Uneven and Combined Fascism: A Postapocalyptic Perspective

Authors

• Daniel Loick, University of AmsterdamFollow

ORCID

0000-0001-5927-8267

Keywords

fascism, crisis of democracy, environmental crisis, state violence, capitalism, exploitation, liberal-democratic institutions

Document Type

Essay

Abstract

This essay develops the concept of “uneven and combined fascism” as an alternative to dominant liberal approaches that understand fascism primarily as a future rupture or return of the European past. Analogizing the crisis of democracy with environmental crisis, it argues that fascism, like ecological catastrophe, should be understood as an ongoing and differentially distributed condition: already present for some while remaining latent or emergent for others. The essay develops this claim by consulting approaches of "postapocalyptic environmentalism" as well as thinkers and activists from the Black Radical Tradition, particularly the analyses of Aimé Césaire and the Civil Rights Congress’s We Charge Genocide, which conceptualize racialized state violence, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation as forms of fascist violence compatible with liberal-democratic institutions. This perspective shifts antifascist politics from defending a supposedly intact democratic normality toward confronting the continuities between democracy and fascization. It consequently calls for a “postapocalyptic antifascism” oriented not toward restoration but toward salvage: mourning losses without succumbing to paralysis, building infrastructures of care and resistance amid conditions of ongoing ruin, and forging strategic alliances without either revolutionary purism or liberal “lesser-evilism.” The essay concludes by revisiting the United/Popular Front debate and proposing a flexible, improvisational antifascist politics capable of acting within contradictory and damaged political conditions.

Recommended Citation

Loick, Daniel (2026) "Uneven and Combined Fascism: A Postapocalyptic Perspective," Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis: Vol. 4: Iss. 6, Article 2.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.55533/2765-8414.1197
Available at: https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/emancipations/vol4/iss6/2