An antifascist conversation about why understanding gender, war, and death politics is important for resisting fascism in all its forms.
A lively presentation of On Microfascism inspires a dialogue on feminist, antirascist, and abolitionist perspectives on the antifascist culture we're creating for a dignified and safe world for all—and the cultural dimensions of patriarchy, white supremacy, and nationalism that makes fascism part of every fight we have to confront in order to live. With Jack Z. Bratich in conversation with Victoria Law.
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Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.
Fascist and reactionary populist forces have undeniably swelled in the US in recent years. To effectively counter fascist movements, we need to understand them beyond their most visible and public expressions.
To do this, Jack Bratich asserts, we must dig deeper into the psyche and body that gives rise to fascist formations. There we will find microfascism, or the cultural ways in which a fascist understanding of the world is generated from the hatreds that suffuse everyday life.
How deeply rooted in Western culture and subjectivity is fascism?
Taking a concept scattered across the writings of Felix Guattari, On Microfascism traces the long history of the cultural production of fascist subjectivity as well as its most contemporary forms. From the Book of Genesis to contemporary gamer squads, microfascism appears in initiation rites old and new, via Proud Boys and Boogaloo Boys as updated archaic warrior societies, in the persecution of witches old and new, and in necropolitical anti-masking protestors.
By highlighting the misogyny at fascism’s core, we are able to observe a key process in the formation of a fascist body. Recognizing the microfascism behind appeals to recover the past glory of white male subjects created by earlier foundational wars, we see how histories of settler colonialism, genocide, and domination are animating the deadly mission of fascism today. By focusing on the variety of ways the resurgent fascist tendency courts its own destruction (and demands the destruction of others), we can trace how fascism refines and expands the death and annihilation that underpins capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal systems.
The implications of On Microfascism are far-reaching and unsettling. Still, Bratich insists, the new fascism is not as powerful as its adherents wish us to believe. To defeat it, we must develop and defend a “micro-antifascism” grounded in the ethics of mutual aid and care in the everyday. Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.
Such a project requires an abolitionist orientation to counter the microfascism’s own version: elimination and extermination.
ABOUT SPEAKERS
Jack Z. Bratich is professor in the Journalism and Media Studies Department at Rutgers University. In addition to On Microfascism, he is also author of Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture and coeditor of Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality.
Victoria Law is a freelance journalist who focuses on the intersections of incarceration, gender and resistance. She is the author of Prisons Make Us Safer: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration and regularly covers prison issues for Truthout and other outlets. Her latest book, Prison By Any Other Name, cowritten with Maya Schenwar, critically examines proposed “alternatives” to incarceration and explores creative and far-reaching solutions to truly end mass incarceration.
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