The BVPS Blog publishes today the fourth post of the international symposium Capitalism and Authoritarianism: What Is to Be Done?, which invited Brazilian and international specialists, drawing from three major areas of the social sciences — social theory, the sociology of work, and Brazilian social and political thought — to answer four questions around the intricate relationships between authoritarianism and capitalism in the contemporary world. The responses will be published in batches every Wednesday. By clicking here you can read the other publications from the symposium.
Today’s contributors are:
Maria Aparecida Bridi is a sociologist and professor in the Department of Sociology at the Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR), where she coordinates the Grupo de Estudos Trabalho e Sociedade (GETS). She focuses on the sociology of work, with emphasis on labor relations, digital work, outsourcing, trade unionism, and collective action. She is the author, among other works, of Trabalhadores dos anos 2000 and co-author of Sociologia: um olhar crítico and Ensinar e aprender Sociologia.
Débora Messenberg is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the Universidade de Brasília (UnB). Her work spans political sociology, with a focus on democracy, political culture, the National Congress, and the parliamentary elite. In recent years, her research has turned to the study of the new right and Bolsonarism. She is the author, among other works, of the influential article A direita que saiu do armário: a cosmovisão dos formadores de opinião dos manifestantes de direita brasileiros and co-author of Brasil em Transe: Bolsonarismo, nova direita e desdemocratização.
Uwe H. Bittlingmayer is a professor of Sociology at the University of Education Freiburg, in Germany. A specialist in empirical research on the sociology of education and health inequalities, he develops studies on the so-called “knowledge society” from a critical perspective grounded in Bourdieu. He is the author of “Wissensgesellschaft” als Wille und Vorstellung and co-editor of Die “Wissensgesellschaft”: Mythos, Ideologie oder Realität?
Gabriel Peters is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE). Holding a PhD in Sociology from the Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Políticos at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (IESP/UERJ), he focuses on social theory, the philosophy of the social sciences, and the study of social practices. He is the author, among other works, of Percursos na teoria das práticas sociais: Anthony Giddens e Pierre Bourdieu and A ordem social como problema psíquico: do existencialismo sociológico à epistemologia insana.
The international symposium Capitalism and Authoritarianism: What Is to Be Done? is organized by Fabrício Maciel (UFF) and Maurício Hoelz (UFRRJ and editor of the BVPS Blog), and has the editorial assistance of Miguel Cunha (PPGCS/UFRRJ).
See below!
Capitalism and Authoritarianism: What Is to Be Done?
1. What is your assessment of the relationship between capitalism and authoritarianism today?
Maria Aparecida Bridi: I think it is important to define contemporary authoritarianism as the political expression of the structural crises of capitalism and as a coercive response to the current crises of hegemony. Historically, whenever the expanded reproduction of capital encounters systemic barriers, a joint offensive between the State and the market is articulated to ensure the subordination of the labor force. Capitalism and authoritarianism have always been symbiotically linked, revealing themselves as two faces of one and the same process of preserving the system.
The history of capitalism itself reveals this instrumental nature of the forms of government. Throughout the twentieth century, capital coexisted both with democratic regimes and with openly authoritarian experiences, with dictatorships of various kinds. This coexistence is mediated by a dense cultural layer: democracy is frequently reduced to an exchange value, discarded when it ceases to be functional to accumulation. In this sense, authoritarianism is not a state “deviation,” but a prerogative of the market itself whenever it imposes the dictatorship of value over social needs. Democracy is a permanently unfinished social and cultural construction. Because it is a historical process dependent on correlations of force, it is inherently fragile: capital tolerates it as long as it does not obstruct accumulation, discarding it when consensus fails.
When I observe the offensive against social rights, I see a response to the crises of capitalism and the crisis of democracy itself. Neoliberalism radicalized this movement by dismantling rights and imposing a cultural grammar of absolute competitiveness. The attack on the rights of the working class occurs through legislation and through the authoritarian management of the market. This process came together with a culture of “entrepreneurship of the self” that undermines solidarity, the necessary foundation for sustaining democracy and the rights of the working class. Without social support, democracy becomes a shell susceptible to autocratic solutions. In Brazil, the 2016 coup and the 2017 reform exemplify how popular sovereignty is subjected to the tyrannical will of the “markets.”
Today’s authoritarianism operates through economic terror and through a cultural hegemony based on fear. It is not a rupture, but the reconfiguration of an autocratic face that was always latent and is now adjusted to flexible accumulation and to the technological management of social behavior.
Débora Messenberg: The articulation between capitalism and authoritarianism in the contemporary world constitutes a structural dynamic that transcends monocausal explanations. Neoliberalism operates not only as economic rationality, but as a form of governmentality that produces specific subjectivities and systematically corrodes the foundations of liberal democracy (Brown, 2019). When all human existence is reduced to the logic of human capital, subjects become permeable to authoritarian discourses that promise to restore certainties and hierarchies in contexts marked by the generalized precarization of life. Contemporary capitalism has, as Fraser (2022) points out, a self-destructive character, devouring its own conditions of possibility – social cohesion, ecological sustainability, the capacities for social reproduction, and political legitimacy. This condition of permanent crisis generates deep resentments and collective anxieties that feed authoritarian projects, which offer scapegoats and simplistic solutions through the identification of internal and external enemies.
The psychosocial mechanisms that link capitalist crises to authoritarian movements remain operative and have acquired new forms of expression. The authoritarian propensity has not disappeared from advanced capitalist societies; on the contrary, it finds new means of manifestation in digital platforms and in regressive identity politics. Financialized capitalism – marked by extreme inequality and systemic precariousness – not only coexists with authoritarianism but actively produces it as a reactionary response to its own contradictions and crises of legitimation. Contemporary authoritarian propaganda, as a technique of mass psychology, mobilizes irrational and unconscious processes that feed on the mental framework of population strata subjected to meaningless frustrations, who develop regressive mentalities (Adorno, 2015).
Uwe H. Bittlingmayer: On the one hand, I would still refer to the writings of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse who saw a direct connection between capitalism and authoritarianism. Since capitalism produces by its very nature forms of anxiety and fear across the society people are generally vulnerable to authoritarian promises to stop uncertainty by blaming and punishing foreigners, Jews, migrants, refugees and so on. Most of these mechanisms are in my view preconscious in Bourdieu’s sense of it so that there is principally the possibility to change authoritarian attitudes by changing the social structures that caused them.
On the other hand, while there is still this traditional authoritarianism, new and ‘modernized’ forms of authoritarianism are at stake. Amlinger and Nachtwey call it libertarian authoritarianism. It is a new form that combines orthodox forms with the idea that freedom is threatened by the state and that it is necessary to resist against state-based rules. This form was specifically visible in Pandemic times when often right-wing groups of people but also others refused to wear masks, keep distance and so on. One thesis about the relationship between capitalism and authoritarianism is therefore that the latter changed at least partly the form while the mechanisms of the production of such attitudes remain largely the same.
Gabriel Peters: The answer depends on how we apply the notions of capitalism and authoritarianism to the specificities of the present. The greatest challenge in this application is to attend simultaneously to: a) the patterns identified in the strong theoretical uses of such concepts, such as the exploitation of labor by capital under capitalism or the neutralization of counter-powers to the executive under authoritarianism; b) the contextual differences between their socio-historical manifestations, such as the new consequences brought about by the centrality of the digital for both, such as the replacement of the organized proletariat of the past by the uberized worker and of the mass party by digital multitudes.
A fruitful starting point is the idea of late neoliberalism: a historical conjuncture that signals not an overcoming of neoliberal capitalism, but its restructuring in the face of a generalized disenchantment with the promises that animated this system at the turn of the twentieth to the twenty-first century. This disenchantment served as the basis for the strengthening of far-right discourses, movements and regimes that politically instrumentalize those disenchanted affects, through ideological narratives that divert the attention of their adherents away from the real causes of their existential difficulties. The arsenal of these ideological weapons of mass distraction, in the era of attention capitalism, is quite varied, ranging from real conspirators (e.g., Steve Bannon) injecting money and manipulative expertise expertise into the dissemination of imaginary conspiracies (e.g., QAnon) to the rendering invisible of distributive issues (e.g., the end of the 6×1 schedule) by flooding the media space with moral panics linked to the morality agenda (e.g., unisex bathrooms).
Such an interpretive map is far from exhausting the subject, but it provides a fertile path of investigation, especially if the connection between late neoliberalism and the far-right “Nationalist International” is analyzed in a flexible and multidimensional way, and not through explanatory reductionisms (e.g., authoritarianism seen merely as the political-ideological “superstructure” of the current phase of capitalism).
2. How do you think your field of knowledge could engage with other disciplines in building this assessment?
Maria Aparecida Bridi: My trajectory in the Sociology of Work began in 2003, under the hegemony of the debate on the “crisis of the centrality of work.” This thesis was so influential that, even today, I encounter young (Sociology) professors who question the relevance of studying work, treating it as an obsolete category of the twentieth century. However, while part of the Brazilian academy was incorporating European epistemological shifts focused on consumption and identities, the reality of peripheral economies remained structured by work, albeit in precarized forms. What presented itself as a “crisis” must therefore be interpreted less as an analytical exhaustion and more as an expression of the political transformations of the neoliberal offensive.
What was reconfigured in this process was not the importance of work, but the system of social guarantees associated with it. The recomposition of profitability, under the logic of flexible accumulation, required the intensification of control over the labor force and the dissemination of practices that restricted rights and weakened democratic mechanisms. These movements produced profoundly unequal effects, deepening cleavages of class, gender and race.
I recognize the limits of an analysis restricted to a single discipline. Advancing this diagnosis requires that disciplinary boundaries function as points of contact for a higher analytical synthesis, capable of confronting the complexity of authoritarianism in the periphery of capitalism. This dialogue is only productive when it proceeds from a consistent command of each field, allowing interdisciplinarity to operate as synthesis, and not as mere juxtaposition.
Faced with millions of Brazilians subjected to the 6×1 schedule (six days of work for one day off), I ask myself: how did this become possible and why was it naturalized? This reality, rooted in flexible accumulation, was radicalized by reforms in labor legislation, recalling here the 2017 Labor Reform, which dealt a blow against union activity. By suffocating collective resistance, the system ensures that the unilateral will of the market prevails over popular sovereignty. Understanding this democratic hollowing-out requires a transdisciplinary dialogue and the unveiling of how contemporary authoritarianism operates: replacing organization with the tyranny of value.
Débora Messenberg: Contemporary political sociology cannot claim to adequately diagnose the articulation between capitalism and authoritarianism without establishing deep interdisciplinary dialogues. It becomes imperative to incorporate analytical perspectives capable of grasping the psychic, social, cultural and moral dynamics of social experience, forged in the interaction between subjective dispositions and structural conditioning factors that produce specific political engagements. The analysis of the affective economy of authoritarianism shows how moral grammars and political emotions are produced, circulated and fixed in certain bodies and social groups (Ahmed, 2004). This perspective makes it possible to understand authoritarianism not only as ideology or institutional structure, but as an affective regime that organizes everyday practices and subjectivities through the strategic mobilization of emotions.
Contemporary authoritarianism operates not only through political institutions, but through the construction of alternative worlds of meaning that invert fundamental epistemological categories. Digital platforms are not mere channels of transmission, but infrastructures that constitute specific political epistemologies and hierarchize realities (Cesarino, 2022). In this direction, it becomes indispensable to examine how algorithms organize perceptions of the real and enable new forms of authoritarian mobilization. The construction of a robust diagnosis therefore requires the articulation of the analysis of economic structures, the understanding of cultural and symbolic mediations, the investigation of affective regimes, and the examination of the technological infrastructures that shape the contemporary public sphere.
Uwe H. Bittlingmayer: As a sociologist and public health scientist I think that it is not only important to try to understand the persistence of authoritarianism from a theoretical perspective. It is equally important to measure the different forms of authoritarianism and to understand the inhumanity of the current globalized and digitalized capitalism. Furthermore, it is urgent to link all this to other forms and structures of power relations such as gender relations or ethnic relations to avoid the risk of pitting different oppressed and marginalized groups against one another. Last but not least, it is in my view very important to talk about alternative forms of thinking and building societies. In the last ten, maybe twenty years, a number of alternatives to capitalism and state socialism have been developed, particularly in the anarchistic spectrum. Participatory Economy developed by Michael Albert and Robert Hahnel and further developed by a lot of others for instance is a serious approach to illuminate a possible other society which tries to reduce significantly all forms of power relations and hierarchies.
Gabriel Peters: By taking the articulation between generalizing knowledge and a sense of the conjuncture as one of its fundamental tasks, sociology becomes a mediator between fields of knowledge prone to the extremes of the abstract/concrete continuum. An example is the dialogue between, on the one hand, more formalist political theories that arrive at precise conceptualizations (“there is fascism if and only if…”), but at the cost of a reduced adherence to particular contexts, and, on the other, historiographical investigations that plunge into conjunctural singularities, but proscribe generalizations and comparisons between diverse scenarios (e.g., Mussolini’s Italy and Trump’s USA).
Sociology also tends toward a multidimensional perspective that, by tracing mutual influences between different spheres of social life, builds interdisciplinary conversations that avoid explanatory reductionisms. One can, for example, turn to psychology to scrutinize the psychic mechanisms involved in adherence to authoritarian ideologies, while not failing to recognize the relative autonomy of technological, economic, cultural, etc. conditioning factors in that adherence.
An illustration: the central role of conspiratorial narratives (e.g., “cultural Marxism”) in the modus operandi of the far right. Different psychological approaches elucidate the intrapsychic pressures that lead media users to replace the disorienting exposure to conflicting information with the “cognitive comfort” and “ontological security” afforded by an informational bubble, whose “protective” function depends on a paranoid narrative about “friends” and “enemies.”
If this psychological perspective explains a good deal of the demand for conspiracy theories, it must nonetheless be combined with a view closer to mainstream economics, in order to explain the supply: cynical propagators who operate on the basis of rational calculations, deducible from the systemic gears of the digital platforms themselves, regarding the market appeal of paranoid narratives.
Historiography and investigative journalism, in turn, qualify this critical view of digital conspiracism through the well-documented evidence that not every “conspiracy theory” is ipso facto false.
And so on…
3. In your view, what forms of effective action could emerge from this discussion to address the social consequences of the current deepening of authoritarianism?
Maria Aparecida Bridi: Today we live in a context that I consider, in many respects, more perverse than that of the 1990s, when we faced the debates around neoliberalism, privatizations and their regressive social effects. In that period, despite the harshness of the disputes, the economic and political projects in confrontation were relatively clear. Today, however, we are confronted with something deeper and more disturbing: the public foundations of scientific authority have been profoundly strained, with science coming to be, in various contexts, systematically questioned, discredited and relativized. This process weakens public debate and creates fertile ground for contemporary forms of authoritarianism.
Denialism is not an isolated deviation; it is functional to authoritarian neoliberalism, since it dissolves common references of truth and weakens the possibility of informed collective action. Agents of disinformation proliferate, having turned lying into a way of life, monetizing fear, ignorance and resentment through digital platforms.
To this scenario is added the deep malaise produced by precarious and precarized work: the difficulty of planning one’s life, the absence of minimal stability, the intensification of competition and permanent insecurity. As is typical of neoliberal rationality, the failures generated by structural problems are individualized, displacing social critique to the plane of morality and individual responsibility. This is a diffuse but effective modality of authoritarianism, which operates in the production of social suffering, insecurity and frustration. For a scholar of work, effective action cannot be merely institutional; it needs to be pedagogical and organizational. If today’s authoritarianism is capillary and acts upon subjectivity, confronting it requires reconstructing the social fabric that neoliberalism has frayed.
On the basis of this diagnosis, I highlight three fronts of action. The first is the repoliticization of labor relations, with the strengthening of unions and social movements not only as arenas of negotiation, but as spaces of political formation, reconstruction of solidarity and collective support. Market authoritarianism operates, to a large extent, through the isolation of individuals. It is important to confront this.
The second front involves the dispute over cultural grammar, combating the naturalization of precariousness and insecurity as inevitable economic fatalities.
Finally, I consider it fundamental to strengthen interdisciplinary networks for the research and monitoring of work, deepening the dialogue between academia and society and producing socially situated knowledge, committed to democracy and to the defense of rights.
Débora Messenberg: Confronting the negative social effects of the authoritarian deepening requires strategies that act simultaneously on multiple dimensions. It is essential to radically rethink the relations between production and social reproduction, recognizing and materially valuing care work, as well as building solid public infrastructures that decommodify basic needs and remove the foundations of collective life from the logic of profit. Without altering the material conditions that produce precarization and ontological insecurity, any resistance to authoritarianism will remain limited.
Civic education likewise emerges as a crucial strategy – not as the mere transmission of contents, but as the collective cultivation of capacities for critical and reflective thought. It becomes necessary to develop spaces for the collective elaboration of the anxieties, resentments and authoritarian impulses that inhabit us, understanding the mechanisms of psychosocial manipulation without presuming an absolute exteriority in relation to them. It is a matter of creating contexts of popular education that allow for the collective processing of the political affects mobilized by authoritarianism. The construction of networks of solidarity and mutual protection constitutes, in this sense, concrete material resistance. Initiatives of solidarity economy, production and consumption cooperatives, and housing movements that ensure social reproduction outside the market logic represent practical prefigurations of non-authoritarian social relations.
In the field of narrative and affective dispute, it becomes imperative to develop communicative strategies that do not replicate the algorithmic logic of social networks, but that build affective bonds based on mutual care and reciprocal recognition. It is not enough to deconstruct negative affects or to denounce the circulation of fake news; it is necessary to actively cultivate other affective regimes, other emotional economies that sustain emancipatory political projects. Finally, it is indispensable to strengthen democratic institutions not only in a procedural manner, but in a substantive one. This means combating social inequality and the concentration of wealth, as well as guaranteeing material conditions that make political freedom effectively exercisable, beyond abstract formalities.
Uwe H. Bittlingmayer: As I mentioned above it is key to develop alternatives to our current societies in order to open the mindsets of all people. It is extremely important to remember that society, even though it is very hard to feel, is made by human beings and therefore changeable. From the practical point of view it is urgent to increase all forms of mutual solidarity.
Gabriel Peters: Faced with such a broad question, I will connect this answer to the themes raised above.
Whether by a Marxist or a cybernetic route, it has already been emphasized that respect for truth and complexity, central components of a sociological literacy beyond the academic space, has little chance of triumphing within techno-economic structures governed by the capitalization of attention and subject to scant external controls. No media literacy, even when it deepens users’ knowledge of the manipulability of their own psyche, can act alone without the support of systemic – and therefore political – transformations in those very structures.
That said, it is possible to mobilize the sociological knowledge obtained in the study of those dynamics of attention capitalism in order to combat them, so to speak, from within. An indispensable dimension of the political dispute over “hearts and minds” lies in the ways of understanding and narrating suffering and its sources. It is well known that we need to put distributive and material issues back at the center of public debate, lest we allow real losses to be attributed to imaginary enemies via paranoia and moral panic. But the left also needs (I had sworn to myself that I would not write this sentence…) to politicize psychic suffering – or rather, to bring to light its sociopolitical character.
Contemporary right-wing authoritarianism combines a kind of “self-help” with a deceptive form of “politicization” of suffering, which can only be countered by a political alternative capable of reaching it on these fronts as well. On the one hand, any arrangement that does not recognize the collective dimension of mental health, as is the case with neoliberal capitalism, will continue to transmute individual sufferings into political pathologies such as neofascism. On the other hand, a left that does not cultivate a “clinical” sensibility (in a broad sense) to the relationship between suffering and politics will continue to lose the dispute over hearts and minds.
4. Which authors and/or works from your field of knowledge do you consider relevant to this debate? Please mention three or four.
Maria Aparecida Bridi: Answering this question is always a challenge, given the theoretical density of Sociology, both in its classical formulations and in contemporary production. Any restricted selection of authors necessarily implies a reduction of a vast and plural field. Even so, if the focus falls on the articulation between work, neoliberalism and democratic crisis, some references seem to me unavoidable.
In the first place, the classical triad of Sociology, namely Karl Marx, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, remains fundamental. Marx is central to understanding the logic of capitalist accumulation and the relations of labor exploitation; Weber provides decisive analytical instruments for understanding economic rationality, the work ethic and the modern forms of bureaucratic domination; Durkheim, in turn, offers essential categories for analyzing social cohesion, anomie and the disaggregating effects of crises on social bonds.
Among contemporary authors, Robert Castel, especially in The Metamorphoses of the Social Question, is a central reference. His analysis of the erosion of the wage-earning society and the advance of precariousness as the norm allows us to understand how the dismantling of the guarantees associated with work produces processes of social disaffiliation. This reading is crucial for connecting the crisis of work to the hollowing-out of democracy, since material insecurity increases vulnerability to authoritarian solutions.
Another fundamental author is David Harvey, especially in The Condition of Postmodernity. His interpretation of the transition from Fordism to the regime of flexible accumulation makes it possible to situate the transformations of work within broader structural changes in capitalism, illuminating their social, political and spatial effects.
Finally, I highlight Wendy Brown, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, central authors for understanding neoliberalism not only as economic policy, but as a rationality that produces subjectivities. Their analyses show how neoliberal reason corrodes democracy from within, redefining rights as costs and subjects as entrepreneurs of themselves, creating the subjective bases for the advance of authoritarianism.
Finally, it is indispensable to emphasize that this diagnosis draws on a permanent dialogue with the solid contemporary Brazilian production in labor studies. I highlight, in particular, the importance of the collective work developed within the INCT Trabalho (National Institute of Science and Technology on Work), approved by CNPq, which brings together researchers committed both to the rigorous production of knowledge and to qualified intervention in public debate. In this context, I mention colleagues such as Roberto Véras de Oliveira, Adalberto Cardoso, José Ricardo Ramalho, José Dari Krein, Andrea Galvão and Renata Dutra, who are members of the steering committee, in addition to so many other researchers involved in this collective endeavor.
One of the central objectives of this effort is not only academic production, but having an impact on the national public debate, placing work back at the center of the country’s political and public agenda. We start from the understanding that many of the authoritarian ills experienced today are directly related to the social malaise produced by a world of work that has squandered expectations of stability, protection and social mobility mediated by employment. The references that sustain this diagnosis are numerous, and I explicitly recognize that, in citing a few names, I leave out dozens of equally relevant contributions to the critical understanding of work in contemporary Brazil.
Débora Messenberg: Theodor W. Adorno remains fundamental for understanding the psychosocial mechanisms of contemporary authoritarianism. His lecture “Aspects of the New Right-Wing Radicalism” (1967), the work The Authoritarian Personality (1950) and the collection Essays on Social Psychology and Psychoanalysis (1972) provide indispensable conceptual tools for analyzing the irrational dimensions of politics, the propagandistic manipulation of the masses, and the structural articulation between capitalism and authoritarian tendencies.
Wendy Brown, in In the Ruins of Neoliberalism (2019), demonstrates how neoliberal rationality operates as a form of governmentality that systematically destroys the foundations of liberal democracy. Brown shows that neoliberalism does not constitute merely an economic doctrine, but a project of total reconfiguration of social relations that produces subjectivities compatible with authoritarianism.
Nancy Fraser develops, in Cannibal Capitalism (2022), a critique of capitalism that articulates its multiple crises – the economic crisis of accumulation, the ecological crisis, the crisis of social reproduction and care, and the political crisis of democratic legitimation. Fraser clarifies how financialized capitalism devours its own social and natural conditions of possibility, revealing the material roots of the current democratic crisis and pointing to ways of thinking systemic and transformative alternatives.
Sara Ahmed, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), addresses how emotions circulate, fix themselves on specific bodies and organize social boundaries, aspects that are crucial for understanding the rise of contemporary authoritarianism. The perspective of the affective economy reveals that fear, disgust and hatred are not individual psychological states, but social practices that produce and reproduce hierarchies, constructing certain groups as threatening and legitimizing acts of violence.
Letícia Cesarino, in The World Turned Inside Out: Truth and Politics in the Digital Age (2022), offers a sophisticated anthropological analysis of contemporary political epistemologies, demonstrating that digital platforms not only disseminate disinformation, but constitute structurally distinct regimes of truth. Her approach makes it possible to understand how the digital far right produces alternative worlds of meaning and mobilizes affects through specific algorithmic infrastructures.
Uwe H. Bittlingmayer: Michael Albert (develop alternatives to our current society), Nancy Fraser (analyzing power relations precisely), and Enrique Dussel (develop strong ethical perspectives).
Gabriel Peters: I hope not to squander my apologia for sociology by arguing that a work is “sociological” not because of the departmental credentials of whoever writes it, but because of its substantive characteristics. This includes the traits mentioned above, such as the search for the causal interrelations between diverse domains of social existence (from the cognitive biases of the human psyche to the megastructures of attention capitalism), but also the analytical movement between the theoretical recognition of inter-societal patterns and respect for socio-historical singularities – a movement by virtue of which we can, for example, identify an exaltation of violent masculinity common to different manifestations of right-wing authoritarianism (from yesterday’s Mussolinists to today’s Bolsonarists), but without ignoring important discrepancies between them.
That said, here are my recommendations:
How Fascism Works (2017), by the philosopher Jason Stanley, offers an examination of the “discursive grammars” that guide the far right in diverse contexts, mapping elective affinities that would soon become the global program of a “Neofascist International.” By distinguishing between fascism as political-ideological strategy and fascism as a modality of the state, Stanley encourages us to use “the F-word” to designate worldviews such as bolsolavismo and Trumpism, even in scenarios in which they have not (yet) turned into fascist states.
Doppelgänger (2023), by the journalist Naomi Klein, is like a Russian nesting doll: a book that houses within itself several (extraordinary) books on themes ranging from the distraction conspiracism practiced (conspiratorially!) by billionaire elites to the many “reverse mimeses” (as Letícia Cesarino puts it in The World Turned Inside Out [2022], another terrific book) to which the far right has subjected the left’s agenda in recent years.
In the Ruins of Neoliberalism (2019), by the philosopher Wendy Brown, which dramatizes on the page the analytical dilemmas regarding the neoliberalism/neofascism relationship: Immanent bond or opportunistic alliance? “Productive power” or “false consciousness” (Marx-Freud-Frankfurt)? Among others…
