Once again, the fascist tortoise proved quicker than all the critical hares: ‘That’s okay. You can just say yes. Okay?’ While the whole world was busy arguing whether and in what sense the political developments currently unfolding in the US and elsewhere may justifiably be called fascism, Trump was one step ahead yet again. Leaning back at ease, he gave his adversary Mamdani a friendly pat on the arm when the latter was asked by journalists in the Oval Office whether he would still call the president a fascist, as he had done several times during the New York mayoral election. Trump is perfectly fine with this designation, which he counselled his younger opponent to affirm for simplicity’s sake: ‘It’s easier. It’s easier than explaining it. I don’t mind.’
In need of a concept
Concepts exist to satisfy needs: a new reality forces its way into one’s thoughts, which then demand to be expressed in linguistic form. The form is itself never entirely determined by reality; rather, it is also influenced by the needs of those who attempt to communicate with concepts. Apparently, new political relations the world over have created an urgent need to invoke the concept of fascism in order to adequately express the horrors we are experiencing. Yet, at the same time, everyone knows that the new political forms and deformations cannot really be equated with what we have learned to define as fascism.[1]
The simultaneous need for invocation and differentiation expresses itself in terminological formations such as post-, late- and neofascism. And even those individuals – ever fewer in number – who caution against a ‘premature’, ‘imprecise’ or ‘trivialising’ use of the F-word can hardly avoid measuring our present against the fascist benchmark, if only to come to a negative conclusion. Alternative concepts such as ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘populism’, which were in circulation for some time, no longer function. All too often, they seem to arise from an (equally understandable) need for reassurance or conceptual de-escalation as opposed to serious scholarly rigour.
The form ‘-ation’
Let us begin with a new proposal for attending to the contradictory needs of the present: “If we cannot talk of fascism as such, we can at least talk of fascization and being fascisized”.[2] Recently suggested by the French philosopher Pierre Zaoui, this modest proposal draws on a long conceptual history with potentially far-reaching theoretical consequences. The shift towards concepts in the form ‘-ation’ (or, alternatively, ‘-ing’) has, historically, been quite useful for theory. Zaoui himself mentions the example of ‘racialisation’, and, in newer engagements with class, the heuristic replacement of ‘proletariat’ with ‘proletarianisation’ has proved its worth.[3] Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, Freud spoke of ‘identification’ instead of ‘identity’, Georg Simmel of ‘socialisation’ instead of ‘society’. Lacanian psychoanalysis knows ‘formulas of sexuation’, the field of gender studies speaks of ‘gendering’ as opposed to ‘gender’. The shift towards processual categories might even be viewed as a feature of conceptual modernity more generally. The ‘ation’-form realises what Hegel demanded all the way back in the early nineteenth century: that substance always be conceived as subject as well. In a post-Hegelian vein, one might add to this the proposition that the subject be viewed from the perspective of subjectivation.
Processual concepts focus on the production and formation of entities, identities and collectives rather than assume they have always existed. They can also lead to fundamental re-evaluations as processes unfold: implicit teleologies and assumed finalities of production are called into question as production processes overshoot or undermine desired results, ultimately eroding their stability. If, for instance, ‘race’ or gender must always first be produced, then their presumed substantiality cannot be all that substantial. A result that was taken for granted ultimately appears as a selectively perceived and arbitrarily isolated snapshot of an ongoing process.
Theoretical history
Today, the theoretical history of fascism, or the history of theories of fascism, is experiencing a renewed boom – and not without good reason. Archives are being consulted in order to assess the present situation. Is what we are experiencing right now already (again) fascism?[4] Interesting from the perspective of theoretical history is that the (left-wing, critical) fascism theory is just as old as its object; as early as 1923, Clara Zetkin delivered a speech before the Executive Committee of the Comintern on the ‘struggle against fascism’. The theory of the 1920s and 1930s in fact proved to (co-)constitute its object; theorisation by its opponents often afforded fascism a conceptual coherence that was downright inimical to the confused, contradictory pronouncements of fascists.
Here, one can also perceive a problem. Rather than constantly and ever more meticulously elaborating a systematic character of fascism against which to analyse historical (or contemporary) phenomena, perhaps it would be – or would have been – better to pay closer attention to the theoretical and practical volatility and elasticity of fascism. It is not the task of fascism to satisfy the theoretical needs of its opponents; even Mussolini took great pleasure in subverting their expectations.
The concept of fascisation has also proved helpful in dealing with this problem: already in the 1920s and 1930s, theorists began referring to fascism in precisely this processual form. As early as 1928, Georg Lukács used the term multiple times in his ‘Blum Theses’, a strategy paper he drafted for the exiled Hungarian Communist Party, and he did so again in Wie ist die faschistische Philosophie in Deutschland entstanden? (How Did Fascist Philosophy Emerge in Germany?), a polemic he began while working as a Comintern emissary in 1932 and completed during his Moscow exile in 1933.[5]
In texts from these decades, ‘fascisation’ initially meant the formation and ascendance of fascist ideology and rule. At the same time, the term cannot be reduced to this one meaning, as it was being used to analyse something that was being produced, that was eminently in the making at the time of the analysis; the theories were concerned with the emergence of a phenomenon whose precise final appearance could not yet be known by anyone. In these early fascism theories, fascisation was conceptualised openly. They sought to register social tendencies that were theoretically foreseeable but not yet teleologically determined, as the telos itself had yet to come about. The process of production had not yet been effaced by the historical result: the fully formed fascist system of the 1930s and 1940s that was to dominate all subsequent theories (and subsequent readings of the early theories). The theories of the 1920s and 1930s reveal a process of theorising that occurred within an open intellectual milieu. This makes them interesting today, for it seems evident – for the time being – that the fascisation tendencies of our present must not necessarily lead to a result that is identical with fascism’s historically known forms.
One hundred years of fascisation
Lukács always used the concept of fascisation in a transitive sense: he was always concerned with the fascisation of something that was not yet fascist but on its way to becoming so. As such, he wrote of a ‘multi-year fascisation process of all of public life’, a ‘fascisation of public opinion’, a ‘fascisation of the trade unions’ and the ‘bourgeois parties’ and finally of a ‘fascisation of university philosophy and German philosophy’. Here, fascisation is conceived as something that affects existing structures and drives them in a particular direction. It specifically does not (or at least not only) seek to overthrow bourgeois-democratic ideology and rule through revolution, but rather to steer them in a direction that is by no means alien or contrary to this goal. Along these lines, Lukács already wrote in 1928 of a potential ‘democratic form of fascisation’.
In the late 1960s, the notion of ‘democratic fascisation’ was taken up by a second wave of theories emerging mostly from West Germany and France. In both countries, parliamentary democracies remained at least superficially intact, yet following the revolutionary upheavals of 1968, left-wing radicals on both sides of the Rhine observed tendencies that to them seemed clearly directed towards a new fascism. They referred to these tendencies with the term ‘fascisation’
In the years following 1968, the left-wing political scene in West Germany witnessed the emergence of a number of Maoist groups, collectively referred to as K-Gruppen, or K-Groups. Within this milieu, the Communist League (Kommunistischer Bund, or KB) developed what was to become its signature concept: the ‘fascisation thesis’.[6] While other K-Groups assumed an impending communist revolution in West Germany, the KB far more pessimistically anticipated a ‘gradual fascisation of state and society’ that would prevent and smash the revolution. In addition to military rearmament and the brutalisations committed by the state security apparatus in its fight against the Red Army Faction and other radical left groups, the KB used the concept to describe the manipulation of public opinion by the tabloid press (such as is portrayed in Heinrich Böll’s novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum), the German judiciary (still staffed by many old Nazis) and the spread of ‘fascist beliefs’ among the population, a phenomenon that was hard for the KB to explain (or digest) given its own class analysis. Thanks to its relatively strong social basis, particularly in the ‘new social movements’ – and more in spite of rather than because of its officially Maoist ideology – the KB developed a finely tuned sense for connections between developments that initially appeared unrelated. Side-by-side in KB publications, one could find: analyses of the rightward drift of the democratic party system in response to the electoral successes of the neo-Nazi National-Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or NPD); critiques of nuclear energy, which could only be implemented with an armed state-security apparatus (an insight based on personal experiences attempting to block the construction of the Brokdorf Nuclear Power Plant); polemics against the micromanagement and political surveillance of students and lecturers at universities;[7] and sociopolitical investigations based on the experiences of KB chapters with the healthcare system and on discussions with the emerging ‘crip movement’. Here, spending cuts to healthcare were already attacked as ‘class war from above’ and as a component of an expanding ‘new eugenics’. All this – and much more – was described by the KB as fascisation.
In France, the discussion took a markedly different turn. Informed by the brutal repression of the protests and uprisings against colonialism, which were also occurring in the ‘motherland’, French comrades located fascisation in the realm of social mentalities and subjectivities. ‘Is not fascism preceded by fascisation, which prepares and establishes it?’ asked André Glucksmann in Les Temps modernes in 1972.[8] In 1970s France, this question led to affect, desire and language: how must subjects be constituted in order to subordinate themselves to and participate in fascist structures, and what does fascism do to subjects? These questions were being posed yet again.
For these questions had already been explored long before, much to the chagrin of the official Communist Party (and official Freudianism), by Wilhelm Reich, whose work was taken up in 1970s France by Deleuze and Guattari. The fascisation of subjects, Reich answered and Deleuze/Guattari concurred, does not occur exclusively or even primarily through repression, but, rather, through pleasure: the pleasure of becoming fascist.[9] Generally speaking, this pleasure manifests itself in two ways: first, as the pleasure of belonging to and participating in a powerful collective, a community to which not everyone has access, and second, as the pleasure of actively excluding those who are not part of the community, of subjecting them to humiliation, violence and ultimately extermination.
Exterminationist pleasure
This is the starting point for theorists seeking to understand fascism today. Pierre Zaoui, for instance, has diagnosed an exterminationist pleasure that expresses itself in a specifically fascist language or speech: ‘To become fascisized means accepting “exterminationist” signifiers, in other words the symbolic and emotional continuity that connects a fleeting frustration and the final solution. Extermination (from the Latin ex terminus, “to drive beyond the boundaries”) is a particularly apt term for the jouissance of getting rid of a particular category of beings once and for all.’
The pleasure is exterminationist because it drives the Other over the boundary of death, but it is also exterminationist in relation to the perpetrator, who drives himself over the boundary of normal experience; there is something transgressive about exterminationist speech, which is bound up with an extraordinary experience of pleasure, with an intensification of one’s sense and enjoyment of oneself.
Hence, exterminationist violence need not be associated with actual realisation; rather, the fascisation of language, affect and desire constitutes its own realm of realisation and reality. The emergence of this realm is linked to other strategies that it can intensify or orchestrate – such as discrimination, physical violence, institutional exclusion – yet it can also stand on its own.
Zaoui’s focus on language leads him to distinguish between fascisation and authoritarianism: ‘Fascism is first and foremost a language. While authoritarianism is silent, and silences people, fascism speaks and writes, and makes people do the same. Fascisation must then first be sought in the babble, the earliest pidgin, the inchoate speech that later spawns fascist language.’
A realm where the fascist ‘flood of signifiers’ and digressive babbling and palavering can be readily observed is that of social media.[10] Here, one can follow live the escalation of violent language and imagery, the ostentatiously flaunted ‘pleasures of aggression, meanness, and violence’ of which Dagmar Herzog writes.[11]
In this context, it is noteworthy from the perspective of theoretical history that much of what is currently being studied in scholarly work on memes, for instance, was approached in the twentieth century through the concept of myth. Today, theories of myth are undergoing a veritable renaissance: Zaoui cites Roland Barthes; Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay ‘The Nazi Myth’ was recently translated anew into German and reissued as a book; the Italian theorist Furio Jesi and his concept of the ‘mythological machine’ is being rediscovered internationally.[12] All of these theories are concerned with myth as an interplay of image and speech. Rather than aim to convince or persuade, they argue, myth is designed to be disseminated, used and modified. In this way, myth can take hold as an imaginary background against which all further attribution of meaning takes place. At present, social media platforms – and not only Elon Musk’s X – are the primary disseminators of myth.
When Zaoui describes the fascisation of language and affect, he emphasises that these processes unfold slowly, inconspicuously and literally subcutaneously – and that they affect everyone, including us. One can observe in oneself how the fascist-exterminationist signifiers lie in wait, ready to be deployed either consciously or unconsciously, but one can also attempt to deny their deployment. This perspective enables us to avoid having to denounce (and label) this or that contemporary as wholly fascist. The potential contradictions and incoherence one can observe in fascisation processes in general can be seen all the better in fascisation as a process of subject constitution. A processual understanding of fascist subjectivation also serves as the basis of several prominent analyses of contemporary mentalities and affects. Diagnoses such as ‘offended freedom’ or ‘stolen pride’ can only be understood as processual forms, not as fixed states.[13]
These processual forms might be traced back to the image of the ‘theft of enjoyment’ used as early as the 1990s by Slavoj Žižek to explain the conjuncture of fascist subjectivation back then. According to this image, a fascisation of the subject occurs when a ‘wholesome’, intact state in which the subject feels at home is destroyed, and an Other is held responsible and itself targeted for destruction. Of course, the crux of the matter is that both the responsibility of the Other (and sometimes the Other in general) and the supposedly destroyed wholesome state are mere figments of the subject’s imagination: phantasms in which entirely different crises and upheavals reveal themselves and remain concealed at the same time.[14]
Bundling
In all of the tendencies described above, the concept of fascisation strives for a fanning out of perspectives and lines of inquiry: it moves away from the monolithic observation of fascism and towards an investigation of individual fields and institutions that are strategically merged in the process of fascisation but potentially also generate contradictions or incoherence.
Fascisation occurs on different levels: in both the realm of official politics and that of public opinion; in both (formerly) reputable media outlets and the unregulated spheres of the internet and social media; and ultimately also in the realm of the personal or private, which has become almost impossible to clearly delineate precisely because of new forms of media and networking. All this is not entirely new, and all these phenomena must be investigated individually and separately, as is already happening in many places. What is currently driving a new debate – a debate about a ‘new fascism’, for instance – is the observation (or impression) that the synergy between the different realms and measures has taken on a new, qualitatively different intensity. It is this new form of synergy for which I propose the concept of fascisation, and in doing so, I would like to draw attention (perhaps Latin class was more useful than we thought) to its origin in the Latin fascis or fasces, which means bundle. As such, fascisation can be understood as bundling, and it is first in the bundling process – through meshing, supplementation and mutual reinforcement – that the fascisation effects we are witnessing today emerge.
Along these lines, fascisation should not be understood as a new great singularity to merely replace the old great singularity of fascism (nor should it be mistaken for a unified theory to replace the old fascism theories). Rather, fascisation is always an effect and a linking of effects; it is the result of measures, phenomena and occurrences that are quite varied and indeed also contradictory. Fascisation effects can be strategically planned, yet they can also come about unplanned and then be taken advantage of: fascism is, like all politics, also an improvisational art. We can assume elastic and occasionally also surprising combination possibilities, for fascisation’s linkages incorporate many elements that would be overburdened by the weighty concept of fascism on their own, or that are even distinctly ‘intended’ to be non-fascist but still become part of a fascist bundling.[15]
From the perspective of theoretical and conceptual history, we can continue to note that ‘fascisation’ can only be meaningfully used to refer to the fascisation of something – that is, of something not yet fascist. In this way, the processual concept of fascisation can help us to conceive of the potential observed by Lukács for fascism and democracy to be combined in a way that is not simply antagonistic. There is a functional dependence or cohesion here that needs to be historically substantiated, but that can be taken for the time being in a conceptual-logical sense: fascisation can only occur within a milieu of democratic structures that then become bundled, deployed for non-democratic purposes and reoriented.[16]
Combinability and functional dependence explicitly do not imply an equating of democracy and fascism, yet they do signal a turn against the typical liberal externalisation of fascism as democracy’s Other. Indeed, the concept of fascisation allows a more precise investigation into the ‘intimacy’ (as Hölderlin would say) of the two, and this is another long-neglected legacy of historical fascism theories.[17]
Historical perspectives I: colonialism
The concept of fascisation has a theoretical and conceptual history of its own that allows us to better describe and analyse our present. Yet it can also be put to use for retrospective historical analyses and re-readings of historical theories, including those that do not explicitly employ the ‘-ation’ form.
The processual concept of fascisation allows for large spatial and temporal dimensions to be examined. Fascisation becomes graspable as a longue durée phenomenon operating within the history of colonialism and capitalism. The concept of fascisation thus removes itself from the epistemological privileging of European fascisms of the 1930s and 1940s. More specifically, it prompts explanations for these historical forms long at the centre of attention to be developed out of the longer history of fascisations, as opposed to beginning with these forms and then using them to explain all fascisation phenomena. As far as theoretical history is concerned, this approach implies closer attention be paid to a ‘Black radical tradition’ that has been investigating fascism, racism and colonialism for more than a hundred years, but that was long marginalised within European theories of fascism.[18]
This connection was made strikingly clear by the exhibit Aber hier leben? Nein danke (But live here? No thanks), an exhibit on surrealism and antifascism displayed in the Lenbachhaus gallery in Munich during the winter of 2024/25.[19] The surrealists, the exhibit made clear, were opponents of both fascism and colonialism, and, when they were forced to flee from fascism’s advance in Europe, some of them – such as André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Wilfredo Lam and André Masson – ended up, of all places, in colonial Martinique, where they were received by Suzanne and Aimé Césaire.[20] Previously, the Césaires had been loosely connected to the surrealist group in Paris and also fought against colonialism and fascism – from the standpoint of the colonised. This inversion of perspective was documented in Aimé Césaire’s famous 1950 Discourse on Colonialism: whereas Europeans saw fascism as the absolute low point of human civilisation in its entirety, the colonised knew that fascism was the return to Europe of the unfettered exterminationist violence it had spread around the world through the process of colonisation.[21]
Césaire spoke of a choc en retour, a ‘return shock’, which is rendered in both English and German with the peculiar yet certainly fitting term ‘boomerang effect’. Not only does the concept of fascisation register the ‘shock’ of fascism’s impact; it also traces fascism’s entire trajectory or flight path, charting out a colonial history of ‘fascism before fascism’.[22] And this makes fascism itself easier to grasp. As Césaire already knew in 1950, the false sense that fascist violence suddenly emerged from thin air is linked to the assessment that it suddenly disappeared with the ‘official’ victory over European fascism. For colonial subjects who resumed their struggles after the Second World War only to be repressed yet again with brutal violence, this assessment was an illusion. With the processual concept of fascisation, we are also able to better grasp the continuity of ‘fascism after fascism’ than with the systemic concept of fascism.
Historical perspectives II: origin in permanence
From Karl Polanyi’s 1940s exile, there survives a fragment titled ‘The Fascist Virus’.[23] In it, Polanyi traced fascism all the way back to the emergence of capitalism and the ‘so-called original accumulation’ of capital (as Marx referred to it in chapter 24 of Capital).[24]
The current ‘fascist attack on the […] rights of the working class’, the theorist and historian of The Great Transformation recognised, ‘is merely the most recent and most virulent outburst of the anti-democratic virus which was inherent in industrial capitalism from the start.’ In the early modern era, the capitalist system could only be imposed through a ‘brute force’ that still latently operates behind all ‘mute compulsion’ of the market. At any time, violence can be retrieved in its raw form should the system come under attack, fall into crisis or require a technological overhaul.[25]
For Polanyi, imposing capitalist forms of intercourse required ‘re-education’: it literally had to be drilled into people that no possibilities for life or survival can exist outside the system of wage-labour and private property. Similarly, Marx wrote that the freshly proletarianised had to be ‘whipped, branded, and tortured in accordance with grotesquely cruel laws until they acquired the discipline that the system of wage-labour demands’. In the violent excesses bound up with this system of conditioning, Polanyi saw a prefiguration of the violence shaping his own present. This idea becomes especially emphatic at the end of the fragment, with the language itself becoming increasingly fragmented and the text suddenly seeming to speak in the staccato prose of the capitalist tyrant:
Such re-education involved dictatorial methods. One of the assumptions was: final inferiority of the people. They are altogether subhuman. They are ignorant and deserve to be so. They are powerless and rightly so. Contempt, in institutionalised forms, was the only adequate response. It might have been often deserved – that indeed is our point. But the inhuman situation had to be retained whether deserved or not… The disenfranchisement of the pauper followed from this lack of civil status… […] The anti-working class feeling now hardened into a metaphysical conviction of the moral superiority of the owning classes over the propertyless classes and the corresponding human inferiority of the latter as compared with the former.
Introducing, imposing and maintaining the capitalist property system goes hand-in-hand with drawing a quasi-metaphysical distinction between people and non-people, or humans and ‘subhumans’; Polanyi depicted dehumanising violence just as gravely as Césaire would depict colonial violence a few years later when he wrote of how the coloniser treats the colonised ‘like an animal’, not noticing that he ‘transforms himself into an animal’ in the process. All fascisation, ultimately, appears to at least threaten to lead to such forms of radical dehumanisation.
Here, we might recall the systematic dehumanisation of disabled people within fascist ideologies and movements, which, as Dagmar Herzog has demonstrated in her recent book, is by no means merely an incidental feature.[26] In the words of a chapter heading from Douglas Rushkoff, the historical and contemporary battle cry of fascism, one that has lasted from ‘original accumulation’ to today, can be summarised thusly: ‘Pedal to the Metal: Dehumanize, Dominate, and Extract!’[27]
What should ‘fascisation’ do?
The last theses have let us far afield from those contemporary phenomena to which the concept of fascisation appears most intuitively applicable. The concept is threatening to become so broad that it will hardly still be able to describe anything with precision.
Yet perhaps we should take seriously the idea that precisely in confronting current political threats, quite different activists and theorists experience time and again the need to find concepts that allow for disparate connections to be traced and deep historical linkages to be forged: the need for concepts that help with retrieving one’s own political struggle from an often oppressive and exclusivity-demanding present of sheer facticity – ‘From a fascism perspective, this has been a really great year’ (Jimmy Kimmel).
The concept of fascisation responds to this need by first articulating it as such, yet the concept cannot itself satisfy the need. Time and again, the connections must be conceptually unfolded, theoretically plausibilised and historically-empirically substantiated. The concept of fascisation that has emerged increasingly often in recent months provides no answer itself, but it (hopefully) opens new questions.[28] At some point, its utility will be evaluated according to whether the questions it provoked did justice to the urgency of our situation.
Translated by Adam Baltner
[1] This text is based on a lecture held at the Berlin Center for Research on Antisemitism on the invitation of Felix Axster. It formed part of ‘Faschisierung – analytische Perspektiven, Schauplätze, Gegenstrategien’, a lecture series organised by the working group on fascisation of the Alliance for Critical Scholarship in Solidarity: <https://krisol-wissenschaft.org/en/fascisation/>.
[2] Zaoui, Pierre 2024, ‘On fascization’, Eurozine, available at: <https://www.eurozine.com/on-fascization/>.
[3] I followed this approach in my study of class formation in nineteenth-century German literature, which was recently translated into English for the Historical Materialism Book Series: Eiden-Offe, Patrick 2023 [2017], The Poetry of Class: Romantic Anti-Capitalism and the Invention of the Proletariat, translated by Jacob Blumenfeld, Leiden: Brill.
[4] See Toscano, Alberto 2023, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, London: Verso; Paul, Morten 2024, ‘Verstehen / Verhindern: Vier Theorieszenen der Faschismustheorie. Teil 1: 1969, 1923, Blog des Kulturwissenschaftlichen Instituts Essen, available at: <https://blog.kulturwissenschaften.de/verstehen-verhindern-i/>; Paul, Morten 2024, ‘Verstehen / Verhindern: Vier Theorieszenen der Faschismustheorie. Teil 2, 1937, 1977’, Blog des Kulturwissenschaftlichen Instituts Essen, available at: <https://blog.kulturwissenschaften.de/verstehen-verhindern-ii/>; Paul, Morten (ed.) 2026, Was war Faschismustheorie? Berlin: Verbrecher; Esposito, Fernando and Morten Paul (eds.) 2027, Faschismus: Ein Reader, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
[5] Lukács, Georg 2014 [1968], ‘Blum Theses’, in Tactics and Ethics: Political Essays, 1919–1929, translated by Michael McColgan, edited by Rodney Livingstone, London: Verso; Lukács, Georg 1989 [1982], Wie ist die faschistische Philosophie in Deutschland entstanden? in Zur Kritik der faschistischen Ideologie. Berlin: Aufbau; for an English translation of the foreword to Wie ist die faschistische Philosophie in Deutschland entstanden? see Lukács, Georg n.d. [1982], How did fascist philosophy Come About in Germany?, translated by Anton P, available at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/fascism/foreword.htm>.
[6] For a very good overview and analysis rooted in critical solidarity of the impact of the KB, see Steffen, Michael 2002, Geschichten vom Trüffelschwein: Politik und Organisation des Kommunistischen Bundes 1971–1991, Berlin: Assoziation A.
[7] In particular, these polemics took aim at the West German government’s Anti-Radical Decree of 1972, which banned many organized leftists from the civil service; against the Mescalero Affair, a tabloid media frenzy over a critical obituary published in the University of Göttingen student newspaper following the assassination of West German Attorney General Siegfried Buback; and against the repeated suspensions of University of Hannover professor Peter Brückner, who came under fire for his affiliations with the New Left. Today, one can observe similar repression directed especially at students and scholars involved in Palestine solidarity.
[8] Glucksmann, André 1972, ‘Fascismes: l’ancien et le nouveau’, Nouveau fascisme, nouvelle démocratie, 310: 266–334. My thanks to Tom Holert for alerting me to the history of French fascisation theory.
[9] See Paul, Morten 2025, ‘Faschismus als Lustgewinn’, Berlin Review, 9, available at: <blnreview.de/ausgaben/2025-03/morten-paul-faschismus-als-lustgewinn#>. In addition to Reich, another exponent of this intellectual current in the 1930s was Georges Bataille, whose 1933 essay ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’ was notably reissued as a German book by the Berlin publisher Matthes & Seitz in 2026. The 1970s French discourse on fascism found its way into the German debate via citations of Deleuze/Guattari in the footnotes of Klaus Theweleit, who extended the analysis to aspects of gender politics. Theweleit’s book Male Fantasies was also recently reissued by Matthes & Seitz in 2019, to great acclaim.
[10] See Strick, Simon 2026, Faschisierung: Fluchtlinie des Digitalen. Berlin: Suhrkamp. The public lecture series ‘Prompting Fascism: Medien/Theorien des neuen Faschismus’, organised by Katrin Köppert of Humboldt University’s media studies department for the 2025/26 winter semester, offered a wealth of material and theoretical insights: <medienwissenschaft-berlin.org/prompting-fascism-medien-theorien-des-neuen-faschismus/>.
[11] Herzog, Dagmar 2025, ‘The New Fascist Body’, e-flux, 157, available at: <https://www.e-flux.com/journal/157/6776787/the-new-fascist-body>.
[12] The essay was reissued in German by the Freising publisher tentare in 2024; the English version can be found at: Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Jean-Luc Nancy 1990 [1981], ‘The Nazi Myth’, translated by Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry, 16, 2: 291–312. See also Jesi, Furio 2025 [2000], Spartakus: Symbologie der Revolte, translated into German by Frank Engster and Cinzia Rivieri. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz; Engster, Frank and Cinzia Rivieri 2024, ‘Wer ist Furio Jesi? Der italienische Theoretiker und Aktivist arbeitete zu Mythos, Marxismus und dem Konzept der mythologischen Maschine’, neues deutschland, available at: <www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1181146.furi-jesi-wer-ist-furio-jesi.html>; Jesi, Furio 2024 [2000], Spartakus: The Symbology of Revolt, translated by Alberto Toscano, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[13] See Amlinger, Carolin and Oliver Nachtwey 2024 [2022], Offended Freedom: The Rise of Libertarian Authoritarianism, translated by Jan-Peter Herrmann; Amlinger, Carolin and Oliver Nachtwey (translation forthcoming) [2025], Destructive Desires: Elements of Democratic Fascism, Princeton: Princeton University Press; Hochschild, Arlie Russell 2024, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, New York: The New Press.
[14] Allow me to cite one of my early works here: the article ‘Die innere Sicherheit des Staates ist die reale Ökonomie des Subjekts’, which I wrote more than a quarter century ago with ‘j.’ and ‘m.’, and which we published in the fourth issue of our journal karoshi: Zeitschrift für den plötzlichen Arbeitstod: <www.studienbibliothek.org/webarchiv/karoshi/k4/1is.html>. Fascisation is clearly, as Alberto Toscano observes, ‘a matter of returns and repetitions’.
[15] A possible example here is contemporary ‘authoritarian’ or ‘carceral anti-antisemitism’, which must be viewed in Germany and elsewhere as a driver of fascisation – such as when it is used to force academics and universities into line. See Attia, Yael et al. 2025, ‘Towards a Non-Carceral Anti-Antisemitism’, The Diasporist, available at: <https://thediasporist.de/towards-a-non-carceral-anti-antisemitism/>. See also Ullrich, Peter 2024, ‘Wird ausgerechnet Anti-Antisemitismus zu einem Katalysator der autoritären Wende?’, Luxemburg: Gesellschaftsanalyse und linke Praxis, available at: <zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/anti-antisemitismus/>; Ullrich, Peter 2025, ‘Hochschulproteste zum Gaza-Krieg, autoritärer Anti-Antisemitismus und das Ende der Kritik’, in Hawel, Marcus et al. (eds.) 2025, Wozu noch kritische Wissenschaft, Hamburg: VSA.
[16] This means, moreover, that the concept of fascisation can only meaningfully be applied to states and societies that are (still) somehow democratic. It would probably be nonsensical to speak of fascisation processes in North Korea, and in relation to Iran or Russia, talk of fascisation would at the very least be imprecise.
[17] Worth rediscovering today, in addition to his mostly forgotten novels, is Hermann Broch’s theory of fascism and mass delusion. See McGaughey, Sarah et al. (eds.) 2023, Massenwahntheorie und Friedenspoetik: Hermann Broch und die bedrohte Demokratie des 20. Jahrhunderts, Berlin: De Gruyter; Eiden-Offe, Patrick 2011, Das Reich der Demokratie: Hermann Brochs ‘Der Tod des Vergil’, Paderborn: Fink.
[18] See Thompson, Vanessa E. 2025, ‘Schwarze Kritik des Faschismus: Warum abolitionistische Perspektiven für sozialen Antifaschismus unverzichtbar sind’, Luxemburg: Gesellschaftsanalyse und linke Praxis, available at: <zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/schwarze- faschismuskritik/>.
[19] Rich in materials and brilliantly curated, this exhibit has been documented in a weighty tome of a catalogue that is worth examining: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau München et al. (eds.) 2025, Surrealismus + Antifaschismus: Anthologie, Berlin: Hatje Cantz.
[20] They fled aboard the cargo ship Capitaine Paul Lemerle, which had been rented by Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee; other passengers included Anna Seghers, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Victor Serge. The history of the ERC has been adapted by Netflix with the limited series Transatlantic (2023).
[21] Césaire, Aimé 2000 [1950], Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review. Suzanne Césaire began her article ‘1943: Surrealism and Us’, which was originally published in the magazine Tropiques, with a pronouncement that makes clear it was precisely its anticolonial engagement that saved Surrealism from the fate of other ageing avant-garde movements: ‘Many believe Surrealism dead. They have said as much. Pure infantilism: its activity today extends throughout the world and surrealism remains bolder and more tenacious than ever’: Césaire, Suzanne 1996 [1943], ‘Surrealism and Us’, in Richardson, Michael (ed.), Refusal of the Shadow, translated by Krzysztof Fijałkowski and Michael Richardson, London: Verso, p. 123. On the Césaires’ struggle and especially their relationship to Surrealism, see Kelley, Robin D.G. 1999, ‘A Poetics of Anticolonialism’, Monthly Review, available at: <monthlyreview.org/articles/a-poetics-of-anticolonialism/>.
[22] In the summer of 2024, I read Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 Gravity’s Rainbow for the first time and could only marvel at how clearly Pynchon illustrated – years if not decades before history scholarship – how many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust had learned their genocidal craft in the colonies during the German genocide of the Nama and Herero.
[23] Polanyi, Karl 2018, ‘The Fascist Virus’, in Economy and Society: Selected Writings, edited by Michele Cangiani and Claus Thomasberger, Cambridge: Polity.
[24] Translator’s note: Chapter 24 in the first edition of Capital, Volume 1; for a new English translation of this edition, see Marx, Karl 2024 [1867], Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, translated by Paul Reitter, edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marx quotations in what follows are taken from this translation.
[25] For an analysis of the relationship between systemic compulsion and violence, see: Mau, Søren 2023, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital, London: Verso. The idea that ‘original accumulation’ is not a concluded historical phase but rather one that must be conceptualised as having an ongoing latency that manifests itself in ever new accumulation spurts has been proposed time and again in recent years. On the historical parallels between ‘original accumulation’ and contemporary phenomena such as data mining, virtual enclosures and digital extractivism – and between the social struggles linked to both (2025 marked the 500-year anniversary of the crushing of the German Peasants’ War) – see Maci, Enis 2025, ‘Gentle Lands, oder: Landnahme 1525/2025’, Berlin Review, 12, available at: <blnreview.de/ausgaben/2025-06/enis-maci- gentle-lands-oder-landnahme-1525-2025>.
[26] Herzog, Dagmar 2025, The New Fascist Body, Berlin: Wirklichkeit.
[27] Rushkoff, Douglas 2022, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, New York: W.W. Norton.
[28] A wealth of material, mainly in German but also in English, can be found on the webpage of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation: <www.rosalux.de>.
