Keywords
capitalism, crisis, Marxism, migration, race, nationalism, nativism, Trump
Document Type
Essay
Abstract
The massive destruction and social dislocation wrought by capitalist crisis has culminated, historically, in the brutal cataclysms of fascism and other forms of authoritarian rule. Today, across the globe, we are confronted with the aggressive advance and entrenchment of a variety of such authoritarian political projects. Anxious discourses about ascendant fascism have become perfectly mainstream. These developments command our acute attention and critical analysis. This essay addresses these dire questions and the conceptual vexations surrounding the concept of fascism, particularly as it has been elaborated in various Marxist analyses. Specifically, much of the debate around fascism as an analytical category tends to be unsatisfactory, precisely because it quickly devolves into scholastic disputations over definitions derived from the correspondence (or lack thereof) of contemporary examples and historical instances of fascism during the 1920s and ’30s. This historical scholasticism is reinforced by a rigid adherence to the notion that fascism can only be understood in terms of a strict chronological sequence that begins with a mass social movement and then conquers state power and culminates in a totalitarian regime. This sequentialism effectively became a kind of catechism for an important sector of the post-World War II left, upholding an overly restrictive heuristic usage that relies on historical description as a surrogate for historically-specific theory in the face of new and different realities. Such analyses do not adequately address the crucial difference between fascism as a political or social movement in contradistinction with fascism in power, as a mode of rule.
Fascism today manifests itself in a kind of reversal of the familiar historical patterns and therefore presents different theoretical questions. With the concept of fascistization of society, this essay contends that fascism need not be exclusively understood as abiding by the sequence whereby a fascist social movement necessarily comes first and eventually succeeds to attain state power, resulting in the installation of a fascist regime. Instead, today, rather than a Bonapartist extreme of last resort for the restoration of a moribund capitalism in crisis, following the failure or defeat of revolutionary rehearsals by the working class, fascism has increasingly become a first choice, the easy go-to option for a capitalist class preemptively refortifying its own rule over the messy and volatile ramifications of a crisis that is permanent. The elite project of fascism in our times implies a process of top-down fascistization, assuming myriad forms whereby the fascistization of the state — and the more or less rapid degradation of bourgeois democratic procedural forms and the erosion of the rule of law — must be accompanied by an onslaught of new tactics and techniques of rule whereby fascism (as a mode of rule) conditions and subordinates the diverse and fractious elements of “society” into submission. Under present circumstances, the apparatus for the production of this sort of submission and obedience by some and fascistic allegiance and even fervor among others is, above all, the apparatus of state violence itself. This sort of authoritarian re-purposing of the state’s police power and the more far-reaching militarization of everyday life has been on abundant display in the United States during the second Trump administration. The populist obsession with borders and the specific targeting of migrants for persecution and punishment provide a particularly salient critical lens through which to comprehend the conjunctures of the global politics of labor subordination and racial subjugation with the more parochial assertions of revanchist nationalism that are fueling the fierce onslaught of authoritarian projects of rule and ascendant fascism. In numerous countries, but especially the United States, it is precisely this border fascism that is catalytic for a larger project of full-spectrum authoritarianism and what we may understand to be a fascistization of society.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
De Genova, Nicholas P.
(2026)
"Border Fascism and the Fascistization of Society,"
Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis: Vol. 4:
Iss.
6, Article 1.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.55533/2765-8414.1187
Available at:
https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/emancipations/vol4/iss6/1
Included in
Africana Studies Commons, American Politics Commons, American Studies Commons, Black History Commons, European History Commons, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Commons, Law and Politics Commons, Migration Studies Commons, Political History Commons, Political Theory Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, Rule of Law Commons, Social Justice Commons
Submitted
May 21, 2026
Published
September 16, 2026
