to consider racialized and gendered fascist potentials, we can also draw from non-Marxist critiques of fascism to consider the ideas and practice of democratic freedoms and the ideologies of racism that deployed historical representations politicized in a fascist context. We need to take seriously, for example, the relationship between fascist formations and patriarchal structures as well as the diverse histories and forms of racism employed – from the racial ordering of color and US racism to the images of a Jewish race controlling global power and banks.

We are also attracted to other Marxist approaches which show more strategic openness to trying to tip the balance during periods of fascist ascent by attempting to build coalitions between the organized working class and other classes (e.g., the petty bourgeoisie, peasantry, lumpenproletariat) who could be converted to opponents to fascism, and who might otherwise join fascist movements. There were also strong democratic movements against fascism in many European countries, such as the Popular Front and the French and Italian resistance. These approaches have to be taken seriously in terms of questions of democracy and their possible effectiveness in different nations of the time which did not succumb to fascist domination. Some non-Marxist theories also viewed class relations and class struggle as relevant to the emergence of classical fascisms. However, many such analyses concentrated on fascist ideology or aesthetics, and lacked economic and social context.

For our November 14 session on fascism, we attempted to bring together a broad set of discussions, not in any way limited by the traditional Marxist debates but paying attention to them as part of crucial ammunition for addressing the threatening situation we face today. Are we confronting fascist movements at present that could assume state power by ostensibly democratic means, then transform radically into violent rule? Or are quite different right-wing formations from fascism ascending with very different trajectories if they assume state power?

For the November 14 session, we asked the authors of the blog pieces that follow not so much a factual as an epistemological question to engender discussion, leading off with “How would you know contemporary fascism when you see it, in the one or two cases you know best from your ethnographic or historical knowledge?” We also asked whether the formations in these cases might better be characterized by other terms and theories.

We concluded our questions by pointedly asking our authors about interventions in struggle. If the contemporary right-wing formations now in existence pose a risk to political democracy, peace, and the capacity of large populations to engage in social reproduction – as we believe they do – we asked, “What would be the most effective preemptive responses by the Left to them?” And lastly, “What would be the disposition of social and political forces and economic conditions that would make these responses feasible?” These last two questions were what we as conveners hope that these blogs will provoke the readers of FocaalBlog to respond to, given the grave political crises and economic and ecological contradictions now before us. There is already much practically at stake in these questions: theorists and organizers on the Left are already facing repression from the rising tide of extreme rightwing forces around the globe.


Don Nonini is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His latest book is Food Activism Today: Sustainability, Climate Change and Social Justice (New York University Press, 2024). His new research project examines racial capitalism and its eco-politics.

Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is currently studying urban social movements, class and commoning in France, Spain, and the United States.


References

Bruff, I. 2014. “The Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism.” Rethinking Marxism 26: 113-129.

Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith, eds. New York: International Press.

Hall, S. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso.

Poulantzas, N. A. 2014 [1978]. State, Power, Socialism. London: Verso.

Renton, D. 2020 [1999]. Fascism: History and Theory. London: Pluto Press.

Rosenblatt, H. 2021. “The History of Illiberalism.” The Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism. A. Sajó, R. Uitz and S. Holmes. New York: Routledge, pp. 16-32.

Toscano, A. 2023. Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. London: Verso.

Trotsky, L. 1971. The Struggle against Fascism in Germany. London: Pathfinder.

Zetkin, C. 1923. “Facism.” Labour Monthly, August 1923, pp. 69-78.


Cite as: Nonini, Don and Susser, Ida. 2024. “Introduction: Fascism, Then and Now.” FocaalBlog, 24 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/01/24/don-nonini-and-ida-susser-introduction-fascism-then-and-now/

Focaalblog: New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Global Capitalism

Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission on Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology – IUAES, in cooperation with the Working Group for Public Sociology ‘Helyzet’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, and FocaalBlog, organized a conference on the 26-27 May, 2022, in Budapest, addressing the escalating crises of global capitalism.

Since 1989, processes of neoliberal globalization, financialization, the erosion of welfare states, and the decline of ‘the standard labor contract’, have produced deepening inequalities and hierarchies, long time hidden under the mantra of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Privatization, gentrification, dispossession, devaluation, and displacement have increased in a multitude of settings despite intermittent mass mobilizations, which were often seen as ‘middle class’. The undermining of democratic possibilities has reinforced the super-exploitation of diverse groups in many places. Globalization, technological speed up and the platformization of labor-markets are threatening ‘middle class’ jobs’ in North and South. Deepening exploitation of labor is increasingly intersected with aggressive rent taking by monopoly sections of capital and states. Issues of nationalism, racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia, sometimes interwoven with waves of migration, have resurfaced, in tandem with the resulting authoritarianism. Accelerating climate change is being addressed in pro-capitalist ways, likely leading to further inequalities, displacements, and challenges to survival. Global imperial rivalries are intensifying and generating new cold wars and ‘global wars’, increasingly of a purportedly ‘civilizational nature’, like the Ukrainian calamity that is playing itself out on the EU border. 

The late Immanuel Wallerstein predicted that politics in this ‘decisive era of the world-system’ will be ever more volatile as inescapable choices must be made about democratic or authoritarian solutions. Most of our problems are well known and anticipated, but narrow ideas about ‘proven causation’ and ‘concluding evidence’ paralyze any decision making on behalf of established interests, while national publics are being fed lies and deceptions, both by the technocrats and the ‘authoritarians’ and right-wing populists. Crisis moments are steadily dealt with ‘unprepared’ and in fire-fighting mode. Left wing grassroots movements are specialized on small scale practical utopias but large-scale breakthroughs for the Left seem out of reach.

If this describes roughly where we are now, what can we expect next? Can we responsibly extrapolate and speculate? What sort of a global capitalism might we be inhabiting in thirty years from now? What can we discover as its likely core tendencies, elements, and relations? What modes of resistance are people experimenting with? What are the visions and opportunities to build a more equal and just society? Where is the new counter politics, where are the new counter movements?

Roundtable on War

Taras Fedirko (University of St Andrews) Militarized civil society and the economy of war in Ukraine

Volodymyr Arthiuk (University of Oxford) The expected war: scales of conflict around Ukraine from February 2014 to February 2022

Denys Gorbach (Sciences Po) Identitarian landscapes in Ukraine before and during the war

Volodymyr Ischenko (Free University Berlin) Madman’s war? Ideology, hegemony crisis, and the dynamics of depoliticization in Russians’ support for the invasion of Ukraine

– moderated by Don Kalb (University of Bergen)

Roundtable on Migration

Attila Melegh (Corvinus University/Polanyi Center) Migration turn and the crisis of capitalism.,

Noémi Katona (Centre for Social Science, Hungarian Academy of Sciences/Helyzet) The division of reproductive labor in global capitalism: the case of migrant care workers in Europe,

Béla Soltész (Eötvös Loránd University), “The wanted, the unwanted and the invisible. Interpreting distinctions and selectivity of Hungarian migration policy”

 Nina Glick Schiller (Manchester University), Has Migration Studies Lost Its Subject?  Migration Studies, Global Disorders, and Shared Precarities

 – moderated by Diana Szántó (Artemisszio Foundation/Polanyi Center)

Roundtable on ‘Illiberal capitalism’ I

Luisa Steur (University of Amsterdam) Cuba Update

Marc Morell (University of Bergen) On transformative movements in neither authoritarian nor egalitarian but flawed paths. A Maltese illustration

Attila Antal (Eötvös Loránd University) Illiberalism as Emergency Governance

Gábor Scheiring (Bocconi University) The national-populist mutation of neoliberalism in East-Central Europe

– moderated by Attila Melegh (Corvinus University/Polanyi Center)

Roundtable on ‘Illiberal capitalism’ II

Florin Poenaru (University of Bucharest) Tanks, tankies and think-tanks. Anthropological vignettes from the Romanian garrison

Jeff Maskovsky (The City University of New York) Not Yet Fascist: The Journey from Neoliberalism to Corporate Authoritarianism of the United States

Ágnes Gagyi (University of Gothenburg) Bridge position and regime fixes: semi-peripheral contexts to “illiberalism” in Hungary

Bruno de Conti (University of Campinas) Bolsonaro: the economic agenda behind the smoke screen

– moderated by Dorottya Mendly (Corvinus University)

Roundtable on Our Futures

David Harvey (The City University of New York)

Michael Burawoy (UC Berkely)

Ida Susser (The City University of New York)

Don Kalb (University of Bergen)

 – moderated by Mary Taylor (The City University of New York)


Cite as: Focaalblog. 2022. “New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Global Capitalism.” Focaalblog, 5 July. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/07/05/don-kalb-new-times-confronting-the-escalating-crises-of-global-capitalism/

Kristóf Szombati: Protesting the “slave law” in Hungary: The erosion of illiberal hegemony?

In recent weeks, Hungary has again made international headlines. This time, it was a popular movement born out of resistance to the latest rewriting of the labor code—which the ruling Fidesz party had already modified in 2011 to the benefit of employers—that made the news. On 12 December, amid chaotic scenes in the National Assembly (where opposition MPs sought to obstruct the voting procedure), Fidesz passed a law that raises the maximum amount of overtime employees can work from 250 to 400 hours a year, and gives employers the freedom to delay payment for overtime work by up to three years. A similar amendment had already been proposed last year but was quickly withdrawn after the government realized the unpopular measure could dent Fidesz’s popularity in the run-up to this spring’s parliamentary election. Off-the-cuff comments made by Fidesz representatives have revealed that the law was reintroduced to satisfy German carmakers who are facing an increasingly acute labor shortage in a low-wage economy that a sizeable segment of the labor force has left behind to take up better-paid work in Austria, Germany, and other Western European countries.

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Oana Mateescu: The Romanian family referendum: Or, how I became a sexo-Marxist

“By the way, Russia had the first sexual revolution. Lenin was a big homosexual; as for Karl and Marx, I think they were together. But they realized on their own it was going nowhere.”
3 milioane1

On 6 and 7 October 2018, in what has become known as the family referendum, some Romanians voted on changing the definition of marriage in the Constitution, from the union between two spouses to that between man and woman. Many more Romanians abstained or actively boycotted the referendum with the felicitous result of only 21.1 percent participation, not even close to the 30 percent threshold required for validation. What are the stakes? As Cristian Lungu, senator and president of the center-right PMP Cluj (People’s Movement Party) summarizes tendentiously, the referendum is all about “reclaiming our country from the grip of the neo-Marxist–progressive–anarchist revolution that promotes moral, cultural relativism and gender ideology.”[2] His is only one of many voices on the Right identifying the referendum with a bid for independence, national sovereignty, and desirable distance from an EU steeped into the sins of liberalism and relativism. It’s no wonder that this referendum provided a domestic opening for the first public grumblings about a possible ROEXIT.

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Bruce Kapferer: Ideas on populism: The paradox of democracy and the rise of the corporate state

“All forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy.”
— Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

“The power of the people is always greater than that of the people in power.”
— Wael Ghonim, a Google executive at the time of Egypt’s popular uprising against President Hosni Mubarak

When Hillary Clinton attempted to counter Donald Trump and his supporters’ populist attacks by explicitly branding them a “basket of deplorables, racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it,” she was hoist on her own petard. The chant “Lock Her Up” drew its enormous potency from her alleged corruption and from her being a figurehead of the ruling Washington elites who have leached the American state’s democratic egalitarian idealism. Calling Trump and his followers racist and sexist was waving a red rag to a bull. She played on a negative view of populism, an immanent antidemocratic elitism, which elicited outrage, making a mockery of her own populist appeal. The occasionally rank dominant-class prejudice that accompanies antipopulist sentiments (including those that assume it is a working-class phenomenon, when it is frequently cross-class) was egregiously apparent in a CNN pundit’s observation that Trump “was throwing red meat to the base” in his highly controversial travel bans.

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