This issue of the Transform Review is about what David Bowie called ‘turning and facing the change’ — more specifically with regard to the dangerous paths Europe is going down. What kind of change do you think we’re going through right now?
Europe is facing a major crisis and challenges that may even put the European Union’s future in question. Not because of cataclysmic crises like the ones Europeans have seen in the past: nothing comparable to World War I or even to the collapse of Yugoslavia at the turn of the 1990s. Still, everyone can see that the EU doesn't have a project for the future. It works with a structure, conceived some decades ago, that doesn’t fit the new situation.
We can sketch out many possible scenarios for the outcome of this crisis. Perhaps the most probable is an authoritarian form of neoliberalism. This diagnosis is grounded in a simple acknowledgement of the objective situation: the growing acceptance, normalisation and integration of far-right movements and parties in the leadership of many EU member states and of the EU’s own institutions. This picture seemed unlikely even just a few years ago but is now the reality.
Far-right movements that were once strongly opposed to the EU now accept this institutional framework and have been accepted with in it. This changes a lot of things: in terms of the profile, the orientation, and ideology of these movements, but also for us, for the citizens of the European Union. Considering the long-term history of post-1945 Europe, this change implies a completely new relationship between the far right and neoliberal capitalism. This tells us that the far right has become a credible interlocutor for European capitalism’s financial, industrial, and economic elites. This is something new.
In a 2017 book, you discussed the continuities and differences between the fascist movements of the twentieth century and the post-fascist right today. You argue that post-fascism is not a canonical concept like liberalism, communism, or fascism, and you speak — as the title puts it — of the New Faces of Fascism. How does this relate to the sociopolitical horizon today?
You are right to emphasize that this is an intrinsically ambiguous concept. Post-fascism is something transitional and contingent. It’s inevitably subject to a lot of transformations and will eventually turn into something else: either a form of conservative liberalism or else a new, true fascism for the twenty-first century. We don't know which way it will evolve, because what I call post-fascism is open to both directions.
Why ‘post’-fascism? Because for obvious reasons, this new far right is different from classical fascism. It is a constellation of movements and parties with different origins and ideological references, which in their overwhelming majority basically accept the institutional framework of liberal democracy. They wish to change liberal democracy from within, not to destroy it from outside. Still, if these movements are no longer fascism, they cannot be defined without reference to fascism. They are in a transitional situation: the umbilical cord attaching them to fascism has not been cut.
We could cite a lot of differences, but the main one is related to the difference of historical contexts. Paradoxically, the novelty of the far right today is its conservatism. The fascism that appeared at the end of World War I had a powerful utopian dimension. Fascism was a project for the future. Fascism depicted itself as revolution. Fascism was deeply shaped by utopia: it spoke of the New Man, the thousand-year Reich. It said that the world is collapsing, but also had an alternative for the future — which was, of course, also full of reactionary values, because fascism was a peculiar symbiosis between anti-modernist or romantic values and a cult of modernity, technology and industry, powerful weapons and so on. In other words, historical fascism possessed a strong idea of futurity, a prognostic horizon.
Today, the new far right is purely conservative. So, it speaks of the Great Replacement threatening European civilisation and the need to defend traditional values. It speaks of Islam threatening our ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilisation and of defending the family against feminists and gays. This is a purely conservative discourse, with many contradictions: for instance, it often says that the West is defending women’s rights against Islamic fundamentalism and yet is itself mobilising against abortion rights. In general, these movements have lost their subversive and revolutionary capacity of making them dream about a different future. Think of Donald Trump’s slogan ‘Make America Great Again,’ which is very exciting for his followers: the dream of getting back to a lost golden age, when the US was powerful and prosperous.
This difference with classical fascism is related to our historical context, which many scholars analyse as a new regime of historicity, which could be called presentism. This is a problem for both the Left and the Right. In the interwar years, communism and fascism were two alternative projects for the future. But both started from a shared statement: the traditional, established order is collapsing and we must search for an alternative. This is not the context today. With Reinhart Koselleck, we could speak of a symbiotic relationship between the past as a field of experience and the future as a horizon of expectation. These historical dialectics are today exhausted. Now we live in this new ‘presentist’ regime of historicity — this way of experiencing, representing and perceiving time and history — in which both past and future are completely compressed into an eternal present. The far right depicts itself as an alternative to liberalism but does not put into question the world organised and structured by liberal democracy and by market society — by neoliberal capitalism. The result is a new form of authoritarian neoliberalism. This has a lot of implications.
This brings me to Clara Zetkin and her 1923 report and resolution on fascism — really rich and cutting-edge texts. I think her lesson pointed in the direction you suggested: fascism is not just a historical question but has this transitional energy, seeking new forms of articulation from time to time depending on the social, economic and political context.
In The Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism, Al fred Sohn-Rethel identified the origins of the Nazi state in a capitalist solution to economic crisis. It had its roots in a collective state of mind, but they could also be found, Sohn-Rethel said, in the balance sheet of a German big businesses. In his words, capitalism gave birth to the deformed monster of fascism. So how would you describe the relationship between fascism and capitalism, or even between fascism and liberalism?
We could relate this to a similar sentence written by Max Horkheimer in 1939: ‘whoever doesn’t speak of capitalism has no right to speak of fascism’. Of course, there is a relationship between fascism and capitalism: this is a basic axiom of any Marxist interpretation of fascism. Nonetheless, I think that both Sohn-Rethel and Horkheimer’s lines are one-sided and debateable. I don’t think that capitalism is a satisfactory explanation of the spectacular rise of the far right on a global scale: maybe now we are talking about Europe, but we could find powerful fascist features in the United States; in Latin America, from Jair Bolsonaro to Javier Milei in Argentina; and then on to India and the Middle East and so on.
It seems to me that the far right appears as an alternative that did strongly criticise the establishment and the political institutions of neoliberal capitalism. This is the key that explains Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, or Bolsonaro’s rise as a macho, populist ad venturer, like Adolf Hitler in the 1920s. Back then, Hitler wasn’t in the vanguard of the concerns of German industrial and financial capital ism. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni won because she led the sole party that wasn’t in the coalition led by Mario Draghi, which was also the European Commission’s and the European Central Bank’s government. Even in the Brazilian case, the economic elites supported the Workers’ Party, not Bolsonaro.
So, I don’t think we can say the far right embodies the most radical tendencies of neoliberalism. Of course, this constellation of movements is very heterogeneous, and we do find extremist neoliberals of this type, like Milei, or ones with pronounced neoliberal tendencies like Vox in Spain. But this wasn’t the orientation of many major movements like the Rassemblement National, Fratelli d’Italia, the Alternative für Deutschland, Fidesz in Hungary or Law and Justice in Poland, etc. Once these movements win power and enter government, their relationship with financial capital and with economic elites will change. That’s obvious. That creates a contradiction, which it's not always easy for them to manage.
I read Sohn-Rethel’s book as pointing against purely ideological interpretations of fascism. Quite similarly, Ishay Landa talks about not taking fascists by their word when they proclaim that they are oriented toward social structures or even socialism, when in fact theirs is a rather individualistic perspective. That's probably why it's not so hard to understand why the far right today has connections to neoliberalism and its entrepreneurial ideology of the self made person, which is deeply rooted in a conservative methodological individualism.
This brings me again to another paradox of these tendencies of neoliberalism and fascism today. Many women leaders promote right wing, reactionary and even fascist tendencies. They often talk about themselves as strong, independent, emancipated women, who even speak about women's rights in order to demonise various minorities, Muslims, black people, LGBTIQ+ people, leftwing feminists and so on. Sometimes we call them ‘femonationalists,’ like Sara Farris does, or speak of a political style inclined to ‘lipstick fascism.’ How do you see this phenomenon, where female nationalists instrumentalise feminism for conservative ends?
That’s another major difference with respect to classical fascism. Of course, we shouldn’t forget that even in the interwar period there were significant female representatives of fascism. Margherita Sarfatti led Italian Fascist cultural policy till the early 1930s, and we know Leni Riefenstahl’s role as an organizer of Nazi propaganda. So, this is not completely new. At the same time, it is obvious that in the 1930s a fascist mass movement led by a woman would have been unthinkable. How can we explain that?
I think there’s an obvious explanation. These new far-right movements appeared in the twenty-first century, and women’s condition today is not the same as it was a century ago. Many feminist conquests have today become part of a new anthropological paradigm in global society. There’re exceptions: I'm not speaking of Afghanistan, here, but of the West in general. This new Lebensführung, as Max Weber would put it, exists in our society and affects everyone. Being reactionary and conservative today is not the same thing as it was in the interwar years.
We are facing a war which increasingly takes on genocidal features. This genocide is carried out in the name of the memory of the Holocaust. In other words, the memory of a genocide is weaponised to justify a new genocide.
So, we find strong women leading these movements. Sometimes, these movements claim to have a feminism of their own against Islamic fundamentalism and immigrants and so on. Still, I think that this simply shifts the question onto another level, i.e. the relationship between capitalism and the traditional forms of gender domination and hierarchy, patriarchy and so on.
On the one hand, we cannot interpret the history of class societies without considering this gender dimension, which always existed and to a large extent still does. On the other hand, I think we should recognise that capitalism — and particularly neoliberal capitalism — is perfectly able to integrate new gender relationships. It can exist under extremely reactionary political regimes and also work with ‘emancipated’ societies. So, we find a lot of racial and religious minorities in the Silicon Valley, or we can find many powerful women in the boardrooms of multinational companies and financial firms, particularly in Europe and the United States. Neoliberalism has this capacity to enact a commodification and reification of many gender and anti-racist conquests and liberatory changes. So, we shouldn't forget that.
Now let’s go further into what I’d call my pessimistic questions. Let’s talk about war. There are many different classical philosophies of war, from Cicero to Thomas Hob bes and from Denis Diderot to Carl von Clausewitz. I find Rosa Luxemburg's reflection on war especially interesting, because she explained how rooted wars always are in imperialism and the accumulation of capital. So, to set the coordinates for a more abstract but necessary question for our conversation, what does the contemporary concept of war mean, and what are the causes of today's wars?
Well, I think that we lack an effective contemporary concept of war. We are working with concepts inherited from the past, basically I would say from early modernity. So, we’re always thinking back to these classical authors who conceptualised war, the authors you mentioned, this tradition going from Samuel von Pufendorf to Clausewitz or maybe to Carl Schmitt. Basically, there is a very long historical sequence going from the Peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century to the Great War: the era of the building of the so-called jus publicum europaeum, in which wars are considered part of the regulation of an international order and are depicted as themselves regulated. The belligerents must share some rules, and this is also why jus publicum europaeum is a Western law: in the colonial world, wars can be fought without any rules, and so can become extermination, genocides and so on.
This modern conception of war codified by Clausewitz — war is part of the establishment of a regulated international order, and depends on a correlation between army, state, and people — failed and collapsed in the years between the two world wars. Then, there appeared new concepts like ‘international civil war’, which replaced the wars between sovereign states of the previous era. During the two world wars, wars were fought as civil wars, which were often not declared, and conducted as wars to destroy the enemy, without respecting any rules of jus in bello. The old classical paradigm of modern war simply disappeared. The Great War finished with multiple civil wars in the defeated countries. World War II did not finish with peace agreements but rather with the unconditional surrender of the defeated side. Germany and Japan were occupied and for a while disappeared as sovereign states, like the Southern Confederation did at the end of the American Civil War. But after World War II, we experienced a new historical sequence, the Cold War, in which conflicts were submitted to the bipolar order and limited by it. The exceptions existed but were contained. Think of the Vietnam War: very important, but geopolitically circumscribed. Yet, the first years of the twenty-first century opened up a new historical sequence in which conflicts took on a new dimension.
Conflicts can proliferate also for contingent, unpredictable reasons. They can be extremely violent because the weapons of the twenty-first century are extremely lethal weapons of mass destruction. And there is an ever-stronger temptation to use these weapons because we have the illusion that they can be effective and that they can destroy the enemy, and there is not an international order to constrain these conflicts.
But the wars of the twenty-first century are completely impotent, ineffective, sterile and useless. Think of the Gulf War, the second Iraq War, the war in Afghanistan, or what is today happening in the Middle East. Israel is conducting an extremely violent and destructive war on several fronts, from Gaza to Lebanon to Syria, because it has the military strength to do that. But Israel doesn’t have a consistent project for reshaping the region. It wishes to consolidate its position by threaten ing its neighbours-enemies. So, while the temptation to intensify the weapons used is ever stronger, these weapons also prove unable to fix a new international order in place. This is the contradiction of our time, and it is difficult to see an outcome.
This brings me to your latest book, Gaza Faces History. You look at the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by offering a critical interpretation that overturns simplistic and one-sided narrations of what is happening in Gaza. You argue that if a genocidal war is unleashed in the name of fighting antisemitism, our moral and political orientations are clouded. You add that if the war in Gaza end in a second Nakba, Israel’s legitimacy will be permanently compromised. What disorientation are you talking about here?
I wrote this essay because I was struck by this contradiction, which is — it seems to me — something historically new. We are facing a war which increasingly takes on genocidal features. This genocide is carried out in the name of the memory of the Holocaust, that is, in order to defend the memory of the victims of a genocide. In other words, the memory of a genocide is weaponised to justify a new genocide.
This is not only an absolute perversion of memory, of history, and of the political conclusions and lessons that we can draw from history. It risks disorienting and threatening our ethical and political horizon, our landscapes of memory, in which we remember genocides to prevent the possibility of new ones. We commemorate the victims of these genocides to fight against exclusion, discrimination, oppression and the possibility of new massacres.
But now we see the spectacular triumph of a kind of post-modern militarism, imperialism and neo-colonialism, albeit one with very heavy consequences. If ‘fighting against antisemitism’ means legitimising a genocide, many people could start thinking that antisemitism is not so bad, maybe that the gas chambers are a myth, that the extermination of the Jews is a myth invented by Israel in order to defend its policies and justify its existence. In short, the outcome of this policy will be to lend legitimacy to Holocaust denial. Positing the ontological innocence of Israel, which acts in the name of the victims of the Holocaust and whose actions are thus always ethically grounded, deserving our unconditional support, is a form of obscurantism, a form of reversed antisemitism. Antisemitism claimed that Jews embodied evil; today’s supporters of Zionism claim that Israel embodies good, what ever it does. So, this is a perverse weaponisation of memory, which should be strongly criticised and rejected. This is a front that the Left has to fight on in this period.
The ongoing horrors and genocide in the Middle East could surely further intensify Islamophobia, but also antisemitism. In your work, you often emphasise distinguishing between victims and the losers of history: the focus on victims has almost become an obsession. As you just explained, it can end up in a kind of perverse weaponisation of memory. But even keeping this in mind, what can the Left do to strategically combat Islamophobia and antisemitism?
The complex relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia is important, here. It’s one of the keys to interpreting current developments on the far right. This is one of the paradoxes of today’s situation: antisemitism, historically speaking was one of the pillars of Europe’s nationalisms. It was one of the premises for building a modern idea of national cultures and identities, and all forms of radical nationalism and fascism were antisemitic. Surely, there were differences between the French, Italian and German cases. Italian fascism wasn't a particularly antisemitic at the beginning, but it became strongly so, issuing the Racial Laws in 1938. In France, antisemitism meant antirepublicanism. In Germany, antisemitism was a pillar of the idea of a Christian, völkisch state. Still, whatever these differences, they each separated an authentic national identity and culture from Judaism, depicted as a kind of virus or corrupting element inside the body of the nation. It was considered particularly perverse after emancipation, with Jews getting citizenship and so on.
But today the far right everywhere supports Israel. They are its best allies, including even the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany. Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán is openly antisemitic and runs his election campaigns attacking George Soros, the Wall Street banker and so on — and is also an ally of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu.
How should we explain these remarkable changes? I think there’s many reasons. One is that after World War II, the Jews crossed the symbolic ‘colour line’ in WEB Du Bois’s terms. Jews were increasingly accepted within the Western establishment. So, antisemitism experienced a dramatic decline in the Western world. Our societies are much less antisemitic than a century ago. But the target of the far right today is no longer Jews but Muslims and migrants and refugees coming from Islamic countries. This means a kind of ideological revision within the fascist and post-fascist approach. But this also means that they found a new target — not one that fell from the sky but one rooted in the political, ideological and cultural tradition of Orientalism. This produces a dichotomous worldview in which we have the West on one side and the (post)colonial world on the other. The West is reason and civilisation, the Orient means barbarism, fanaticism, irrationalism and backwardness. This dichotomous view, which we thought belonged to a time fully in the past — the era when colonialism was depicted as a civilising mission — is reappearing today.
Think of the language of this new conservative wave. Mainstream media cannot speak of October 7 without stigmatising the ‘barbaric’ terrorist attack. Nobody uses this adjective to refer to Israel. It might be ‘merciless’ but not a form of barbarism. This rhetoric, this lexicon of war, which pervades Western media and the language of Western statesmen in general, is especially strong in far-right movements. It reveals a change in which antisemitism, which was so powerful and led to a genocide in the mid-twentieth century, is declining and Orientalism and new forms of colonialism are on the rise.
In terms of the response to these wars: is it possible to achieve peace in the Middle East or in Ukraine without armed struggle?
We must answer this question on different levels. There is an ‘on principle’ answer. This is a question of political or moral philosophy. Of course, we can say — it’s an obvious statement — that peace is better than war. Nonetheless, I don’t think an effective Left should be pacifist. I have respect for people who are pacifists on principle, but I don’t think the answer to the current situation is a mass campaign for peace. What does it mean, peace? That we should accept the Russian invasion of Ukraine without reacting? That Palestinians shouldn't defend themselves against the Israeli aggression? That Lebanon should wel come the Israeli invasion in the South?
Let’s look to history. After the gigantic massacre that was World War I, many authoritative personalities became pacifists: think of Albert Einstein. There was also a famous international declaration, the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, signed by France, Germany, and the US, which renounced war as an instrument of national policy: war had to be banned as a means of settling conflicts. After 1933 and Hitler’s rise in Germany, Einstein emigrated to the United States and abandoned his previous pacifism. He met with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and convinced him of the necessity of producing an atomic bomb: not because he had become fascinated by violence but simply because he feared Nazi Germany having such a bomb faced with a fragile democratic world. So, he completely changed his mind. It seems to me that the best traditions of anti-fascism, of solidarity with national liberation and anti-colonial movements, is not the tradition of pacifism. I think of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. I think we should be proud of Vietnam's armed struggle against imperialism, and of the armed resistance in Europe, which in Yugo slavia became a revolution. This wasn’t a peaceful movement. So, the problem is not pacifism on principle, but to consider the question of violence as, first of all, a question of political strategy.
I have no doubts that the Palestinians can legitimately use arms in defending their rights and in fighting for their liberation. The problem is how to use them. This is a strategic and tactical issue. And some times, the armed struggle is less effective than a peaceful strategy. It depends on the context and the balance of forces. So, we can criticise October 7 because I don’t think killing civilians is a productive, acceptable, ethically and politically effective way to defend the Palestinian cause. October 7 is also the epilogue of the shipwreck of the Oslo Accords. In Oslo three decades ago, the Palestinians chose a peaceful path to achieving their rights. Israel worked doggedly to capsize the agreements that had been made. Israel continued colonial settlements in the West Bank, and in East Jerusalem, and segregated Gaza. This explains why the Palestinians went back to violence.
When you mentioned the anti-fascist tradition there it made me think about your book Left-Wing Melancholia. In it, you argued that this melancholia can become a link between past and the future: the Left looks back to the experiences of the past in order to find a new perspective. Maybe we can see anti-fascism also in that context. But this brings me to another paradox: what are we going to do about the Russian claims about ‘anti-fascism’ and ‘denazification’ in Ukraine? How should we analyse this kind of instrumentalisation of the historical, emancipatory, progressive anti-fascist struggle?
Left-wing melancholia has always existed. It is a feeling that belongs to human nature and to what, borrowing Raymond Williams’s terms, we could call the Left’s ‘structure of feelings’. Changing the world requires ideas, values, organisations, people able to mobilize to act. But changing the world also means changing the relationships between human beings. It means conceiving the future and building that future and changing the world through collective action. We cannot do that without mobilizing feelings, emotions, passions, desires, and hopes. Even when these exciting experiences are defeated, because of counterrevolutions or because they run aground, this inevitably produces a certain left-wing melancholia.
Melancholia is a kind of work of mourning related to the legacy of lost or defeated revolutions — that of fallen comrades and human lives that were completely destroyed. If sometimes hidden or censored, it is part of left-wing culture. I formulated some hypotheses why the Left usually suppressed these feelings. I think this kind of censorship was deeply related to the military paradigm of revolution that dominated the Left during the twentieth century. Revolution meant the armed conquest of power, and a revolutionary movement was a kind of revolutionary army of soldiers struggling for power. This militaristic conception of revolution implied certain value hierarchies and indeed gender hierarchies. So, the Left did keep the memory of the fallen comrades, but a revolutionary soldier had to be strong, courageous, heroic, shouldn’t appear mournful, which might be a symptom of weakness, of fragility, of vulnerability. In other words, left-wing melancholia is neither an illness or a disease of the Left, and nor is it therapy. During the Arab revolutions or Occupy Wall Street, or Black Lives Matter, people were not melancholic but joyful and excited. But left-wing melancholia can also coexist — I would say harmoniously — with all these feelings. This can be the emotional dimension of a necessary work of memory: rethinking the past, why the past revolutions failed or were defeated, what is their legacy, and so on. Left-wing melancholia does not necessarily mean resignation or passivity; it can be also redemptive and active.
The democratic and left-wing opposition to Vladimir Putin in Russia is anti-fascist, because it clearly describes many fascist, quasi-fascist and authoritarian features in Putin’s political regime. At the same time, Putin paints the Russian war in Ukraine as an anti-fascist war against ‘Nazis’.
Related to this question is a paradoxical metamorphosis of twentieth-century concepts and values in the twenty-first. The democratic and left-wing opposition to Vladimir Putin in Russia is anti-fascist, because it clearly describes many fascist, quasi-fascist and authoritarian features in Putin’s political regime. At the same time, Putin paints the Russian war in Ukraine as an anti-fascist war against ‘Nazis’. We have to manage this contradiction, which is similar to the other contradiction I mentioned before: a genocidal war fought by Israel in the name of the memory of the Holocaust. In the same line of reasoning, it’s important, I think, to say that the Hamas fighters in the tunnels of Gaza remind me of the Jewish fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, fighting domination for reasons of principle, because the balance of forces was similar: the Warsaw Ghetto uprising couldn’t prevail against the Nazi army and the Palestinian fighters today cannot prevail against the Israeli army. Nonetheless, their struggle is necessary. This is the premise for keeping alive the perspective of a future liberation. And sometimes this means working with semantic contradictions like fighting an anti-fascist struggle against an enemy that itself lays claim to anti-fascism. Nonetheless, we shouldn't leave this enemy alone to claim a monopoly on anti-fascism. So, one of the Left’s tasks is re-establishing the truth. To say it with Antonio Gramsci, the fight doesn’t just need effective weapons, but also a capacity to create and build a cultural hegemony. That also means re-estab lishing the true meaning of words.
Much of what we’ve talked about is the differences from the world of a hundred years ago. 2024 marked a century since the death of Lenin. A recent book of yours was on the intellectual history of revolution. What would you say to him about the possibility of revolutions today?
I think that we should defend the legacy and the posterity of Lenin, sim ply because he is one of the most completely distorted figures. Lenin is not the fanatical totalitarian depicted by 80 percent of his biographers and by the kind of commonplaces you get in liberal publications. I’m not a Leninist and I wouldn’t cast myself as such. Still, I think he shaped the huge and diverse landscape of twentieth-century revolutions. He has his place beside Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, and Frantz Fanon and so many other revolutionaries.
This legacy, which I would be ready to defend, has a powerful symbolic dimension. Still, I don’t think that we should claim Lenin’s legacy in terms of strategy, or his theory of the revolutionary party, for instance. This is also one of the reasons why the conservative campaign against Lenin, depicted as one of the faces of totalitarianism, wasn't powerfully resisted by many new anti-capitalist movements. Not because they are anti-Leninist, but simply because they don't find in Lenin a useful legacy of prescriptions, of conceptions of organisation and strategy which could be effective today.
When I was twenty years old, around 1977, there weren’t political activists who didn’t read Lenin. It was a kind of normative reading. Today, this is no longer true, for understandable reasons. So, we have to defend Lenin, but we have also to historicize him. This doesn’t mean that Leninism could be a valuable option for twenty-first century. We need to invent a new concept of revolution. The problem is that a new concept of revolution cannot ever exist without assimilating the past, without the memory of the past revolutions. That’s the dialectical difficulty facing today's movements. They cannot inscribe themselves within a revolutionary tradition. You can’t build these new movements while establishing a kind of historical continuity with twentieth-century communism, for instance. That's almost impossible.
In 2023, we celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the Institute for Social Research. Where does Frankfurt School critical theory stand today? Especially when we talk about the ongoing wars, even cultural wars, post-fascism and neoliberalism, antisemitism and Islamophobia. Is this tradition of Marxist philosophy useful for the struggles of today's Left, in the context of many existential challenges of our time? Or should we approach this Western Marxist tradition more critically, as Perry Anderson, for example, suggests?
In in my intellectual and political trajectory, at the beginning, the Leninist legacy in the 1970s was much more important than that of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno or the Frankfurt School. But in the following decades, the relationship was reversed. I worked much more with categories inherited from the Frankfurt School, rather than from classical Marxism. Still, in this case, we could distinguish between Rosa Luxemburg on the one hand, and Lenin and Leon Trotsky on the other. Luxemburg can maybe appear as a more timely thinker today: she got older better than them. Like them, she was internationalist, universalist, and anti-colonialist, but she was a woman, with a gender sensibility that gave her writings and assessments a less authoritarian taste, and she was deeply attached to democracy. Lenin’s and Trotsky’s legacy cannot be separated from their role of founders of a revolutionary dictatorship and their defence of Red Terror during the Russian Civil War. Luxemburg’s legacy is surrounded by the aura of her martyrdom. She did not create a regime of terror; she was killed while defending an uprising from below and the workers’ councils. I think this is the key to explaining her lasting legacy, rather like the Paris Commune, which had an ephemeral existence and was defeated without experiencing a phase of authoritarian dictatorship or terror.
But of course, the Frankfurt School is extremely important, as are several of its categories. The concept of instrumental reason, for in stance, or this attempt at fusing the legacy of Marx, Freud and Weber. Or take the new concept of history elaborated by Benjamin at the end of his life: in short, that revolution is no longer a locomotive of history, but rather the emergency brake stopping the train driving toward catastrophe. This conception speaks to us much more than to previous generations, in an era when we cannot conceive a revolutionary project for the future without including a strong ecological dimension, for instance.
Nonetheless, my relationship to the Frankfurt School and its legacy is also critical. I share many assessments sketched out by Perry Anderson, particularly when he pointed out the political retreat and resignation of Horkheimer and Adorno (by a certain irony of history, something like the evolution of the New Left Review itself, which took a much more academic dimension). The problem, in my view, in the Frankfurt School legacy is precisely its Western dimension. The concept of Western Marxism is certainly pertinent, even if for reasons a little bit different to those which Anderson mentioned in his essay fifty years ago. With few exceptions, perhaps like Herbert Marcuse, there is a real blind spot in the tradition of the Frankfurt School and of Western Marxism, namely its incapacity to think about colonialism and the racial dimension, and to conceive capitalism as a global phenomenon.
From this point of view, I think that the Frankfurt School, which appeared in the interwar years as an interesting attempt at overcoming the limits of classical Marxism, had a limit which marked a regression with respect to Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, and to the tradition of classical Marxism. We can read the complete works of Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, but the words ‘imperialism’ or ‘colonialism’ almost never appeared. In the twenty-first century, this is obviously problematic. So, what I suggest with respect to Western Marxism is a dialectical Aufhebung — not rejecting their achievements but overcoming them in a different perspective.