While everyone offers answers to the causes of the far-right’s victories, they will win and continue to win. To avoid the future that this trend holds, we should instead be asking ourselves better questions.
In the catalogue of ready-made responses to the resounding victory of Trumpism , it is said that social democracy, trapped in its Narcissus mirror, can no longer see the working classes, the blue collars and social inequalities. In fact, the Democrats would be the system itself – the cosmopolitan caste facing a new extreme right that, yes, manages to be authentic, sexy and anti-system. The fact is that facing the irresistible emergence of fascism is a long-term challenge for which we still do not have general formulas.
To differentiate it from historical fascism, inspired by a term by Daniel Bell later popularized by Fareed Zakaria, some analysts have preferred to call its governments “illiberal democracy,” or “neofascism” – as proposed by Enzo Traverso. Among them, we have the historian of fascism Robert Paxton, who defined MAGA (Make America Great Again) as “[A movement that] bubbles up from the bottom up in very worrying ways, and that is very similar to the original fascisms.”
We have just seen that the system of checks and balances, timid and established, is not enough, and that the institutional timidity of the fight against Trump, which took place in the four years that followed the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was not enough either. The lesson we can learn from this is that democracy, at all its levels, needs to be strengthened, exponentialized. It is better to run the risk of taking the legal-judicial fight against fascism to its ultimate consequences than to leave your weapons at the disposal of the new tyrants – as the formation of the new Trump government already announces.
But the struggle for democracy must take other forms than just representation. This is what happened with the unfolding of the Minneapolis uprising in the election of Joe Biden, with Bolsonaro’s electoral defeat in Brazil, and what is happening in the virtuous relationship that the Ukrainian resistance can have with the political recomposition – still precarious, but real – of Europe. No matter what you call it, fascism of a new type is the symptom of a serious crisis, but that does not mean that it is a “wrong response to just demands”. Quite the contrary, its tremendous success lies in the denial of the enigmas that our societies face.
It was Sigmund Freud who stated that “denial is a way of becoming aware of the repressed; in fact, it is already a lifting of the repression, but naturally not the acceptance of the repressed.” In our case, denial does not only affect content that we would prefer to repress, but also material paradoxes that we dare not enunciate. This happened during the pandemic, and today it manifests itself “in a cube” in the face of the climate crisis, the emergence of war by the so-called “axis of resistance” (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea), the increasingly important role of migratory flows and the emergence of a global totalitarian proposal that already has a war to call its own.
Contrary to what one might think, seeing all the swing states in the US turning red (the Republican color), Trump’s election was not the result of a huge Republican mobilization, but of the combination of two phenomena: Trump maintaining the same level of votes he had in 2020 and a massive demobilization of the Democratic vote. In 2020, Trump received 74.2 million votes, while Joe Biden reached 81.3 million. In 2024, Trump only obtained a marginal gain (74.6 million), but Kamala Harris lost more than 10 million votes (70.9 million) compared to Biden. The fascist drift of important sectors of the electorate that traditionally headed to the political center is a global and consistent phenomenon. Our priority must be to understand why democratic mobilizations have increasingly failed.
Instead of giving the same old answers, we need to ask the questions we are not asking. One of them is: what are the paradoxes we are moving through, and how asking them generates – not new answers, but – better questions about what we are doing, and what we can do, with ourselves.
We propose here a first and unfinished non-exhaustive list of five paradoxes that for our time.
1. Democracy against itself
Let us think of the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington, and the sacking of the Planalto Palace on January 8, 2023, in Brasília. In both cases, Trump and Bolsonaro emulated what Mussolini and Hitler did, and repeated what Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping did: legally appointed, they tried to perpetuate themselves in power.
Perhaps Trump and Bolsonaro failed to become tyrants because their institutions proved to be more solid than their determination to cross the Rubicon. Or perhaps both events prove that the new far right does not need to destroy formally democratic institutions to perpetuate itself in power. In any case, fascism has just been given a second chance – through democratic means – in the United States. This is the same fascism that is preparing to repeat the dose in Brazil. This fascism has already become a dictatorship in the countries where it came to power with leftist rhetoric: in Chavista Venezuela and Ortega’s Nicaragua.
Republican institutions, their procedural dynamics and their checks and balances, on the one hand, are more necessary than we thought, but on the other hand they are no longer sufficient. This repositions the simplistic nature of the struggles that turn against the authoritarian and representative dimensions of the State. Democracy, naively understood as the “power of the people”, puts the Republic as a form of governance and the Rule of Law at risk.
There is clearly no shortage of good reasons to criticize the State. One need only think of the murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis (2020) and Marielle Franco in Rio (2018). However, criticism must be unambiguously directed at strengthening and expanding democratic and republican mechanisms. As long as they work well, almost everything goes well; but when they stop working, we enter the realm of exception, which can reinvent them, but also risks destroying them once and for all.
2. The disappearance of the Outside
The second paradox concerns the fact that, in contemporary capitalism, there is no longer an Outside. Global capitalism, both financial and cognitive, includes everyone and the entire planet. Marx called this process “real subsumption.” The name this phenomenon has received more recently is “anthropocene.” However, this occurs through the modulation of fragments, singularities, or “dividuals” in control societies, and no longer through the homogenization of the masses in the concentrationist institutions of disciplinary society.
It would not have been necessary to wait for the advent of app workers to talk about work outside of the wage relationship – that is, within the production of subjectivity itself. Whether this happens in the transformation of mass informality as a residue of underdevelopment on the horizon of modernization itself, or in the algorithms that modulates in real time all dimensions of our lives – which, in turn, inform the algorithms – this is our condition.
To say that there is no longer an outside means to say that the outside and the inside mix and circulate, exactly as violence circulates in the Brazilian outskirts, where it is not known – in the clear demonstration that is the infamous murder of Marielle – who is the police and who is the militia that already governs us. Fascism is nothing more than the construction of the outside “from within” that offers the clear (and fake) figure of an enemy coming from an externality that is only imagined: the migrant, China, communism, wokeism.
But this formulation of the paradox is still only apparent. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine supported by China (24/02/2022), and the pogrom perpetrated by Hamas under the leadership of Iran and Russia in southern Israel (07/10/2023), when young people of migrant origin took to the streets of European cities to protest October 7 with Hamas flags, in the eyes of the electoral bases of the new far-right, this serves as confirmation of their xenophobic theory of the “great replacement” and, therefore, of the enmity around which these deadly movements are organized.
The challenges facing the European Union are a symbol of this complexity. It needs to remain united, support Ukraine – most likely without the help of the United States – and fight anti-Semitism without endorsing Islamophobia. This is a spiraling dynamic that is becoming increasingly difficult to confront. This complexity is clearly evident in the Lula government’s attempts to normalize the Venezuelan situation: the dictator Maduro, an ally of Putin, China, Iran and North Korea, has begun to use the same arguments as Bolsonaro supporters against the Brazilian electoral system.
Meanwhile, Russia and Turkey control the main migration routes (via Syria and the African Sahel) towards Europe, where the variations in the flow of migrants and refugees are already translating into further increases in the electoral results of the new far right. This, in turn, is allied with Putin and fuels both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Islamic and Jewish fundamentalisms clash in the Middle East while fueling the upcoming massacres of Muslims and Jews around the world. In turn, the closing of borders and the mass deportations of migrants that Trump 2.0 will carry out will flood Latin America with an increase in the social tensions that made the “success” of the Bukele government in El Salvador.
The left that wants to be “pure” also dreams of an exit. They apply to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the old schemes of the 1970s, or even older. At the time, the Palestinian struggle was a struggle for national liberation. Today, organizations like Hamas are religious fundamentalists that fight for the implementation of a theocracy, while at the same time remaining functional to the regional and theocratic sub-imperialism of Iran. This narrative becomes explicitly delusional when groups like “Queers for Palestine” applaud their current or future executioners. However, the same thing happens in Israel. Meanwhile, the Netanyahu government relies on the messianic and fundamentalist drift of the Israeli far right that attacks the population of the West Bank on a daily basis, proving that fascism always comes from within – even if its narrative is organized around “external” enemies.
This explains why the same leftists who claim to detest Trump also adore Putin – and from a democratic point of view, the two could not be closer. There is something perversely cynical about the spectacle of the fascist far-right using the rhetoric of the left. For example, in the mobilization of the human rights banner at the BRICS summit in Kazan, or in the recolonization of Africa by the Russian Wagner mercenary group, and other Chinese Silk Roads, in the name of “decolonialism”. The high-intensity war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine, with the support of China, Iran and North Korea, goes hand in hand with the construction of the “outside” by the bowels of fascism.
Just as the Berlin Wall served to contain East Germans who wanted to flee to the West, Trump’s wall aims to contain Latinos, Africans, Asians (now called “East Germans”) who want to flee to the North or the West. The difficulties in Europe and the United States, sometimes celebrated in a mindless way, not only do not lead the countries of South America to any further democratic expansion, but produce the opposite effect.
As George Orwell said: “One of the most basic pastimes in the world is to denigrate democracy. A sixteen-year-old can criticize democracy better than he can defend it.” Today, however, it is essential to defend it and, to do so, to rebuild it.
3. Anti-pro-system
The third paradox concerns the notion of “system.” This idea has its origins in the cybernetics of the 1950s, and was applied as a key to explaining the functioning of complex societies by Niklas Luhmann. When Ernesto Laclau revisited it based on his experience of the schizophrenia of the Peronist right and left, it was to shape his theory of “left-wing populism” as “anti-system politics.”
The Laclausian notion of “left-wing populism” ended up asserting itself in the ebb of the democratic uprisings that began in the cycle of the Arab Springs, in 2011, passed through the Brazilian June 2013, and reached its peak with the “revolution of dignity” in Maidan Square, in Ukraine, in 2014.
In Brazil, right after Dilma Rousseff’s reelection, we blamed the left-wing forces for their inability to create new institutional spaces (in Brazil, the PT, for all). The symptoms of this inability were, on one ideological pole, the anti-neoliberal rhetoric brandished against Marina Silva’s candidacy in 2014, and on the other, the legitimization of “structural” explanations and the identity-based self-cannibalism of the “place of speech” – in parallel, of course, with the most blatant opportunism. The fact is that the 2013 uprising failed to crystallize any expansive dimension of democracy, and the space it left empty, after the restoration by the left, was left at the mercy of manipulations by the far right. It was in Spain that, on the corpse of 15M, Podemos was born as an operation set up outside the encampment movement and within Venezuelan and Iranian populism. In common with the latter, there is the capture of the themes of real democracy by anti-democratic narratives, these organized around reductionism against castes, “the system” and the essentialization of the “West”.
Just as populism incorporates the terrain of demagogy, the notions of “caste” and “system” take the place of any approach in terms of the social composition of labor. It would not be difficult, therefore, to find behind the ideas of “system” and “caste” Mussolini’s rhetoric against “plutocracies”, Hitler’s rhetoric against “Jews”, and even the alliance formed against intellectualism and science, whose weddings were renewed by No Vax denialism during the pandemic.
It is not surprising to find left-wing anti-Semitic rhetoric in the pro-Palestine discourse. Any distinction between the right-wing Netanyahu government and the Israelis (20% of whom are Arab) is obliterated while, when looking at the Palestinian side, the hegemony of the religious fascism of Hamas-Iran is ignored.
The academic social sciences, trapped in the victimization grid (the “place of speech”), become devices for reducing the complexity of conflicts. On the one hand, there are the oppressed to be defended (the “wretched of the Earth”). On the other, there are the oppressors, easily compared to potential Nazis. In addition to the Godwin point mechanism – the law according to which, after a certain moment of dispute in networks and forums, the accusation of Nazism appears –, the increase in accusations against the Israeli government of being “Nazi” clearly shows the trivialization of anti-Semitism and the proliferation of operations to hierarchize victims.
Not only does it fail to recognize the point at which Israel ceases to defend itself and begins to commit unspeakable war crimes against the Palestinian civilian population, but it fixates on accusing yesterday’s victims (the Jews persecuted by historical fascisms) of having somehow deserved what happened to them. Thus, it turns the same screw of today’s fascisms yet again.
As in Freudian denial, which admits repressing everything that its enunciation rejects, the anti-system discovers itself to be anti-pro-system.
4. The Twist of Disobedience
The fourth paradox is that of the twisting of disobedience. The wild subjectivities of the poor do not think about the life that a socialist or progressive project could offer them. They live the life they have, and it is in this life that they produce twists in disobedience.
Henry David Thoreau – the American anti-slavery activist who lived through the Walden experience – wrote: “I came not into this world […] to make it good, but to live in it […]”. This gesture was innately linked to civil resistance and disobedience. Rejecting all edilic morality, it was nevertheless a matter of “keeping one’s hands clean and […] refusing practical support for what is wrong”: not participating in any way in the evils one condemns.
This Thoreauian illusion comes to an end with the real subsumption of society by capitalism. When everything is capitalist, not only does the outside not exist, but a twist in disobedience is determined. To the extent that there is no longer an outside, there is no longer any way to disobey simply by withdrawing, because there is “nowhere to run.” As the poor know well, it is a matter of living the life one has, but within it, trying to build the life one desires – even if this manifests itself in the form of a radical desire for inclusion in the existing one.
In this internal desire for life that they have, the poor want it by betting only on themselves to achieve it. Perhaps they imagine that they are seeing on far-right platforms the promises of an ideal of government that was once Thoreauian: “the best government is the one that governs least”, and becomes “the one that does not govern at all”.
By imagining “getting the government out of the way,” aren’t they trying to “fix” the external conditions so that they can be the transformation they want to see in their lives? A revolution of personal dignity and the feeling of self-worth? This same revolution is manifesting itself today on very different scales and in very different phenomena: in the blasé attitude of the young pejotas of generation Z, whose work ethic is to not give a fuck 24/7; in inventions such as quiet quitting, lazy job and the transversal struggles for the end of the 6 x 1 work shift of the VAT (“Life Beyond Work”) movement. Even if the failure of the demonstrations of November 15, 2024 confirms that the left-wing apparatuses are obsolete to the point of necrotizing even the most genuine mobilizations: it’s all about living the life you have. They’re all ways of taking possession of ever larger portions of it, expanding it.
Has disobedience, which from La Boétie to Thoreau, and from Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr., always involved taking consent and power out of the hands of those in charge, become a way of expressing belief in one’s own desire for freedom and autonomy?
Some will say that the trap lies in the capture of freedom as a strategy of servitude. We think not. When cooperation is a given, the freedom one can have is to choose with whom and with what to cooperate. It is not about doing what you want, in a childish conception of freedom, but about wanting what you do. This is the only freedom that dying representative democracies ensure, and desire does not accept no for an answer.
What all these desires contain is a constant and paradoxical negotiation between autonomy and servitude, which correspond to what we call the “torsion of disobedience,” and constitute the most diverse forms of cooperation. If, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards—and especially from the post-Second World War period to the present day—freedom has been placed within the technologies of power, we are faced with formations of subjectivity that want to guarantee for themselves the “optimal conditions” to negotiate spaces of freedom within subjections that they do not see themselves capable of reversing or transforming.
The trap is not in the ideological fireworks of corporate subjectivity either. Being a manager of oneself does not carry any contradiction. If the choice is between being a manager of oneself or being managed by others, being a manager of oneself sounds much better than obeying the orders of others. It always seems less painful to negotiate one’s own servitude to oneself.
The question we always return to is the same: how is social cooperation organized? Without it, there is no freedom. But its inherent dynamics, when they crystallize and accumulate, produce their opposite: servitude. They return under transcendent figures: gods, tyrants, or some kind of boss, who could be either a “capitalist” or a trade unionist who has appropriated the union; some Venezuelan lieutenant colonel, or a Cuban leader who remains in power ab illo tempore.
Liberal democracy has tried to avoid this by multiplying formal control mechanisms in the Constitutions, through the doctrine of the “Separation of Powers”. The French elections demonstrated the effectiveness of these mechanisms, which made the winner (the fascists in the European elections) the third-place finisher in the internal elections. However, the French left, which wants to be pure, refused a center-left coalition and gave the fascists a preeminent role on a silver platter. In wanting to be “pure”, the left has left – in France, as recently in the United States – the working classes, the poor and the immigrants, which it claims to defend, in the hands of right-wing governments. Thus, the “pure” remain intact in their ivory towers; invulnerable, even if the world to which their good feelings contribute is a world of disaster.
5. The wild subjectivities of the poor
The fifth paradox is that of the savage subjectivities of the poor. As has long been the case with money, “entrepreneurship” has also become a taboo subject and, at the same time, the master key to explaining the victories of the extreme right. Such victories, in fact, would reveal a hint of revenge: we just don’t know for sure whether it is the revenge of the foreman or that of the bastards.
Beyond the doxa of Marxist sociology, we speak of the savage subjectivities of the poor from a class perspective. Unusual classes that, during the pandemic, dared to demonstrate on Paulista Avenue against Bolsonaro’s necropolitics: they were delivery workers, informal workers, organized fan groups. Heterodox classes that, as they do today, are trying to reappear in the fight against the 6×1 work regime. A fight that, at its core, demands an increase in the productivity of capital in Brazil, pushing lazy capital to the side of what we once called “relative surplus value.”
Even so, in the dyslexic lexicon of adrift progressivism, “entrepreneurship” has become synonymous with moral and ontological failure, since poor and precarious app workers constitute the electoral base of the extreme right. Thus, the São Paulo left committed suicide not when it chose a candidate incapable of forming a majority, but when this candidate – in electoral desperation – decided to talk “even about entrepreneurship”. The poor should wait for reindustrialization or socialism – we no longer know which century. Most likely, they will be offered some kind of therapy, but the poor would not be able to afford it.
The Bets data came like a thunderclap. Bolsa Família beneficiaries are massively betting on platforms, the Tigrinho game, and similar games. At the beginning of the Zero Hunger Program, the proposal was to “teach people how to fish, not give them the fish.” After the shift towards income distribution (Bolsa-Família), the debate became about the “exit door”: income as a path that would lead to formal employment. During the pandemic, emergency aid proved to be a fundamental tool for social and economic resilience.
But the fact is that the subjectivity of the poor remains savage, while, for the morality of labor value, the poor cannot and should not be tempted by entrepreneurship and the theology of prosperity, nor can they throw away the money they do not have. The illusion of being an entrepreneur of oneself is followed by the illusion of easy and quick money from electronic casinos linked to leisure time – the same time dedicated to watching live sports scattered between streaming subscriptions and pirate sites. “Poor” the poor who believe in the stroke of luck that would change their lives. What are bets and vaping today, were once (and still are) carnival and lança-perfume crossed by the mafia capillarity of the jogo do bicho, in its polymorphic violence and addiction?
Beyond all judgment and moral orthopedics, when the poor invent themselves as “entrepreneurs”, “consumers” or “gamblers”, they produce emotions and meanings for the lives they already have. Struggles need to be thought of and leveraged from this enigmatic material and biopolitical terrain .
Criticism of new labor relations that is limited to narratives that debate their legitimacy is hollow. May the devil wear Prada! When black feminists appear advertising luxury handbags, it is likely that we are not facing the moral triumph of money, but the need – common to Prada, the BETs or neo-Pentecostal religions – to produce meanings that mobilize and connect with the wild subjectivities of the poor. There is no longer an outside: paradise is in hell – and hell, in paradise. Only democratic mobilization makes a difference: that is why fascism needs to be fought (even when it adopts left-wing rhetoric).
The question we are not asking is what flows of transformation are carried by these beliefs and desires? What do we really want to believe in when we bet on a bet, scroll through the tiger screen, or worship in church? What do we really want when we dream of being entrepreneurs, playboys from Faria Lima, trad or trophy wives on TikTok, or black poster girls living off advertising for Prada? None of these questions takes away even a nanoparticle of the legitimacy of the beliefs and desires to which they refer.
If we are, in fact, in the era of controls and “universal modulation,” all that seems to be left for subjects is, as in a bet in which their own lives are at stake, to recompose the odds and chances of freedom in hellish negotiations with their implicit conditions of subjection. To the extent that the conditions of subjection are perceived as external to the subjects, the best thing they can do is to “get the governments out of the way.” To be their own pension plan, their own insurance, their own boss and their own gigolo.
To do everything for themselves, strategically relying on the relations of subjection that touch their bodies, as they embody the promise of a potential for maximizing their freedoms. This desire is a form of belief in the only realistic future – minimal, infinitely contracted, self-referential, and based on a planet where life has only just begun to collapse.
— How can we get out of this?
— We don’t know.
— Why do we state so many paradoxes?
— Because the traditional questions, and the ready-made answers given to the causes and effects of the electoral victories of the extreme right, lose sight of what, in our view, is essential: asking the questions that we are not asking.
To stir up the biopolitical soil in which the democratic paradox, the disappearance of the outside, the systemic negation-affirmation, the twisting of disobedience and the wild subjectivation of the poor are articulated. To seek a new arrangement of these factors in order to invent a new inside.
GIUSEPPE COCCO (PhD in Social History, University of Paris I/Panthéon-Sorbonne, professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, editor of Lugar Comum magazine, author of Trabajo y ciudadano, Dopo la marea, New Neoliberalism and the Other: Biopower, Antropophagy and Living Money, with Bruno Cava, GlobAL. Biopower and Struggles in a Globalized Latin America, with Toni Negri, among others).
MURILO CORREA (Associate Professor of Political Theory at UEPG, where he coordinates the Laboratory of Social Theory, Political Theory, and Poststructuralism (Labtesp); Associate Research Fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium; and Visiting Research Fellow and Professor at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. He completed postdoctoral studies in Political and Legal Theory (VUB) and Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires; Permanent Professor of Law at the PPG (Professor of Law) at UEPG; PhD (USP) in Philosophy and Legal Theory: published Odio a la Ley)
ALLAN DENEUVILLE (Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne, France, and Vice President of International Relations at SFSIC)
Originally published in Portuguese by the Nomadic University Network.
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