Exhaustive Theoretical Notes on Critical Theory, Fascism, and the Anti-State State
Institutional Context and Conceptual Overview
Academic Context & Institutional Affiliations:
Critical theory and social/political theory analyze traditions of Marxist and critical philosophy with direct relevance to contemporary social conflicts and political movements.
Key institutional frameworks include the Digital Democracy Institute within the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University (SFU), as well as the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Center for Philosophy and Critical Thought.
Key literature includes translations of Alain Badiou, philosophical studies on fanaticism, Cartographies of the Absolute, and Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis (published by Verso Books in fall 2023).
Historical Framing of Critical Theory:
Critical theory was initially forged in the late 1920s and 1930s in direct response to the emergence of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, the historical defeat of socialist and communist left-wing forces, and the subsequent problem of fascism's "afterlives" or ongoing potentials following World War II.
Fundamentally, early critical theory is structurally defined as a theory of fascism.
Critique of Mainstream Media Formulations:
Contemporary mainstream media coverage (e.g., CNN, MSNBC) and political rhetoric (such as Joe Biden defining the GOP as exhibiting "semi-fascism") rely on a truncated, stereotypical understanding of interwar classical fascism.
"Semi-fascism" was originally a precise technical concept utilized by American Communists in the 1930s and 1940s.
Mainstream analyses fail by focusing on rigid checklists or stage-by-stage progression models based exclusively on 1920s and 1930s European templates.
Mainstream debates ignore how elements of fascism were seeded in 19th-century colonial settings and how they prolong themselves into modern neoliberal political formations without manifesting initial, obvious symptoms of historical fascism.
Re-evaluating Early Italian Fascism and the March on Rome Centenary
The October 1922 March on Rome:
The October 1922 March on Rome marked the ascension of Benito Mussolini and the National Fascist Party to power in Italy. Its centenary in October 2022 was celebrated by political inheritors of fascism, including supporters of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Historical examination reveals significant discrepancies between early fascist practice and received commonplaces regarding fascist economic organization.
Early Fascism vs. Modern Misconceptions of Statism:
Fascism is conventionally associated with a hyper-statist, totalitarian model characterized by centralized economic planning, corporatism, state-directed industry, and state-mediated class reconciliation uniting workers and employers.
Historical evidence from Mussolini’s speeches in 1921 and 1922 (on the eve and in the immediate aftermath of the March on Rome) demonstrates an explicit alignment with economic liberalism.
Early fascist doctrine asserted that the state's role was to retreat from major economic sectors:
Complete removal of the state from the management of state railways.
Divestment and exit from the national healthcare system.
Proposed total privatization and removal of the state from public education.
This early iteration aligns structurally with extreme neoliberalism, demonstrating that economic planning and central statism are not inherently present in the original "DNA" of fascism, but were adopted later in the 1920s and 1930s to regulate mass society and control working-class demands.
The Duality of Violence and Liberal Economics:
Early fascism paired an idealization and celebration of post-World War I virile, martial violence (squadrismo) with classical economic liberalism as understood by early 20th-century Italian economists and politicians.
Ideological Synthesis and Georges Sorel's Theory of Myth
Georges Sorel's Intellectual Role:
Georges Sorel was a French civil engineer who became a prominent theorist in his mid-40s, exerting profound influence across Italian political debates in the 1910s and 1920s.
Sorel was a central figure in Marxist revisionism alongside Italian Marxist Antonio Labriola and liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce.
From 1903 to 1910, Sorel deeply influenced Italian anarcho-syndicalism and socialist syndicalism.
His erratic political trajectory spanned revolutionary syndicalism, associations with the hyper-nationalist and anti-Semitic French right in the 1910s, and simultaneous praise for both Vladimir Lenin and Benito Mussolini upon his death.
Sorel's death inspired reflective obituaries across the entire political spectrum, including the communist journal L'Ordine Nuovo (edited by Antonio Gramsci, Palmiro Togliatti, and Umberto Terracini/Angelo Tasca) and the fascist journal Gerarchia ("Hierarchy").
Sorelian Concepts and Fascist Appropriation:
Revolutionary Voluntarism: Primacy of human will, action, and hostility toward parliamentary liberalism.
The Concept of Political Myth: Drawing on philosopher Henri Bergson, Sorel defined political myths as "blocks of images" designed to catalyze creative revolutionary spontaneity.
In Sorel's Reflections on Violence, the primary myth was the general strike.
Mussolini adapted the Sorelian concept of myth, substituting the general strike with the myth of the virile, martial nation at war.
Mussolini's political application of myth was explicitly instrumental and cynical: claiming that because a unified nation did not yet exist, it had to be constructed artificially through political myth, mass political mobilization, and organized violence.
Walter Benjamin's Engagement with Sorel:
In his essay Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin integrated Sorel's general strike but subverted Sorel's framework.
Benjamin posited the general strike not as a myth, but as an active political practice specifically directed against "Mythic violence" (mythische Gewalt) to destroy political myths.
Models of the Fascist State: Anti-State State and Non-State State
The "Anti-State State" (Ruth Wilson Gilmore):
Formulated by critical theorist Ruth Wilson Gilmore to describe the spatial and racial dynamics of neoliberalism.
Defined as a state apparatus that expands its repressive, violent, and penal capacities under the ideological pretense and advertisement of shrinking its role in social infrastructure and welfare.
Early Italian fascism operated as an anti-state state before transitioning in the 1930s to the "ethical state" formulation ghostwritten by philosopher Giovanni Gentile in the Doctrine of Fascism ("Nothing outside the state, nothing against the state, everything within the state").
The "Non-State State" and Behemoth (Franz Neumann):
Critical legal theorist Franz Neumann analyzed the structural power dynamics of the Third Reich in his 1942 work Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944.
Neumann argued that National Socialism did not construct a classic unified state (a Hobbesian Leviathan), but rather an unstable, chaotic "non-state state" or Behemoth (Hobbes's symbol for civil war).
The Nazi Party and movement reduced the formal state apparatus and legal bureaucracy to mere instruments for racial and power projects that exceeded state boundaries.
Neumann noted that jurist Carl Schmitt fell out of favor with elements of the Nazi establishment due to his traditional "state fetishism."
Under Nazism, legal intellectuals crafted justifications for a system characterized by a permanent internal civil war, where political power directly converted into private plunder and resource extraction.
Conflict was no longer mediated by state legal frameworks; instead, the system functioned as an arena of competing rackets (the SS, the industrial capitalists, the Wehrmacht/Army, and the Nazi Party) with Adolf Hitler acting as the central arbiter maintaining an illusion of cohesion.
Mechanics of Fascist Power Acquisition: Institutions and Violence
Rejection of the Pure Insurrectionary Model:
Contrary to popular depictions of fascism as an illegal military coup d'état or insurrection, classical fascism achieved state power through legal structures, executive invitation, and elite political alliances.
The Function of Squadristic Violence:
Mass militia violence (squadrismo) in Italy during 1920–1921 systematically attacked socialist municipal governments, trade union headquarters, and labor cooperatives.
This violence demonstrated that the state's official monopoly on violence was already fractured, revealing the porosity of state repressive apparatuses (police and military) toward fascist squads.
Political violence did not directly overthrow the state; instead, it applied violent pressure to create an elite crisis, prompting conservative, liberal, and business elites to collaborate with fascists to preserve property relations.
Institutional Collusion in Power Transfer:
Italy (1922): King Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign the state of emergency decree presented by the government that would have authorized the military to suppress the March on Rome. The King subsequently invited Mussolini to become Prime Minister despite fascists holding only a minor fraction of parliamentary seats. During the march, Mussolini waited near the Milan train station with a planned escape route to Switzerland in case the elite transfer failed.
Germany (1933): Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg through conservative elite consensus after Nazi electoral support had already peaked and begun declining in late 1932.
Black Radical and Anti-Colonial Theories of Racial Fascism
Critique of European Stage Models:
Anti-colonial and Black radical theorists—including Aimé Césaire, W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Cedric Robinson, and Amiri Baraka—dismantle normative European-centric frameworks that treat interwar fascism as an unprecedented, isolated phenomenon.
Racial Fascism and Reconstruction:
In Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. Du Bois conceptualized the violent white supremacist reaction against Reconstruction in the American South—termed the "counter-revolution of property"—as an explicit form of "racial fascism."
Amiri Baraka highlighted Du Bois's identification of racial terror and disenfranchisement as foundational expressions of fascist rule long preceding 1920s Europe.
Differential Class and Racial Experience of Fascism:
Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis, and George Jackson emphasized that fascism is experienced differentially based on racialized and gendered locations within capitalist power structures.
Writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s regarding the mass incarceration of Black political prisoners and militarized policing, Angela Davis asserted that fascist modalities of governance, terror, and repression were already operational within the United States for racialized populations, even while dominant white populations experienced nominal liberal democracy.
These repressed sites function as laboratories for authoritarian techniques later expanded to broader populations.
Fascism as Reaction to Liberation Struggles:
In the North American context, fascism is not merely an abstract structural response to capitalist economic crises, but a targeted, preventive counter-offensive against civil rights and Black liberation movements threatening white supremacist property regimes.
Colonialism, Settler Colonial Models, and the Boomerang Effect
Aimé Césaire's Boomerang Thesis:
In Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire formulated the "boomerang effect" (choc en retour), positing that European fascism was the importation and application to European soil of genocidal, racial, and administrative violence previously perfected in overseas colonial empires.
Parallel arguments were articulated by Marxist theorist Karl Korsch and by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (though Arendt's formulation remains tied to colonial tropes). Robin D.G. Kelly's introduction to Césaire contextualizes this theoretical trajectory.
Qualifications to the Boomerang Model:
Internal Racial Capitalism: As Cedric Robinson established, European history was already characterized by internal "racial capitalism," including internal colonialism, anti-Semitic pogroms, anti-Roma persecution, and violent class subjection (e.g., British conquest and repression in Ireland acting as a template for external colonialism).
Settler Colonial Templates for Nazism: The influence of settler colonialism was direct and structural rather than merely a return loop:
The Nazi concept of Lebensraum ("living space") and the conquest of Eastern Europe (Generalplan Ost) explicitly adopted the model of American Manifest Destiny.
Historical research (such as James Whitman's Hitler's American Model) details how Nazi legal scholars in the 1930s directly analyzed United States legislation. While they initially deemed Jim Crow segregation laws excessively extreme for European adoption, they directly modeled early Reich citizenship laws on United States federal Indian law—specifically utilizing mechanisms that created non-citizen nationals to strip Jewish populations of civic rights.
Military practices drew on imperial precedents, such as the German Empire's genocide of the Herero and Namaqua peoples in German South West Africa in the early 20th century.
European fascism, particularly National Socialism, represented the establishment of a settler-colonial regime within the European geographical space.
Contemporary Political Warfare and Preventive Counter-Reform
Preventive Counter-Reform Defined:
Extending Herbert Marcuse's and Angela Davis's late-1960s analysis of preventive counter-revolution, modern reactionary political drives represent a "preventive counter-reform."
This dynamic operates in a landscape lacking an immediate, organized revolutionary threat, seeking instead to preemptively foreclose the mere possibility of emancipatory politics or disruptions to property and white supremacy.
Ideological Warfare in Education and State Policy:
Systematic legislative maneuvers (e.g., Florida's Stop WOKE Act, proposed political ideological disclosures for university professors in Ohio, and curriculum revisions by the Virginia Department of Education removing historical terms such as "fascism" and "militarism") illustrate aggressive state-level cultural warfare.
The political attack on "Critical Race Theory" treats all discussions of structural racism or historical slavery as subversive. The word "theory" itself has been weaponized by right-wing movements as a racialized slur denoting leftist subversion of Western white civilization.
Educational censorship campaigns—such as the state-level editing and redaction of the Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies curriculum (which originally included texts by scholars like Robin D.G. Kelly and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor)—reflect intense discursive struggles over institutional hegemony.
Border Fascism, Gender Panic, and Psychological Projection
Border Fascism and the Far-Right Matrix:
In Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right, journalist Brendan O'Connor traces the political economy and foundation funding (dating back to the 1970s) behind nativist, eugenicist, and anti-immigration organizations in the United States.
Despite internal ideological fragmentation among far-right factions (Christian nationalists, neo-conservatives, neoliberals, Proud Boys, and explicit neo-Nazis), these groups cohere around Border Fascism.
Border Fascism centers on the violent defense of white Western settler homogeneity and border enforcement against perceived demographic replacement, decline, or suicide.
Gender Panic as International Currency:
Gender panics—manifesting as transphobia, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, and attacks on "gender ideology"—serve as an essential unifying discourse across mainstream conservative parties (e.g., the Republican Party) and far-right extremist groups.
This rhetorical structure forms a global post-fascist international, uniting figures across vast geopolitical divides (e.g., Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro, and Bashar al-Assad) around identical anti-gender rhetoric.
Psychological Projection and the Fantasy of Annihilation:
Far-right mobilization relies on tropes of white genocide, demographic replacement, and imagined white annihilation to produce a violently victimized subjectivity.
Critical theorists Theodor W. Adorno, Leo Löwenthal, and Norbert Guterman (in Prophets of Deceit) analyzed this phenomenon as a form of mimesis and psychological projection.
The eliminationist racist projects their own genocidal and violent desires onto marginalized groups, claiming that minoritized populations are actively scheming for the total erasure or destruction of the dominant group, thereby justifying preemptive violence.