White West – The Afterlife of Fascism

In 1950 two divergent takes on fascism were published. In his essay Discourse on Colonialism, poet Aimé Césaire argued that what in Europe is called "fascism" is just colonial violence finding its way back home. But his warnings went unheeded. More widely read was The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno et al., which developed the F scale (F for fascist) in order to gauge the psychological predisposition for fascism among the democratic citizenry, leaving the post-war consensus to settle on the notion that fascism was a personality trait, resulting from the devolution of the individuated liberal subject. Still dominant today, this tendency to psychologize fascism fails to incorporate the colonial dimension, obscuring the continuities between fascism and the biopolitics of empire, and ultimately depoliticizes both.

White West contends that without the will to confront the structuring force of race in the production and reproduction of global wealth differentials, the question of the good life can only be raised in distorted form, under the guise of welfare chauvinism or the tech industry's cargo cult, promising that a cornucopia of goods will be supplied magically—weak utopias whose structural inconsistencies open up an ambiguous space in which a critique or disruption of capitalism can be inflected in the direction of fascism.