Alberto Toscano | "Democratic" Imperialism
The Pan-African intellectual George Padmore, who broke with the Communist International over its inability to reflect on the connection between "democratic" imperialism and fascism, describes settler-colonial racism in How Britain Rules Africa (1936) as "the breeding ground of that fascist mentality which has been unleashed in Europe today." He would later recognize in South Africa "the fascist state par excellence," based on the "unity of race in opposition to class." Padmore's anatomy of what he called "colonial fascism" thus anticipates the famous description of fascism as the boomerang effect of imperialist European violence in Césaire's On Colonialism . A similar thesis can be found in the Tunisian-Jewish writer Albert Memmi and the Guyanese historian and revolutionary Walter Rodney, who, referring to the settlers' support for the Vichy regime in France and the efforts of French-born Algerians to destabilize liberal rule in the motherland, speaks of the "fascist potential of colonialism." The anti-colonial conviction that the perspective of the victims of racializing violence refutes the exceptional nature of intra-European fascism was also taken up by African-American intellectuals. At the anti-fascist International Writers' Congress in Paris in 1937, the poet Langston Hughes declared: "Black people in America need not be told what fascism means in practice. We know it. Its theories of Nordic domination and economic oppression have long been our reality."
This lesson can also be drawn from the historical reckoning with racial capitalism in the USA, found in W.E.B. Du Bois's 1935 book , Black Reconstruction . As Amiri Baraka suggests, the violent end of Reconstruction gave rise to a " racial fascism" that, in its use of racist terror, the co-optation of poor whites, and the enthusiastic support of white supremacism by large sections of the financial and industrial capitalist class, long anticipated Hitler's movement. Viewing the present through this lens, one can see how and why "the historical furniture filling American political space has been institutionally arranged to always maintain a perspective of development toward more authoritarian forms, such as fascism."
From this perspective, American racial fascism was able to go unnoticed because it operated on the other side of the color line in a similar way to how colonial fascism operated at a spatial and epistemic distance from the imperial metropolis. Or as Jean Genet put it on May 1, 1970, in New Haven at a rally to free Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale: "Another thing that worries me is fascism. We often hear the Black Panther Party talk about fascism, and white people have difficulty accepting the term. This is because white people have to mobilize a great deal of imagination to grasp that Black people live under an oppressive, fascist regime."
The concept of "fascism" returned to the center of left-wing debates and activities in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely due to the Black Panther Party , or at least those associated with it. The 1969 United Front Against Fascism conference in Oakland brought together a broad spectrum of old and new leftists, Asian American, Chicano, and Puerto Rican activists, all of whom had developed their own perspectives on American fascism (emphasizing, for example, the Japanese experience of internment during World War II). A remarkable testament to the specifics and continuities of antifascist traditions in the United States is the fact that the essentially reformist demand for community-based, decentralized policing was one of the conference's main themes—removing racist white police officers from Black neighborhoods and establishing local control of law enforcement. If we want to explore theories about the nature of late fascism in the United States, however, we must focus less on the leading members of the Black Panther Party than on the political prisoners associated with them. While the discussion about the "new fascisms" polarized radical debates in Europe, the correspondence between Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson outlined a possibility for theorizing fascism based on direct experiences at the violent interface of racial capitalism and the carceral state.
In the USA, a “racial fascism” was established from the 1870s onwards, which long anticipated Hitler’s movement in its use of racist terror, the co-optation of poor whites and the support of white supremacy by the financial and industrial capitalist class.
In one of his prison letters about fascism, published in Blood in My Eye , George Jackson writes: "If I am interviewed by someone of the old guard and point to the concrete and steel, the tiny electronic listening device hidden in the ventilation shaft, the phalanx of guards eyeing us, and his barely functioning plastic recorder that took him a week to repair, and if I suggest that all this is an expression of fascism, he will inevitably try to object, defining fascism as an economic geopolitical project with one-party rule, in which no oppositional political work is allowed."
With Jackson, we could ask: How does the theoretical engagement with fascism and (neo-)authoritarianism change when it undergoes a morphing transformation and takes the racializing capitalist state and its prison apparatus as its pivot, thus taking a kind of "oblique view from below" to reveal a "panorama of the violence suffered"? In an unsent letter to Jean Genet, dated the day before Jackson's assassination by a San Quentin prison guard sniper, Jacques Derrida writes: "In prison—this or that—where the system of (Western-white-capitalist-racist) society believes it has shackled its exterior, it is precisely by this procedure that it makes possible an analysis of its functioning, a practical analysis that is at once the most relentless, the most desperate, and the most affirmative."
In the debate on fascism, it has become commonplace to criticize the 1970s as a kind of intellectual nadir, at which the concept of fascism was degraded, with fatal consequences, from a category of historical analysis and classification to a blanket political swear word. In the following, however, I would like to put forward the thesis that valuable insights lie hidden in the supposed inflation and exaggeration of the concept of fascism in the context of the liberation struggles and radicalism of the 1970s. Above all, however, I would like to emphasize how considering fascism from the tradition of Black radical intellectuals can give contemporary debates a productive direction. What happens to our concepts of fascism and authoritarianism if we orient ourselves not by the supposed analogies of the European interwar period, but by the materiality of the prison-industrial complex, by "concrete and steel," by surveillance technologies, and by the personnel of repression? By examining the analytical link between fascism and racial capitalism as it was developed in the liberation struggles of the 1970s, we can link it back to the analysis of fascism by Black theorists of the interwar period and build a bridge to the resurgence of fascism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
In their correspondence, which testifies to differing perspectives but also to a deep connection, both Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson identify the US state apparatus as the site where certain features of (European) historical fascisms recur or are even perfected. Much of their theoretical debate revolves around the nature of monopoly capitalism, imperialism, and capitalist crisis, and, in Jackson's case, an attempt to reassess the conventional historiography of fascism. Of particular relevance to the present is how the intersection of fascism and democracy is illuminated through the prism of race —racializing domination and racial capitalism —and how this can help us to question and refute the normative conviction regarding the absolute contradiction between fascist despotism and liberal democracy. While Jackson and Davis are fully aware of the differences between the forms of domination they experience and historical fascism, both assert the epistemologically privileged perspective from within a prison and judicial system that can rightly be described as a system of racist terror. In different ways, they take up and recode the initial thesis of anti-racist and radical Black antifascism formulated in Césaire's On Colonialism . In the words of the poet and politician from Martinique: "And then, one fine day, the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrible boomerang effect: the Gestapo is up to mischief, the prisons fill up, and around the racks the torturers invent, perfect, and discuss."
But the new form of American fascism that Jackson and Davis examine is not an unwanted echo from the repressed sphere of colonial violence; it springs from the womb of liberal democracy itself. The prisons are already full. And the generalization of racializing carceral terror in society—which is one of the most important features of the new fascism—presents itself less as a boomerang effect than as an undramatic and insidious process, a penetration of the social space of existing liberalism by patterns and instruments invented, analyzed, and perfected between concrete and steel. Mullen and Vials rightly note:
"For people of color, the experience of racialization in liberal democracies has, at various historical moments, been tantamount to fascism. That is, although a fascist state and a white supremacist democracy have very different mechanisms of domination, the experience of racialized disenfranchisement in liberal democracies can blur the distinction between this and fascism at the level of lived experience. For those denied basic rights of liberal democracy through racialization, the word 'fascism' does not simply refer to a distant and alien social order."
Alberto Toscano , born in 1977, is a philosopher living in Vancouver. The German edition of "Late Fascism" was published by Unrast Verlag in 2025. (Translation of the excerpts in "nd": Raul Zelik.)
The "nd.Genossenschaft" belongs to its readers and authors. It is they who, through their contributions, make our journalism accessible to everyone: We are not backed by a media conglomerate, a major advertiser, or a billionaire.
With your support we can continue to:
→ report independently and critically → address overlooked topics → give space to marginalized voices → counter misinformation
→ advance left-wing debates
By "paying voluntarily," you're participating. You're helping to ensure this newspaper has a future. So that nd. stays.
nd-aktuell
