"Nick Buxton: What is fascism and how does it differ today from its manifestations in the past?Alberto: This is a somewhat awkward question for me because I have spent some time criticising the political science obsession with a hard-and-fast definition of fascism or with checklists telling us whether something is fascism or not. It’s as if there were a diagnostic manual for political disorders where you could just tick off various features or elements. That said, we can start to approach the phenomenon of fascism by talking about it as a politics of domination, supremacy and exclusion that emerges from the crises of mass electoral democracies.That’s a very broad-brush take that hopefully allows us to think through the continuities as well as the differences between interwar European fascisms and current movements or regimes that we may want to characterise as fascist or fascistic.My inclination is not to chase after an essence of fascism but to think of fascist potentials or fascist processes, to use a term that Angela Davis1 was already using in the late 1960s and 1970s.If we want to paint a picture of what fascism might mean in the present, we also must contend with the vast transformations in social and economic and political life that we’ve witnessed in the century since Mussolini’s March on Rome. We also must confront issues that were not germane to interwar fascisms but are now absolutely key, namely climate catastrophe."tni.org/en/article/lifeboats-s#Fascism #Colonialism #Imperialism
"There has been a spreading ‘common sense’ that things are not going to get any better, that the pie is shrinking. Even climate denialists are often implicitly climate realists, for instance, when they talk about their apocalyptic scenarios of mass migration. After all, why would those mass migrations happen? Oh yes, it’s because of that very thing they’re saying is not the case.The neoliberal ravaging of social expectations has baked in a sense of precarity and a foreclosed future, which has played a massive role in making the victories of the far right possible. It has created an undercurrent of profound cynicism. Ultimately, my sense is that most people don’t believe in the grand rhetorical visions of becoming ‘great again’ or in futures of affluence or abundance but rather are mobilised by promises that they might retain some material and symbolic goods for whatever ethnic, national, religious or class group to which they belong. If things are inexorably immiserating, so the thought seems to go, perhaps that can be slowed down through policies of exclusion or hierarchy. Often the only goods available are purely symbolic, like the impoverishing or humiliation of others, not your own betterment. Using W.E.B. Du Bois’ term the ‘psychological wages’ may increase while the material ones flatline. This notion of a zero-sum game dovetails with the centrality of anti-migrant racist and xenophobic politics to the far right across the globe."
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