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Late Fascism:Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis
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In a world shaken by ecological, economic and political crises, the forces of authoritarianism and reaction seem to have the upper hand. How should we name, map and respond to this state of affairs?
The rich archive of twentieth-century debates on fascism can steer a path through an increasingly authoritarian present. Developing anti-fascist theory is an urgent and vital task. From the ‘Great Replacement’ to campaigns against critical race theory and ‘gender ideology’, today’s global far right is launching lethal panics about the threats to traditional political, sexual and racial hierarchies.
Drawing especially on Black radical and anti-colonial theories of fascism, Toscano makes clear the limits of associating fascism primarily with the kind of political violence experienced by past European regimes. Rather than looking for analogies from history, we should see fascism as a mutable process, one anchored in racial and colonial capitalism, which both predates and survives its crystallization in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. It is a threat that continues to evolve in the present day.
Reviews
There are no unearned claims here. Rather, one feels that Toscano has thought through the political stakes of every single sentence in this crucial book. Late Fascism is painstaking in accounting for, differentiating, and connecting the many historical contexts and iterations of fascism - from the onset of colonial modernity, through the mid-twentieth century, to the present day.
Alberto Toscano's Late Fascism brilliantly elucidates what Adorno once called 'the meaning of working through the past' to grasp fascism's capacious aptitude for untimely reappearances to resolve crises, real or not, to save capitalism from itself and restore the necessary political order such rescue operations require. Rather than drawing upon fascism's past in his approach, Toscano 's account persuasively lays to rest an interpretative scheme that explains such unscheduled repetitions by appealing to analogical comparisons of past and present as if they were the same. His own strategy positions history and memory against the present to disturb one another, unveiling uneven historical differences and incommensurables removed from an everyday dominated by exchange. Toscano's lasting achievement is the program of watchfulness he so carefully constructs to uncover the contemporaneity of late fascism in our midst, but never too late to recognize its ever-present morbidities.
In this bold book, Alberto Toscano argues that the old checklist for identifying and understanding contemporary fascism won't work. To apprehend its present-day manifestations, we must consult writers from the Black radical tradition and critical ethnic studies. With his characteristic erudition, Toscano combines innovative readings of Western Marxism with insightful interpretations of the genealogies of anti-racism. This is an indispensable book for a distressing time.
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Alberto Toscano is one of the most significant and original political theorists of our contemporary moment. In this work on the nature and aetiology of late fascism, he moves us beyond the European interwar examples as fascism's "ideal-type," and deconstructs the alleged opposition of fascism and liberal democracy. He instead emphasizes multiple origins, locations, and temporalities of fascisms; the imbrication of fascisms within colonialism, slavery, capitalism and counter-revolution; and is precise about fascisms' libidinal claims and the weaponizing of atavistic social energies turned against racial, religious, sexual and gendered others. Toscano engages an illuminating range of anti-fascist thought: from Ernst Bloch, Georges Bataille, and Leo Löwenthal, to Angela Davis and George Jackson; from Stuart Hall and Ruth Wilson Gilmore to Jairus Banaji and Furio Jesi - with dazzling results.
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Can we speak of fascism before fascism? Alberto Toscano believes we can. In his learned excavation of debates across the twentieth century, he revives still unanswered questions about the location of the prison, the market, and the bedroom in theories of fascism. He also reminds us to ask what late fascism is afraid of. What is it trying to prevent? In this way, a study of fascism becomes a roundabout recovery of repressed and forgotten utopias-a flashlight in the dead of night.
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Late Fascism is brilliant, incisive, and right on time. We are living through a moment when the "F" word is no longer taboo and the threat of fascism lurks everywhere. And yet, so mired in debates over definitions, typologies, and analogies that our understanding of fascism remains elusive. Alberto Toscano avoids this trap by turning to anti-fascist thinkers, whose groundings in anticolonial, antiracist, and anticapitalist struggles remind us that liberalism is no enemy of fascism, and fascists flower in the hot house of capitalism.
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Toscano's wide-ranging, erudite study is both theoretically satisfying and politically inspiring - an essential reference for rethinking fascism and antifascist politics today.
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In this book, Toscano provides us with the language and analysis necessary to theorize our current moment, one in which the danger of fascism is as real as ever.
, Protean -
Toscano's high-octane new book on heterodox theories of fascism ... traces the myriad ways it has been deployed over the past 100 years, mining each of them for parallels with the present.
, The New Statesman -
Concise and intellectually ambitious.
, Salon -
Late Fascism is such an important book.
, e-Flux -
Toscano's penetrating, theoretically grounded analysis is an essential resource for understanding and confronting the resurgence of reactionary ideologies.
, LSE Review of Books