A review by dakkafex
Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis by Alberto Toscano

challenging reflective slow-paced

3.0

I have not read enough theory to understand everything in this book and neither have you. While I understand that not every book is for a mass audience, this work is dense and abstruse even by academic standards, especially if you're not already deeply ensconced in particular strains of post-structuralist analysis. I come from a background studying fascism (both "classical" and "modern") via methods of history and political science, and found this work interesting, but too many degrees abstracted away from boots-on-the-street material realities; once you spend a chapter talking about atemporal chronologies and time 'in' vs 'of' vs 'for' fascism, it gets a bit difficult to follow how any of it relates to actual political forces and human motivations. There are plenty of the usual language games and endless problemitizations expected of this corner of theory, but by and large they're not too inscrutable and the author occasionally does allow themselves to actually make a firm conclusion on something. For all my grumbling I'm not rating this lower because the author is genuinely quite thorough in their argumentation, even if much of that argumentation boils down to a shrug, and you will certainly come out of reading this having thought quite a bit about the deep abstract nature of fascist tendencies over time. You won't be any better at identifying or combatting them, if anything maybe worse, but you'll certainly have thought a lot about them.