Do We Need an Updated Theory of Fascism?

To frame the question in such a way may seem somewhat biased, as the answer is already implied given recent socio-political developments: yes, we are dealing with fascism, and presumably — due not only to historical shifts, but also internal transformations of the capitalist mode of production — that requires us to renew our theories. In earlier discussions around the Left and anti-fascism, people placed a lot of value on theory. Fascism could only be prevented or stopped if grasped theoretically. From Clara Zetkin and Ignazio Silone to Leon Trotsky, Bertolt Brecht, and Theodor W. Adorno, efforts were made to formulate a theory of the authoritarian, fascist dynamic of capitalist society.

In the 1970s, it was entirely plausible to think that the success of the Right was largely due to deficits in left-wing theory, which remained largely economistic in orientation. Yet all the theories and comprehensive studies on the social structure and fractions of capital, the electorate and voting behaviour, on the social position of workers or voters, on sexual morals, on the organization of the Right and its ideologies, were not able to prevent the rise of authoritarians. How should we interpret the successes of an anti-democratic, heartless, socially racist politics?

Indeed, even if they did not refute all theories, they did undermine them, pointing to a cluelessness within the democratic and social camp. For, if the theories are not wrong, then the success of the authoritarian right suggests that the problem lies not in the theories themselves. Critical-materialist theories of fascism and authoritarianism have yielded many important insights. Nevertheless, there is something insufficient about them, as they do not prevent the powerful (the bourgeoisie, the rulers, the elites) from organizing their rule in fascist or authoritarian manners, nor do they inspire the people (the subalterns, the masses, the people, the proletariat) to become a consistent force of resistance and its alternative.

Perhaps the expectations placed on these theories are too great — or even mistaken. At the same time, the position represented by critical theories of fascism was in many instances irrational. It was not a matter of simple enlightenment in the sense of humanism, an appeal to reason, to bourgeois norms such as freedom and equality or democracy, nor was it merely a mere reference to facts. Anti-fascism was able to appeal to the “power of the gun barrels” of the victorious Allied powers and the resistance movements, and to affirm the conviction that fascism’s authoritarian revolts had been defeated militarily. Democracy was and is not weak The confrontation with fascism, far-right groups, and authoritarian tendencies in the striving towards enlightenment was summarized with the warning, “You see, these will be the consequences: destruction, poverty, hunger, loss of education, resentment, racism, violence, and murder.”

Fascism today has learned from its historical defeat. It wants to win in the long-term, but is willing to accept the downfall of humanity as the cost of that victory. Deploying a metapolitical strategy, it seeks to weaken or destroy those forces capable of demonstrating the power of democracy and unwilling to acquiesce to nihilism. In the following, I argue that it makes sense to consider reviving theoretical work on fascism, that even a revived theory is insufficient, and that the current resurgence should not be understood as fascism.

Transnational Nationalists

The current resurgence can be compared with the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s in at least one key respect: anti-democratic forces are growing stronger. Developments in individual countries have contributed to this for some time, at different speeds but not in isolation from one another. Representatives of nationalist and authoritarian-populist parties are meeting, intellectual circles are exchanging ideas, militant — in some cases armed — neo-Nazi groups are cooperating. There is also right-wing media, cultural scenes with music, clothing, publishers, and magazines. Right-wing actors, which to some extent strengthen neo-fascist actors, reinforce one another, network with churches, government, media, and organized crime, where they find sympathy and support. They blur the lines between formal-constitutional institutions, civil society, and underground activity.

The authoritarian dynamic cannot be explained solely by the social position of a segment of the population, political development, or the activity of right-wing parties within a single nation state. Despite their professed nationalism, right-wing parties find common ground in their programmes and pursue alliances, cooperation, mutual support, visits, and conferences. A recent example is the backlash against the conviction of Marine Le Pen, who misused EU funds for her own party during her time as an MEP. Immediately after the verdict was announced, Orbán, Meloni, and Trump denounced the verdict as politically motivated. It was a scandal on multiple levels: interference by foreign governments in a domestic judicial ruling, disregard for the French legal framework, support for authoritarian politics, especially considering that governments such as Turkey and Russia had been not criticized in a comparable terms.

A similar episode occurred when the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was officially designated as a “confirmed right-wing extremist group” by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. One US government representative accused Germany of tyranny. Such a response is reminiscent of Nazi propaganda, where the roles of persecutors and persecuted, perpetrators and victims, were reversed. Unexpectedly, we are now witnessing the strange spectacle of a faction of the ruling class radically disavowing and attacking the institutions of the state: the media, the judiciary, and the police. 

Invoking the term fascism conjures a false historical image. Fascism was a self-designation used to define a specific form of violence, mass mobilization, and conception of the state.

There must be deeper causes behind these synchronous developments. They cannot be found in the activities of right-wing nationalist and authoritarian groups, nor in the widespread attitudes of the population revealed by opinion polls, nor simply in social poverty. What we are witnessing is a broader, transnational trend towards authoritarian rule, supported by substantial bourgeois forces. Some of these forces may not want right-wing governments, or remain ambivalent (consider Bezos or Musk in the post-2017 era, of the reserved stance of German business associations toward the AfD). Presumably, they themselves are drawn into an authoritarian dynamic that increasingly becomes a relationship of dependency. They have talked themselves into a hostile position — against gender, political correctness, so-called identity politics, the overburdening of the welfare state, and bureaucracy. The CDU’s slogans about “foreigners out” and the ongoing weakening of asylum law under the pretext that Islam does not belong in Germany then escalate into demands for mass deportation and far-reaching immigration restrictions.

The fact that Wolfgang Schäuble, Christian Wulff, and Horst Seehofer later retracted their own racist statements after leaving office no longer matters. There is a continuous presence of far-right forces in the media, in the conservative parties, and in interest groups. These actors pursue the same politics or deliberately adopt the far right’s dynamics, cooperate with them strategically, push for suitable policies, and oppose what they portray as the ruling parties’ indecisiveness and hypocrisy. They radicalize mainstream positions in the so-called democratic centre (think Nicolas Sarkozy, Sebastian Kurz, Seehofer, Jens Spahn). This is the product of a certain indecisiveness within the bourgeois milieu — political parties, the media, and churches — concerning how far they are willing to go, and concessions are made. In other words, as political and strategic conflicts unfold across these divisions, specific individuals and groups may radicalize and break away. As much happened in the AfD, whose founding members included market libertarians and right-wing, CDU-aligned, middle-class actors.

Actors in the right-wing parties sometimes openly refer to themselves as fascists and invoke historical role models such as Hitler, the SS, and the SA. They explicitly articulate anti-Semitic views, deny the Holocaust, dig up Stolpersteine memorials, disrupt commemorative events, or desecrate Jewish cemeteries — only to threaten their opponents with the violence they claim they did not commit moments later. Often, their stance is less overt — they imply a certain sympathy or continuity with historical fascism, only to then disavow such allusions. They make historical-revisionist or relativizing statements, only to chalk them up to misunderstandings later on.

That said, there are also deliberate attempts to distance themselves from fascist or Nazi legacies. To this end, authoritarian-populist parties have expelled members who made anti-Semitic remarks or expressed positive views of Nazism; party representatives visit Israel and seek close relations with right-wing Israeli governments and politicians. Their relationship to Jews is ambivalent. Trump attacks academia in the name of combatting antisemitism at US universities, yet  had the audacity to call the Charlottesville neo-Nazis, who chanted that they would not be replaced by Jews, “very fine people”, while pardoning right-wing extremists.

The Dynamics of Fascism in the US

This brings us to the question of nomenclature. How should we refer to these forces and developments? There are numerous and often contradictory critical attempts to name them: populism, nationalism, authoritarian populism, right-wing extremism, fascism, authoritarianism, radicalized conservatism, late or post-liberalism, micro- or schizo-fascism, right-wing authoritarian nationalism.

After the first weeks of Trump’s presidency, intellectuals in the US spoke readily and directly of fascism. An administrative and constitutional coup has occurred via DOGE; many officials and employees were summarily fired. Individuals were kidnapped, imprisoned, and deported using methods reminiscent of past police practices; legal procedures were ignored, and Supreme Court rulings were not respected by the administration and government. The media were excluded, flooded with lawsuits, and intimidated through legal and financial pressure. Law firms representing critics of the government lost contracts or faced lawsuits. The academic freedom of universities and research institutions is being systematically violated. Politicians are being threatened. The administrative coup is going hand-in-hand with a political and state crisis, in which no political institutions enforced laws or court rulings, and there were no avenues for those affected to seek judicial review of state actions.

Nevertheless, invoking the term fascism conjures a false historical image. Fascism was a self-designation used to define a specific form of violence, mass mobilization, and conception of the state. The Left often linked this to Marx’s theory of Bonapartism. In the 1920s, it tied the Left to a historical imaginary (support from large segments of the peasantry) that failed to fully grasp the reality of Nazism: the suppression of the workers’ movement, constant mass mobilization, the levelling of society, the formation of paramilitary combat units and secret police. Many believed Hitler would not stay in power for long and that the masses would soon realize that socialism had not been achieved. The war was expected — the quick military victories, plunder across large parts of Europe, and, above all, racist policy of extermination and resulting self-destruction of Germany and Austria, on the other hand, were not.

Due to the Nazi dictatorship, the Left has repeatedly expected a re-fascization or a neo-fascism. At demonstrations in the 1970s against the war in Vietnam, the coup in Chile, or US imperialism, it was not uncommon for protestors to shout “USA-SA-SS.” The expansion and militarization of the police and judicial systems in the 1970s, the frequency of right-wing attacks in Italy, or the anti-communist NATO intelligence operations against leftist or non-profit groups were cited as evidence of fascization and authoritarian tendencies. Although such tendencies did indeed exist, they never developed into a new state of emergency.

With Gramsci and Poulantzas one can make the argument that fascism was the result of a comprehensive crisis of the bourgeois power bloc — an economic crisis, a crisis of hegemony, a political crisis, and a crisis of the state.

It is surprising that a fascist dynamic supported by broad swaths of the population should emerge in a country like the US, where a democratic constitution has existed for over 200 years, parliamentary democracy has proven relatively stable, and changes in the administration run smoothly. It casts doubt on attempts to explain the success of Nazism in 1920s Germany solely by pointing to weaker democratic institutions, unfamiliarity with democratic practices, and lack of experience with democratic culture. Longstanding institutions and civil society may not suffice to guard against fascism. In fact, the opposite may be the case: the contradictory ways in which politicians have to participate in democratic institutions can seem hypocritical. Moreover, the fact that they often invoke democratic norms may obscure the fact that authoritarian practices can emerge from both within and outside of democracy.

Fascist developments are not primarily dependent upon public opinion or attitudes. Based on their personal experience, the representatives of critical theory argued in the 1940s that antisemitism was more widespread in Americans than it had been in Germany before 1933. This was important to critical theory’s sociology of domination: majority opinion alone cannot predict political developments. What matters is what the ruling powers want. With economic pressure, threats, violence, propaganda, and lies they create an atmosphere of obedience and conformity that compels people to join and integrate into the authoritarian collective. Opinion polling supports this claim.

For this reason, my deliberations proceed in a different direction. We are not dealing with genuinely new phenomena nor with historical repetitions. Authoritarian political patterns and practices of domination represent a long-term tendency — in essence, they belong to the capitalist mode of production and the formative processes of civil society. At the same time, I pursue one of Marx’s deliberations — formulated in the third volume of Capital — even further. What he attempts to determine is the “ideal average” of the capitalist mode of production, and recommends that statistical regularities be taken into account by theory in order to understand the constant shifts, instabilities, crises, and revolutionary changes within bourgeois society. Nothing remains stable or identical — and yet, with a certain regularity, specific practices reappear in forms that are both identical and transformed. This includes not only economic processes and their fluctuations, which with a certain probability then lead to overproduction and underproduction, to a shortage or surplus of labour, to simultaneous poverty and wealth, to free trade or mercantilism.

Marx himself was evidently uncertain, in the course of his research, as to which phenomena should be included in the ideal average of the capitalist mode of production. Yet he did emphasize the novelty of bourgeois society: the capitalist mode of production is the only one that occurs in the form of statistical distributions, regularities, probabilities, and averages — and this is decisive in the determining of value through abstract labour, the result of the market-mediated exchange of concrete labour. 

This deliberation also applies the capitalist state and the various political strategies of bourgeois rule. In his analyses, Marx comes to the conclusion that the parliamentary republic in its “ideal” average is the standard form of the bourgeois-capitalist state. It is an “ideal” average, because in reality bourgeois rule was organized into different forms, often non-state forms: in other words, in states, feudal-aristocratic principalities, or empires — or it was exercised in authoritarian forms: monarchy, colonial dictatorship, military dictatorship, Bonapartism, or fascism.

The rule of the bourgeoisie took shape beginning at the end of the fifteenth century, and forms of authoritarian rule played a significant role in its battles against the peasants, who sought to rid themselves of feudalism and the Catholic Church: the destruction of peasant emancipation and urban movements, the Counter-Reformation, the suppression of popular movements aiming to appropriate agricultural property, the Restoration following the French Revolution and its intellectual representatives such as de Maistre and Bonald or parts of German Romanticism, the struggle against the emerging workers’ movement, the Catholic counter-revolution after 1848 with figures like Donoso Cortés, the rise of antisemitism, and, after World War I, fascism and Nazism. These were all efforts and strategies aimed at preserving and extending rule — that is, not only combatting popular movements after they emerged but working preventively and counter-revolutionarily so that resistance, protest, and social movements would not emerge in the first place. For this reason, the rulers adapted to the likelihood that resistance and popular movements would emerge.

In a unique way, bourgeois rule organized itself with and against a comprehensive, historically new social movement — the workers’ movement — which not only maintained great continuity and was able to expand across regions, but also developed a secularized knowledge about actual social relations and was able to develop concrete plans for an alternative to the bourgeois world and way of life. That not only forced realism upon the bourgeoisie — that is, an orientation towards the concrete immanence of social relations and the development of a knowledge of domination and conflict — but also led to the development of preventative measures meant to guarantee security and order and monitor social processes and events to see to what extent they called into question established habits and regularities. 

Fascism was thus a counterrevolutionary practice, and not primarily the implementation of the interests of one bourgeois fraction, as Georgi Dimitrov claimed. According to him, fascism is the openly terrorist dictator of the most reactionary, most chauvinist, most imperialist elements of financial capital. In contrast, with Gramsci and Poulantzas one can make the argument that fascism was the result of a comprehensive crisis of the bourgeois power bloc — an economic crisis, a crisis of hegemony, a political crisis, and a crisis of the state. On the whole, it was a destabilization of the previous equilibrium of compromise among various social forces. Although the workers’ movement had no real prospects for revolutionary success, the bourgeoisie was nonetheless indeed demoralized, saw itself threatened, and did not know how to administer and resolve the problems of capitalist reproduction. It had to prevent the socialist and Communist movement from organizing in a way that would undermine national and military policy from within, transform the relations of production, and socialize the reproduction of society.

Historical fascism in Italy, and even more so in Germany, constituted a totality of authoritarian practices developed by bourgeois rulers over centuries. Until that point, fascism had been an unknown form of unleashing authoritarian state violence. It integrated modern industry, communication, law, science, and technological developments in order to exercise power over a vast population, to govern, persecute, and exterminate it in accordance with racist ideas. At the level of biological life, prevention aimed to combat every deviations in such a way that only a racist norm and a homogenous Volksgemeinschaft could prevail. This included the extermination of Marxism and the workers’ movement, of European Jews, Slavs, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, and the disabled — in other words, all those who did not fit the image of a master race.

Fascism took the form of a state of emergency. It consolidated all the authoritarian elements. At its end stood the traumatizing murder of countless people, the genocide, extermination, the displacement of populations within Europe, the dissolution of the colonial empires, and with it the collapse of Europeans’ ethnocentric certainty of their superiority.

Even if it is sometimes problematic to use a kind of checklist to define fascism, it nonetheless seems sensible to adhere to a series of features characteristic of the fascist form of authoritarian rule. These include: readiness to use violence as a daily and arbitrary instrument of rule, elite disdain of the masses, a national community and rejection of the free individual, nihilism and historical-philosophical pessimism (cultural decay, degeneration), populism and a leadership that presents itself as part of a resistance in order to implement the interests of the rulers with help of the mobilized Volk, nationalism, conservation, racism and antisemitism, sexism, misogyny, and hostility toward sexual minorities, rejection of democracy, rejection of intellectuals and scientific rationality. Fascism was the attempt within bourgeois society to use scientific and police resources to search for and destroy the generic aspects of dissent and deviation, combined with the delusional belief that any such practice of alterity or alternative perspective could be eradicated. It was to be a final victory, a total elimination of the enemy.

The military defeat by the Allied forces under the leadership of the US, on the other hand, demonstrated that one can be more successful by exercising bourgeois rule through the medium of democracy, through statistical regularities and unstable normalization processes. The delusional belief in the supremacy of the Germans, the Aryan race, was refuted. In the form of a familiar racism — a belief in one’s chosen-ness and the superiority of one’s own family, and the conviction that one knows the truth with regard to gender, the economy, and the well-being of the US — enters the political stage in the guise of figures like Trump and Musk. As a result, they support regimes that are indeed nationalist and racist, but lack the same ability to enrich themselves and thrive at the expense of others.

Fascism took the form of a state of emergency. It consolidated all the authoritarian elements. At its end stood the traumatizing murder of countless people, the genocide, extermination, the displacement of populations within Europe, the dissolution of the colonial empires, and with it the collapse of Europeans’ ethnocentric certainty of their superiority. When fascism is invoked today, it is often this sense of finality in social dynamics — totalitarian rule and its destructive consequences — that is evoked. For this reason, the reference to the fascist or anti-Semitic character of convictions, public statements, or actions have often served as a form of political-moral boundary. It is enough to refer to the anti-Semitic implications of a politician’s remark in order to force an apology, a resignation, or a change in behaviour.

This is because, for the majority of the bourgeoisie, the experience of fascism stood for unfettered racist violence and the elimination of democracy — and they recoiled from any renewed attempt to institute authoritarian rule in the guise of fascism. The bourgeoisie was and is not opposed to the use of authoritarian practices, but it did not want the system of rule itself to be called into question, to lead to unparalleled destruction, defeat, and the destabilization of balances and normalization processes. That has changed in recent years due to the Right’s metapolitical strategy. They do not deny the Holocaust, but relativize it, operate with ambiguity, retract allusions, or cynically confess: “Then I guess I’m a fascist.” Enlightening arguments pile up, but lose their effectiveness. A growing pressure is emerging to once again experiment with and implement authoritarian forms of rule.

Grasping the Dynamics

When I argue that historical fascism as state of exception consists of a series of practices, I conclude that there need not be such a finality. I picture it as a kind of prism: all the authoritarian elements are present. In the context of social struggles and power relations, specific political-ideological practices can assert themselves: political-economic conservatism, anti-genderism, authoritarian populism, racism, antisemitism, statism, fascism (characterised here, as Adorno and Scurati suggest, by violence and propaganda). One of these moments can cast all the others in the light of one colour and overdetermine them. 

These moments do not necessarily have to dynamically coalesce into the form of fascist exceptionalism such that fascism becomes the dominant feature. They can combine with the existing forms of democracy, embedding themselves with and permeating them. There can still be a parliament, parties, a media public, constitution, law, courts. But these formal institutions and their representatives are divided and merge into a fragmented and crisis-ridden field of forces: judges, public prosecutors, or police officers become part of fascist networks, journalists or writers gradually connect organically with the right and become its spokespeople. At the same time, judges, politicians, academics, journalists, and their family members are insulted, legally and physically threatened, attacked, or even murdered.

This process unfolds continuously, and institutions and individuals often attacked individually. The attacks have a threatening, corrosive, and demoralizing effect because there is no clear prospect of a solution. Police and public prosecutors are largely powerless under the current legal framework. The legal model of action proves inadequate in the face of fascist threats and violence (much more so than in the case of organized crime). Even broad mobilizations against the Right can hardly prevent their terror against individuals, or their threats and insults. 

The current cycle is characterized by the rise of autocracy, which distinguishes the current constellation from earlier forms of exceptional rule.

Instead of speaking of fascism, it may make sense to look at the dynamic process of becoming fascist. But what exactly does that mean? This refers to a dangerous dynamic, but not in the sense of a directed, teleological process that necessarily culminates in fascism. Rather, we should think of constellations of the moments mentioned above. Fascist elements are continuously present within the bourgeois apparatus of power (i.e. racism, neo-Nazi groups, revisionism, the cult of the soldier), but they only surge cyclically and are only one component of this apparatus. If, then, becoming fascist is an important factor in the current conjuncture, without this necessarily culminating in exceptional fascist rule, it raises the question of how to define the concrete form of rule. 

Elsewhere, I have argued in favour of identifying authoritarian populism. The basis for this practice of rule lay in the demoralization of key parts of the middle classes following the financial crisis and the emergence of a large wave of protest movements. It was expected that this dynamic could lead to a Green New Deal. However, the polycrisis has since deepened. Tipping points have been surpassed in multiple areas: melting glaciers and the Arctic ice sheet, warming seas and destruction of coasts, high CO2 and methane emissions, species extinction, pollution with micro- and nanoplastics, loss of groundwater, drought and soil erosion, large groups of people fleeing their homes. Shortages of raw materials and energy are becoming increasingly noticeable in light of AI-driven demand, infrastructure security and military readiness are under threat, space and the deep sea are emerging as new sites of geopolitical conflict.

A necessary transformation, which would need to be set in motion immediately, would not only fail to yield sufficient profits in relation to the investments, but would also be the beginning of a process that would diverge fundamentally from capitalist property and production relations. The challenges posed by the contradiction between production relations and productive forces are too great. We would have to become serious about abandoning the accumulation of capital at increasingly higher scales, reorganizing or even shutting down entire branches of production, developing other patterns of consumption, overcoming dependence on fossil fuels, and establishing new global economic balances.

The transnational bourgeoisie are not able to suppress these problems. That said, they are well aware of the challenges. The discussions at the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos testify to this. However, there are efforts to suppress knowledge and the emergence of new, corresponding practices. Knowledge must not translate into action, politics must not follow scientific insight. Cutting off knowledge entails wilful ignorance, blocking paths to action, and responding with obstinate inertia: more and bigger cars, smarter weapons, the restoration of conventional family structures and sexual norms, the destruction of research institutions and universities — as if nothing were wrong, as if the findings of earth system science, gender studies, or critical race research did not exist. This includes maintaining control over the disasters — whether imminent or unfolding — and suppressing the practices of solidarity they provoke, dismissing warnings from the military or the insurance sectors: it was not so bad, those were just one-off events.

In other words, the strengthening of the fascist elements is an attempt to block the socio-ecological transformation. Bourgeois society does not want to know anything about the monsters it is creating and hopes to contain or prevent communication flows and dissident practices by suppressing the sciences (“universities as the enemy”), harassing the media, and controlling and monitoring social media.

Feudalizing State Apparatuses

The current cycle is characterized by the rise of autocracy, which distinguishes the current constellation from earlier forms of exceptional rule. Those who occupy state power are not simply functionaries of the bourgeois class, representing different bourgeois factions. Rather, they themselves belong directly to the ruling class. They are entrepreneurs pursuing oligarchic interests. This leads to the state apparatuses becoming feudal: overlaps of power, the superimposition or elimination of hierarchies. This can extend a neo-feudal habitus, as can be observed in the case of Trump, Putin or Erdogan.

Access for representatives of other capitalist interests is now mediated by class affinity rather than formal legal equality. Public media are restructured or obstructed (newspapers excluded, public broadcasters suppressed, journalists persecuted), the role of civil society organizations is severely curtailed, and the influence of scientific knowledge is diminished. The autocrats are obviously suspicious of the state apparatus, its organization, and its personnel. They hijack the state and partially reorganize it, replacing the leadership with oligarchs, friends, and family members.

Democratic institutions and authoritarian leadership increasingly overlap. Parliaments, parties, and electoral law remain in place, but they are restructured to consolidate power within a single group, obstruct changes in decision-making, and create quasi-dynastic forms of representation. Developments in the US suggest that state apparatuses can also be drastically dismantled or that an organization from the outside, such as DOGE, can be used to make render individual state apparatuses (social services, foreign ministries, education ministries, research institutions, universities, media) hollowed out or severely dysfunctional. This autocracy may combine various forms of bourgeois rule. Alongside representative democracy, it could include elements of the totalitarian state and the form of the libertarian deregulatory projects like sea steads, charter cities or free trade and special economic zones.

Defending Emancipatory Victories

These are new challenges for the Left. Civilizational norms and the power structures of recent decades — if not centuries — are being called into question. That applies first and foremost to all ecological disruptions that shake millennia-old certainties — and accordingly, to notions of order that presumed themselves to be rooted in stable natural conditions. In the Anthropocene, where the laws of nature reveal themselves as historically shaped and human-mediated, a core ideology of the bourgeoisie — the appeal to the naturalness of social conditions — is being fundamentally undermined. The nation state, legal authorities, bourgeois democratic procedures, the media and the bourgeois public sphere, already eroded by globalization, are now under intense pressure.

The progressive achievements asserted since the 1960s — sometimes in an alliance with so-called progressive neoliberalism — are now under massive attack by the Right, even to the point of policing language. The Left must defend these emancipatory gains and not weaken itself by allowing the conservative-authoritarian forces to convince it of the contradiction between social and identity-based politics. These triumphs were and are an anticipation of a new civilization in which difference can be lived without fear and reconciliation with nature becomes possible.

New, democratic alliance constellations must be considered in the current situation.

New practices of solidarity are needed, because the catastrophic trends will continue: forest fires, floods, drought, supply bottlenecks due to transport disruptions. People, their possessions, and infrastructure are under threat. Governments are failing to provide sufficient assistance, insurance companies are shirking their responsibilities. A renewed collective will is needed to drive forward ecological renewal and organize solidarity in response to ecological emergencies. 

During the traffic-light coalition made up of the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats, representatives of the Social Democrats and Greens were often criticized and described as the stupidest government Germany has ever had. This was a false polarization. While the criticism was partially correct — implementation was lacking and opportunism was evident — a number of important projects were undertaken: the shift to e-mobility, the phasing out of subsidies for diesel or commuter allowances, the regulation of pesticides like glyphosate, the heating law, and the increase in CO₂ emission pricing. The real failure lay in the insufficient implementation, opportunistic compromises, and the absence of broad societal mobilization in support of a meaningful socio-ecological transformation. 

New, democratic alliance constellations must be considered in the current situation, in which the small grand coalition is threatening rearmament, compulsory military service, and cuts to social welfare systems, and in light of fascist tendencies that amount to an autocratic form of rule. A socialist pole is needed. The forces supporting this pole need a clear position. However, it is also important to articulate a broader strategy for building alliances. Given the strength of current authoritarian dynamics, it makes little sense to limit such alliances by party or organizational lines. The starting point could be (without false actualisation) considerations of a popular front movement as developed by Willi Münzenberg at the end of the 1930s. Such a policy can only be successful if it fulfils the requirements of democracy in the relationship between the alliance partners and the participation of individuals.

This article first appeared in LuXemburg. Translated by Bradley Schmidt and Hunter Bolin for Gegensatz Translation Collective.