Fascism and the Metapolitics of

Imperialism
8th May, 2021

By Gavin Walker

There is no such thing as the ‘spontaneous knowledge’ of the dominated classes; or,
more exactly, we could say that any such ‘spontaneous knowledge’ has no fixed
meaning that would tie it to this or that form of politics.

Didier Eribon, Retour à Reims

The question of fascism today is no longer of a principally theoretical character for thinkers of
the Left, as it often has been since the upheavals of the long 1968, the “revolutions of 1968”
in Immanuel Wallerstein’s terms. Today, it is rather a question not only of history and theory,
but of practical political stances in the immediate moment, insofar as openly fascist political
formations currently enjoy more currency than they have for decades in the advanced
capitalist countries. From the global left, and especially in Europe and North America, our
moment has seen remarkable new theorisations of fascism, from Enzo Traverso’s important
discussions of “post-fascism” to Ugo Palheta’s new and powerful text here in Historical
Materialism on “Fascism, Fascisation, Antifascism,”1 along with his major recent work in
French, La possibilité du fascisme. I am in a strong agreement with Palheta’s theses, not
least because they place into dialogue a three-fold process expressed in his title: a reflection in
theory (the concept of ‘fascism’ as such), a reflection in history (the process of what he calls
‘fascisation’, the ‘becoming-fascist’ of social and political phenomena), and a reflection on
the immediate political situation (the tasks of contemporary ‘anti-fascism’, how it can be
politically built and organisationally sustained).

Where I want to offer a contribution to this debate – for whose organisation and coordination
I would like to thank Historical Materialism and for his invitation particularly Alberto
Toscano, in his own right an important theorist of the new fascisms – is, fundamentally, not a
rejoinder to or criticism of Palheta’s formulations, which I find both original and productive.
Instead, I would rather simply to point to a missing or somewhat invisible element of this
broad debate in texts from Palheta, Traverso, and many others: the relationship between
fascisms today and the specific character of imperialism, both as a geopolitical force for the
organisation of relations between states and national entities, and as a metapolitics derived
from imperialism’s specific character as one historical regime of accumulation within the
development of capitalism.

In thinking through the transformations of contemporary fascism – or ‘post-fascism’ – in

relation to the question of imperialism, we would do well to remember a key watchword of
Lenin:

Recognition of the present war as imperialist and emphasis on its close connection with the
imperialist era of capitalism encounters not only resolute opponents but also irresolute friends,
for whom the word ‘imperialism’ has become all the rage. Having memorized the word, they
are offering the workers hopelessly confused theories and reviving many of the old mistakes
of the old economism.2

The reason I want to think through the metapolitics – “whatever consequences a philosophy
is capable of drawing, both in and for itself, from real instances of politics as thought” 3 – of
imperialism here is precisely to refuse it as an economism, in which we would simply say that
fascism is a domestic political correlate to monopoly concentration and the export of capital
to the colonies. Although a concrete economic imperialism persists as the broad stage of
accumulation of world capitalism at present, and although this exerts an important effect on
the geopolitical arrangement of the world, what interests me is why fascism should re-appear
now, in the wake of decolonisation and the national liberation struggles, why fascist solutions
appear to be on the agenda all over the advanced capitalist countries. And this, in my view,
requires that we think about what happens when imperialism experiences a kind of cultural
boomerang effect of many decades, when the consequences of the colonial laboratory of
modernity transversally bisect the metropolitan political situation, a process in which we
might even say tentatively that the metapolitics of imperialism is itself the process
of racialisation.

I. The Relapses of Imperialism

In the opening lines to his Fascism and Dictatorship, Nicos Poulantzas famously replied to
an injunction central to the theorisations of the Frankfurt School, and particularly one of its
‘master thinkers’, Max Horkheimer:

Horkheimer, reacting early against the whole conception of ‘totalitarianism’, wrote, ‘Anyone
who does not wish to discuss capitalism should also stay silent on the subject of fascism’.
Strictly speaking, this is incorrect: it is he who does not wish to discuss imperialism who
should stay silent on the subject of fascism.4

As Poulantzas argues, the problem of dealing with fascisms can only be posed correctly when
we take stock of “the political crisis to which the exceptional state is a response, and the
particular kinds of political crises to which its specific forms correspond.” And this in turn
requires “an analysis of the question of the historical period of capitalist formations within
which these political crises and exceptional regimes occur.” (16) Echoing the demand for an
approach structured by differing levels of analytical abstraction, Poulantzas emphasises that
“the analysis of general historical periods to which exceptional regimes belong […] affects
the conjuncture of the class struggle (political crisis), which alone provides an answer” to
the question: why now? Why fascism? (16). And he delivers the fundamental crux of this
parallel conception of imperialism’s relation to fascism in the following formulation:

Imperialism, considered as a stage in the ensemble of the capitalist process, is not in fact just a
question of modifications in the economic domain, such as monopoly concentration, the
fusion of industrial capital into finance capital, the export of capital, and the search for
colonies for purely ‘economic’ reasons, etc. These ‘economic’ factors actually determine a
new articulation of the ensemble of the capitalist system, thereby producing profound changes
in politics and ideology. (19-20)
Poulantzas’s work is decisive, not least because he understood the crucial nature of this
relationship between fascism in its expanded sense and the specific political and ideological
character of the historical stage of imperialism as a regime of accumulation. However,
Poulantzas did not fully carry through the determination of this question. His analysis,
in Fascism and Dictatorship, is concerned principally with two factors: 1) the pressures
exerted by imperialism on the domestic working class and its susceptibility to fascist
solutions to the social and national questions and 2) the historical demonstration of the roots
of this tension in the German and Italian experiences of fascism as a concrete problem of
mass politics.

Where, however, there is an unspoken question, is precisely in the more general relationship
between imperialism and fascism at the level of politics and ideology, not only for the
domestic working class, but for a new relationship that characterises our contemporary
moment: that between the general postcolonial condition, migration (and so-called ‘labour
segmentation’) as a key element of working-class composition globally, and the political
technologies of racialisation in the core imperialist countries. What precisely remains to be
thought is this question for which Poulantzas’s work provided a historical analysis, but which
remained an open problem in his thought: how to clarify the ways in which “these ‘economic’
factors actually determine a new articulation of the ensemble of the capitalist system,” not
only in a directly economic manner, but also in more diffuse metapolitical terms, in which the
nexus of imperialism as a historical regime of international references and hierarchies thereby
assists in the production of new fascisms that are the results of “profound changes
in politics and ideology,” not only in the ‘exceptional state’ but in the everyday ‘normality’
of the contemporary moment.

Certainly, his former teacher Louis Althusser would have been familiar with
Poulantzas’s Fascisme et dictature, published first by Maspero in 1970. Some years later,
as the European conjuncture was transformed by the movements of decolonisation sweeping
Africa in the early 1970s, Althusser entered into a little-known written dialogue in 1975 with
the Portuguese playwright Luiz Francisco Rabello. Exchanged some months after the
Portuguese ‘Carnation Revolution’ put an end to the Estado Novo, and thereby one of the
longest-lasting fascist governments in Europe – a situation that came to a head under the
influence of the guerrilla struggles for independence in Angola, Mozambique, and elsewhere
in Lusophone Africa – this important series of letters was published the subsequent year
as Cartas sobre a revolução portuguesa, and to my knowledge, never subsequently
released in French or English. In his letter of 17 August 1975, Althusser wrote:

It is thought with excessive complacency, in certain layers of the bourgeoisie and among
certain intellectuals, that fascism (in Spain, Portugal, Greece) had become, from the point of
view of imperialism, its monopolies and states, an "archaic", "outdated", "cumbersome" and
"costly" process which no longer corresponded to the interests of an active and enlightened
"neo-capitalism". Behind this judgment, it is easy to get the idea that a "normal" form of
"modern" capitalism (i.e. monopolist capitalism or imperialism) would exist in itself, i.e. in all
circumstances: the form of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, guaranteeing a certain
number of individual and political freedoms. Now, I think that this judgement and this idea do
not correspond to reality.

Fascism is by no means in itself an 'abnormal' or 'rendered abnormal' form of bourgeois rule.

Historically, Italian, German, Japanese fascism, etc., constituted a bourgeois solution to the
contradictions of imperialism between the two wars, especially after the crisis of the 1930s,
and was mainly the instrument of the imperialist class struggle against the working class.
Historically, fascism developed exploitation and accumulation prodigiously: it served the
monopolies. After the war, fascism continued to be, albeit in a less visible way, one of
the necessary forms of bourgeois rule: in certain defined conjunctures. Certain
fascisms undoubtedly give particular features to the economy of the country they dominate,
holding back the development of certain sectors, forcing workers to emigrate, and subjecting
the working class, rural workers and poor peasants to unbridled exploitation. However, this
fascism in no way prevents the national and international monopolies from developing and
prospering: it even provides them with exceptional conditions of security and profit through
the intense repression of the working-class struggle and the consequent increase in
exploitation.5

This remarkable letter of Althusser, which should be more widely known, links together both
the full-blown function of the high point of imperial-colonial power (the institutional
existence of the formal colonial system) with its aftermath, what Sandro Mezzadra has long
named ‘the postcolonial condition’. Althusser takes one step beyond Poulantzas’ analysis in
emphasising not only the form of fascism as a political orientation of the ‘exceptional state’,
but also as a generic solution in the domestic sphere for imperialism and its after-
effects: migration, the creation of mass politics, forms of territorial and capitalist
securitisation and more.

In this regard, we might recall the fact that the last 30 years have seen a renewed interest in
the juridico-theoretical work of Carl Schmitt, but the focus of this attention has largely been
on his famed reading of the political as a sphere of the friend/enemy relation. Less attention
has been paid to his quite complex discussions of the specificity of colonialism and
imperialism, discussions which in essence constitute a form of fascist introspection on
the speculative future of the history of imperialism.

The special territorial status of colonies thus was as clear as was the division of the earth
between state territory and colonial territory. This division was characteristic of the structure
of international law in this epoch and was inherent in its spatial structure. Clearly, to the
extent that overseas colonial territory became indistinguishable from state territory, in the
sense of European soil, the structure of international law also changed, and when they became
equivalent, traditional, specifically European law came to an end. Thus, the concept of
colonies contained an ideological burden that affected, above all, European colonial powers.6

Now, the notion that the colonial sphere contained an ‘ideological burden that affected, above
all, the European colonial powers’ appears at first glance to be a kind of inverted narcissism
of the West, a fantasy that places the point of emphasis on the loss of a worldview for the
colonizer, rather than a confrontation with the injustice of domination on the part of the
colonised. But Schmitt’s statement bears some interesting connection to Poulantzas’s broader
point: in the wake of the formal colonial system, the collapse of a clear political distinction
between the legal status of the ‘mother countries’ and the ‘colonies’ augurs a new moment of
civilisational, political, economic, and cultural contradictions. If the racial taxonomy of the
world found its supposed ‘proof’ in the institutional division between metropole and colony,
the only function of imperialism’s worldview that would remain in the wake of its
institutional breakdown is the application of its techniques of division, taken from the macro-
level of states and territories, to the micro-level of bodies, categories of citizenship, the
policing of language, physiognomy, and markers of difference. In this sense, Schmitt, in
exposing the fascist sentiment of the changing forms of ‘politics and ideology’ produced by
the articulation of imperialism and fascism, shows us precisely that there is a clear historical
pathway from formal imperialism and formal fascism to a new and informal post-fascism,
whose essence is the internal application of previously external modes of governance,
where the technologies and apparatuses of racialisation come to replace the former spatial
imaginary of the earth. In this sense Traverso is correct to emphasise, in his formulation of
‘post-fascism’, the often-peculiar “contradictory co-existence of classical fascism with new
elements that do not belong to its tradition.”

In turn, these technologies of racialisation, generated in the colonies within the

imperialist regime of accumulation, today are re-routed to apparatuses of domestic control,
none more central to imperial modernity than the police. Today, it is clear that policing is no
longer simply an arm of governance, to be deployed as sovereign power sees fit in service of
the social peace. Quite to the contrary, the last ten years in the advanced capitalist countries
have shown us a form of the institutional unmooring of the police-function, and an
intensification of its violence as an apparatus in the service of detecting ‘abnormalities’,
‘dangerous’ racial subjects, and ‘unruly’ workers. “In other words,” Palheta writes, “the
police are becoming increasingly emancipated from the state and the law, i.e. from any form
of external control (not to mention the non-existent popular control).” The colonial character
of police power was once expressed in the typical division of the military dealing with the
foreign, police with the domestic. An era of mass migration and postcolonial integration
means that the police function is now a kind of centripetal military itself, spiralling inwards
from the military “foreignised” exterior into the domestic interior, now a zone of the state
hierarchisation that used to be applied to the “other space”. The antecedent of this process was
the imperial reach of the colonial police – as imperialism transferred both those ‘exceptional
spaces’ of its domestic sphere to the colonised territory, it also transferred its policing
apparatus in a centrifugal movement, spiralling outwards from the policing of the interior of
the “homeland” to the hierarchised militarisation of occupation, wherein the tasks of policing
were no longer the enforcement of domestic law and daily regulations, but the physical-force
shepherding of the ‘target population’ into a new status as colonised labour and colonial
subjects of a second-class nature.

Ishay Landa, in a magisterial contribution to the thinking of fascism historically and

theoretically, reminds us not only of the origins of fascism in liberalism, but, more
specifically, the origins of fascism in a worldview and set of forces nurtured by the nexus of
liberalism and imperialist expansion:

Tocqueville’s belligerent and expansionist foreign policy outlook cannot be separated from
his understanding of internal social policies, allegedly benign and moderate. We should rather
stress the symbiosis—indeed, one that would come to typify fascist practice—between
imperialism abroad and severe social repression at home, embodied in the figure of the French
general Cavaignac, whom Tocqueville supported almost unreservedly. Combating the
insurgents of the 1848 June revolution, Cavaignac introduced in France the ruthless repressive
methods he and other French military men first used in fighting the Arab ‘rebels’ in North
Africa, and which were unprecedented in the history of European civil wars. In that way, the
struggle against the actual Algerian Bedouins, in aims and methods, was transferred onto
Paris, against the figurative ‘Bedouins of the metropolis.’7
The racial figuration of the object of police-military repression has been emphasised in recent
anti-racist movements, from Black Lives Matter in the streets to new perspectives in political
and social theory on the racial character of governance. We might even say, following Landa,
that this relapse of imperialism onto the domestic scenario is the fundamental structural
feature of fascism tout court. After all, we know that fascism’s greatest force lies not in
charismatic leaders or prophetic visions, but in the everyday forms that allow it to capture the
sphere of the normal, rather than the exceptional: “the true problem, the central secret of the
political is not sovereignty, but governance, is not God, but the angel, is not the king, but the
minister, is not the law, but the police — or, the governmental machine that these form and
keep in movement.”8

2. The Lumpenproletariat Dreams of “Great Politics”

Lump ist sein Ideal, Lumpe sollen Wir alle werden.

(The lumpen is its ideal – we shall all become lumpen)9

-- M. Stirner

At the level of psychic tropes, two fundamental directions in the evaluation of contemporary
fascism co-exist today: the first, which attempts to locate the roots of fascism in the material
substratum, and the second, which attempts to understand or conceptualise the psychological
and affective structure of adhesion to fascist ideas. The material substratum of the
development of fascism – a form of politics inseparable from the transformations of a
capitalist commodity economy – is a given for Marxists. But this does not mean that the
second question is unimportant. After all, the material substratum of class positions is
precisely what exerts an effect at the level of cognition, a kind of grammar of the psyche. And
perhaps the most important sentiment of youth adhesion to fascism is a projected sense of
loss. What distinguishes this attitude from forms of oppression or deprivation characteristic of
adhesion to radical sensibilities otherwise expressed is that this, rather than an experienced
loss felt in concrete material terms (to be poor, to be discriminated against, to be the target of
racism and exclusion), is a loss that is anticipated, which induces paranoia, hysteria, a
desperate search for solidity, and, above all, a kind of psychic creation of the loss itself as
an act of recuperating something that has not yet been experienced.

If the ‘anticipated loss’ expresses to some extent the particular admixture

of ressentiment, fear, and projection that characterises the psychoanalytic adherence to
fascist solutions10 – the “ideology” in Poulantzas’s terms – the “political” side of this
equation is often linked to the status of the nation. In commonplace utilisations of the term,
the new fascisms of our moment are frequently expressed as one possible polarity of ‘ultra-
nationalism’, an excessive and even racialised fixation on the national essence, with
‘nationalism’ in general here playing the role of the nurturing force of fascism. Palheta, for
instance, sees fascism in its fundamental state as a “a political project for the ‘regeneration’ of
an imaginary community – generally the nation,” a loose definition that is probably widely
shared, at least in its broadest sense. But is this really the case? Perhaps this easy
correspondence between fascism and the nation is not as straightforward as we might like, not
least because the contemporary liberal or centrist appeals as much to the nation as the fascist,
albeit for different reasons: one to emphasise the ‘normality’ of the typical function of the
state, the other to appeal to a figure of legitimation purportedly dwelling in the misty
historical past that could provide proof positive for the image of the socially-permissive,
administrative liberal state as a betrayal of the national destiny. But where the Marxist
tradition has always distinguished itself from the purely speculative character of other theories
of social development, is precisely in its insistence that political-ideological forms are, one
way or another, part and parcel of the historically-determined regime of accumulation and
mode of production that dominates the social formation. In this sense, the Marxist
clarification of fascism’s roots must take into account, but not begin and end with features of
psychic life that are ungrounded in the conjuncture, but rather with concrete forces of social
change, expressed in the hegemony of ideas that themselves depart from the material
substratum. Landa reminds us of a crucial fact related to the historical function and emergence
of fascism, when he remarks:

In the fascist axiological hierarchy […] the nation comes only after a fetishized Nature, whose
graces are conferred upon those who are successful in the business of imperialism and
capitalism, those “strongest in courage and industry.” […] The notion of “nationalism” or
“ultra-nationalism” as defining “the fascist minimum” is thus largely devoid of meaning,
unless one is willing to acknowledge the concrete class content of such “nationalism,” and the
way the national “palingenesis” was itself predicated on the bedrock of imperialistic-
capitalistic triumph.11

This point incisively recalls for us that, rather than simply a mystified theory of origin based
on the national community, the ultimate figure of fascism is a fantasy of a Law of Nature, a
sort of evolutionary narrative inhabited by “winners” and “losers,” whose positions are not
historically mutable but rather etched in destiny by the great objective force of this “Law of
the Strong,” which is nothing other than the modern conception of the market. To put it
succinctly, it is not nationalism that is to blame for the rise of fascism, but capitalism, and
especially a libertarian fixation on the quantifiability of all social phenomena, reduced down
to the zero-sum sphere of a pure market, in which “winning” and “losing” can be the sole
criteria of all social forms. Of course, it might well be argued that, in the fascist discourse, this
‘natural law’ is typically given its basis in a national or civilisational essence, made to
correspond to “the colour line” of which DuBois so powerfully spoke. But in its most
fundamental form, what preceded Trump in the United States, for example, was not waves
and surges of fetishisation of the nation, but decades of libertarian political and ideological
struggle towards the economisation, the quantification, of every aspect of life in terms of the
Manichean scene at the foundation of the market. This discourse of the capitalist triumph,
traceable, of course, to the neoliberal turn of the 70s, found its major spur in the turn of the
centre-right to the literal denigration of ‘society’, a concept perhaps forever marked by the
doctrine of communism, at least for the Reagans, Thatchers, Pinochets and others of our
world.

This hatred of society – of ‘socialised’ Man, society as a miscegenated zone of non-

quantifiable ‘encounters’, ‘mixtures’, losers copulating with losers, potentially corrupting
‘winners’ with their non-market life – is no direct derivation from the category of the nation;
it is an effect of the telescoping of the concept of ‘the market’ into a kind of alternate form of
sociality, in which there are nothing but ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. In such a schema,
the Lump that we are all becoming can only dream of ‘winning’, not of emancipation, not of
freedom, but only of a dwarfish and stunted vision of the classic Spenglerian (or
Nietzschean…) “Great Politics,” the comic-book versions of ‘the imperialist-capitalist
triumph’, whose rhetoric and figures of speech now trickles down to the lumpen masses: the
politics of great achievements, proof positive for ‘virtue’, a kind of quasi-religious piety
whose God is literally Mammon, and most importantly, for contemporary fascist tendencies, a
form of racial taxonomy as a kind of ‘measure’, even itself a form of ‘money’ or ‘wealth’ –
the proof of being a ‘winner’, and the fear that, since Natural Law dominates all, we might all
become losers.

For the young American fascists of our time, Trump unleashed their imagination, and let them
dream - dreams of winning, of being a ‘winner’, of triumphing over everything that stood in
the way of the sentiment of accumulation. It was not enough just to ‘win’: the ‘losers’,
whose communitarian belonging, etched into their bodies, had to be brought to heel,
‘civilised’ and adapted to the one true fascist God, the market. The ‘decent’ liberals, ever
fearful of any break with the status quo, could not recognise that they shared the same God
with Trump’s troops: the dollar, the number, the market, the empire. Of course, this love of
‘triumph’ and ‘winning’, this feature of making outlandish political claims solely on the basis
of desire and the anticipated loss is not only a sign of collective delusion, social hysteria, and
so on - it is also a symptom of an overall mass of immiserated people desperate for an idea,
any idea, any myth, anything to feel part of a collective experience of politics, of life, after
decades of austerity, the destruction of the trade-union movement, the wholesale devastation
of communities by means of the emptying out of the last vestiges of the welfare state, the
annihilation of any provision of means of subsistence outside the firm. Now, they see their
fantasies and aspirations to be part of some grand narrative of human redemption crashing
back into the timidity and hopelessness of centre-right technocracy. So long as the doctrine of
the market – and its racialisation of the sphere of circulation as a relapse of imperialism’s
predation of the rest of the world – remains at the centre of institutional politics, fascist
solutions will emerge from this ground. It is in this sense that, even if the abandonment of
myth and dreams to the Right by the Centre is nearly complete, the Left should refuse to fully
cede this ground.

The good liberals will tell us: that is all well and good, but the young fascists, the Trumpists,
the new FN voters, and more are overwhelmed with ‘misrecognitions’, they do not
‘understand’ the situation they are in, they refuse all ‘understanding’ and ‘deliberation’. They
have no ‘rationality’. But is not emancipatory politics also a ‘misrecognition’, a refusal to
make the status quo the measure of politics? A refusal to accept the capitalist rationality that
would entomb any transversal line of emancipation from the existing order? Who would not
want to ‘misrecognise’ this miserable society, the banality, cruelty, and evil of its ‘normal’
function? We must have an answer that does not negate the force of misrecognition, but that
harnesses it to a principle of equality, a destruction of the market so that society can live, and
a doctrine of communism, which means nothing other than: “freedom.”

"Defend DC Against Facism Rally 4" by Stephen D. Melkisethian is licensed under CC BY-
NC-ND 2.0

 1.https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/fascism-
fascisation-antifascism
 2.V.I. Lenin, “A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist
Economism,” originally published in Zvezda, nos. 1
 and 2 (1924), reprinted in Collected Works, vol. 23
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 28-29.
 3.A. Badiou, Metapolitics (Verso, 2005).
 4.Nicos Poulantazas, Fascism and Dictatorship: The
Third International and the Problem of Fascism
(London: Verso, 1974), 17.
 5.Louis Althusser and Luiz Francisco Rabello, letter of
17 August 1975 in Cartas sobre a revolução portuguesa
(Lisbon: Seara Nova, 1976). See reprinted excerpts
from this letter at:
<https://www.marxists.org/portugues/althusser/1975/08
/17.htm>. My emphases.
 6.C. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the
International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum
(Telos Press, 2006), 199.
 7.Ishay Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal
Tradition and Fascism (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 233.
 8.G. Agamben, “Appendix: The Economy of the
Moderns” in The Kingdom and the Glory (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 276.
 9.Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum [The Ego and
Its Own, 1845] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1972), 129. I owe
thanks to Yutaka Nagahara for reminding me of this
remarkable formulation.
 10.On especially the ressentiment of contemporary
fascisms, see Harry Harootunian’s important essay “A
Fascism for Our Time” in Mass Review, January 2021.
 11.Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer, op. cit. 320.