A Black Critique of Fascism: Lessons from Black Radical and Anti-Colonial Thinkers for the 21st Century
by Vanessa E. Thompson
30.10.2026
From genocidal colonial violence and the terror of racial apartheid and lynching regimes to mass incarceration and related methods of surplus containment, such as border regimes, these forms of rule have combined legal normality for some segments of society with systematic violence against racialized working-class and working-poor populations. Tracing the rich tradition of Black radical and anti-colonial critiques of fascism, Vanessa E. Thompson argues that we must not confine our analysis to European fascism of the early twentieth century. Moreover, Black radical and anti-colonial thinkers offer a perspective in which fascistization – that is, the transition toward more fascist forms of rule – is not regarded as the antithesis of liberal democracy but as embedded within liberal-democratic rationalities and projects. This perspective holds important lessons for renewing anti-fascist politics today: the task is not merely to combat the far right, but also to confront the social conditions and state dynamics in liberal democracies that drive fascistization.
This text first appeared in the German magazine LuXemburg. The Fascism & Liberalism Blog is honored to publish this shortened and translated version with the kind permission of Vanessa Thompson.
In light of the second Trump administration’s designation of Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization in 2025, the statement by the late Black revolutionary Assata Shakur appears strikingly prescient. Importantly, it represents a critique of fascism that is not limited to drawing analogies with the historical European cases, but identifies elements of fascist rule across different spatial and temporal contexts. The Black radical and anti-colonial theorists who developed this tradition understand fascism primarily in relation to capitalist social relations, crisis and the imperialist drive for expansion, and to forms of extra-economic violence that shape the dynamics of capitalism. What can we learn from their analyses at a time when discussions of a new fascism are once again dominated by Eurocentrism?
Colonialism as a Prefiguration of Fascism
As early as the interwar years, Black Marxists and radical anti-colonial theorists argued that the fascism emerging in Europe was not a “new” phenomenon but had already been embedded in Europe’s colonial projects. Colonial techniques and forms of accumulation such as the legally protected exploitation of “unfree” labor and racial governance through violence and coercion were, in a sense, a prefiguration of fascism. From this perspective, the genocidal campaigns and methods of Belgian and German colonialism in present-day DR Congo (1885–1908) and Namibia (1904–1908) can be understood not only as precursors to the Nazi’s systematic mass murder, but as instances of what Alberto Toscano calls “fascism-before-fascism” [1].
At the time, Black and Third World Marxists such as George Padmore and C.L.R. James understood fascist rule as both a reaction to capitalist crisis and an expression of Western imperialism. Consequently, they saw “democratic” imperialism (as allegedly opposed to fascist imperialism) as incapable of truly combating fascism. Tellingly, the struggle of “democratic” (British and French) imperialism against European fascism left not only colonial rule intact but also the very conditions that had given rise to fascism in the first place.
It was on these grounds that George Padmore, a Caribbean Marxist who organized dockworkers and sailors in Hamburg on behalf of the Comintern in the late 1920s and early 1930s, criticized the Comintern’s collaboration with the “democratic” imperialist powers – France, the United States, and Great Britain – in the fight against fascism. Rather than rejecting any popular front or cooperation between socialist and social democratic/centric forces per se, Padmore was obviously concerned about its political orientation. He was convinced that anti-fascist alliances would be ineffective if they left the root causes of fascism, including its colonial dimension, unaddressed. As Alberto Toscano also noted, in his 1936 book How Britain Rules Africa, Padmore argued that the racism of the settler colony was “the breeding-ground for the type of fascist mentality that is being let loose in Europe today” and that South Africa was “the world’s classic Fascist state” based on the “unity of race as against class” [2].
The Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James took a similar position, noting that after their victory in the First World War, Great Britain, France, and Belgium simply took over Germany’s colonies. His diagnosis in 1939 was equally bleak: “If the fascists win they will take the colonies back. If the ‘democracies’ win they will keep them. But whether ‘democracies’ win, or fascists win, the Africans remain slaves in their own country” [3]. With these arguments, Padmore and James anticipated Aimé Césaire’s better-known analysis in his Discourse on Colonialism (1950), in which he describes fascism as a “a formidable shock in return” of colonial violence that reverberated from the colonies back to the European metropolises (often translated, somewhat inaccurately, as “boomerang”). Césaire points out that as long as National Socialism was only being imposed on non-European peoples, Europeans could turn a blind eye to it, could excuse and legitimize it [4].
Racial Fascism in the Segregated United States
While the before-mentioned authors analyzed fascism from the perspective of the so-called periphery, Black radicals in the U.S. focused on the Western core. In his 1935 classic Black Reconstruction, the Marxist sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois emphasizes that fascist tendencies are deeply rooted in the structure of liberal democracies, also domestically [5]. He argues that following the Reconstruction – the rebuilding and reintegration of the U.S. South after 1865 – and the possibility of multi-racial class struggle and transformation, the capitalist class of plantation owners carried out a “counter-revolution of property”. Facing their defeat and the formal abolition of slavery, they shifted their strategy to integrating white workers into the political-ideological project of racist supremacy and the massive deployment of racist terror against Black and non-white workers. This included the introduction of new forms of forced labor such as the convict-leasing system and the Black Codes – a series of laws enacted in former Confederacy states explicitly designed to continue to limit the rights and freedoms of Black people to ensure their super-exploitation. A sophisticated legal apparatus enshrined racial segregation and prevented any form of social, economic, or political participation along racial lines. Additionally, parts of the executive state apparatus, particularly local and state law enforcement, often operated with considerable autonomy and in close collaboration with the Ku Klux Klan, terrorizing Black populations across the South.
According to Du Bois, all of these are characteristics of fascism: the daily racist terror of the lynching regime, forced labor on the plantations and regimes of super-exploitation, the systematic dehumanization and racist segregation in all areas of life, the denial of civil rights, and the normalization of an apartheid regime. In sum, U.S. society was characterized by the coexistence of the rule of law for some and unrestricted “arbitrariness” for others. Du Bois’ analysis of fascism is thus surprisingly similar to the concept of the “Dual State” in the analysis of National Socialism by the Jewish political scientist Ernst Fraenkel. Fraenkel’s description of how legal normality and a regime of arbitrariness and coercion coexisted in Nazi Germany is regarded as a seminal work in the study of fascism. However, as Alberto Toscano points out in his book Late Fascism, racial fascism went unnoticed “because it operated on the other side of the colour line” [6]. In fact, structural racism shapes what is perceived as fascism in the first place and which coercive relations are considered a “normal” part of state rule.
According to Toscano, Black radical, Marxist, and anti-colonial approaches show that fascism should not be understood statically as a shift from liberal to fascist regimes, but rather as an ideological and political process that “targets racialized and subaltern population groups in differentiated ways” [7]. They demonstrate that fascism is not a uniform phenomenon conforming to a particular “template”, such as German or Italian fascism. Instead, colonial and racialized capitalism and imperialism were always accompanied by fascist potentials, ideological elements, and practices that developed before the rise of fascism in Europe.
Black Radical Anti-Fascism in the Post-War and Neoliberal Era
Black radical analyses of fascism in the above-described tradition remained relevant in the postwar era, too. The Black Caribbean communist Claudia Jones, the prisoner and Black Guerrilla Family member George Jackson, as well as the Black feminist philosopher Angela Davis each describe processes of fascistization as a recombination and intensification of power relations intended to block a potential revolution by the exploited and disenfranchised in times of crisis.
Claudia Jones, who was deported to England during the McCarthy era, analyzed McCarthyism as a process of fascistization that involved large-scale repression against leftists, workers, and anti-imperialist organizations [8]. In doing so, Jones showed that fascistization can unfold within liberal democracies rather than standing in fundamental opposition to them.
Two decades later, amid the crushing of revolutionary movements and the onset of the neoliberal counter-revolution, George Jackson identified another fascist conjuncture in the United States. Writing from his cell at the notorious San Quentin State Prison (before being shot and killed while attempting to escape in 1971) Jackson described the relationship between prisons and fascistization. According to Jackson, the function and expansion of the prison system characterized the transition from the plantation society to the integration of Black workers into the wage labor regime. However, Jackson did not view the prison, including its political-economic function, as a continuation of slavery, which was geared towards the production of cotton, sugar, and coffee based on “unfree” labor. Rather, he viewed the prison as a state method for the suppression of revolutionary resistance and containment of the primarily racialized subproletariat and surplus populations. In the face of escalating crises, the expansion of the repressive state helps to forcibly assert class power [9].
In the following years, this form of crisis response and regulation would also become an essential element of the authoritarian-neoliberal politics of Thatcherism. In their 1978 book, Stuart Hall and his co-authors coined the term “policing the crisis” to describe the authoritarian, police-driven targeting of marginalized and migrant segments of the working class [10]. Hall understood these developments as a prerequisite for the emergence of new right-wing politics and ideology. In a similar vein, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in her 2007 book Golden Gulag, described the neoliberal counter-revolution as a shift from military Keynesianism to “post-Keynesian militarism” [11] where instruments of crisis management – prisons, police, and borders – were massively expanded and strengthened – also in liberal-democratic states.
The culmination of this development is what contemporary sociologist William I. Robinson identifies as the rise of a “global police state,” increasingly facilitated by new technologies [12]. Beyond its function as a crisis response, Robinson also highlights its capacity to generate profits. Against the backdrop of the capitalist polycrisis and intensifying competition for resources, these systems of warfare – including borders, prisons, and deportation regimes – present the model of “accumulation through repression.” In his view, 21st-century fascism advances through an alliance between the faltering liberal-authoritarian “reformism from above” and right-wing authoritarian projects. Although ideologically not completely coherent, this new bloc cooperates effectively in expanding the regimes of warfare and carcerality.
Lessons from Black and Feminist Abolitionists for the 21st Century
In the past years we have witnessed massive state repression against Palestine solidarity protests, the multi-billion-dollar expansion of border regimes, and the increasingly stratified exploitation, containment and racist control of “surplus” populations. All these developments show that fascistization does not require fascists to be in power. Whether at the external borders of the EU, in prisons, or in impoverished and heavily policed neighborhoods, racialized working class and working poor people have long been subjected to forms of fascist violence.
For years, abolition feminists in Brazil, the U.S., and Europe have argued that the “policing of the crisis”, that is, the criminalization and containment of migration and poverty, must become the focal points of anti-fascist struggles – as exemplified by the widespread protests against border regimes and violence, of which the ICE raids are just one articulation. Abolition feminists also link struggles against carceral violence with struggles against privatization, the commodification of land and against all forms of warfare. Calls for the socialization of care work likewise advance a vision of the demilitarization and “de-incarceration” of society [13]. Together, these abolitionist struggles pave the way for new forms of anti-fascist internationalism.
Abolition feminists thus expand the scope of anti-fascist struggles not only by focusing on the social conditions and crises that give rise to fascistization in the first place, but also by promoting a materialist anti-fascist politics centered on workers – both in production and social reproduction – and the struggles of so-called “surplus” populations. In doing so, they overcome the severe limits of historical European anti-fascism and conventional labor struggles as well.
Crucially, Black radical, anti-colonial and feminist abolitionist thinkers teach us that a simple restoration of welfare states – distinguishing between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor – does not bring processes of fascistization to an end. Rather than focusing solely on the role of far-right parties and movements, anti-fascist struggles today must also target the state mechanisms that drive fascistization. This approach can offer a genuine alternative to the emerging late fascism: through abolition – that is, the internationalist dismantling of racist, gendered, and capitalist relations of production and imperialist violence, as well as the institutions that perpetuate them, in favor of an abolition democracy.
Vanessa E. Thompson is Associate Professor for Black Studies at the Department for Gender Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. Her work focuses on the relationship between racism and state violence, abolition, anti-colonial theories, and internationalism.
References
- Toscano, Alberto. 2025. “The Changing Strategies of Counter-Revolution.” Communis, June 10, 2025.
- George Padmore (1936) cited in Toscano, Alberto. 2023. Late Fascism. Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, London: Verso, p.28.
- James, C. L. R.. 1939. “Why Negroes Should Oppose the War.” Marxists Internet Archive.
- Césaire, Aimé. 2000 (1955). Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
- Du Bois, W. E. B. 1998. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Free Press.
- Toscano, Alberto. 2023. Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. London: Verso, p.29.
- Toscano, Alberto. 2025. “Das Gefängnis als faschistisches Labor.” nd, June 9, 2025.
- Jones, Claudia. 1949. “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman.” Political Affairs, June 1949, 51–67.
- Rodney, Walter. 1971. “George Jackson: Black Revolutionary.” Maji Maji 5: 4–6.
- Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: Macmillan.
- Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Robinson, William I. 2020. The Global Police State. London: Pluto Press.
- e.g. Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2024. “Social Reproduction Theory as Diagnostic, Abolition as Politics: Reimagining Anticapitalism.” Labor 21(4): 117–129.
Further Reading
- Burden-Stelly, Charisse, 2019: Claudia Jones, the Longue Durée of McCarthyism, and the Threat of US Fascism, in: Journal of Intersectionality 3(1), 46–66
- Kelley, Robin D. G., 2025: The Black Radical Tradition Against Fascism and Genocide: The Long Durée, Media Education Foundation,
- Samudzi, Zoé, 2021: Paradox of Recognition: Genocide and Colonialism, in: Postmodern Culture 31
- Walia, Harsha, 2021: Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Chicago
- Zelik, Raul, 2025: Treiber des Faschismus, in: ak: analyse und kritik 716