Gender antagonisms have consistently sounded the alarm on the rise of contemporary fascism. From the cult of the strong leader as sexual predator and unprincipled bully to the ‘tech bro’ inauguration ceremony, masculinist ‘take backs’ have signalled, at every step, the reactionary progress of the Far Right taking over the mainstream of politics, culture and governance. Contemporary fascism also declared itself through an intensification of white supremacy, both emboldening and feeding off the reassertion of the right to express racial hatred, prejudice and to be free to commit racial violence with impunity. Dismantling Black Lives Matter Boulevard in Washington DC is only the most visible sign this year of a conscious intention on the part of contemporary fascism across the globe to set the clock back not only before BLM but before the Civil Rights movement and the anti-colonial independence movements. Routine attacks on multiculturalism and immigration have become the measure of how far contemporary fascism has set the agenda for mainstream politics and global media.
Contemporary fascism is also the era of anti-trans, TERF alarmism and homophobic hate crime. It shows itself in countless daily monuments to the history of fascist reaction that constitute a great grotesque backlash against LGBTQIA+ lives. Climate crisis has perhaps been the highest profile victim of the alt-right’s attacks on science, expertise and truth where Muslims have replaced Jews as the Far Right’s absolute ethnic other, defined as having no justification for their continued existence. Contemporary fascism can be glimpsed also through its treatment of protesters of all kinds, who are condemned, intimidated, beaten, arrested, imprisoned and demonised, just as the disabled, the unemployed and people on welfare are not identified for support but scapegoated for the economic difficulties of others and treated as parasites on the comfortably off. Contemporary fascism draws attention to itself in a tsunami of anti-woke assaults. This is what counter-revolution looks like today.
Class is the anomaly. In the history of the Left class is located within a growing string of emancipatory social movements. In the 1950s, class politics were set within a broader set of issues including environmentalism, peace, the anti-nuclear movement. With the rise of identity politics class was sometimes included in a short list––class, race, gender––and sometimes left out of alternative short lists such as gender, race and sexuality. Anti-woke fascism is impatient when faced with the contemporary Left’s lists of social attributes but it makes an exception for class. Class appears within the era of the alt-right as the ‘white working class’, which is to say, not as the structural point of exploitation but as the face of fascism itself. The politics of class today appears to be a dog whistle for rightwing politics. The Populist Right and ‘Blue Labour’ complain that the so-called ‘white working class’ have been ‘left behind’ by the contemporary Left.
Contemporary art has formed itself in proximity to the problems of patriarchy, white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, neocolonialism, ecological devastation and war, all of which have been the principal issues of the New Left and the contemporary Left since the 1950s. What Alberto Toscano calls ‘Late Fascism’ does not in any way diminish these problems but sets out deliberately to exacerbate them and demonise those who participate in or support emancipatory struggles around them. In fact, fascism not only intensifies the existing injustices and antagonisms, it locks them into an entire world of mythic closure, an imagined milieu, that unites and invigorates the social forces of reaction while it splits and hollows out the social forces of revolution. This is the great mission of the far-right dream of a world order that is pre-feminist, pre-gay-liberation, pre-trans, pre-secular, pre-multicultural, pre-MeToo and pre-BLM. If we accept the argument that the white working class is the face of contemporary fascism, then contemporary art finds itself in an existential battle for its own survival against the white working class and everything it has come to represent.
Talking about contemporary fascism is catching on but has been hampered for decades by academic objections to comparison and analogy. This can take two forms. One is more abstract or technical and concerns history and the writing of history in general and the other is narrower, empirical and is a guarded feature of the study of fascisms in particular. The former constitutes the principle under which the latter is effective in closing down discussions of contemporary fascisms. During Trump’s first term, for instance, experts on fascism typically testified that Trump was not, strictly speaking, a fascist or he had some fascist values but was neither the leader of a bona fide fascist movement nor the head of a fascist regime. The empirical blockage on comparison is the result of setting a high bar on the typology of fascism. In effect, emergent tendencies of new strains of fascism are compared to a list of attributes of fully fledged historical fascism so that the former is seen to fall short of the latter. If fascism is an anti-democratic, extra-legal, authoritarian, totalitarian, violent dictatorship, then the new faces of contemporary fascism appear to be not fascist at all. This is because the typology of fascism is not only a portrait of early twentieth century fascism but also because it is defined through liberal theories of fascism as exclusively anti-liberal.
The reason that the liberal typology of fascism hangs over the attempt to identify contemporary fascisms is that alternatives to the liberal theory of fascism, such as the Marxist theory of fascism, have been discredited within the academic study of fascism. The consensus that the theory of fascism is a typology of fascism arises from this fact. Marxist theories of fascism, on the contrary, tended from the outset to be explanatory theories, not typologies. Explanations of fascism typically refer to capitalist crisis, the defeat of the working class and the counter-revolution of a disunited bourgeoisie, but descriptive typologies of fascism see the taking of the state by force, the one party state, the rejection of modernity, the scapegoating of immigrants, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, the demagogic mobilisation of the masses and the tendency towards war and imperial expansion.
These differences were clear from the outset. Italian fascism was initially described by fascists, the far right and its conservative and reactionary enthusiasts and fellow travellers in terms of its values, tactics and the personality of its leader. Italian Marxists, by contrast, initially explained the rise of fascism in terms of “A coalition of all the reactionary elements […] against the advance of the working class” (Gramsci) and “a counterrevolution of the bourgeoisie against a red revolution that did not come about” (Zibordi). For Marxists in the 1920s and 1930s, fascism was explained through narratives of the reactionary solution to economic and political crisis, as a counter-revolutionary response to the perceived and real threat of communist revolution, as the violent arm of the bourgeois hostility towards socialist struggle, as the homecoming of colonial techniques of domination and exploitation, and as a Bonapartist mobilisation of the masses as a counter-revolutionary force against the Left. This is the basis of a social history of fascism which differs from fascist and liberal theories of fascism by giving priority to social forces such as class relations, economic conditions, patterns of structural crisis and the confrontation between an imminent, delayed or thwarted proletarian revolution and a swift or protracted counter-revolution.
Mainstream theories of fascism are liberal theories of fascism. Liberal theories of fascism are descriptive rather than explanatory but what makes a liberal theory of fascism liberal is not the liberalism of its theorists but the central opposition between liberal democracy and illiberal, extra-legal, violent, anti-democratic fascism. The totalitarian theory of fascism is a liberal theory in this sense. The differences between liberal typologies of fascism and Marxist explanations of fascist capitalism play out in different theories of the role of the working class in fascism. Fascists spoke of values, spirit, myth, blood, victory and they spoke of the people, the nation and the folk not of classes. Conservatives and reactionaries argued that fascism was a mass movement of the anti-communist working class. Fascism appears to give voice to white working class values and fascist leaders appear to tap into deep seated, spontaneous but previously repressed fears, frustrations and rage of the white working class.
Liberal and conservative political historians object to the prominence of class in Marxist theories of fascism. From a descriptive point of view, class is an almost negligible feature of fascism. Class war in fascist rhetoric is massively overshadowed by race war. This objection puts the emphasis back on values and tactics rather than conditions and causes. In the entire history of the literature on fascism there has been no explanation of fascism that has been based exclusively on race or nationalism or religion. Black Marxist anti-fascists in the 1920s and 1930s such as Du Bois, George Padmore, Claude McKay and Otto Huiswoud did not formulate a racial theory of fascism, but developed their theories of fascism through a Marxist analysis of how capitalism and imperialism is based on the exploitation and oppression of both class and race. In his study of British rule in Africa, published in 1936, Padmore demonstrated that colonial rule, including British colonial rule, was “the breeding-ground for the type of fascist mentality which is being let loose in Europe today”. When Padmore broke with the Comintern in 1934 for its insistence on a Popular Front policy that distinguished between good colonialism and bad colonialism, he did not break from the Marxist theory of fascism, they did.
Padmore was a strong advocate of the early Marxist theories of fascism, especially ‘counter-revolution’ and ‘social fascism’. Social fascism has the worst reputation of all the Marxist theories of fascism because it deliberately fails to distinguish between fascism and liberal democracy, which is the primary purpose of mainstream theories of fascism. The leading exponent of the theory of social-fascism was Dmitri Manuilsky who argued that social democracy is the accomplice of fascism and that fascism grows organically out of bourgeois democracy. In his report to the Executive Committee Communist International (ECCI) plenum in 1931, he said fascism is not defined by “those characteristics which the fascists themselves emphasise when speaking of their predatory regime––for example, the cooperative character of the fascist state, the extreme nationalist ideology (‘Great Italy’, ‘Third Reich’), or the whole medieval garb in which fascism appears”. Rather, he said, fascism “is based on the concentration and centralisation of capital and the associated development of trusts and cartels, and leads to a massive centralisation of the whole apparatus of mass oppression”. For this reason, ‘social fascism’ is not a theory of fascism at all but a Marxist theory of liberal democracy in the age of fascism. Social fascism is the thesis that social democracy is “the moderate wing of fascism” and that fascism and social democracy are “two sides of a single instrument of capitalist dictatorship”. Stalin said “Social Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism”, adding that they “do not negate, but supplement each other. They are not antipodes, they are twins”.
For Marxists, historical fascism as counter-revolution is possible only with the defeat of the organised working class because it is the working class during the 1920s and 1930s that stood at the head of the socialist revolution which fascism negated. Marx had provided a theory of counter-revolution in his analysis of Bonapartism in The Eighteenth Brumaire. Bonapartism, he explained, is “a form of bourgeois state power in a period of defence, retrenchment and re-fortification against the proletarian revolution.” After killing, imprisoning and transporting the leading activists of socialist revolution, the counter-revolutionary state takes advantage of the fact that the masses can no longer represent itself and is represented by a ‘saviour’ from another class in its most conservative and reactionary guise. It is in this context that Marx argues that the modern French peasantry was “a class that is not a class” because it could not represent itself but must be represented by a saviour. This process of proxy representation, which ventriloquises the conservative values of the masses and crushes its revolutionary potential, is essential to all forms of counter-revolution, including fascism.
Bonaparte displaced the identity of the people from the city to the country in a pastoral image of national identity purified of working class threats to social unity. Historical fascisms constructed images of the folk, the family, nation, race, ethnicity, the state, territory, imperialism and war to give a reactionary interpellation to those who might otherwise represent themselves in shades of the revolutionary. Italian Fascism and German Nazism were not movements of the white working class. White supremacy was built into the rhetoric and practice of historical fascism but no fascists in the 1920s and 1930s nor their subsequent historians placed the “white working class” at the heart of the Far Right. Historical fascisms of the 1920s and 1930s did not coin the term ‘white working class’, but bonded the (white) working class to the (white) middle class and the (white) elite through concepts of the ‘white race’ or the ‘Aryan race’ or the ‘Mediterranean race’. What these have in common is that they are racial theories that read class division as social division in a united opposition to other others.
In the 1920s and 1930s fascism was characterised as the ‘revolt of the middle class’, as the political and military arm of big business and finance and as the capitalist counter-revolution against the imminent threat of the socialist working class. When the working class is mentioned within the literature on historical fascism it is either in the acknowledgment that fascist regimes ‘mobilised the masses’ or, for instance, that as Marxist historians Tim Mason and Geoff Eley have shown, the Nazi party “failed to breach the historical strongholds of the labour movement” (Eley) and had to turn instead to the unorganised workers. It is only relatively recently that fascism has been associated with the white working class, as part of the long revival of fascism. The ‘white working class’ is a postwar invention of the Far Right rebuilding itself on a new footing, especially after the relative success of Far Right agitation about immigration and multiculturalism. Even Enoch Powell did not use the phrase in his infamous rivers of blood speech. The far right concept of the white working class did not crystallise until the 1980s and 1990s. Contemporary fascism does not merely describe an empirical social entity called the white working class, it constructs one either in the wake of working class defeat or as part of a long campaign against the revolutionary potential of the working class, conceived now in isolation from the wider socialist tradition (with all its diverse solidarities and alliances) that it represented in the 1920s and 1930s.
The phrase ‘white working class’, as an empirical category, first appeared, alongside similar designations such as ‘white workers’ and ‘white hands’, within the polemics against the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century. This was not merely descriptive but often had a normative connotation including the assumption that ‘white labor’ ought to be protected from any adverse consequences of the abolition of slavery such as the flooding of the labour market. White suprematism and racist expressions of the superiority of ‘white labor’ run through this literature. Typically, the middle class and slave owners claimed that the condition of African slaves was in many regards superior to the condition of the poorest working class. Certainly, there were instances where slaves were given preferential treatment to wage labourers. Noel Ignatiev gives two examples of slave owners who employed white labourers to protect their investments. In the early 1850s, Irish workers were hired to build a wagon road across a swamp in south-west Louisiana by a landowner who stated that he would not risk his slaves in the marsh, and an official of an Alabama stevedoring company explained that Irish workers were employed on the docks because slaves “are worth too much to be risked” but “if the Paddies are knocked over-board, or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything”.
The white working class exists only in the shadows of this literature, not as its authors but as a counterpart to the slave in the bourgeois social imaginary. White workers are presented like evidence in a case that does not initially seem to be about them at all. In debates that begin with questions about the humanity of black slaves in plantation capitalism, the agenda is deliberately hijacked by anti-abolitionists by asking ‘but what about white labor?’ Bourgeois concern for ‘white workers’ was not expressed by workers themselves but voiced on their behalf in acts of ventriloquism in which the fears of slave owners and their trading partners were offset to poor whites. Radical working class anti-abolitionists are present in the literature but for them anti-abolition did not equal proslavery. Their argument against the abolition of slavery was based on a revolutionary critique of the concept of free labour. If abolition of slave labour meant nothing more than the universalisation of ‘wage slavery’, they argued, then abolition did not go far enough.
Neither the empirical category of ‘white hands’ nor its normative connotation of those alleged to be at risk from the abolition of slavery, nor indeed the concept of class underpinning the revolutionary anti-abolitionist anti-wage slave, correspond to the fascist concept of the ‘white working class’. All show traces of, or are, fundamentally shaped by white supremacy but it is important to spell out the different forms that it takes in empirical, normative, revolutionary and fascist conceptions of race and class. Clearly, a substantial transformation takes place between the anti-abolitionist and the postwar fascist conception of the white working class. The key difference is that the fascist concept of the ‘white working class’ foreshadows or presupposes the political defeat of the working class as a whole. In other words, it is a bleak picture of the working class not only as white or as racist and xenophobic but also as always already (or inherently) reactionary, conservative, traditional, backward-looking, subservient and toothless.
The white working class not only takes on a new meaning in contemporary fascism, it is a crack in the surface of contemporary capitalism that allows us to see inside, showing how it works. Whatever else it does, twenty first century fascism represents the most conservative elements of the working class as representative of the working class as a whole. It is aided in this masquerade by a defeat of the organised working class achieved by decades of neoliberal and neoconservative attacks on the trade union movement and the Left generally. In the rhetoric of the alt-right and its conservative amplifiers, the white working class has been ‘left behind’ by a woke Left that does not share its values. This already tells us that for the Right, the working class cannot represent itself but must be represented by a right wing saviour or leftwing ‘intellectual elite’.
When it is noted that the ‘white working class’ is not an empirical social entity but an imaginary figure, it is important to add both that it belongs to the middle class social imaginary of class struggle and that, within this, it is deployed by rightwing capitalists in a struggle with the professional middle class and their allies over the soul of the middle class and the political character of capitalist society. It is the return to the original conception of the poor in the Tudor Poor Laws, which was a problem to be solved with state violence. There is a direct and continuous line between the Tudor Poor Laws and the eugenic theory of middle class reformers who view the poorest sections of the working class as people to be eradicated. The stigmatisation of the working class is not a marginal cultural or psychological aspect remote from the structural conditions of exploitation, inequality, stratification, hegemony, coercion, mute compulsion, value extraction and political struggle. Stigma is class struggle from above. The intensification of the stigma of the working class today is the proxy representation of the working class as a class that is not a class because its infrastructures of collective resources and its politics of class struggle were systematically decimated.
The contemporary definition of fascism as deeply rooted in working class bigotry is a new addition to the catalogue of liberal theories of fascism. With no acknowledgment that the ‘white working class’ is the antithesis of class nor that the concept of the white working class has a fascist origin, it has come to be used normatively by the contemporary left. David Roediger’s thesis of the wages of whiteness, for instance, portrays the most reactionary elements of the white working class as representative of the politics of class as a whole and plays down the racism of the white middle class. Today, Wendy Brown is a prominent example of a leftwing writer who only writes pejoratively about a working class that she only imagines to be white, male, straight and American. Brown’s willingness to replicate negative tropes of the ‘white working class’ ironically includes blaming them for their misrepresentation of Muslims, women, people of colour, trans folk, and others. Now, the working class no longer signifies revolutionary emancipation but conservativism, reaction and bigotry. Although the white working class is an idea derived from the far right it quickly becomes an idea more widely deployed by leftwing middle class intellectuals and even some working class Marxists.
In my reading of the literature, the best Marxist theory of the ‘white working class’ is also the best Marxist theory of fascism. We understand both, I argue, through Marx’s analysis of Bonapartism in the Eighteenth Brumaire with its themes of crisis, counter-revolution, a weak and divided bourgeoisie, defeated revolutionary forces, class masquerade, tragedy and farce, the difference between an organised class and a sack of potatoes, uneven development, the proxy representation of a class in its most conservative guise, and the populist rise of a saviour for a defeated class representing other class interests. Paraphrasing Marx, the white working class is one of the names of the “class that is not a class”. For fascism, the working class must be turned into what Marx calls “a sack of potatoes” that takes whatever shape is given to it. Fascism represents not the revolutionary working class, but the conservative unorganised workers; not the workers that strike out beyond the condition of the existing social existence, the wage system, but rather the workers who want to consolidate this system, not the folk who want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who, in stupefied seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their jobs and traditions saved and honoured by the ghosts of empire.
Since counter-revolution attacks every revolutionary social movement, not only the workers movement, fascism and its conservative base oppose all social movements with a revolutionary component including feminism, Black Radicalism, critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, gender critique, trans activism, decolonisation and climate change activism. Today counter-revolution goes by the name of anti-woke. Understanding fascism in this way also helps to build a conceptual framework for explaining the complex relationship between race and class in fascism, as well as the potential solidarity between anti-racism, anti-capitalism, feminism, anti-colonialism and queer politics in their common resistance to fascism. Here, the working class is not the source of fascist ideas or the thugs who support and fight for it, but one of the main political forces that fascism attempts to snuff out.
Fascism proposes an alternative social order in which social divisions, antagonisms and hierarchies are simultaneously aggravated and dissolved into a new whole. Since fascism does not attempt to abolish class divisions, it manufactures a reactionary basis of a patriotic unity between the classes. This is achieved not only by demonising and crushing the collective agents of working class struggle but also delegitimising middle class professionals, experts, scientists and intellectuals who defend democracy, liberalism, emancipatory struggles, tolerance and political correctness. Historical fascism smashed the organised working class but contemporary fascism inherits a defeated working class after decades of neoliberalism. In the 1920s and 1930s fascists persecuted Left intellectuals but today, so far, they have been cancelled, shadow banned, pilloried and sacked, especially through the weaponisation of anti-Semitism. Some Left intellectuals have become fascist or fascist-adjacent.
Fascists had always masqueraded as representing workers within an ethno-nationalist, reactionary and counter-revolutionary social imaginary. There is nothing unprecedented about the drift from the revolutionary Left to the reactionary Far Right. Mussolini set the template in the early 1920s. Italian Fascism was immediately understood as “a counterrevolution of the bourgeoisie against a red revolution that did not come about” and as “the revolt of the middle classes”, so there is nothing surprising about the extent of middle class enthusiasm for fascism today. Actually, the extent of middle class fascism is unclear because it so often exists in polite or intellectual denial, euphemism and dishonesty. Fascism hides itself behind and shows itself through patriotism, nationalism, tradition, Christianity, white supremacy, warmongering, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, technocracy and the romance of business success. Each of the masks of fascism is detachable from the whole and yet serves as a pathway into a mythic universe of reaction.
As a mask and face of fascism the ‘white working class’ is not an empirical category but a phantom that exists, properly speaking, only within the bounds of a reactionary social imaginary. The concept of the ‘white working class’ is a fascist idea that has been detached from fascism but remains deeply reactionary in its representation of the working class. So, when contemporary Left intellectuals add their own weight to the discourse of the ‘white working class’, condemning it as bigoted or the bearer of toxic masculinity, say, they differ from the Far Right only by giving an empirical dimension to the fascist social imaginary of the working class.
A space has opened up for middle class artists and intellectuals to unite against the ‘white working class’, taken as a representative of the traditional working class and the face of contemporary fascism. It can seem as if the only thing that the whole of the middle class intelligentsia shares is its common opposition to and collective revulsion of the ‘white working class’ and therefore it seems as if the Left and liberal middle class is the agent and author of this crusade against the living source of all bigotry and intolerance. Structurally, it is not the middle class Left but contemporary fascism, in fact, that creates the conditions for a cultural chasm between the progressive middle class and the working class.
Fascism, understood as extreme reaction against the threat of social change from below (originally the organised working class but now a wider family of woke struggles centred on women, POC, LGBTQ+, ecology and decolonisation), proceeds by a dual strategy of stigmatising subalterns and romanticising the rich and powerful. Scarily, the fascist stigmatisation of the organised working class has been taken up in the current epoch by the progressive middle class. In the middle class social imaginary, the image of the bigoted (white) working class is as timeless as the old tropes of working class savagery that it revives from the Tudor Poor Laws to the demonisation of the Underclass. Historically, these tropes of working class life as lazy, ignorant, aggressive and worthless were integral to the early twentieth century conservative dogma that the far right is preferable to the revolutionary left. This is why today the progressive middle class and its artists need to make a choice between defending their class against the threat of the ‘white working class’ and defending humanity from the reactionary violence of their own class.