ACFM - ACFM Trip 42: Fascism

Episode Date: April 21, 2024

A lot of people are saying that fascism is on the rise. But what are we pointing to when we call a system, or a person, fascist? On this Trip, Nadia, Keir and Jem map out a complicated ideology, from its roots in 19th century industrialisation to its resurgence in ethnonationalism and eco-apartheid. Exploring how […]

Hello, weird lefties. It's Nadia here. Before we launch into the episode, some news for you. Next month, in May 24, we'll be taking ACFM to How the Light Gets in, the Festival of Philosophy and Music, which is taking place this year in the beautiful hey-on-why. We'll be recording an ACFM episode live at 1.30 p.m. on Bank Holiday Monday, the 27th of May, on the topic of destiny. Can we ever have control over our destinies, or do social conditions always control our lives? And perhaps it's your destiny to join us on the banks of the River Y on that bank holiday weekend. You can buy tickets to how the light gets in on the festival website, how the light gets in.org. And ACFM listeners can get 20% of festival passes by using a special code at the checkout, Novara 20. Now, on with the show.

Welcome to ACFM, the Home of the Weird Left. I'm Nadia Idol, and I'm joined as usual by Keir Milburn. Hello. And Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're tackling the subject of fascism. So guys, why are we talking about fascism today? Because we thought we'd had enough fun.

Yes, we don't need a nice grim topic to round off our frivolity. No, to get serious for a moment, it's because there's a rise of the far right globally, basically. Probably over the last 10 years, particularly over the last sort of, five years, you might say, as the sort of the left project got defeated in various ways around the turn of the decade. The far right are likely to do very well in the European elections this year, and the left's likely to do badly. There's also a fairly strong possibility of a second Trump presidency. We can discuss later on whether all these things are fascists or not, but these are certainly the contemporary far right. You have leader such as Meloni in Italy, who's party directly

traces back to Mussolini's party. Got like Auburn in Hungary, for instance, Modi in India, Le Pen in France, from the possible government, but anyway leading Macron round by the nose and setting a agenda in France, etc. And then a bit closer to home, it's likely that we're going to have a Star-led Labour government

at some point this year. And there's a big worry, I think, a danger that that will set the ideal context for a sort of a right-wing surge, perhaps in a right-wing government. towards the end of the decade because it's highly likely that Stama-led government will not tackle any of the major and accelerated crises we're faced with. So, yeah, all of that sets us up quite nicely to talk about fascism.

In fact, China Mayville made a statement a little while ago saying that we live in a utopia. Unfortunately, it's not our utopia. It's the far-rights utopia. It's the fascist utopia, as in this situation we're in now in which there's a global rise. far right is way beyond even the wildest imaginings of far right activists from like the 90s and 2000s I think so not a lot of jokes in that but that's why I want to talk about it no I think that is the good reason for talking about it there's a lot of interesting philosophical and theoretical stuff to say about fascism and the concept of fascism

in some way some of my own work is about trying to think through like what are the you know what's what is the opposite of fascism and what isn't the opposite of fascism There's always a lot to say about it, but the urgency comes from this question of, to what extent, are the forces that we're now facing iterations of fascism? And to what extent does it matter analytically, whether that's the case or not? Yeah, that's all really interesting stuff. I guess I'm also interested in, you know, some of the historical information about, especially from the 20th century, like how did fascism arise, what's the origin of those movements? but also, I suppose, in the 21st century, what are the conditions that lead to the rise of fascism? I am also interested in who calls who fascists and why, and in that distinction, which I hope we are going to have time to explore,

between what we would call far-right movement and real existing fascism. If there's going to be a distinction between socialism and real existing socialism, then I'd like to define terms a little bit, because I feel like the term fascist is banded around a lot, so it will be good to understand what we're actually talking about. So all of those reasons and everything you guys talked about just a minute ago. But before we get into this episode, we should mention that you can go even weirder and leftier by subscribing to our newsletter,

which we will now be sending out with every new trip. So not more than once a month, with bonus content and updates from the whole ACFM crew. To sign up, go to Navarra.media forward slash ACFM newsletter. And for more music and less of our chat, follow the ever-expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify. Just search for ACFM. Also, we're asking people to give us a five-star review on whatever platform you listen to this podcast on. They really put a smile on our face and, yeah, we love to see the lovely things that you write

and also really helps with the algorithm. So thank you for those who have already given us those reviews. And to support us, to keep bringing you even more from this ACFM Cosmos, please do support our hosts, Navarra Media, for as little as one pound a month by going to navara.media forward slash support. We should play the song, I was going to fight fascism by the band Soccer 96 from 2020. I actually don't know anything about Soccer 96. I really know this song, but it's really funny.

I was going to fight fascism, but I just got a bit tired. Then the next line, I was going to fight fascism, but I didn't really want to be rude. And the last line is, I was going to fight fascism, but I looked over at Jenny, and I don't think Jenny was fighting fascism, so I didn't do it either, which is very funny. I was going to fight fascism. But honestly, I just had so much all. You literally wouldn't believe it. I was going to find fascism.

I was going to. I was going to. But I looked over and Jenny and I don't think Jenny was fighting fascism. So I didn't either. I was going to. Right, guys, let's get back on to the topic. How are we going to start talking about fascism?

Well, we should probably go back to a mid-20th century fascism, which we had the term, arose and think a little bit about mid-20th century fascism. I'm not so interested in like a taxonomical debate about like what contemporary movements fit into this definition of fascism, etc. But like we need to understand 20th century fascism to understand what's different about the contemporary rise of the far right. What can we learn for the mid-20th century and what's different? So we have to start with fascism, defining it in some sort of way

in terms of its origins in Italian fascism. and then German Nazism, and then we can discuss some of the surrounding projects and how closely linked they are. So the term fascism originates an Italian ultra-nationalist movement, which emerges in the wake of World War I. The context is Italy has only been like a nation state for a few decades at that point. It's always important to remember that. If you want to understand something about why Germany and Italy

develop this ultra-nationalist ideologies in the 20th century, It's partly to do with the fact that they weren't countries. They didn't exist as nation states. There was Prussia and there was a load of tiny little countries that weren't even really countries that eventually got unified into Germany. And then Italy was essentially a collection of city states and their surrounding territory that was more or less under the thumb of various other like imperial bodies like the Napoleonic Empire

or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. etc. So the whole question of like, well, what does it mean to have this country called Italy or what does it mean to have this country called Germany is sort of live for people and contentious for people in a way it's not really necessarily in places like Britain to the same extent. And also there was a broad sense in Italy that Italy had not done well out of the First World War even though they'd technically been on the winning side. And the term fascist, the term actually comes from the Fasquez, which is a traditional symbol of military authority, dating back to the Roman Empire or even the Roman Republic, it refers to the symbol of a bundle of sticks, which are tied together, symbolising the idea that through unity, through singular collective action and deference to authority, you know, the great Roman people become this unbeatable military force, whereas if they were divided, like the bundle of sticks disaggregated, they could be easily broken and snapped.

that tells you something about the idea of fascism, which begins with a paramilitary movement, this paramilitary movement under the leadership of Benito Misalini morphs into a political movement and a political party. Eventually, in 1922, they march on Rome and effectively take over the government. Through a sort of a quasi-coot, they become the effective government of Italy. Yeah, it's worth thinking about there what's going on with fascism

because this is, even before fascists start to, to discover things like eugenesis race theory, as happens in Nazi Germany, what they're really obsessed with is this idea of order, of national unity, of uniform, homogenous identity, absolute unity and absolute deference to authority, the singular authority of the leader, the duchet, the leader in Italy, the Fuhrer in Germany. And arguably, those are kind of key features of fascist ideology. And then fascism obviously has its greatest political success. in Germany, in the form of Nazism, and Nazism develops into this distinctive form of fascism, really,

which is particularly distinctive, as I say, for its embrace of forms of race theory, which, I mean, even for the Italians, it has to be said, like, seem pretty wacky, seem pretty far out, and become more and more central to its ideology as the war with the ally powers develops, and as the whole kind of situation becomes more and more intense in various ways. So then there's all kinds of historical debates over really whether all these various other nationalist, militarists and far-right parties and organisations and regimes which emerge in different parts of Europe over the course of the 20s, 30s and 40s. There's all kinds of debates as to whether those are properly fascist. So is this necessarily a product of the nation state? As in we would not, even movements expressing similar ideas would not have had this.

form. And I mean, obviously you're saying there's an origin to the term. And maybe movements existed before that, but they weren't called fascist. But the nation state is important here, isn't it? Yeah, totally. I mean, I would say, in a nutshell, what happens as a result of the process of industrialization and urbanization and modernization is that the forms of community that people have experienced for hundreds of years, like pre-industrial agricultural societies, are broken up in very traumatic ways. And they're replaced by different forms of what Benedict Anderson famously calls imagined communities, is much larger scale kind of collective bodies.

So rather than basically living your life in terms of a kind of set of face-to-face relationships in your local village and the nearest market town, you're living in this imaginary space which is constructed by the existence of newspapers and railway networks and the political institutions, the space of Britain or France or something like that. And there's basically two big types of imagined community that emerge out of that society in the 19th century. And the one is the nation, the modern idea of the nation

as a political formation, which there's all kinds of arguments as to what extent you can call ideas of nationhood that predate the 19th century. You can call them sort of nationalisms. There's all kinds of arguments as to whether, for example, the idea of the nation of Israel shows that the idea of the nation is really, really old. But a lot of historians would say really the whole idea of the nation as we think of it today only really gets invented like in the early 19th century.

And then the other big form of imagined community is the left idea of imagine community, which is the idea of the class, the idea of the social class as being the thing which will unify a set of interests and become a basis for collective action. And the main forms of political party that emerge in the over the course of into the late 19th century, there's the liberal parties which sort of are dependent upon an idea of the nation, but it's the nation as a political space within which norms of liberalism will be upheld. So, you know, private property, free speech, individual rights. There's conservatism, which is really about putting the idea of the nation above any kind of liberal aspirations. So it's the idea that the nation state is the thing which must prosper.

the nation must go forward and expand or defend its borders even at the expense of any kind of individual rights and without any notion of equality. And then there's the socialist, communist, communist idea of the class, the class being the basis of political organisation and political expansion. And that's an idea which, you know, very rarely, if ever, actually manages to capture the imaginations of enough people to become sort of normative in any particular country, arguably even in Russia. It's a sort of mixture of nationalism and socialism that

becomes the basis for Bolivism. I mean, arguably, there's a whole question we don't have to get into it. I'm just answering. So I'm just saying, yeah. You know, I mean, one way of understanding fascism is it is just a kind of pathological version of nationalism. Like once its nationalism carried to a certain logical conclusion, it's this idea that there's this coherent community, this homogenous community, which is defined by a single language, a single culture, single identity and within which kind of relationships of inequality between different social groups don't matter. Like it doesn't matter really that much if you've got massive inequality as long as everybody's on board with this general project of national pride and expansion,

etc. And it's pretty obvious how that's going to lead to certain kinds of militarism. It's going to lead to certain kinds of authoritarianism. And of course, that's always one of the, one of the problems in 20th century politics is always the question of, well, can you ever differentiate nationalism from a kind of proto-fascism? One of the questions for radicals, like for much of the 20th century, is actually, well, how much nationalism can you tolerate, say, as part of an anti-colonial struggle? Because the fear is if the organising ideology, say, if your anti-colonial struggle is basically a nationalistic one, rather than one which has some more utopian internationalist aspiration or what have you, but then there's always a risk that it can end up mutating into

fascism. I mean, that's the other thing you'd add to that account is like imperialism. The late 19th century is like this big sort of period of like the race for Africa and this sort of like imperialist expansion. That's a race in which Italy in particular, but Germany also to some degree loses out in and misses out on, you know. And so one of the things that Mussolini wants to do is to get an Italian empire. Yeah, get a colony. Get a colony, and he famously invades Ethiopia to try to do so. Yeah, it doesn't even go that well.

Invade the one bit of Africa that's managed to resist, being colonised by all the bigger, better military powers. Yeah, there might be a reason why it's the only one that's not in somebody else's empire. And, of course, like, Nazism, it is a response to all sorts of things, and we need to come back to the context of, like, the socialist movement and the Revolution of Russia as a spurter to the development of fascism, but like the whole idea of Leibn's room, you know,

the need for Germany to have an empire and have living space, etc. That's also developed in reference to not just imperialism, but like, you know, settler colonialism. The US was the model for Leban's realm, the elimination of the Native American populations, etc. We simply have to play Heaven 17 fascist groove thing from 1981. So Heaven 17 are a synth pop band from Sheffield. They formed when Martin Ware and somebody else, I can't remember, left the Human League.

For some reason, Sheffield was like the absolute centre of like synth pop and experimental synth music, wasn't it, in the late 70s? ABC, Human League. Also Cabaret Voltaire, by far, by far the most important. More important than Manchester, honestly. More important than Manchester. Yeah, no, it is. It's interesting. That was its moment, though, music.

Anyway, look, this is their first debut single after they leave the Human League. So you have to situate, I suppose, in the early 80s with the rise of facturism and Reaganism and the fascist groove thing they're talking about is Faturism and Reaganism. In fact, it contains the great description of Ronald Reagan as fascist god in motion, which is just superb. You have to situate in that early neoliberalism was accompanied by like an authoritarian populism and lots of people thought that we were heading into a new fascism at that point, basically. Spread it all across the land Don't just sit there on your ass

And look at funky chain dance Brothers sisters shoot your best We don't need this fascist Croup thing Brothers We don't need the fascist crouthing Brothers As you guys were speaking, I was just thinking about Jeremy's initial point about, you know, the leader, the authoritative figure.

And I wondered whether it's a character of fascism is that there needs to be a leader or are there forms that have developed? Maybe we'll get to this. That could be, you know, not leader less, but like without that specific figure. Or are we saying that one of the distinctions between fascism and nationalism is that you can have nationalism without that, you know, one. a quote-unquote charismatic leader. It's just something that I'm thinking about as you guys are speaking and mentioning, you know, different points in history.

This is one of the historiographical debates. It's one of the many debates over what really defines fascism because there's a kind of pop psychological version theory of fascism, not even pop psychological, psychological theory of fascism that, for example, Freud, I think, is quite committed to and Freud kind of borrows from the reactionary French social psychologist Gustavler And within that model, yeah, it is all about the leader. And it's not just that, it's that somehow fascism is like the tendential form of all possible

social relationships, all possible collectivities. According to that model, I mean, really what fascism is, is this situation in which, you know, every individual in the mass has this kind of personal imaginary identification with the lead. But then there's other historians of fascism who say, no, no, no, actually, if you look at the movements like Mussolini's fascism and the emergence of the Nazi party. Actually, it's the party. It's the mass political party

and with its paramilitary ring, which is really the distinctive feature of fascism. And they would say, they argue, look, there's been charismatic demagogues like forever. You know, you can think about like Julius Caesar in like, you know, Republican Rome. You know, he's a charismatic demagogue.

Like, you know, riles up the masses and gets a mass following and he's able to destroy the republic. public as a consequence. But he wouldn't say he was a fascist because he didn't have a party. He had an army, but he didn't have a political party. So other historians say, no, no, it's actually all about a particular form of the mass party.

And there's just no real agreement about this. It's the first of the many, many points on which we're going to have to say there is no agreement among commentators as to what is the distinctive feature of fascism. It's really important to stress the extent to which fascism is a direct reaction and an organised and concerted reaction against the rise of communism. And I think it's always really crucial for us to understand this polemically and analytically

because the liberal account of fascism, which everybody gets taught in school these days. You know, my kids are being taught today. Basically, what fascism was about, it was about the stuff I've already talked about, you know, the disappointment of defeat in World War I, the frustrated imperialism, it was about racism in the case of Germany.

But of course, the thing that kids in secondary school, don't really get taught because it's too political is the extent to which fascism was a direct response to the rise of Bolshevism and the success of Bolshevism and communism and the success of anarcho-syndicalism in Spain. I should say anti-communism

is arguably more foundational to fascist ideology than anything else, arguably even the nationalism in some sense, I would say. Historically, it emerges as a response to the threat of a successful socialist revolution taking place. under the conditions of defeat after World War I,

which you see happening in Russia. And if you're asking, well, where else has not done well out of World War I? You've got a lot of disgruntled soldiers around the place who might be radicalised by leftists and initiate a revolution, which is what happens in Russia. Well, the next places you're going to look are these places like parts of Eastern Europe, Italy, Germany. And to some extent, it's directly in order to stop that.

the kind of powerful elements, you know, people with money, people with resources, people with political capital, people who were influential in the military, start to coalesce around these emerging fascist ideas. It's directly in order to prevent socialist revolution from happening, basically, and also just to prevent peaceful liberal democracies, electing socialist governments. In both Germany and France, there are either direct revolutionary attempts which fail, or near revolutionary events. So you've got the two red years in Italy, etc. You've got the Spartacist uprising, in Germany, etc.

And of course, in Spain, you have, in fact, it's Franco's rebelling against an elected, vaguely leftist government, but then his rejection of that and insurgency against that provoked a revolution in Spain. So, like, there is this confrontation between the prospect of revolution, socialist revolution, or anarchist revolution, however you want to put it, and this upsurge in fascism. And I think it's important that it's probably an important point to make because that's one of the things that we have to say

about the contemporary rise of the far right as well. I wish there was a threat of socialist revolution, but you don't really look like it when you look around. And in fact, you know, what seems to be animating some of the far right are really, really trivial things, such as like casting decisions on TV. That is something we have to come back to when we talk about the nature of contemporary fascism.

is like is this one of the things that's missing or is it there in some other form this sort of threat of change or do they have to just like, you know, make a fantasy of the threat of wokeness in order to sort of hide the absence of the threat of revolution? Something to come back to. John McCutcheon is an American folk singer

and this is from a country. compilation that came out, I think around 2007, of songs about or from the Spanish Civil War, which is obviously one of the great pre-World War II struggle against fascism by the Allied forces of liberalism, socialism and communism and anarchism. The song is a memorial to the main American brigade of the international brigades who fought for the Republic against Franco, named after Abraham Lincoln, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. All the teachers, the artists, the workers who died, oh, the Abe Lincoln Brigade, their stories still thrill me.

We work side by side with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. No passer on, no pass at arm. So sang the Abe Lincoln Brigade. Cross the years and the oceans, you still sing the song, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. So far we've been speaking in quite abstract terms, but I'd be interested to think about the different forms that fascism takes in terms of its effect on people's everyday lives. So like whether, you know, when I think about fascism and fascist movements, I think of, you know, we were just talking about a reaction to socialist or anarchist movements. And those will have been manifested in, you know, practical senses in terms of people's communities and how they would organize and how people would relate to each other. But when I think of fascism, I think of Mosley in the black shirts, for example, I think about Cable Street.

I think about organized white men, you know, marching through the streets of London. Like, that's the image that comes to mind. So it would be interesting to talk about what other forms fascism takes in the kind of, like, public realm. That's not just, you know, rhetoric and leaders and speaking through certain, like, ideological narratives, you know, in the media, as we know, exist in 21st century. So like the actual practical, like what does this look like? How would I come up against it as a mixed heritage, you know, woman in London is an interesting thing to discuss as well. It's really important to stress this, that fascism emerging in the 20s and 30s and having as much success as it does is the thing that, apart from a few really paranoid liberals,

actually, like Gustav Le Bonn, is the thing that people felt that they just hadn't seen coming. it's the thing that both liberals and socialists and even conservatives actually had not really expected and that therefore various kinds of theories had to be developed or changed in order to explain how this had happened so it becomes this very urgent task and i mean i would say really more than is often explicitly acknowledged it's a dominant theme i would say in particular of liberal and radical actually even conservative actually it's a dominant theme of certain kinds of political theory for much of the 20th century.

So how do you explain fascism and how do you prevent it from happening again? So, yeah, there are all these different explanations. Let's do it vaguely chronologically. Okay. We didn't plan for it, listeners, but we'll give it a goal. Well, the earliest one I know of, I mean, would be a sort of Marxist explanation

because the communist international has to explain what's happening with fascism and obviously to a large extent that explanation has to do the explanations which you're offered as you would expect they're the materialists they're economic basically the argument is that fascism is the last redoubt of capitalism like trying to defend itself from the the growing inevitability of proletarian revolution so the explanations coming from people like trotsky emphasise the extent to which on the one hand And fascists are successful because, you know, they are backed by significant sections of the capitalist class. You get, you get, you know, big national newspapers are basically advocating for fascism. Even in Britain, you know, the Daily Mail famously advocates for the small British fascist movement explicitly and very explicitly advocates for Hitler and Mussolini. And it's seen, indeed, as seen as a sort of response to the inevitable crisis of imperialism as well,

that kind of nationalist ideology that underscores imperialism in its latest stage. can't sustain itself. The other thing about Trotsky's analysis, though, is he sort of identifies the social base for fascism as like the petty bourgeoisie, actually. Yes, that's right, yeah. And that is really important,

and that is important, isn't it? Petty bourgeoisie, it means literally the little bourgeoisie, it's the classic Marxian term for the middle class, so famously sort of contentious term because when Marx is talking about the petty bourgeoisie,

he's talking really about small business, small to medium-sized business people, you know, not sort of big business and not people who work for other people. It all gets a bit confusing because at the time that would include like everybody we would now think of as salary professionals because if you're like a doctor or a lawyer, even a lot of the times if you're like a teacher, what you're doing is you're managing like a small business basically, sort of selling your services with a little admin staff. But then over the course of the 20th century, of course, a lot of people doing those kind of jobs end up working for salaries for kind of big institutions rather than being

business owners and the whole kind of political character and social composition of the middle class changes a lot in later decades this is something's been written about by lots of sociologists Dan Evans has his book out very recently trying to review some of that literature with regard to the contemporary situation but from the time when Marx is writing up until I would say the 1950s really it's a pretty consistently observable phenomenon The thing about the petty bourgeoisie, they are characterised by being absolutely terrified of workers' movements, because they see any kind of workers' movement, any kind of extension of the privileges and power of the working class or the democratic capacity of the working class, they see it both as threatening their position in the political order because the working class is much bigger than them and can vote, you know, if it forms mass parties and participates in elections, it's got a lot more votes than they have. but also because if trade unions start to push up wages and the first people who are going to suffer, they think are not the big employers who can take the hit, but the small employers who are going to see their wage bills eating up all their profits. And just in terms of kind of social state and cultural status, you know, the petty bourgeoisie often live alongside the working class, unlike the proper bourgeoisie who are off in their grand villas somewhere. And so they have to define themselves socially and culturally against the working class. Like, the proper bourgeoisie who are off in their grand villas somewhere. And so they have to define themselves socially and culturally against the working class. very emphatically.

And so for all these reasons, historically, they're very easy to rile up. And if you want to get a sizable social constituency who you can persuade to be afraid of any sort of a workers' movement, then the petty bourgeoisie is where you're looking for that basis of support. And indeed, it's a pretty consistent phenomenon from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. The petty bourgeoisie do tend to be the bedrock of the most reactionary political movements. Is that a fair Samarique here? Yeah, no, totally.

But also I think we should mention, like, the other side, as in, you know, at least rhetorically, fascism is often against big capital or in particular finance capital. And so that is that petty bourgeois class or sector can feel itself like squeezed between the working class or at the time were very organized and like big capital or finance capital. And they're the ones who get squeezed by this. That's the big confrontation going on in the mid-20th century. That's right. And if you want to even get into this in more detail, then, I mean, the classic model of fascism from a sort of political sociology perspective is that it represents a sort of coalition between this petty bourgeois constituency, elements of the state, which it's always worth saying, you know, this is the period in history when for various techno-social reasons, the state really develops a lot of power. You can do a lot of things with the national government during this period of history that you couldn't really do before or after.

And also sections of industrial capital. I mean, what economists sometimes call corporatism, a kind of cozy relationship between the state and even some conservative trade unions and sections of industry is like central to the kind of economic model of fascism. And so, and that coalition is partly based on, it's based on a shared fear of workers' democracy,

but it also includes a shared sort of distrust of and resentment of the power of finance capital, because whether you're an industrial capitalist or whether you're a small shopkeeper in the Parisian suburbs, then the finance capitalists are the people lending you money and to whom you have to pay interest and like you sort of resent a bit. Classically, that is the kind of social basis.

Of course, at this point in the analysis, things are getting quite complicated because we're having to talk about different fractions of the capitalist class, different sections of the middle class, the petty bourgeoisie, and even we're having to observe that fascism doesn't really get anywhere without a significant section of the working class,

classically disenfranchised, disillusioned ex-soldiers, as forming part of its overall coalition. And this is the point at which even sort of Trotsky's version of Marxism tends to start to seem a bit clunky if you're really trying to explain all the fine-grained detailed here. And this is exactly why people like Antonio Gramsci in the 30s are trying to develop a much more sort of complex neo-Marxist political sociology because they're looking at the way in which this distinctive formation is emerging.

which sort of has to have certain levels of support from sections of the working class and sections of the middle class and sections of the capitalist class against various other sections of all those classes. Before we move on to Gramsky, though, I'm sure you will do, Jeremy. I already have.

I know, I'm dragging you back. Welcome to the Gramsci three-part series disguised as the fascism episodes. No, no, just to carry on on this line of thought around the social base being petty bourgeois and that sort of being constricted between finance capital and the working class of the socialist movement,

perhaps we put it that way, because it helps us to understand some other sort of ideological coordinates of, well, Nazism in particular. Like what goes along with like a confrontation between an organised working class and big capital as you get inflation, you get rising inflation base

because wages get pushed up and then employees push prices up, etc. Not all inflation, dear listeners, is cost by a wage, price spiral, but like you can definitely think about like the huge increase in inflation around the Weimar Republic, etc. And like the petty bourgeois in particular are most at risk of inflation. This confrontation might give one reason why anti-Semitism is such a important part of like Nazism in particular. You want some sort of ideology in which you can cover both

big capital finance and the organised working class. And like the idea of a Jewish conspiracy against the nation is the thing that can do that. Finance capital, or that's usury, that's the Jews, etc. And if you look at like the leaders and originators of the workers movement, you can see like Marx is Jewish, etc. And so like this phrase, Judeo-Bolshevism is a really big part of like Nazi ideology and like, you know, post-war fascism as well, I think. You can go from the social base to understand certain coordinates of Nazi ideology, which would appeal to that social base. we can move on that, Gramsley. Well, I think I've already said it, really.

I mean, what Gramsci brings to the analysis is just this observation that you can't really understand all these processes without understanding that social classes in the classic Marxian sense, the workers, the bourgeoisie, maybe the petty bourgeoisie in the middle, are themselves internally differentiated. And under these conditions of historic crisis, then different kinds of relationships will be formed between different class fractions.

I mean, this is a model of an example. analysis, which Marx himself already used in works like the 18th premier of Louis Bonaparte. So it's not like a total innovation even within Marxist theory. And also, Gramsci starts to try to integrate this purely economic or socioeconomic analysis with some attention to, you know, the specific cultural traditions in specific sectors. And, you know, he points to the ways in which, indeed, as you've just said, you know, for example, anti-Semitism is just available as a way of understanding the world in particular social context that means it can get activated under the conditions we've been describing.

You know, he talks about the way in which, for example, the historic fatalism of the southern Italian peasantry, you know, makes it very difficult to persuade them that there's any possibility of a sort of modernising project which could actually have egalitarian consequences. So it's difficult to recruit them to socialism and they become relatively sort of passive in the face of the upsurge of fascism. Of course, one of the sort of of logical conclusions of that Gramscian approach, although he doesn't really do this much himself when talking about things like fascism. One of the conclusions is also to start thinking about issues like, well, how are men and women experiencing these social traumas differently? And

a lot of subsequent analysis in more recent decades has looked at the way in which, for example, for men who had been traumatised by the experience of war and had just felt that, you know, the sacrifices made by them and their comrades doing World War I had just never really been rewarded. There's a kind of deep pool of resentment and anxiety and trauma which can then be channeled into the hyper-masculinity of fascist ideology. One of the most interesting examples of that is a book called Male Fantasies by Klaus Theo-Awalt.

It's Thelvovate, isn't it? Thévelvite. Sorry, my German pronunciation is almost as bad as my English. I'm not sure I've ever actually heard it spoken before, I've just read it. Learning through reading is a commendable thing. Yeah, it is. No, it's true. It's completely fine to misrepresent. That's a really good point.

You shouldn't be embarrassed about not having known how to pronounce stuff because that means you've been reading. It means you've been reading and you haven't had the privilege of, like, being in a seminar with some person pronounces it for you. Yeah. It's more my inability to pronounce common. an English word. It's a source of my embarrassment, I think. Well, you can, you can, you can, you can, you can, you can, you can, you can, you can use Welsh nationalism there as a, I think. Anyway, enough about me. And we've totally fucked up the

chronological order. But it's just a really interesting book because he's, he's reading like the diaries of pre-fascist organisations such as the Frey Corps, which is the sort of like armed squads of veterans of World War I who play a very important role in defeating the, the Spartacists apprising, etc. In Germany, and like he reads all this sort of material and he's sort of like, the thing that comes over is this absolute obsession with women. Women standing in for this formlessness, basically,

this sort of women's bodies being sort of leaking and formless and the need to put order on society. One of the approaches to fascism that sort of reveals something around both mailness and the mailness that comes out of the trauma of World War I. The obsession with women is also just part of the obsession with othering. So that seems to be one of the central things that fascism does is it's saying, you know,

it's putting borders around this is us and there are the other. And the other tends to be basically 50% of the population, women, and then like all minorities or some minorities, etc. And it's kind of the delineation of that borders is quite, seems like, quite a central theme to how authority is articulated. Yeah. Well, it's the fetishization of homogeneity is really central. I mean, the great Nazi slogan, the great Nazi slogans, one people, one empire, one leader. It's catchy, in it? Yeah, it's catchy.

It is catchy. Your pronunciation of that fascist slogan was a little bit too good there, just. Well, I make no apologies for my time in the Frye Corp. Bolshevism had to be stopped. I'm glad you can have some laughs around fascism. I'm expecting his Italian to be impeccable, and as we are all internationalists here. So to prove our internationalist affiliations,

we will all be pronouncing everything perfectly. We won't. No. But yeah, and so, which of course has huge implications for things like the philosophy of difference in France, in the 60s and 70s, etc. So this obsession with homogeneity is really crucial. But I also think it is important just sociologically,

rather than sort of psychosatially or philosophically just to observe that in the 1910s through World War I into the 1920s, there's a significant wave of sexual liberalisation, of feminist ideology, of pushing for equalisation of relationships between men and women, of women achieving suffrage rights in most countries. And particularly men from social groups

that have lost a great deal of socio-economic status already, they feel threatened by that. And I think, I also think one of the conditions for fascism success in the 30s in places like Italy and Germany is a reaction against that. I mean, it's very clear in Germany. It's clearly a reaction against sort of a wave of sexual liberalisation and a wave of feminism, basically. And I think that's really relevant to understanding the far right in the late 20th and early 21st century as well, actually, as a reaction against feminism. That's not to say it's important to stress when something is a reaction against feminism, against forms of feminism, it's not only,

men who can react against it. It's also women from social groups who don't feel they're able to benefit from that particular form of feminism. So women who aren't going to university or aren't going into professional jobs, women who are fulfilling a traditional role as housewives or what have you can also feel very, very threatened by kind of change in gender norms. And yeah, it's absolutely central to Nazi ideology and Italian fascist ideology, actually. The idea of the housewife is really really important. You know, the Italian mama making pastor at home and then the German, the Nazis become absolutely

obsessed with the idea that the role of the role of the woman in German societies do have babies and raised good Nazis. That is, they're obsessed with it. Women are some of the biggest perpetrators of the patriarchy because it's a closed system. It's clear that if you

think, like you said, if you think the change is threatening, then you know, defending that system which keeps you safe for not speaking out is actually like central. to how the system is kept to float at the first place. So it makes total sense that women would be some of the biggest speakers for exactly the sort of system that oppresses them. Just a historical note is that there was quite a movement

from the suffragette movement into the British Union, a fascists, led by Unity Midford. I know this is true, but I'm very uncomfortable with this. It's true in the first years of the 1920s in particular, Lots of people, especially outside, say, Italy, are quite confused about what fascism means. And there are lots of people who think it is a form of socialism. It's a form of socialism, but it's a form of socialism which is going to be less threatening or less all-encompassing or even, like, potentially, like, less totalitarianism.

And so, like, Bolshevism. I mean, it's a completely stupid naive. I'm not justifying it. You know, that's why you get, also mostly, goes from being a Labour politician to being the leader of the British Union of Fast. A lot of the leadership of fascism in different parts of the world isn't coming from the traditional parties of the right. It's people from the Labour movement, parties of the left, who think that marrying a kind of collectivist ideology to a nationalist ideology is the way to make it popular and the way to make it sort of viable. And what they're all reacting against to some extent is the perceived failure of liberalism. You know, the perceived failure of liberalism to prevent the disaster of World War I and then to prevent.

kind of socio-economic near collapse in places like Germany, Italy, even Britain in the 1920s. So it's terrible recessions. It creates a lot of suffering for a lot of people. That is the circumstances under which, indeed, you get people who have been very active in the suffrage movement, then becoming fascists. And it's just important to say that, I mean, I'm definitely not discrediting the suffrageting the suffragette movement by saying that this is a direct, necessarily a direct pipeline. No, well, most of them didn't. Let's be clear. Most suffrage jets. suffragists, let's always remember the suffragettes were a very small minority of the mass suffrage movement. Suffragettes was just the nickname for the direct action wing. Yeah, I just, no, the reason I think it's important to clarify that is because of the way the

term feminazis is banded around in popular culture of the 21st century. This is not what we are talking about on the suffrage movement and the suffragettes, even though a lot of them were upper middle class white women, what they did in terms of a certain time in history was really important. So I just want to make that clear. Yeah, yeah. Because you could just as easily, and many people try to, of course, with the horseshoe theory of politics, it's to try to associate fascism and socialism.

It's a far-right talking point that the Nazis were socialist of the left-wing. But Mussolini emerged out of the socialist movement, basically. Yeah, in the firm end, people can go in very different ideological and political positions. What we're trying to do is understand the social conditions and understand what it was like to be these people involved in different movements and what, you know, the logical conclusion

or different pathways were. I thought we would play Black Sabbath, Ferry's Wear Boots. So this is from their second album, Paranoid, 70 or 71. I think it's funny because it is one of the most elusive and it's one of the most elusive and non-explicit references to a confrontation with fascist or proto-fascist that I've ever come across because the story

the lyric just goes fairies wear boots and Ozzy Osborne always said oh it was about an incident where they got beaten up by him and some people got beaten up by skinheads but somehow they were comparing the encounter with skinheads

to a kind of mysterious and disturbing encounter with the fae people from like a sort of folk tale I know people are going to protest that early skinheads were not all fascist I'm going to say that that case is itself often overstated by skinhead apologists so it's not wrong

but it's also often overstated That song sounds like sets up a very nice scenario for a role-playing game It does, yeah, fairies with fascist fairies That's really good Going home Late as night Suddenly

I got a prize Yeah, I looked through a window I surprised what I saw Well, that takes us on quite neatly To another set of explanations for fascism that have been put forward, and we still inform a lot of contemporary political assumptions today. When we made down notes, we sort of divided these

between psychological, sociological, psychosocial, economic, political distinctions. But as we're talking about it, I think really, we're actually, we're talking about sort of leftist, liberal, and conservative explanations for fascism, actually. We've been through a set of radical explanations for fascism, and I should say, correct explanations for fascism.

But we should think about some of the less correct, or at least versions. So the liberal explanation for fascism is often tied to a certain kind of psychological explanation. There's this tradition which, I mean, you can trace it all the way back to Plato if you want to actually. You can certainly trace it to people like Alexander de Tocqueville in the early 19th century.

It gets very explicitly manifested in the work of this person I keep mentioning, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon. Gustave Le Bonn is taken up by Freud. in his classic study of group psychology and the analysis of the ego. And all of these guys have an account where basically large groups of people are inherently irrational and are probably incapable of collective rationality. And any large group of people, any collectivity on almost any scale, can only really exist by virtue of the fact that each individual in the group has some kind of individual

identification with some central points and central locus of identification which might be symbolic it might be the flag or the crown but it's probably an actual person so the model here is like the army with a general and the idea that well as soon as the general is killed on the battlefield the army will just disperse like like ants without a queen like running all over the place that but from that point of view which you know in my book common ground they sort of trace this back through at least to Hobbs in the Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century. From that point of view, there's two things to say. One is that actually all forms of collective action on any scale tend towards fascism. If you're not going out of your way to stop them becoming fascist, they'll become fascist.

For me, I mean, it's not just me. This has been a critique which people on the left have made for decades. This is a perspective which is born out of a kind of bourgeois fear of the collective, You know, the fear that if you let the collective really do what the collective would want to do, they'll come and tax you and they'll take your stuff and share it out amongst themselves. And you don't want that. But what emerges out of that desire, not really to have anything like collective action or democracy and thinking that they're always sort of bad and nasty, what emerges is this kind of assumption that on some level, a sort of mass society is going to tend towards fascism, unless you're making very strong efforts not to do it.

Then the form which this takes in like the post-war period is things like this American psychological idea of what they call the authoritarian personality. So it becomes this massive preoccupation of American psychology in the post-war period to try to explain how it is the terrible disaster of people supporting either fascists or communists, like could have happened, like all over Europe and to try to work out how you could possibly prevent that happening in America. America. And the idea that they have is this idea is that there's this, there's a particular sort of personality type, which is, which is, tends to be susceptible to these kinds of authoritarian collectivism. And that personality type is defined by not having a well developed enough ego. So it's having a well developed enough sense of your individual personality is supposedly the thing that's going to prevent you from becoming, you know, a part of of a fascist crowd, a fascist mob. And that is one of the things that eventually, I think,

it will eventually feed into the hegemony of neoliberalism, actually, eventually, because it's a perspective which really fetishizes the idea of the individual and the individual as independent from the rest of society, is the thing that is somehow the bullwalk against this horrible, undifferentiated phenomenon which you might, which you call totalitarianism or authoritarianism, which includes all forms of collective politics, including sort of socialism and fascism. And that is still absolutely persistent today. I mean, you absolutely see that. You see that in all the reactions just by British centurists, you know, to Corbyn and Corbinism. You see it right now in the people like freaking out over the fact that MPs are under pressure

not to vote for a war that 70% of people in Britain are opposed to, as if that's some like breach of the breach of the basic fundamental norms of civilisation. It's precisely, that attitude precisely inherits that ancient, well, ancient, that classic, like bourgeois fear of the mob. Also, like, the Times headline, sorry to interrupt, the Times headline the other day of like, who was it that was saying, oh, you've had, you've had, you've, you've, you've had your say now. You've made your point go home. That was it. Yeah, you've made your point go home, which is like the level of patronising, which is just, I mean, it speaks exactly what you're saying. Sorry to interrupt you, Jeremy, I just had to bring that up because it was intense.

headline to be normalized. We must never normalise this kind of language. No, no, you're right to interrupt. It was a good point to interrupt, actually. I mean, our perspective has to be that this is totally wrong. It's a shit analysis of the conditions for fascism. It's a shit analysis. And in fact, it's an analysis which can only lead to politics and policies and programs, which eventually just recreate the conditions for fascism. Because the point on which, in fact, even conservative analysts, I think, were correct. And in fact, a point they shared in many ways, the leftist analysts, even in the like the 1920s, was that really one of the historic conditions for fascism was the inability

of liberalism to actually manage an advanced industrialising capitalist society in a way that doesn't make life just horrible for so many people, that they become desperate for any sort of alternative. And that is a sort of political analysis, actually, of fascism, which runs through some sort of post-Marxist theory, but it's even shared by some conservatives, actually, Some conservative analysts of fascism would say that their line is, well, what actually explains fascism is when you get just a complete breakdown of social order, then you get to a point where people will just vote for anything, anything that seems like it's going to stabilize the situation and produce predictable outcomes, even if those predictable outcomes are going to mean a bunch of their neighbors are going to be hauled off to a concentration camp when they're people who they didn't really have a problem with a few months ago. They'll even accept that if that is the price of just, of it just feeling like the chaos is going to end. Just in passing, the authoritarian personality was written by O'Donno at all, wasn't it, from the Frankfurt School.

That's true. The Frankfurt, the authoritative personality book, who was it, who were the actual authors? It was Adorno. It's Adorno, yeah, and some others. But it was in response to this kind of demand from liberals. It was an intervention into this debate, which was essentially initiated by liberal. I don't, I mean, and I would say, okay, this is a whole side issue. Yeah, I meant to, I meant to mention that in passing.

No, you're right, no, you're right, because it's bad. We can't mention it and not mention that Adorno is involved. I mean, for me, that is one of the point to which Adorno's analysis become so psychologist that it really isn't Marxist in any meaningful sense, in my view. It's Freudian, but it's not, it's not Marxist in any meaningful sense, or socialist, more importantly. But I would say, but that is something that O'Donno scholars would very much want to use. argue with me about? What I wanted to go, though, was back to Hannah Arendt, her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is like written 51, so that's a year after, like,

the authoritarian personality book. Because I think that idea of totalitarianism, that plays a really, really central role in the worldview of contemporary centrists and sort of contemporary liberals. And so this is the idea that totalitarianism is something you can detect in both Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union and the Stalin, etc. And its feature size is something like, you know, the state wants to dominate every aspect of life, something like that. You know, so it's like this image of like a total state, if you want. So like 1984 by Orwell also is also famously the other book that centrist would read, read some effing Orwell as a famous Twitter personality puts it. So Nazism, therefore totalitarianism, also obviously like this fits very well in Cold War political priorities of the post-war period.

in which you want to link fascism to Stalinism. That analysis now looks, because of the contemporary rise of the far right and its character, it just looks like an unsupportable position now. Because the contemporary far right emerges far more out of, well, neoliberalism, particularly like right-wing libertarianism, almost like an anti-state ideology. That's one of the sorts of contemporary fascism.

If you want an example of that, just look at Argentina, Javier Millier, and once again, my pronunciation is probably not very good, who sees themselves as an anarcho-capitalists and is nicely lining up a huge amount of repression, etc., etc. That whole image of totalitarianism, fascism and Nazism as like the totalistism as like the total state, the state that wants to be in all of your business, etc. I think that's like the political imaginary that people most associate with fascism. And that's the thing that basically doesn't hold anymore. Or rather we can work backwards and say, That wasn't the key characteristic of fascism

because modern iterations don't display it. The other place we could go as well, if we want to think about psychological explanations for fascism and Nazis and would be somebody like Wilhelm Reich. Yes, sure. The mass psychology of fascism, which then in turn plays really big.

It's very influential on Deleuze and Guateri's work in the 1960s and 1970s. Yes, it is, yeah. The important thing about that is this idea that fashion Nazism, wasn't something that was imposed on people. You know, the masses had a desire for fascism. You know, it gave them something.

We've got to work out what the desire was, why there were these, like, libidinal investments in fascism. So you could say, well, it's a libidin investment in the leader, etc. But more than the leader in the sort of like the more general program, like what was it giving people, basically? Which is a very important question of like, what is causing this rise of the far right now? What are people seeing in it?

Why do they desire it? Yeah, that's a really good point. And there's an interesting continuity. I think, between, although they would never want to admit this, there's a continuity between people like Reich's analysis and Delis and Guittari's and then more recent analyses, people like LeClau and Mouf, like LeCloiremouf,

who also stress ideas like Libid and Non-Investment, the sort of psychic investment, in just some idea of society having some kind of stable order. One of their sources for that is also the conservative philosopher, Carl Schmidt.

I think all those analyses actually, they all converge quite interestingly, because you know, Gramsci is also a key source for the Clover move. What's really interesting about all that, actually, is there's even these people like Schmidt, who are historically associated with the political right, who have a set of observations, which I think people like LeCloem, a move of showing quite convincingly, you can make fit together with an analysis that includes Reich's observations, includes some of Freud, includes all these others. When you put all those things together, the people who really got it totally wrong are the liberals.

It's the liberals who had no good account for what they're. the hell happened under fascism. And that's partly why liberalism itself, like classical liberalism, became so weak politically for a generation, like Britain and the States. I mean, the great period of like welfare reform, which we're still struggling to cling on to the last residues of in places like Britain and the States, it happened during the period from like the 30s to the 70s when liberalism had been like really discredited, even among large sections of the political class and the ruling class. You know, then it sort of comes back with the neoliberal epoch.

One of the reasons liberalism was so discredited, actually, I think, is partly because both it hadn't been able to prevent the rise of fascism and also because its explanations for fascism was actually so weak. There are many, many, many, many recorded versions of the Italian partisan anti-fascist anthem Bella Chow. of historical debate over why a song which doesn't really mention fascism or the struggle against it explicitly became a partisan anthem. But I think my favorite and I think the most dance floor friendly version of Bella Chow that I know is a very interesting interpretation

by the New York-based Afro beat band Underground System. So, bella, chow, chow, bella, chow, chow, bella, chow. Laboro, infame, infame, for a pockhisto di, your life to consume, your life to consume. But it will be a journo, that all we'll laboreremo, laborerment more in liberty. So what do we think about the rise of the far right today? Is fascism happening today? and if so, why?

Yeah, those are two related questions, but different questions, I think. But like the, why is the far right rising sort of almost globally at the moment? I mean, the context is just the context that we're very familiar with. Post-2008, we're in a position, a situation of like secular stagnation, long-term stagnation of the economy, especially in a country like the UK, like the current economic setup is just not, you know, giving people the rising living stand, or not giving a wide enough section of the population, a rising living standards, you know,

enough to maintain political stability. And this has been a really, really big political instability from both the left and the right. Fortunately, most of the left saw like 2010 up surge. It got defeated at the turn of the decade, and we'll see where it goes from there. But like, that's opened up more space for the far right, which is why they'll do well in the European elections this year.

What's gone along with that has been another crisis. of liberalism, on particular crisis of neoliberalism, but like the crisis of liberal democracy, basically, and a real turn towards authoritarianism within liberal democracy. Once again, that sort of seems to parallel to some degree, perhaps to a slightly less an extent, the sort of mid-20th century context of the rise of fascism. And then the other thing, which is different, is you have climate change and ecological catastrophes, which are like really alter people's historical perspective, I think. But then we have to account for this other thing, which is like the far.

right seems to be emerging, partly out of the conservative movement in the U.S., etc., but like the conservative movement really inflected with a right-wing libertarian ideology, which would be sort of anti-state. Anti-state, as in rhetoric of anti-state and wanted to shrink the state and all that sort of thing, but also what goes along with that is like a real identification with almost like a celebration of the more repressive functions of the state, where in the thin blue line, et cetera, which actually that makes me think of like there is another context of that, which is there has been an upsurge of the left. You have the Black Lives Matter movement, me too, an upsurge of feminism. And in some ways, it's a backlash to that. The problem with

that is the left of the 2010s and into now, etc., the movement for black lives, etc. You know, that's on a minuscule scale compared to the challenge to capitalism in the early parts of the 20th century. But I think that's the sort of context. I think on the social psychology level, it's also like important to note that when things have been seemingly chaotic and out of control and you have a loss of living standard over a period of time, it's understandable on a social psychology level that people want control. And whether that control is interpreted as I want control over my life or I want somebody else to take control and just sort things out,

or basically just get shit together because everything feels like it's unraveling, I think that terrain lends itself for people to think, well, okay, well, what about this kind of extreme right-wing solution to my problem of feeling like everything's out of control? Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, that classic argument, which you get from, partly from people like Ernesto LeClau and Chantan Mouf, it's also a classic conservative argument, is that people will just end up voting for whoever seems to be able to bring order to the situation. But I would say a way of making the same observation from a more progressive perspective

is to say, well, people want some form of collective agency. And like even having the dictator who does things on your behalf, and even who does things to you, on some level is a way of experiencing a kind of collective agency, like more than just living in the totally disorganized anomic chaos of a kind of capitalism in which you're just subject to market forces and you're just dictated to by corporations and you have no recourse whatsoever. And I think it's the desire for collective agency. And this is really a classic leftist position on fascism. And I think it's completely the correct position that when you go through a historical period when, in particular,

liberals and centurists do everything they can bend over backward to frustrate demands for collective age forms of collective agency then the beneficiaries of that are always the right I mean this is the part I mean this is it's true that the scales are all very different and in many ways the conditions are different but it is also really difficult to get away from the observation that well the historic condition for the emergence of Nazism was especially the German liberals and the right wing of the social democratic party like just did everything in their power to prevent what looked like was going to happen which was a effectively a socialist communist revolution in Germany.

And they did everything they could to prevent it. They went as far as like trying to have Rosa Luxembourg assassinated. And it was the liberals and the right wing of the Social Democratic Party who were doing this, rather than the far right initially. And then having smashed the left, they created a vacuum, which was then filled by the Nazis. A vacuum in the space where some kind of opportunity for people to express the desire for collective agency needed to be. And it's very difficult to say there's no parallel with what's happened over the past five years in Britain and the States with the centrist establishment, just doing absolutely everything in its power to frustrate an emergent political, a democratic left movement in order to retain basically their own institutional privileges, which were threatened by that movement.

And now in that space that they've deliberately cleared out of left-wing forces is emerging, you know, a kind of right-wing populism. And that's what happened. That is how these things work. This idea that people will vote for whoever promises to bring them order. It's hard to look at like a vote for Trump. And to some degree, I vote for like Brexit. I'm not saying that everyone who voted for Brexit is a fascist at all. But like, you know, that doesn't look like a vote for order.

That looks like something else. You know what I mean? It's almost like a celebration of chaos. Really? I see it as a vote for order. No. I don't think Trump's attraction is that he's going to bring order. I think it's something else.

I think it's a much more nihilistic sort of proposition. It's almost like basically, people have argued this, that what you have today, even though I started off saying this is a fascist utopia, problems of that statement, it's almost like you have fascism now, but without a utopic element, there's a much bigger nihilistic element.

All right, okay, there was always a nihilistic element to fascism. I think you're right in terms of the US because of the Wild West imaginary, which exists and that whole, you know, make America great again is part of like actually let America be, you know, wild and trample over other people's rights, etc. Like there is a little bit of that narrative going on. But, you know, I think in general, like order is, I would say the order is part of it. Perhaps it's the question of that order for who or something.

Yeah, exactly. I was going to say, I also, I've never been happy. I was never very happy with Ernesto and Chantal using that language. And it's part of the argument made by me and Alex Williams in our most recent book, Hegemony Now, is that there's a problem with any approach to any of these issues, which doesn't pay attention to the basic question of different social groups having material interests. I mean, one of the great debates historically about fascism is was fascism a revolutionary movement or a counter-revolutionary movement. And there's a kind of liberal,

and even I would say, using this term casually, a sort of soft left analysis of fascism, which says, yes, it is revolutionary, and that it wants to completely overturn the existing liberal democratic social order and replace it with a completely different one, but it's a reactionary form of revolution.

And then there's a more, there's analysis, which indeed you would associate more with the Trotskyist tradition, also to some extent with people like Gramsci, a Marxist tradition, which say, no, fascism was always basically, conservative, even though it might be seeming to take kind of revolutionary reforms at the level of political institutions, like marching on Rome, overturning parliamentary democracy,

what it's trying to do is always prevent radical social change. Ultimately, what it's trying to do at the social level is to defend the existing interests of people of certain groups who already enjoy certain kinds of privilege. And from that perspective, you can see a very clear continuity between classical forms of fascism and the contemporary rights. You can even understand the continuity between those sections of the American right who've gone from indeed being sort of anarcho-capitalists in their own description to being just supporters of sort of kinds of neo-fascism. Because ultimately, what's the state for those people is defending their privileges

as wealthy white men. So at a point in history when it seems like the main threat to their privileges as wealthy white men is the federal government taxing them in a way they find annoying, there'll be libertarians who are just against any idea of the state and thinks everyone to stand on their own two feet at a point where they suddenly feel threatened again by the potential collective agency of organised black people and their allies and comrades or the organised working class

or Bernie Sanders, then they'll quickly switch to actually being favour of an authoritarian state which can repress these democratic forces for them. So the simplest explanation, the Occam's razor explanation, is that this is indeed always about social groups with established forms of privilege, existing privileges, defending those privileges,

under historical conditions where it seems to them that there's a zero-sum game now in play between them defending what they've got and anybody else making any kind of social advance. I think that helps actually about the non-utopic character of contemporary fascism compared to someone like Italian fascism and Nazism, et cetera. Because, like, you've got to account for this,

like, how fucking trivial. A lot of this stuff looks like, do you know what I mean? How cartoonish a lot of it looks like. The anti-woke stuff where people are getting frothingly angry because, you know, Doctor Who has got black people playing characters who were historically white. You know, these things that are incredibly,

that seem incredibly trivial compared to, like, the problems that face us. And, like, there doesn't seem to be any proposition or, yeah, there doesn't seem to be any proposition of, like, this is how we can tackle the problems facing us. I think when you look into it, there is, but, like, that's not the thing that they are motivating people around. It's not that, like, this is, like, this is the solution to the climate change, because climate change will be denied in some sort of way, or sublimated into something like the Great Replacement conspiracy theories and that sort of stuff. Yeah, but that kind of makes sense. I mean, even with that example of, you know, classically white characters being played by black characters and that being what the culture war is focused on, it's tangible, right? There's actual figures and people.

And this goes back, even though, you know, this is a small example, like this goes back to our discussion on the cosmic right. Like, people in times of crisis and dismay and depression, like they want it to be somebody's fault, like an actual person with a face. and a name, whether it's a character on a TV thing or like some great leader with their supposed pedophile ring or whatever. Like there has to be a figure and climate change and structures and the rhetoric that we use on the left. Like, this is not easy for people to understand. No, I would go further. I would say people intuitively understand correctly that there are people who are responsible and that people are to blame. But if the people whose job it is to point that out, Whose job is it in like the British polity of 2024 to point out to the public that the people to blame for their distress are the bankers, the shareholders of the big energy companies etc?

That is the job of the leader of the Labour Party and he's not doing that job. He's declining to do that job because of his own, I mean, I would say his own rational calculation that he doesn't actually have the political capacity to both do that and then not get completely hammered and destroyed by the media and the establishment the way Corbyn did. for whatever reason, he's not doing it. So people are looking, so when people are looking for somebody to give them a narrative account of what's happening, which identifies a set of agents as responsible for what's happening,

but they're not wrong. It's because they intuit correctly, that there is someone out there who's benefiting from all this and who's responsible, and the people who should be pointing out to them who it is aren't doing the job. They're not telling them. So I think that is really important.

Yeah, this is why, you know, my big criticism of Jeremy Corbyn, was always he was terrible at doing that. He was terrible at actually pointing the finger rather than just sort of talking about, you know, the moral, the moral obscenity of homelessness. He should have banged on about how it was landlords who were doing it. And it wasn't in his character, but it is in Mick Lynch's character. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I wrote that Guardian article about that. That's why, that's why Mick Lynch became so popular because people loved hearing it. People loved hearing it. And they were right

to love it. And also, I mean, we can get into a whole thing about how there's been an absolute systematic, you know, a whole set of systems put in place over the past 30 years to make sure nobody like Mitt Lynch becomes an MP because that is the thing that historically poses the greatest risk to the careers and ambitions of the Liberal Centre is technocrats. I think we should say, though, like what are the reasons why a lot of people would say that all these things we're talking about in the contemporary scene are not properly fascism? Why it's too casual, it's kind of banal to refer to these as fascism. because we've been sort of, we have been talking as if you can just comfortably refer to these

as fascism. And I'm going to say, to be very clear, I just don't have a view on this. I mean, my view on the question, is it fascist? It's like the debates over the nature of class. They're always circular debates over semantics, really. Like, if your definition of fascism includes a historical phenomenon, a necessary component of which is large-scale paramilitary organization, then, of course, what we are seeing in the form say Trumpism is not really fascism. It's true there's a bunch of nutters with

guns in the States, but they're totally disorganized and their chances of posing any kind of serious military threat to the American military is zero. And that is one of the reasons why lots of analysts and historians say it's just banal to say that Trump's a fascist. He's not a fascist. He's not capable of marching on Washington or New York in the way that Mussanini marched on right. So he's not a fascist. If on the other hand, your analysis of your definition of fascism focuses on, indeed, the way in which a particular social interests are expressed in terms of a particular kind of ideology, then you can see very clear continuities between the contemporary right and the people who support Trump and fascism. But I think it's important

to acknowledge that for some critics, it's one of the things that they would point out is, of course, none of these things, none of those aspects of fascism, when you, when fascism is happening. You know, the fact that there's kind of conservative reactionary populists who are, you know, who don't like things that seem different from them and are willing to follow somebody who's saying they're going to stop them is a really old phenomenon. I'm sure I've mentioned this on the show before, but I think any 19th century essay or late 18th century essayist,

William Hazlitt, makes a reference to some writing by Dryden, the 18th century writer. And I think there's some debate over where or when Dryden actually said this, but he says that Dryden says at some point, that there's many an Englishman who's prepared to die in the fight against popery, meaning Catholicism, who doesn't know if popery is a man or a horse. That is just a good indicator of the way in which reactionary populism isn't a phenomenon that first emerges in the early 20th century.

And that is also a reason why a lot of people think it's sort of banal to call Trump a fascist. When what he is, he's a reactionary populist of a kind you can identify. Again, you can find them in ancient Greece, you know, reactionary populace. I thought you were talking about potpourri then. The nice smell. Pop-pourri. The Julia oil is that we must fight against, as it's a symbol of contemporary cosmic acid fascism.

What's this problem with dried roses? Popery, sir. Pupory. Pupory, idolatry. We should play a song by the classic California punk band-a-dead Kennedys, we could have played California Uber Alis, which is, I think it's their first single from 1979. And California Uber Alis, I would make a claim that it's an early exploration of the possibility

of hippie fascism or other cosmic writers, we've called it, and contains the lines, Zen fascists will control you 100% natural, you will jog for the master race, and you will always wear a happy face, which is great. The Swade Denim Secret Police, they have come for your uncool need. It also contains the line mellow out or you will pay, which is a trade. It's such an idiotic,

so that's what they're worried about. I want to do a whole show about this and born in flames. It's like people, it's like radical culture in the 1980 that thinks, the thing you should be really worried about is a not intersectionally enough socialist

government being elected. Or Jerry Brown, like literally the most progressive governor of California ever, like being a bit, like a bit too bossy in his advocacy for New Age ideas. That's like, it's so, it's like funny from a contemporary perspective, it's also tragic. It is. And for those reasons, we shouldn't play it. Let's play Nazi punk's fuck off from 1981, absolute classic song, which also illustrates that punk rock and its meaning was being fought over right up through the 1980s, from the 1970s about whether it was going to be a left

white-wing thing or a right-wing fascist thing. Nazi punks, fuck off. Okay, this is interesting, right? But what about how this rhetoric or these set of behaviours or this language translates into actual real lived policy, right? So my measure for fascism is like can people of colour, can women like actually like live their daily lives under this system? Or is the discrimination that you are facing like so intense? either on the part of like the state or of followers of that ideology, that, you know, life is becoming unbearable. So I'm looking at Roe versus Wade, for example, in the US and like the effect on

abortion law. And that is a sphere which makes me think, okay, are we see, are these fascist policies like due to fascism or is it not? Or, you know, like the conditions at which people are losing their jobs for speaking up about, you know, certain realities or whatever. Like, those are the things that I think about. I think like what's happening in the reality of people's lives. For example, another example I could give is when certain police forces in the UK are supported by the government to clamp down on protesting and then suddenly like a hundred young brown people like find their doors smashed in at four o'clock in the morning because they've been to a Palestine demonstration, like, is that fascism?

Like, this is the terrain where I'm interested in, like, on the level of identification. It's not for the sake of taxonomy. It's to understand, like, where we are socially at the time, like, what is happening and what are these trends, and therefore, then where is the space for us to counter that? I've been reading this, the Alberto Toscano's recent book, Late Fascism, and he goes to, like, people like Angela Davis and, like, to people from the black radical tradition in the 60s 70s. I know Angela Davis is still writing, et cetera.

And he gets this idea from there, this analysis that you can have differential experiences of fascism. You can have a country in which in certain area, for certain sectors you have liberal rule, and then forever sectors you have, like, racial violence and, like, something that looks like fascism. And obviously, one of the things they're thinking about is Jim Crow America.

And then, like, the experience of black prisoners as well was really central because, like, you have people like George Jackson writing this sort of analysis as well. But of course, you know, obviously you could look at South Africa and you could look at Israel as well as like not everybody has the same experience of that you can have some people who are really subjected to like really awful racial violence or even just, you know, authoritarian crackdowns, etc. And for other people, they can't see it at all. You know what I mean? Because they experience it in a completely different way, which complicates discussion of like, you know, what should I look for when I'm looking for fascism. You know what I mean? It doesn't really help us answer to like what is fascist and what isn't fascist. But like that idea that Are we experiencing 21st century fascism? Well, for some people probably are, to be honest. And other people probably aren't. Their experience is in a completely different way.

Which tells us something about the public nature of it. Okay. So if we're saying it's possible in Britain today that some people are and some people aren't, we're either saying that some communities are so separate to others is that it is possible. I mean, with Israel, it's an apartheid state, right? Okay. I feel like it's quite a distinct situation because there's no other. state that's running in the way Israel is at the moment, you know, is from a different century.

But in Britain today, like, if we are saying that there are, there are people who are experiencing not at the level of like racism and institutional discrimination, but like actual, like, fascist policies, whether, whether officially or not, then either there's a massive separation of those communities for one not to even be aware of the other, or it's happening in a way which isn't overt. It isn't physically obvious to people, right? So it's not like people are being marched out of their houses, for example.

So that's like that I find interesting. Yeah, I mean, I don't think Britain's a very good example of it. I think let's have this discussion again towards the end of the decade when the, when Starmerism has failed catastrophically, et cetera, et cetera. I also think it's like, well, like where I started, I don't think it's helpful to sort of say,

is this fascist and is this not fascist? It depends what your question is. I think it's important. I know you don't think it is. I think it's very important because there are consequences to what people call things. There's real life consequences. Yeah, no, there is that. There's that idea. So, like, one of the strategies around, like, naming things fascists used to be that you could name things fascist and then, you know, that would motivate a sort of moral outrage. So, like, the anti-Nazi league was called that because they wanted to make associations to the Second World War, etc. And there would be a moral outrage that would put those ideas outside of respectable conversation. Like, that's just redundant. I don't think that's redundant. I mean, it's still the case. I mean, fascist is still like a clear term of opprobium, like even from liberals.

And it was one of the historic victories for the left, actually, to have fascism made more explicitly beyond the pale than they ever succeeded in making communism. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, but I just think that that has been reversed. Perhaps the word fascist is, but like, you know. Actually being a fascist. Yeah.

It's no longer. Yeah. Beyond the pain. Yeah. And that's part of the discourse about, oh, they call everything fascist these days. You can't even wear a swastika and do Nazi salutes about. I mean, that's true.

I mean, you know, the supposed struggle against fascism was used to justify the Iraq war. It's used to justify Afghanistan. It's used to justify all kinds of things by kind of military liberalism. And that has really, to some extent, degraded the, the utility of the term, doesn't it? I do think it's interesting to think about what is

historically at stake in defining a thing as fascists for the left, because it's not only that you can get liberals to agree that it's bad. There's a strong tradition on the left going back to the days when Trotsky is writing about fascism. There's a strong tradition that if you have defined

something or someone as fascist, then there is a range of actions it is legitimate to take against them, which it isn't necessarily legitimate to take against any other political opponents and you know that includes the tradition of no platforming so you're allowed to try to deny a platform to opponents who you've defined as fascist even if you wouldn't do that to any other set of political opponents in some cases you're allowed to you know basically you're allowed to go you know beat them up I think it's interesting to observe that that's historically that's one of the things that's at stake I don't know what to

do without observation but once again I think that that that probably is like redundant to some degree, just because it's so widespread. And also that idea of trying to prevent fascists from the Nazis or the far right from controlling the streets. Of course, that had an upsurge around the EDL, etc. We were a far right street movement. I've no idea whether you'd be able to call them fascist or not actually. And once again, that's not particularly interesting question for me. That quickly became such a size that the potential for like posing and physically just became extremely difficult and not as not a very successful. strategy. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Does that mean like the, you know, the campaign against

the British National Party, like embarking in East London about 20 years ago? Is that the last time we're going to have seen a sort of classical anti-fascist struggle of any kind? Yeah, I think you're probably right. And in part that was because the BNP had taken a strategic move away from control of the streets, which is what the fascist marches are about, etc. to the like the ballot box basically, which broke up anti-fascist action and, you know, the groups that were organising around that from the 1970s and into the 1980s and very early 1990s. Yeah, I feel like we're alluding to a history without quite explaining it for people who don't know it. So the organised far-right is pretty much negligible in Britain from World War II

through to the 70s. There is still far-right activity, and I always remember my dad, a North London working-class Jewish anarchist in the classical early 19th century tradition. Up to the day he died a couple of years ago. I remember him telling me about taking part of an anti-fascist action in the 50s and how he thought afterwards it was a waste of time because he just gave the fascist publicity.

They wouldn't have had otherwise because they had no real popular base. But then there's an upsurge of organised fascism, including local councillors, trying to get elected in a few places. in the 1970s. And then over the course of the 70s, 80s and 90s, there are various waves or fascist activity,

both including fascist groups, basically terrorising ethnic minority populations in very localized areas, like particular housing estates, particular parts of towns and cities, and also occasionally trying to get local councillors elected in municipal elections. And then partly because every time they try to do

that kind of street activism, They just would attract like thousands, like tens of thousands sometimes with demonstrators and anti-fascists, like into their neighbourhoods, who would go and smash up their headquarters and stuff, partly because they just couldn't get anywhere with that kind of street-level activism. There was a turn to a purely electoral strategy by the British National Party, the main fascist party at the time, during the new Labour years. But then even that was kind of roundly defeated by local campaigns, which would involve sort of some street activism,

but a lot of community organising and just electoral campaigns against them. And since then, in Britain at least, since the early 2000s, there was a flicker of activity, there was a lot of attention for a few months by an organisation calling itself the English Defence League,

which is basically the sort of Islamophobic organisation that was prominent about 10 years ago. But because it was Islamophobic, like it had like Sikh members as well, and it was a very weird little formation. But that didn't really last very long. But really all of the real political energy on the far right went into the Brexit campaign.

And we're now in a moment when the far right are trying to sort of regroup again around some sort of an electoral project to try to benefit from disillusionment both with Labour and the Conservatives. Which could actually take the form of being in control of the Conservative Party following their defeat coming elected. That's right, yeah. I mentioned that just because Liz Truss was in the US with far-right figures,

you know, fully signing up to like, you know, some of the weirdest conspiratorialism, et cetera, and the far-rights. I think you'd also point, a lot of commentators would point to the massive popularity with young men, people at Andrew Tate as a kind of contemporary former far-right politics in Britain, which doesn't really yet have any clear political manifestation, but it is quite worrying. Lots of people who teach school or kind of young undergraduates have been very worried about over the past couple of years. Yeah, I mean, there's a Venn diagram there with that whole just ultra-misogynistic intel culture, which is like, I think, really interesting and dangerous. But I'm not sure it's, I mean, it's an interesting discussion. It would be one for an entire episode about like how that develops and if it can develop into any kind of organized fascism when mostly these are people sitting in front of their computer.

at home. I mean, there has been a pipeline from that whole in-cell scene and that sort of like manosphere into far-right activism. The most horrific expression of the young spree killers who would issue manifesters, which would talk about inability to have sex, not with women generally, but the women that they think are hierarchically appropriate to them. No, it's really fucked it's really fucked up. Like, it's so, it's so fucked up. But it is mostly that. It is mostly the pipeline has been, like, their activism has been suicide or killings

or both, you know, together. You know, it's been that, right? Rather than getting involved in men's groups, like activating themselves to go out and I don't know what, like gang grape women or whatever, which I would see as a logical conclusion, like going back to like the level of the discussion that we're having earlier, about how this collectivise and like where collectivity sits, you know, in fascism. Thankfully, that doesn't seem to be where it's manifested. We're seeing that kind of ideology or like that men's right stuff in individual horrific incidents like Sarah Everard.

That indicates the extent to it. It's a sort of specifically neoliberal phenomenon. And these are guys who feel they haven't been able to win in the social competition, which neoliberalism tells them everything is. You know, and they don't have the social status they want. And the most immediate, the most agonising way in which the lack of social status registers for them is their lack of success in what they see as the competitive marketplace of sexual relationship. But it's also the objectification that very, very clearly, like, you know, a woman is somebody to have sex on. Like, it's a 100% male gaze.

It's not about relationships. It's about, you know, it's much cruder than that. A record, a song we can't not play on this show, even though we have played it before, and the folk music, Microdose, is the absolute classic, I think the seminal anti-fascist anthem in the English language to this day.

Woody Guthrie, or you fascists bound to lose. Well, I'm going to tell you fascists, you may be surprised. People in this world are getting organized. You're bound to lose. You fascist, bound to lose. All you fascist bound to lose. Master.

All of you fascist bound to lose. Yes. All of your faces is bound to lose. You're bound to lose. You've sort of made this point that, like, we have to think about this in terms of material interests. Differential interests. You have differential experiences.

But I do think you have to put, if not psychological, then like an effective dimension dimension on fascism and particularly contemporary fascism, which is I'm trying to get into it earlier about the triviality of it all and the lack of like a program. Underneath all of this, there is a fascist program in relation to climate change, which is, you know, this drive towards an ethno-nationalist protection of resources, etc. in a period of unfolding catastrophe and like no economic growth. But that's not how it expresses itself. It expresses itself in this sort of like bizarre, trivial culture war thing.

And that sort of indicates, I think, this idea that, like, owning the libs. Of course, defeating the left is another way to say that, which is a classic part of the far-up fascism. But, like, seeing yourself as part of a group can dominate others, even if it's just rhetorically, which is like the whole thing about debate me, bro, sort of like far-right commentators on YouTube, etc.,

and this idea that we can have this performance in which we can win this and, like, dominate another group, etc. It's another Toscano thing, Alberto Toscano, that he says there's a freedom around fascism. Fascism contains a freedom. The freedom is the license to say the things that you really shouldn't say. Do the things like to celebrate the most awful things or the license to commit violence, you know, or to celebrate in state violence against people that you don't like. Do you know what I mean?

That's the sort of freedom. It's the freedom to dominate other groups. Do you know what I mean? To see yourself as part of a group to dominate other groups. And what's implied there is that there has been some kind of repression of my need to be liberated. Yes. Is that there has been something that before that, where I am repressed or like there is something about the situation or the political landscape or like the way I am being governed where I'm repressed. And I want to be quote unquote free to, you know, shoot, rape, litter, not recycle, like.

drive five cars whatever the fuck it is you know well i think it's people they're not being offered compensations for the things that are being lost it's funny we took we were talking about in cells i always feel like whenever we mentioned in cells i feel like i've got to mention this argument it was made by my friend mandy murk who's like retired now she's a professor royal holloway for years and she's a queer film theorist belongs to the sort of baby boomer generation there was a leftist and a radical in the 70s and 80s but i remember her saying in a in a graduate seminar about queer theory mainly, making this point. The really sort of, yeah, this really shot like the group of students to hear say this

in such sympathetic terms of the time. This was the early 90s. She said, I get really worried because it seems what's happening in the culture is, well, actually, yeah, things are great if you're like a professional class queer person or if you're a woman who wants to go have a career. But quite large groups of men, they're kind of losing what they used to have, and they're not getting anything in return for it now because of neoliberalism, actually. They're not really getting anything in return for giving up the privileges they enjoyed

when they at least they had the privilege of knowing their social fate was to be a father in the head of a household and a husband. And I think that was really, really prescient because clearly that has totally happened to a whole sort of constituency of young men. We're doing a whole episode on this. I think this is such an important point. Okay. Well, I think it is really important.

Yeah. And I think to some extent it's true, nearly all these constituencies we're talking about, this kind of fairly scattergun collection of, scatter collection of constituencies who are attracted to these far right positions at the moment. They are all people who, they've lost something from social liberalisation, they've lost something from the relative progress we've made in the sphere of culture and social norms, but they haven't been offered anything in return.

Of course, historically, the role of the left was to offer people like that something in return, even for having to pay more tax. And what was to be offered in return was the opportunity to live in a society, which because it was more equal, because everybody was free, it would be a happier, more joyful place to be. And they haven't got that. The old promise of social democracy, that even though those who were the most privileged

would have to give something up, in return, they would get the joyful experience of living in a better society, in a good society, that's been completely withdrawn over the past few decades. That's what the cancellation of the future has meant for those people. And that cancellation of the future, which incidentally is a phrase for,

coined by Raymond Williams, not Bifo or Mark Fisher. That cancellation of the future has affected everybody differently, but it's the people who have definitely lost something from it, and have also, you know, they've lost stuff they had in the past or, you know, more than other people did, but still aren't being offered anything in return. You know, that is exactly the conditions, I think, that provokes that attraction to the far right,

which is partly why I think, you know, for me the political response is the same one it is to all these problems, right now. And I know I'm just like a stuck record saying this, because I think it is just, it's the immediate problem facing us. Certainly in Britain, the States, but also much of Western Europe. Let me put it this way. You look at what's actually happened over the past few decades. I mean, I would say the first instantiation of the type of politics represented by Trump is actually Silvio Berlusconi's premiership in Italy, which starts in kind of early to mid-90s. And you look at what's happened in Italy since then. There's this kind of alternation between

governments which are either some sort of mad populist government which gets elected like claiming it's going to do loads of stuff like whether it's fascist stuff or like weird cyber libertarian stuff ends up doing some of it like really hurting like a few marginal constituencies but basically doesn't really get anything done and then they get replaced by some liberal technocratic government which has less and less political legitimacy every time it happens and in italy not necessarily by elections no exactly it just gets imposed by the EU I think the real danger we're facing in countries like Britain and the States now is that's the cycle we're trapped in.

We're trapped in this cycle where we'll get this alternation between these increasingly wild-eyed, like manic, sort of right-wing populist governments, like Trump's administration or whatever the Tory party comes up with next. But they're not really going to have anything like the social capacity to do classical or fascism. They're not going to be able to do concentration camps. They're just going to make the lives of a few thousand members of my minorities, absolutely miserable, but just fail to stop, like, this gradual deterioration of the social fabric. And then they're going to alternate with these awful technocratic centrist governments

who are also just going to do nothing really to accept very slightly slow down that process of retardation, which will just, which will continue on. Yeah, and whose only source of legitimacy is, oh, look, we're not them guys. No, exactly. That's the whole point. The point to really stress is that is what the centurists want. They want that. I don't think the people, most of the people voting for them don't want that. Most of the people supporting them and keeping their positions don't want that. But the actual professional political class themselves, it's the best possible scenario for them because they get to keep their job, under the scenario I've just described, they get to keep their jobs as MPs, they get to keep their jobs at the Guardian, they get to

keep their jobs at the BBC, every few years they have to actually be in government, the rest of the time they're in opposition and every time there's an election, every time there's an opportunity to renew or not your subscription to the Guardian, they can pop up and say, oh, well, it's either us, it's either us or it's the daily mail and it's, you know, Boris Johnson or it's Liz Truss or it's Donald Trump. And that is what they want. That is absolutely what they want. I mean, that is why the urgent political task right now is really to talk to the people who kind of don't have any, who still support them, who still think, oh, well, maybe those guys, maybe the command of the world will kind of help us and prevent, save us from Trump, is to absolutely

convince those people that the commander harasses, the Obama's, the Bidens, the, you know, the starmas, you know, the Guardian editorial desk, all those people are not going to save us from this like hellish cycle of long-term degradation, that they have to be got out of the way so that we can have some chance of an actual democratic, solution to the social problems facing us under the conditions of climate catastrophe. If we can't do that, then that is the cycle we're just going to be locked into. I don't think it is going to lead to actual classical fascism. It will be this situation in which the specter of fascism is constantly used

to frighten people into allowing those technocrats to retain their positions while they do nothing to save us from the future that awaits. I mean, I think you're right about the specter of fascism there. Because as you were speaking, I was thinking about discussion that we had when we were preparing for the show, which is the way that the Conservative Party has been able to, you know, in a kind of neoliberal way, encompass all sorts of people from various different races, like in the top echelons of the Tory party, right? So it doesn't present itself as classic fascism when you have like, oh, you know, you can say this story, look, we are multicultural Britain. and like here is multicultural written in front of you. So it becomes the way that then that oppression starts to manifest itself is very different to what we've seen in the 20th century

because I cannot imagine, I mean, I can imagine, but I don't know how that kind of rule would manifest itself in a way that would actually, you know, expel a high percentage of British population who is not white. So it's not just about race. And I think race is an interesting one here because I think, you know, the relationship between fascism and race in the UK has changed or like far right has changed actually in the way that it actually is going to play out because it's not the same as the US

and the dynamics are not the same as they are in the US. Just give it a slightly even more depressing angle. One of the other really big dangers is that we have differential experience of fascism but on a global level, which of course is like basically what colonialism was in the first place. One of the big worries at the moment is, like, what we see in Israel, the genocide in Gaza, etc., is like this could be like a premonition of the future. People talk about eco-apartheid in which the fact of climate change and increasing crises that that develops, it forces a situation in which there's a real global apartheid much more than there is now. And lots of populations become basically civilist requirement and that's got like an eliminationist sort of aspect to it, if you know what I mean. But I also want to say that to sort of raise things a little bit

and give a little bit more hope or a little bit more of what is to be done. One of the things that we've been circling around, one of the resources on like what is fascism that we didn't talk about was Walter Benjamin's analysis of fascism. He writes an essay called The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction where he talks about fascism as the aestheticisation of politics. And one of the things he says is that like what fascism wants to do is to, like, give the masses a form of expression, the expression of the discontent,

while making sure that, like, property and property rights are preserved. To reduce politics to vibes. Yes, to some, yeah, to some extent. Yeah, so he says, like, the logical result of that is that, like, fascism introduces aesthetics into politics and into political life. And his response is what we should do is to not aestheticize politics, to politicise aesthetics, do you know what I mean? And that links to, like, there is an effective dimension to this, you know what I mean?

There are sort of like, you know, this libidinal investment of licence, etc. The thrill that people get from expressing themselves. And so one of the responses to that is that you have to find other ways in which that can be expressed. So we have to take seriously like the sort of like cultural dynamic, the cultural dimension of politics and ways in which people can express their own experiences in ways which are like egalitarian. And that, of course, is a central concern of this podcast, dear listeners, which is why you give us a five-star review.

Seamless, Milburn, seemingly. I agree with all that. I also think, I don't think the situation is hopeless by any means. I mean, the grounds for hope is none of this stuff has popular support. There's no popular support either for those centrist's technocrats on their agenda or really for the far right. Like what people want right now, it's very clear in Britain at least. What people want is some restoration of the project of, of social.

social democracy and even now just political democracy, just the idea that the political process should express the middle of the people rather than the preferences of a technocratic self-appointed elite. So I think there's every reason to be optimistic that we can challenge those people. I just think that's the crucial feature. And I suppose I do worry, I do think we have to be careful that on the one hand, we must always take seriously the need to combat explicit racism and authoritarianism and fascist. But I do think we have to. be alert to the fact that those guys, you know, the Starmas and the Rachel Reeves and the Obama's, you know, the Bidens and the Harris's, they are going to be dangling like

the threat of fascism in front of us in order to distract us from the harm that they're doing, like more and more and more over the next few years. No, I agree. I'm like part of like that cycle that you mentioned between a cycle between the far right and centrism is that centristism doesn't stay where it is. It gets dragged more and more into like an authoritarianism into rejection of democracy. I mean, just look at the last week, et cetera. Anti-democratic measures being proposed that MPs and councillors should not be able to have any contact with Palestinian support, things which would have been rejected from the most far-reaching speculative fiction only 10 years ago, suddenly being proposed, etc.

Yeah, it's an important point. I'm very down on liberalism, like historically and tendentially, but a really crucial point, a thing to keep telling your liberal friends and family listeners to keep pointing out to them is that these people are not even liberals anymore. I think this is a really important thing that's happened actually under the conditions of the war in Gaza is the Labour leadership really has abandoned any pretense even to be liberals. I mean, they clearly are now just taking a set of positions which can only be reasonably described as centre-right and increasingly authoritarian. They're not even defending liberalism anymore. I mean, Blair was willing to basically take an authoritarian set of

positions against very marginal communities. But these guys are now saying, even for like members of the professional classes, the classic liberal privilege of free speech is not going to be extended to you anymore. Yeah, I think, I don't know. I think, I mean, you're, you are right, but I think, you know, this would be, this will be a podcast about Israel if we get into that. But like, the exceptionism of Israel is the reason for all of this. And it's about power and it's about influence. And those people in the Labour Party just know that it's not worth saying anything that can even allude to the fact that, you know, Palestinians should have the same human rights as, you know, the Israeli Defence Force or whatever. Like, it's not worth their while.

And so, like, Palestinians will die. Like, you can't measure the war on Gaza as if it's any other war just because of how important Israel is to those people. Full stop. Like, we should be holding the Labour Party to, like, those values. But, like, we should be holding the Labour Party to, like, those values. they just won't. So it exposes a lot about their own ideas around colonialism and racism, to be honest. And if anything, it makes the argument that they are quite right wing. No,

I agree. But also, I think, like, it gives us a sort of clear steer on the political program, the political strategy, basically, in the wedge you make between, you know, the centrist in their sort of orbit around the far right and vice versa, is that, like, you know, the program is, like,

you have to defend democracy and universalism. Our Palestinian life is worth as much as an Israeli life is worth as much as a British life. But it's not just enough to defend democracy. I think we have to extend democracy. Because the only way you deal with climate change is democratized the economy, basically, democratized investment decision. So that's my slogan, extend democracy. Defend democracy, extend democracy.

How beautiful. Let's get some T-shirts printed up. That's too far out.