Against the Republic:
Fascism, Capitalist Crisis, and the Assault on Popular Sovereignty
by Pınar Bedirhanoğlu & Cenk Saraçoğlu
19.06.2026
What are the roots of today’s global fascist turn and where is it leading us? In this article, Pınar Bedirhanoğlu and Cenk Saraçoğlu argue that fascism is not a fixed regime type, but a counter-revolutionary political process triggered by deep capitalist crises. Moving beyond rigid historical checklists, the authors show how fascism systematically assaults “republican political rationality” – the institutional and ideological frameworks that allow ordinary people to act as active political subjects. They trace the current wave of global fascistization back to the backlash against popular uprisings following the 2007–08 financial crisis, itself a crisis of neoliberal capitalism. While contemporary movements differ in their rhetoric, their shared objective is to atomize societies and eliminate democratic restraints on capital accumulation. Addressing today’s fascist turn means recognizing it as a broader assault on popular empowerment and our ability to shape our collective future.
Understanding Today’s Fascist Turn Within the Historical Development of Capitalism
The renewed urgency with which fascism is discussed today is not merely an intellectual exercise. It reflects a widely shared intuition that what is unfolding across the world today cannot be understood by terms such as “democratic backsliding”, “competitive authoritarianism”, or “right-wing populism”. These conceptual debates often get stuck in a methodological dead end, evaluating fascism only by the degree with which it corresponds to past instances, such as interwar Germany and Italy.
This article differs from common approaches that use a checklist of features to decide whether the “fascist minimum”, in Robert Paxton’s words [1], is met. Instead, we draw on a historical materialist framework by investigating the question of what fascism means within the historical development of capitalism: what structural function it serves, what it targets, and why it recurs. Alberto Toscano’s 2023 book Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis [2] offers a decisive methodological starting point. Building on W.E.B. Du Bois’s characterization of late 19th century post-Reconstruction period in the US as a “counter-revolution of property” led by white supremacy, Toscano argues that fascism must be approached not as a fixed regime type or a coherent ideological formation, but as a historically fluid process intimately tied to the dynamics of capitalist crises. In this respect, “late fascism”, like “late capitalism” varies in form and content according to its conjuncture. According to Toscano, its genealogy can be traced back to racial capitalism and extends well beyond the interwar European cases that have dominated theoretical reflections.
We take up Toscano’s argument and seek to extend it in a specific direction: if fascism is a counter-revolutionary process whose form and content change with historical circumstances, then we need a clearer answer to a basic question: what exactly is it a revolution against?
Fascism as a Counter-Revolution Against “Republican Political Rationality"
We argue that fascism consistently targets two interrelated terrains. The first consists of the ideological and political gains won through socialist and progressive struggles. The second is the ideological and institutional ground which enables working and lower social classes to be active political subjects in the first place. It is this second terrain – what we term republican political rationality – that gives today’s fascist counter-revolution its characteristic depth and reach. It does not merely suppress specific gains but works to eliminate the very conditions under which such gains become possible.
The concept of republican political rationality has its roots in the French Revolution, or more precisely, the long revolutionary conjuncture of the late eighteenth century. It was during this era that popular forces — the sans-culottes, the urban laboring poor, the peasantry, the colonized subjects of the Haitian Revolution — first entered onto the political stage. For the first time, the question of who rules and on what terms could no longer be settled among elites without responding to the cries and claims of the laboring majority. Thus, what the new, republican state form registered, however imperfectly and however much against the intentions of dominant classes, was this irreversible entry of the popular classes into politics.[3]
The political rationality – i.e. the logic or set of ideas – of the republican societal order and state structure builds on a specific conception of freedom, freedom as non-domination, as long emphasized by Philip Pettit.[4] Here, freedom is understood not only as the absence of interference but as the absence of subjection to arbitrary power. As such, we can define the republican political rationality as encompassing following principles:
- Popular sovereignty: the legitimacy of political authority derives from and must remain accountable to the people as a collective subject, not via divine mandate, dynastic right, or the will of a particular privileged group.
- Active citizenship: the political community is made up not of passive subjects but active participants – people who deliberate about and take responsibility for the common affairs of their polity and play an active role in designing the constitution and laws that organize social and political life.
- The priority of the public: the common good, the res publica, takes precedence over private interest; the state is accountable to the general will rather than to particular interests.
These principles do not constitute a coherent or tension-free doctrine but are better understood as the normative residue of social struggles. While capital forces the state to maintain the conditions for its accumulation, such as the protection of property and the “policing” of class conflict, the republican political form introduces into this equation a set of principles – such as popular sovereignty, active citizenship, non-domination – that are structurally in tension with the impositions of capital. This tension is what makes the republican state both a mechanism of bourgeois class rule and a terrain of popular struggle. This has significant implications for how we read both the historical instances of fascism and its contemporary forms.
How Neoliberalism Created the Conditions for Contemporary Fascism
In the interwar period, the fascist assault was directed simultaneously against the organized working-class movement – its parties, unions, and revolutionary organizations – and against the liberal-democratic institutional and ideological framework within which that movement had won its basis. The neoliberal era since the 1970-80s has been characterized by a systematic hollowing out of the gains achieved by social and working-class movements in inter- and post-war eras.[5] The financialization of social relations has atomized the working class and made collective political action increasingly difficult; the subordination of public policy to the demands of financial markets has reduced popular sovereignty; the technocratization of government has removed key decisions from the domain of democratic deliberation; and the dismantling of welfare institutions has eroded the material conditions of active citizenship.
The result is a procedural democracy stripped of its republican substance, reduced to the empty form of periodic elections that reproduce the management of accumulation by different political figures but do not alter its fundamental logic. This neoliberal erosion of republican political rationality is not yet fascism. It does, however, create the conditions for fascism. It produces the generalized political disorientation, the erosion of trust in democratic institutions, and the atomized social landscape on which a fascist counter-revolution can operate.
The Significance of the 2007-08 Crisis and Its Aftermath
The 2008 financial crisis was not merely an economic event. It was the explosive moment at which the accumulated contradictions of neoliberal capitalism could no longer be contained. The rapid delegitimization of existing political institutions and ideological frameworks, the material impoverishment of broad sections of the working class and middle strata, and the sudden visibility of the structural violence of capital produced what Antonio Gramsci would have called an organic crisis. The 2008 financial crisis was not merely a crisis of the economic realm but of the entire social formation, in which the old forms of hegemony could no longer be upheld. The result was a wave of popular political mobilization unprecedented in the post-Cold War era: the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, Occupy Wall Street, Turkey’s Gezi Park uprising, the Indignados movement in Spain that eventually crystallized as Podemos, the student movements in Brazil… to name only a few.
These varied movements shared a common political grammar that is highly significant for our argument: not particular to a specific sector or identity group, but what can be recognized – in retrospect – as cries of republican political claims. Popular masses reclaimed the political institutions that had been captured by private and oligarchic interests. They reacted to the hollowing out of popular sovereignty by financial, technocratic and coercive strategies, which were systematically destroying the conditions of active citizenship and people’s capacity to participate meaningfully in shaping the collective conditions of life.
The counter-revolutionary response did not take long to respond, however. The violent repression and/or “hijacking” of the Arab Spring, the crushing of the Gezi movement, the defeat of Syriza’s opposition to EU-imposed austerity policies, the systematic containment of Occupy and the Indignados: these were the opening moves of what has become a globally converging, if not centrally organized, counter-revolutionary assault.
The Fascistization of Post-2008 Societies Around the World
What followed was not limited to the reassertion of neoliberal policy, but a more far-reaching attempt to eliminate the very political, social, and ideological terrains from which popular challenges might re-emerge. This is what substantiates the use of the term fascistization, not because all its contemporary manifestations replicate the organizational or ideological forms of interwar fascism, but because the counter-revolutionary logic at work shares the same structural target: the conditions that enable everyone to be active political subjects.
This fascistization process has taken different forms in different national contexts. Trumpism and the MAGA movement combine the mobilization of racial and nativist resentment with a systematic assault on the institutional and legal constraints on executive power. In India, Modi’s BJP has deployed Hindu nationalist ideology to reconfigure the political community along exclusionary ethnic-religious lines, dismantling the constitutional protections that had, however imperfectly, sustained a plural political field. In Turkey, the AKP has combined right-wing populist mobilization with a subversive assault on the republican institutional and ideological framework of the state. In Brazil, Bolsonarismo represented not merely a right-wing government but an attempt to reorganize the terms of political conflict around the elimination of the social and political gains of the PT era.
In Europe, the picture is more complex, but its fundamental logic is the same. The electoral rise of far-right parties across almost all European countries represents something more than the predictable shift toward the right. These forces systematically undermine the democratic norms that structure political contestation – from equal citizenship regardless of origin, to the principle that political authority is accountable to the entire population rather than to an ethnically defined community. Crucially, we argue that these forces remain part of the fascistization process even when they are not in power. Their role is to reshape the political horizon by normalizing authoritarian and exclusionary ideas, weakening the republican foundations of popular political agency, and redirecting the energies unleashed by organic crises into nationalist channels rather than true emancipatory alternatives.
Fascistization vs. Our Common Future
What all these diverse manifestations of fascistization share is a goal of eliminating the republican political rationality. The particular institutional targets and ideological codes, and the specific combination of repression and mass mobilization through which consent is organized all vary in each national context. But the structural logic is the same: to annihilate the conditions of popular political subjectivity and to depoliticize, atomize, and reintegrate the popular classes under forms of identification and mobilization that preclude true collective agency. [6]
In this way, fascistizsation secures the conditions for the continued extraction and accumulation of capital, unhindered by social or political forces. Discussions on the extent to which contemporary forms align with historical examples overlook fascism’s broader purpose of dismantling our collective capacity to shape our common world – and risks distracting from the urgent need to form collective responses.
Pınar Bedirhanoğlu is Professor at Middle East Technical University, at the Department of International Relations. Her work focuses on global political economy, neoliberalism, financialization, and corruption.
Cenk Saraçoğlu is Professor at Ankara University. Amongst others, his work focuses on political and social theory, nationalism, migration racism, and inequality.
References
- Paxton, Robert O. 2004. The Anatomy of Fascism. Alfred A. Knopf.
- Toscano, Alberto. 2023. Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. Verso.
- Bedirhanoğlu, Pınar, and Cenk Saracoglu. 2023. ‘Demokrasi Nereye?: Neoliberalizm Döneminde Demokrasi-Cumhuriyet Bağının Kopuşu’ (Quo Vadis Democracy: De-linking of Democracy and Republic in the Neoliberal Era). In Demokrasi: Kavram, Kurum, Süreç (Democracy: Concept, Institution, Process), edited by Menderes Çınar. İletişim Yayınları.
- Pettit, Philip. 2012. On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. Cambridge University Press.
- Saraçoğlu, Cenk. 2026. ‘Beyond the Freedom of Movement: Rethinking the Global Migration Regime through the Right to Homeland’. Globalizations, April 29, 1–22.
- Saraçoğlu, Cenk. 2026. ‘Beyond the Freedom of Movement:…’