#antifascism

I increasingly distrust the language of “multiple crises.” AI-driven labour displacement. Climate catastrophe. Right-wing populism. Fascism. Racism. Sexism. The organised backlash against queer existence. We are encouraged to catalogue these as separate problems, each requiring its own specialist vocabulary, institution, funding stream and respectable panel discussion. But they are not unrelated phenomena. They emerge from overlapping structures of domination. The same political economy that renders a worker disposable can render a forest disposable. The same authoritarian imagination that reduces migrants to a demographic threat reduces queer people to a threat against an imagined social order. The same hierarchical logic that demands obedience from bodies demands obedience from nature, labour and dissent. And when the system produces insecurity, it offers a remarkably convenient explanation: Not the structure. The Other. The migrant. The queer person. The feminist. The unemployed. The dissenter. Someone must be made responsible for conditions they did not create. This is not an accident. It is politically useful. So I am less interested in asking which crisis we should address first than in asking what keeps producing them. Because if we merely treat the symptoms, the machinery remains intact. And machinery does not become humane because we learn to describe its victims more politely. Find the structure. Name the hierarchy. Follow the power. Then start taking the machine apart. #Antifascism #ClimateJustice #QueerLiberation #TransLiberation #Feminism #AntiRacism #WorkersRights #HumanRights #Solidarity

…and behind everything, Vladimir Putin smiles. Nothing quite says “German patriotism” like voting AfD, Putin’s favourite little useful idiots. History really does have a fucked up sense of humour. #AfD #NoAfD #Antifascism #Putin #Germany #NeverAgain

“Fascism is not a historical accident, but the logical continuation of liberal capitalism at the stage of monopoly.”

• Max Horkheimer

There is something almost offensively inconvenient about Horkheimer’s sentence.

It refuses the comforting story.

Fascism is not a monster that crawls out of the forest while respectable society watches helplessly from the window.

It does not require civilisation to suddenly disappear.

It can emerge from within existing institutions, existing hierarchies, existing economic relations.

That is the point.

When capital concentrates, inequality deepens and economic crises become structural rather than exceptional, the question becomes increasingly unpleasant: what happens when democracy starts getting in the way of concentrated power?

One possible answer is reform.

Another is repression.

And fascism is, among other things, a particularly vicious political answer to that contradiction.

It preserves hierarchy by redirecting popular anger away from the structures producing insecurity and towards convenient human targets.

The unemployed become lazy. The migrant becomes dangerous. The queer person becomes corrupting. The dissident becomes subversive.

The system remains innocent.

The victim becomes the problem.

And this is why I find the contemporary habit of treating fascism as something belonging exclusively to history so profoundly dangerous.

Fascism rarely introduces itself as:

Hello. I am fascism.

It tends to arrive as an administrative measure.

A moral panic.

A security policy.

A campaign against “degeneracy.”

A little restriction here.

A little dehumanisation there.

A political movement discovers that cruelty polls well, and suddenly cruelty acquires a press office.

Horkheimer was not offering a prophecy.

He was offering a warning about structure.

And structures do not care whether we find them aesthetically unpleasant.

They simply keep producing consequences.

#MaxHorkheimer #CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #Fascism #AntiFascism #PoliticalEconomy #Capitalism #Authoritarianism #History #QueerResistance #NeverAgain